Sample Chapter: Gore Point
Sample Chapter: Gore Point
This is the first chapter of a book called Gore Point — first book of a demon-fighters trilogy I’m co-writing with Sean Platt.
The trees grew strange as they approached the Gore Point, and Adrian Porter decided to tell his brother what was on his mind.
“Father James says Dad is going to Hell.”
Ray wasn’t moved. He was four years older and officially a teenager now. That meant he knew everything. “Father James likes to diddle kids,” he said.
Adrian didn’t answer. Ray’s words didn’t really mean anything. That was just the sort of thing he’d been saying lately, now that he no longer believed in the church.
In Adrian’s experience, Father James was anything but a pedophile. He wasn’t even creepy, and Adrian sometimes found the other priests creepy. And really, that right there was the problem. If Father James was creepy, he’d be as easy for Adrian to dismiss as Ray did. Instead, Father James struck Adrian as reasonable and rational. Father James didn’t condemn kids to Hell for smoking or drinking or having sex or listening to heavy metal music. When new rifts opened and outbreaks came, Father James hid like everyone else instead of throwing Holy Water and hoping God would save him. He was actually a lot like Dad, come to think of it — except he wore a collar instead of swinging a Rollard.
So when Father James said Eldon Porter was going to Hell, Adrian had taken the idea seriously — even if he wasn’t sure whether or not to take it literally. Father James hadn’t said “going to Hell” like a priest. He’d said it like a scientist reaching a foregone conclusion. It’d come out like a fact about their father, like how he lived on Chance Street and was six feet tall.
“I’m serious, Ray.”
“I know you’re serious. That’s what’s so sad about it.”
At first Ray said nothing else. They walked on, dead leaves and twigs snapping beneath their feet. It was almost noon and the air was dark gray, like gaseous ash. The flashlight Ray carried helped less than it should. About thirty feet out its beam was swallowed by the gloom, as if it’d been eaten.
Ray climbed over the strange, low-hanging arm of a Teardrop tree, then leapt over what seemed to be a long-dead body. It’d been picked down to the skeleton — a grizzly discovery that Adrian took pains to walk around. The bones had been a suicide, Adrian assumed. Even this far from the Flats, Freaks still came here to die.
Ray didn’t even slow. Even though he wasn’t yet out of middle school, the darker side of life behind the Rampart didn’t bother him. He thought the way Dad thought: Life began; life ended; life was random, so why bother worrying? Adrian instead favored his mother: There was more to the world than eyes could see, and everything had meaning. The best time to worry was when you didn’t know what that meaning was.
Ray stopped short of another Teardrop tree, then turned to face Adrian. Reluctantly, he donned his you-suck-but-you’re-still-my-little-brother expression: the one that diluted his usual know-it-all with a parody of compassion.
“Listen,” he said. “Hell’s just a word. Dad’s an exterminator, nothing more and nothing less. He’s not going to Hell. He’s never been to Hell, because Hell doesn’t exist.”
But Father James’s declaration wasn’t the only thing Adrian had been keeping to himself. Seeing as he’d started this, he might as well get the rest off his chest.
“Matt says Dad crossed a rift,” he told Ray.
“Legions don’t cross rifts. That’d be stupid. You can’t breathe over there without a rig. Besides, it’d be like walking into a wasp’s nest to get rid of the wasps. You kill wasps from the outside, dipshit.”
“Well, Matt says he crossed one.”
“Matt’s a choad.”
Adrian looked down and shrugged. He wished he hadn’t. The ground this far in was covered with scuttling beetles. They were harmless, but they gave Adrian the creeps. That’s what half of the crunching he’d been hearing underfoot was, he realized: not just leaves, but bugs too.
“How the hell would Matt know what’s going on out here?” Ray continued. “He just sits at home all day playing D&D and pulling his dick.”
“His dad’s in the Brigade, too.”
“Yeah. And Dad says he’s a tool. Don’t listen to Matt. I’m your brother. You should listen to me.”
Adrian was considering this twisted bit of sibling logic when a huge cracking sound rent the air. It was like the sundering of the forest’s largest tree — larger than the largest here by a factor of five.
Adrian flinched. Ray lit up. All this unknown was a splinter under Adrian’s skin, but Ray thrived on it. Adrian sometimes envied his brother. Ray’s impulsiveness was always getting him in trouble, but there was nobody Adrian knew who lived more in the present moment, disregarding both past and future, lessons and danger. It made him a jerk sometimes, but it also made him fearless.
“Hurry,” Ray said. “That sounded like a big one.”