Excerpt from Ed Calkins' "Ruthless"

Ed Calkins, Steward of Tara, has finally written his first novel (hurray!), a back story that contains elements of Ed the real person in real time, Ed the pretend person as he invented himself, and Ed the vampire as portrayed in the BryonySeries "drop of blood" trilogy.

All of these personalities come together in a single tome of absolute literary nonsense. Colleen Robbins, who edits the books in the BryonySeries, is currently editing Ruthless, which has a release date of Calkins Day (Feb. 13).

While you're eagerly awaiting the release, here is an excerpt - or what you'll read after the table of contents.

I doubt you'll be anymore enlightened. But I can say the same after you've finished the book.

Happy reading!

FORWARD

 

Glorna, a wood sprite, perched in a crooked branched of a chatty pine tree while the tree murmured to him a scenario of what  killing a modern king might be like should Glorna continue with his plan to assassinate someone set on becoming the king of all vampires. Clearly, the pine had more whisper than wit, but since Glorna was a wood sprite, he was obliged to listen.

              “Such a king,” the tree said, “would travel in a motorcade of high-speed limousines and an army of men who’d fight to the death rather than let their monarch break a nail. The king would occupy the middle car, so you must time your dive from the branch onto the correct limousine roof. Once you hit your target, gunfire will spray from the other vehicles and seven ninja warriors will do a dance of death to avoid it as they dive on you, kicking and blocking your counter chops and kicks in a fur ball of high-pitched verbal utterings that only makes sense to ninjas. Six will lose their balance and fall to their deaths.”

“Why?” Glorna asked.

“I don’t know why,” the pine said irritably. “It’s some kind of rule. Are you going to listen or not?”

“Sure,” Glorna said.

“Now the gun fire will not hit anyone, just come perilously close. The last ninja, however, will push you to the hood and pin  you there. Your head will sink lower than the grill of the car and leave your face just inches from the rapidly moving pavement. But you’ll flip that ninja over his head with the kick of your feet, being saved from falling only be the tenuous grip of the hood ornament on his clothes. Once  you’re free of the last ninja, the magical swords will attack.”

“Magical swords?”

“Yes. Six steel blades with no one holding them. They’ll stab and slice while you dance around them until the swords gave up and the serpent takes over. After that will come the poisonous monkey, followed by the green tiger, all attacking while the cars speeds over one hundred miles per hour and the gunmen continue to shoot. Eventually, the car will hit something and explode, but the king and his guard will survive. Got it?

“Got it.”

Glorna knew the tree was full of sap. Killing the king of vampires would be far more difficult. Most wood sprites were cautious mythical creatures, not given to performing assassinations without some sense of duty or cause. Glorna was different. Glorna was the cool bad boy type - if wood sprites could be cool, bad, or boys. The point is: Glorna wasn’t here for the whispering of pine trees, he was here to kill.

              The wood sprite knew who his target was, though was less clear on why that was his target. True, a strange leprechaun from a different realm did offer him money to do it, although Glorna didn’t understand what money was, let alone have any idea on how to spend it. Wood sprites lived in the trees they protected and typically cared about nothing except their trees. But it wasn’t cool, bad, or boyish to be so duty-bound. With all that time to kill, why not kill?

            So why did he hesitate? There had to be another reason.

              Maybe his target was too ruthless, especially to wood sprites who were too cool, bad, or boyish. The leprechaun that had offered him money to make the killing also hinted that the assassination was a competition, that Glorna had to make his hit before somebody else “hit” first. Timing was everything.

              “Get there before a vampire bites,” the leprechaun warned.

              So Glorna sat – and waited.

              Soon a rust bucket van drove under the branch where Glorna was poised to drop from the tree to the roof of the vehicle, superhumanly balance himself as he broke through the windshield, and then stab his target with a knife. But the van just stopped.

What the hell?  Was this a trap?

Patiently, Glorna remained in position, toes curled around a limb, hoping the van would soon be on its way, but it stayed, as if to block a motorcade from driving under a wood sprite/assassin. Glorna sighed and tightened his grip. If the van didn’t move, how would the motorcade drive past? Maybe the truck was broken. Glorna could offer to fix or move the van, but cool bad boys didn’t help people, they yelled at them.

              He dropped from the branch to do just that only to find that the unmoving driver was his target. This was way too easy to be cool, bad, or boyish, but at least he got there first. He quickly stabbed his target who didn’t even resist.

            Maybe his next crime wouldn’t be so boring. At least he got his target first. Glorna looked around. No sign of any vampires.

             The two killers that followed thought the same, not realizing that each was too late.

              “Not again!’ thought the pot-bellied, white-bearded, middle-aged man still sitting upright in that rusty white single seated van. He had been delivering newspapers, his only job for the duration of his adult life, when something distressed him, making him unable to correct a mistake. His face was still red with anger and with the approaching footsteps, he wasn’t feeling any calmer.

              First, he’d been stabbed in the belly then shot in the head with a bullet, which was now rattling uncomfortably in his skull, and all of that was before he wound up with the huge pain in his chest. So naturally being dead was a perfectly reasonable expectation. Along with being dead should come the feeling that any concerns about this other newspaper carrier, who had parked behind him and was now approaching his van, should be somebody else’s problem. Ed, for that was the driver’s name, lamented on how many other people died so often in such a short time. It hardly seemed fair. Most people that died, he was sure, didn’t have to work the next day.

              Suddenly Ed realized something. He hadn’t just been murdered; he’d been assassinated! Hell, anyone can take a knife or a bullet, but to be the victim of some elaborate conspiracy; well, didn’t that make him important?

            He saw the carrier quiet distinctly now. It was the new carrier, John Simotes, and somehow Ed Calkins knew something about him that he didn’t know the day he hired him. At first, John seemed like a godsend, as he was willing to take a paper route Ed thought he would never fill. This route contained pockets of small towns surrounded by forests, grasslands, and farm fields, which increase the mileage exponentially, all on the carrier’s dime. John not only accepted the route, he especially asked for it, so Ed thought of this new carrier as his LPC: least problematic carrier.

              Don’t get him wrong. Ed loved his carrier. Most were hardworking problem-solvers, trying to pull themselves up in the world by taking extra work for extra money. But carriers, by their nature, always came with problems they brought to work with them. For example, a carrier takes the route to get his car fixed, but he needs it fixed to do his route; do you have an extra car I could use? Or money. I'm a little short right now, can I have an advance? I need a sitter; can you watch my kids while I do the route?

Until now, Ed thought John’s problem was the two-year-old boy he took with him on the route, a little boy with an exceptional talent in music and an equally exceptional appetite, so much that he was eating his proud parents out of house and home. While the parents were proud, they didn’t seem happy, at least not with each other. That seemed to be the most of this carrier’s problems.

              Now, inexplicably, and all at once, Ed knew the truth. John’s main problem was that he was a vampire that fed on human blood, and he was trying not to be a vampire that fed on human blood and was failing miserably at that endeavor. That problem was about to be Ed’s problem as John just found his next supply of human blood in Ed. As bad as that seemed, that wasn’t John’s biggest problem, which was also about to become Ed’s biggest problem. John wanted a changeling son.

              “Relax,” John murmured to Ed as he closed in. “It will be fine.”

But it wasn’t. John was going to make Ed a vampire too and pass onto him that little deal of making that changeling son that, two years ago, became the little John-Peter that accompanied John on the route. Sure, John; make a human, do a better job this time, and get it all done a couple of years ago? No problem…except how? John was insistent. Ed could use his skills as a computer programmer to write AI software to the specifications of his bachelor’s psychology degree, which undoubtably gave him all the knowledge he would ever need to make a child from scratch. Ed kept insisting that the deed was impossible, but John kept insisting otherwise, as John-Peter already existed.

              Teeth sank into Ed’s neck. The experience seemed familiar in an awful way. Ed felt the vampire sucking deeply not only for his last drop of blood, but his very soul.

              To this, Ed might have smiled. He didn’t have a soul as it had already been stolen by his lover and wife, which is an important distinction to note. Ed had many wives, but only one was, by the enforcement of her own machete, and would be for all times, his lover. All other women were just potential wives that would be numbered, but never bedded, as Ed believed he was in a bragging rights contest with the biblical King Solomon.

              Still, something felt wrong. It was almost as if Ed wasn’t protected by his lover’s theft from eternal damnation. Was he going to answer for his plans to kill of every other living male on the earth? To be fair, his plan was to enable someone else to do that and kill them once he finished. What about his plans for world domination? To be fair again, they were no longer his plans as everyone seemed to steal them before he could bring them to production. What he worried about the most was what he did about the day he won the lottery. Ed was a broken creature. Surely the Divine would understand and show mercy. More likely, the luck of the Irish would swoop down at the last minute and rescue the damaged soul just before it hit those eternal flames.

              The timing problem suddenly had a surprising solution. As John informed him, Ed was going to disappear for a time too slight for anyone to notice, but a small plastic leprechaun would appear in his pocket when that time was up. John’s wife, who was about to get out of the car and listen to his final words, should receive that leprechaun with his last instructions, “Give it to the boy,” meaning John-Peter. Between now and then, Ed would have plenty of time and every kind of help for his task, as John would supply his own blood and an impressive piece of wood that Ed’s imaginary leprechaun friend could use to craft a changeling body.

              While Ed objected, time did something strange. How was it strange? Image a rubber circle with a seven second radius. Now imagine the center of the circle being pulled downward for ten years. Technically, this would be a cone, but to the naked imagination’s eye, it would look like a very deep, narrow cylinder. Now, as Ed realized that he would have to cover for himself to allow for burial, plans that required being at two places at the same time, and a wild idea about stealing future technology that may or may not have gotten him lost and had him wandering through the end of time till he was back at its beginning. You must now imagine some very long, impossibly thin warts to that cylinder, folding upward, downward, and making it impossibly ugly and just as impossible to imagine. All of this time travel would make Ed crazy, John informed him, but it would also make him famous.

              Now, Ed was never the sanest man to begin with, but understand the havoc that time travel can bring to mental wellness. There are three things to existence: who you are, where you are, and what you are doing. Normally, none of these things contradict each other. To understand this, take a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker in France during the summer of 1812. Pick one, let’s say a candlestick maker named Jean. We can say with confidence that if Jean is making a candle somewhere in France in the summer of 1812, that Jean is from France in the summer of 1812. Now throw time travel into the mix. We might see Jean, making a candle somewhere in France in the summer of 1812, but do we know he is from France of the same time? He could be from the past, doing work for his future self or completely the reverse. None of that matters of course. Jean could make too many candles, and no one would notice unless he took nuclear technology from some Russia launch site in the late winter of 2031 and made a very large candle that impressed a customer who then lit it with a blow torch so that it blew/will blow France out of existence. That might catch notice. If you’re a new vampire, or plan on becoming one, don’t try what Ed did about time travel without senior vampire supervision. You see, if Ed had merely gone back in the past, future, and imagined present, the result might have been benign, but Ed unwittingly changed the course of human existence in his efforts, thus effecting what can be called deep time, which effected a disorder that he coined “deep time psychosis” or DTP. If you should become a vampire and ignore the warning about deep time, know that the only person that can treat your DTP is Ed Calkins himself.

              Yes, Ed Calkins would become the vampire’s leading authority of not only psychosis, but also Astro-Time Physics, a mathematical field which he invented, despite not really understanding any of the underlying math. He also became the poster child for why vampires needed to bite more qualified authorities into vampirism.

              Ed did disappear for seven seconds. When he reappeared, Melissa, John’s wife, rushed from her car to aid the dying Ed, but he grabbed her jacket and dropped a plastic leprechaun in her hand.

“For the boy,” he croaked, just before he actually did croak.

            This is the tale of what happened in that seven seconds…except of course, when it didn’t.