Damage Control - ARC Read online

  Advanced Reader Copy

  This book is an Advanced Reader Copy–a pre-publication proof. You may find errors in this copy, and some details may be different in the final version.

  Also by Mary Jeddore Blakney:

  Resist the Devil

  When Terry Caulfield uncovers evidence that his town is the target of a terrorist plot, he puts over a decade of his life into trying to stop it. Only when the attack finally comes–a huge explosion leveling several blocks and nearly killing Terry along with countless others - do police finally show an interest in what he's learned. And that's when Terry finds out who was really behind the attack all along.

  Resist the Devil highlights the growing pains experienced by much of America and the world as demographics change and cultures clash. Based on research, it gives us a candid view of Christians and Muslims from several walks of life and answers commonly-asked questions on topics such as jihad and the trinity.

  theefletcherrvariablee

  The Fletcher Variable

  ___________________________

  damage control

  by

  Mary Jeddore Blakney

  ___________________________

  theefletcherrvariablee

  Copyright 2015 by Mary J. Blakney

  Cover design copyright 2015 by Luke Bellmason

  This book, its stories, characters, settings and names, are published under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. Please join me in adding to the lore of the Chuzekk world. Just be sure to give credit for its creation and maintain consistency with the original works. For more information on the Share Alike license, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/legalcode.

  This book is based on the short stories "The Mammal Cage," which won first place in the Spring 2008 New Hampshire Writers Short Story Contest, and "Pleased to Beat You."

  thanks to:

  Horace Miner for his inspiring essay “Body Ritual Among the Nacerema.”

  Beta readers Joe Lore, Peya Urena, M. Joseph Murphy, and others who do not wish to be named.

  Laura Lee Romage for content editing.

  Benjamin Blakney for his help in worldbuilding, and for proofreading.

  Luke Bellmason for designing the cover.

  to mama

  preface

  This is a different kind of book. It’s a preview of the Fletcher Variable series, a taste of what’s coming. At the same time, this book tells its own story. Each chapter is taken from one of the books in the series:

  THE ERRATIC: When an experiment in quantum physics transports American college student Piper Craven to a distant planet, she awakens in a village where the people keep her as a pet. Her efforts to tell them she’s not an animal only seem to convince them that she is. And her time is running out, as hidden forces are preparing to destroy the village and everyone in it. (Chapter 1)

  THE CHAOS BROTHERHOOD: When promising cadet Zuke Gevv tries to rescue a kidnapped friend, he discovers that she’s being held by the government. Turning to a criminal gang for help, he soon finds himself in the middle of a power struggle between two rival superpowers and a terrorist group holding a 300-year-old grudge. (Chapter 2)

  16,000 NIGHTS: Gretchen Rogers is alone, broke and hundreds of miles from home when a stranger offers her a chance to make a quick $5,000. Wary of legal trouble, she makes up her mind to find a safer solution. In spite of her efforts, she realizes she’s still been set up to face life in prison without parole. With a defense team convinced she’s guilty, a prosecution focused on winning the case, a judge intent on following procedure and a jury that sees nothing but the witness box, it’s up to Gretchen and a small band of amateurs to uncover the truth. (Chapter 3)

  THE CLAW AND THE EYE: When a rogue operative makes unauthorized contact with an alien species, he sets off a chain of events that threatens all the planets in the region. To save the world, Chegg Jaigg must break the rules he’s always lived by. But even that may not be enough, as an elusive figure called Fletcher interferes nearly every time he makes a move. (Chapters 4-18)

  key to chuzekk ranks

  Rank

  Insignia

  Responsibility

  Cheej

  Entry level

  Chiroje

  Supports 12 cheejes

  Zeed

  Supports 12 chirojes

  Zirode

  Supports 12 zeeds

  Keev

  Supports 12 zirodes

  Kirove

  Supports 12 keevs

  The symbol of the Chuzekk Counter-Intelligence Command

  theefletcherrvariablee

  The Fletcher Variable

  ___________________________

  damage control

  by

  Mary Jeddore Blakney

  ___________________________

  theefletcherrvariablee

  The first time, it was a rock.

  Nobody saw how it got there, or even exactly when, but one day there was a knee-high hunk of grey rock sitting in the Gogue desert where it didn't belong.

  The Gogue Quantum Research Laboratory had been in operation for only about five years at the time, and when a safety officer from the nearby village found it on her morning patrol, it never occurred to her to inform the Lab. She figured somebody had put it there for some mundane and useful reason, so it was more out of mild curiosity than any sense of concern that she started asking questions.

  It turned out nobody in the village had put it there, and stranger still, the rock was made of granite, with little glinting bits of quartz and mica in it, which meant it had to have been shipped in from far away. Granite was simply not a stone that occurred naturally in the Gogue.

  Eventually, more than twelve days later, the scientists at the Laboratory found out about the rock and came out and examined it. They asked lots of questions about when it was found and who had touched it and whether anyone had moved it, even just a little. They took measurements and images. Then they hauled the rock to the Laboratory and took samples and conducted experiments. But in the end they still couldn't say where it had come from or how it had gotten there.

  Eleven years later, it was a tree.

  The tree was found by a young villager on his way home from hunting, in the same area where the rock had been, maybe even the same exact spot, but nobody could say that for sure. It was just lying on the ground, roots and all, so he took it home and planted it. The tree bore a delicious fruit, and he called it 'sandfruit' and built himself a thriving business cultivating and selling it.

  Ten years after that, it was a mammal...

  1

  the mammal cage

  Piper Craven went to sleep in her dorm room and woke up in a cage. For a split second she thought she was dreaming. Then she jumped up and tugged at the bars on all sides, looking for a door.

  Nothing opened. The metal bars wouldn't even rattle or bend. After a while her throat hurt and she realized she was screaming. She stopped and just stood there until her breathing evened out.

  She guessed the cage was a kennel made to contain a number of big dogs at once. There was a sort of square bucket in it, mostly full of water. She cupped her hands and drank. The water was lukewarm, but at least it was clean.

  Beside the water was a strange-looking purple object on a six-sided plate. She sniffed it, and it had a sharp, pungent, awful smell. Maybe it was insect repellent. The only other thing in the cage was a large empty box with a hinged cover, possibly made of some sort of plastic.

  The cage was near the end of a long, unfamiliar room. The walls were plain and painted white, not broken anywhere she could see by either pictures or windows. Maybe there were windows around the corner, though, because a soft light came from somewhere,
and she didn't see any lamps or light fixtures. The ceiling was white, too, but exposed beams gave it a more interesting look than the walls.

  The furniture—if it could be called furniture—was large and lumpy and Piper didn't know what to call it. It was not chairs or tables or couches or desks or bookcases or anything else that had a name. It was just four big shapeless soft-looking brown heaps and two highly-polished, heavy-looking wooden blocks with designs carved into the tops.

  The floor was a mottled lavender color, and when she reached her finger between the bars and poked it, it turned out to be made of something rubbery. The bottom of the cage was lined in something similar, but in a dull brown color, and under that were the metal cage bars.

  She reached her arm between the bars in one end of the cage where there seemed to be a door, and felt for the latch. She thought she found it, but couldn't be quite sure. She wished she'd had a mirror so she could look at it. At any rate, if that was the latch, it was locked. She examined every inch of the bars and found no other opening, nothing else that seemed to be a latch, no way of popping the hinges, just a woven mesh of round metal bars about four inches apart.

  She knelt and had another drink from the water-box, then sat back down on the cushion she'd woken up on to retrace her steps. But it was hard to think when everything was so deafeningly quiet. For a moment, she just listened to the silence. There was no refrigerator humming, no radiator hissing, no water sloshing through heat pipes. Yet it was uncomfortably warm in the cage.

  She had just started to go over what had happened in the last few minutes in the dorm before she'd gone to sleep when she thought she heard a faint sound of water sloshing, as though someone were taking a bath with the bathroom door open.

  "Hello, is anyone there?" she called, jumping up, then held her breath to listen.

  The only response was her own heartbeat pounding in her ears.

  Then she realized that someone taking a bath may not be inclined to answer. She could practically hear her grandmother saying, "Polite people ignore the outside world when they are indisposed."

  But Piper needed help, even if she had to disturb a very proper lady during her bath. "Is anyone taking a bath?" she called. "I need help. I've been kidnapped." That should get her attention.

  Nothing.

  She sat back down on the spicy-smelling cushion she'd woken up on. It just didn't make sense. How could she have gotten from her bed in Holt Hall in Naperville College to—to wherever this was?

  She had walked back to her dorm from the campus Post Office shortly before curfew, put her hair in curlers and gone to bed. At the Post Office she'd mailed a very strongly-worded letter to her brother Philip, because Philip had used that very same Post Office to send her a box of live mice. And now she, Piper, was in danger of being expelled for it.

  Then she'd fallen asleep and had the strangest dream about hot sand and huge lizards. But that couldn't be quite right because she distinctly remembered burning pain in her arms, her legs, her face and several other places. She'd never been in actual pain in a dream before—not like that. No, this was a real memory. She'd been lying on her back, very sick for some reason, with people fussing over her, and her skin had felt like it was on fire.

  She looked down and realized that her arms and legs were very red, as though they were sunburned. She hadn't gone to bed with a sunburn. And even if he had, it wouldn't have been this shape. She'd gotten this burn in her pajamas, after she'd gone to bed.

  Then, almost all at once, she remembered.

  Piper woke up and coughed. Dizzying pain shot through her head. She shaded her eyes with her hand and began to open them, but the stabbing light nauseated her, and she shut them fast.

  She spat out sand and tried to stand up but only fell on the burning, shifting surface. She tried again and again but always ended up in a crumpled heap on the sand. She stopped when she thought she heard voices.

  They were voices, alright, but she couldn't make out what they were saying. She tried to yell to them for help, but all she could manage was a hoarse squeak. Her throat burned. She tried to look for them, but the sun on the sand was too much for even a quick glimpse.

  The voices came closer and she realized they weren't speaking English. There seemed to be two of them, and they picked her up and put her in a truck or something and drove away.

  She didn't open her eyes until the truck had stopped and the voices had moved her to a cool, relatively dark place. But even then, she may as well not have bothered. No matter how much she struggled to focus her eyes, the images she saw made no sense.

  She'd been laid on her back on some sort of table or bench: that much she could tell without looking. And when she opened her eyes, she could make out walls and a ceiling, painted white or off-white. She thought the room might be an unusual shape, not square, but she was so dizzy she couldn't be sure.

  It was the people that she wasn't seeing correctly. The people who spoke a foreign language, who were now beginning to wash her face gently with cool water, looked like people, yet not like people. They stood upright and wore clothes. They had hands with four fingers and a thumb. But they were scaly-skinned and a color somewhere between gray, green and brown. Their fingers ended in claws, and there were spines on their bald heads. I'm hallucinating from the heat, she thought, or just dreaming. I should try to go to sleep, so I'll wake up.

  One of the lizard-people rinsed the sand out of her mouth, gave her a cube-shaped thing with a tube sticking out of it and helped her put it to her mouth. It was like an oddly-shaped juice box with the straw in the bottom instead of the top. She sucked on the straw and cold water rushed into her mouth, soothing her throat.

  Someone washed the sand off her arms and legs and put a cooling balm on her sunburns. She felt sleepy and her headache was beginning to subside. She finished the water box, put her head down and went to sleep.

  Piper was hungry and needed a bathroom. Her headache had started to come back, too, and she was bored. She took her curlers out and hid them under the cushion. Then she decided to pass the time by practicing her French. At least she'd be well prepared for next week's final.

  She exhausted her tiny French vocabulary pretty quickly and recited all the conjugations and declensions she could remember. She had just begun to attempt a review of her American History class when she began to hear noises.

  She sat on the cushion and listened and waited. The noises came steadily closer, and soon she was sure there were people in the house. The question was, were they her kidnappers or someone who could help her? Either way, she was desperate to get to the bathroom. "Hello!" she called. "Who's there?"

  She wasn't surprised to see two people enter the room and approach the cage. What did surprise her was how they were dressed. She hadn't been hallucinating earlier: the people really had looked a lot like lizards, and here they were again. Now that she was alert, it was obvious that it was a costume, a disguise. 'I guess that's good news,' she thought. 'If they're hiding their identities, then it means they don't intend to kill me.' They were both men, and one was smaller than the other.

  Piper thought of about ten things she wanted to say, and they all crowded together in her head. To her surprise, the only thing that came out of her mouth was, "Where's your bathroom?" It was a good thing Grandma wasn't there to hear it. 'Ladies don't mention such things,' she would have said.

  The men didn't answer. The smaller one looked at Piper with a quick, curious, amused glance and continued through the room and around the corner, in the direction of the sloshing sounds. The larger one unlocked the cage and opened the door.

  Piper's desperately-full bladder gave her courage, and she hurried right past the big man and began to search hurriedly for the bathroom.

  She found it, but it was the oddest bathroom she'd ever seen and she almost didn't recognize it. The toilet, for example, was only about a foot high, had no tank on it, and was round instead of oval. She dashed inside and tried to shut the door, but the big man
was holding it open. "Please," she begged, "close the door."

  The man only laughed and kept his grip on the door. She tried to push him off, but his arm was huge and muscular, and she couldn't budge it.

  She gave up. Fortunately, the pajama top she was wearing was long, almost like a tunic, and she pulled it down over herself and was able to get her business done without too much immodesty. There didn't seem to be any toilet paper, but there were some squares of something that looked like blotting paper, and she used one of them. It was rough on her delicate skin.

  She looked for a sink, but there didn't seem to be one. Maybe she'd need to wash her hands in the kitchen. The big man still held the door half-open, blocking her exit. For the first time, she got a good look at him. He must have been close to seven feet tall.

  "Where can I wash my hands?" she asked.

  He gestured toward a triangular object installed in a corner.

  "What's that?" Piper said. Whatever it was, it wasn't a sink.