Shattered Skies

Shattered Skies

Chris Miller

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

Shattered Skies Copyright © 2021 by Chris Miller

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Published by Death’s Head Press, an imprint of Dead Sky Publishing, LLC

Miami Beach, Florida

www.deadskypublishing.com

Edited by: Christine Morgan

Formatting and Cover Design by: Apparatus Revolution, LLC

Photography by: Cottonbro Studio, and Mitja Juraja

Contents

Dedication

Foreward

1. 10-35 at First United Bank

2. Behind Blue Eyes

3. Horror on Lonesome Lane

4. A Thirst for Scarlet

5. Road Kill Gods

6. Farewell

7. Severed

8. The Christmas Miracle

9. A Magnificent View

10. Neon Sky

Author’s Notes & Acknowledgments

About the Author

This one is for my Granddaddy. I think you would have been proud of me. I miss you.

This one is also for Cerberus. M Ennenbach and Patrick C. Harrison III, you guys are my sounding boards, my writing partners, and my brothers.

World Domination.

Foreward

by Patrick C. Harrison III

One of the first books of horror I ever remember reading was Alfred Hitchcock’s Haunted Houseful. It was (and still is) the perfect text to introduce kids to the horror genre without sending them screaming into the night, unable to sleep for weeks on end. With spooky tales from classic authors like Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Walter S. Brooks, Haunted Houseful served up horror of a lighter sort, horror meant to entertain more than frighten, horror meant for children. And what I found most delightful (and probably most frightening) about Haunted Houseful, was the creepy interior illustrations by Fred Banbery, often featuring Hitchcock-like ghosts or mysterious figures.

Not long after discovering Haunted Houseful, while garage-selling with my dad, I came across a whole host of Alfred Hitchcock paperbacks, each one with a scary title, like Grave Business and Once Upon a Dreadful Time and Happiness is a Warm Corpse. Naturally, I figured Hitchcock was a horror author himself, much like Stephen King. After all, why else would his likeness be decorating every book’s cover, usually with him involved in one nefarious deed or another?

Then I discovered he’d also directed the classic horror movies The Birds and Psycho. This Hitchcock guy was a horror god! He had his fingers deeply imbedded in horror no matter what medium it came in. Or, at least, that’s what kid me thought.

It would be years later that I discovered Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t really a horror guy. Sure, he dabbled in horror cinema, and probably made tons of money off those paperbacks with his image on them, but he wasn’t a through and through horror guy. Not like Stephen King. He may have been a horror guy to a kid like me, whose only real interests were baseball and horror. But what Hitchcock actually was, of course, was the Master of Suspense.

If you’ve read Chris Miller’s work before, it’s probably been The Damned Place or Dust, or maybe the collection myself and M. Ennenbach collaborated with Chris on—Cerberus Rising. And after reading those books, if you were to call Chris a horror writer, I wouldn’t argue with you. All three of those books are very much horror. (The Damned Place has some of the most gut-wrenching scenes of pure horror I’ve ever read, and The Final Correspondence of Thomas Baker Wolfe from Cerberus Rising is one of the best Lovecraftian tales ever written that wasn’t penned by Lovecraft himself.) But you’d be cutting Chris short by calling him a horror author and leaving it at that. Like Hitchcock, Chris Miller is very much a master of suspense first.

Two of Chris’s lesser-known works are The Hard Goodbye and Trespass, both of which, I would argue, are suspense thrillers, not horror. Certainly, this is the case for Trespass, which is perhaps still my favorite of Chris’s works (curse you, Deadman, for getting your tobacco-stained mitts on the manuscript before me!). Talk about edge-of-your-seat, fingernail-biting suspense! Trespass and The Hard Goodbye, in fact, are like Hitchcock suspense films boosted with a shot of steroids and a snort of cocaine.

The same suspense quality can be found in Chris’s horror. He never just shows you the monster. Quite the opposite, in fact. Chris will put you in a dark room with a closet cracked slightly open, and he’ll tell you about the dreadful, tentacled, fanged beast that may be lurking beyond that door, waiting for you to flip on the light and chance a look inside the closet, at which point the thing would rip you to shreds and devour your insides. And then he’ll have you flip on that light and look inside, and guess what…there’s nothing in the closet. Just clothes and old shoes. You begin to relax. All is safe. Except, there was knife-wielding madman hiding beneath the bed this whole time, and now he’s jumped out and has the serrated edge of his blade pressed against your throat. You weren’t expecting it. You never are in a Chris Miller tale.

So, what is it you’re holding in your hand? A book of horror stories? Well, there are some horror stories here. Indeed, they’re mostly horror stories. But no, you’re holding a book of suspense tales written by one of the best crafters of suspense there is. The first tale in this collection, 10-35 at First United Bank, will help convince you of that. It’s the literary equivalent of being shot out of a cannon.

Chris doesn’t let up from there. Readers will witness the end of days (twice?) and glimpse maybe what can be expected on the other side. You’ll read a tale Chris wrote with M. Ennenbach that plays like a cyberpunk action flick, and perhaps prepares the masses for a project involving the three of us. There’s a little comic relief with Severed and yuletide insanity with The Christmas Miracle. And those are just a few of the nightmares and thrills you can look forward to. And each one is dripping with—you guessed it—suspense.

Except Farewell. It stands alone. It’s tender. Heart-warming and heart-wrenching. And, I believe, therapeutic for our beloved author. It’s a beautiful story.

By this time, as Chris himself is reading this foreword for the first time, he’ll be wondering why I haven’t berated him with the usual light-hearted insults that accompany most our conversations. So, I’ll do that now.

A while back, at a garage sale (yes, I’ve managed to bring up garage sales twice now in the foreword to a book), I purchased a hardback copy of Carrie, shockingly thinking I’d found a first edition. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a book club edition, which I was less than pleased about. Still, it was a pretty neat find for North Texas. I was telling Chris and Mike Ennenbach about this and we were discussing good book finds in general, when Chris dropped a bomb.

"I have an old copy of Dracula," he said. This conversation was through messenger, but my mind’s eye saw him smugly saying this then taking a sip of gin. His pinky extended as he did so.

How old? I asked, jealously recalling my own copy of Stoker’s greatest work was a near worthless paperback with the cover half gone.

It’s from the nineties, Chris said.

The nineties?! I thought. As in, the 1890s????? Christ, he could have a first edition! Dracula was published in 1897! Chris’s copy could be worth thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands!—if it was in good condition!

I quickly began hammering him with questions about its exact publication date and its condition and so on. It turns out—brace yourself—Chris’s "old copy of Dracula" was from the mid-NINETEEN-nineties. Old indeed, Chris, old indeed. Mike and I gave him hell.

But don’t let that dissuade you from reading his fiction. As I said, he’s worthy of the same title as Hitchcock himself—Master of Suspense. Just don’t ever let him fool you into thinking he’s an antiquarian book collector.

Patrick C. Harrison III

Author of A Savage Breed

1/3 Cerberus

10-35 at First United Bank

They’re going to kill them, he thinks.

He wants to say these words out loud, but he cannot. His throat feels like sand. Anxiety dances through his every quivering molecule. A tear collects in his right eye and slips over his cheek as his mouth works silently and the gun he’s holding on the manager wavers.

Jesus, Ken, says Leonard, the bank manager, what the hell are you doing?

His hands are up and his eyes are wide over his flushed face and Ken can see three places where Leonard nicked himself shaving this morning.

Brittany, one of the tellers, screams as she sees the scene unfolding, her hands promptly clapping over her unhinged jaw, her expression one of abject terror. Ken doesn’t blame her, but his shoulders spasm at her outburst and he comes dangerously close to accidentally blowing a hole through Leonard’s skull. Ken lets out a staccato sigh, the air forcing its way around the sand coating his esophagus. His heart is nearing overdrive and he can’t think.

Say something, damn you! he thinks, trying to will himself to calm, but his throat only clicks.

Terry, the assistant manager, is ducked behind his desk, but Ken can see the bright red bow tie beneath his throat where a protruding Adam’s Apple bobs as he gulps. His glasses are thick and make his eyes look too big. Like an alien. The kid is probably twenty-six, twenty-eight at the outset. Been here all of two months or so. Maybe a little longer, but not much. Seemed to know what he was doing, fell into the routine pretty quick. Leonard was a fan, and obvious about it. If Terry loaded a fresh ream of paper into the printer, Leonard was quick to tell him what an asset the boy was to the team. Leonard is still in the closet, but he seems to be the only one who thinks he is keeping a secret. Terry notices how Leonard treats him, but so far he’s just rolled with it.

All that’s present on any of their faces now is fear.

Muzak plays softly through the speakers around the lobby, something with a saxophone and a Benadryl. Ken used to wonder how he was supposed to stay awake for eight hours at a time on guard duty with that shit playing. He soon found staying on your feet the bulk of the day did the trick. But he’s wide awake now, every synapse firing, every muscle tense, his lungs struggling to keep him from hyperventilating.

They’re going to kill them.

Ken and Janine Horton had been sitting down to dinner with their grandson when they came. Some rosemary chicken recipe Janine had found on the internet. Smelled fantastic, and the steam rising off the mashed cauliflower she was serving with it had Ken’s stomach raring to go. They’d just joined hands and bowed their heads when the doorbell rang.

It was 7:33PM.

You expecting anyone? Janine asked as Ken rose, dropping his napkin to the table.

Ken shook his head and hiked his pants up while he stepped around the table.

You two start without me, he said.

As he left the dining room he could hear the clinks of silverware on ceramic as they dug in and Ken’s stomach did another rumble. He sighed, aggravated. It always seemed someone wanted to come knocking at your door right when you were getting ready to lie down or getting comfortable in your favorite chair to read or watch TV. Or sitting down to dinner. People didn’t have any etiquette anymore. In his day, you didn’t make a phone call to another person after 7:00PM unless it was a legitimate emergency and you sure didn’t show up at their house jingling the bell. But, the age of cellphones had largely done away with etiquette for calling hours, though coming to a person’s house should still be off-limits without a good excuse.

Ken had retired from a security consulting firm two years before. He had put together a nice retirement for himself and Janine, something they could live comfortably on for the remainder of their years—assuming they didn’t keep on kicking into their mid-nineties, anyway—but he’d soon found himself restless. He had his hobbies, picking at the mandolin and a little woodworking, but it wasn’t enough. Eventually, he’d decided to come on as a guard part time at the bank. It was easy money, and the people he worked with were decent enough. But more than anything it gave him something to do. Janine hadn’t been a fan of it, preferred to have him home, but Ken thought she also understood that he just had to have something to keep him busy, and a regular schedule with a work routine was just the ticket.

She’d brought it up again when Todd, their grandson, was set to spend the summer with them. Wanted Ken to get out of that bank and enjoy his grandson and his retirement, at least until Roger and Annette got back from their trip to Europe to claim Todd. After that he could go back if he really wanted to. But Ken had protested. He loved his grandson and every second he spent with him, but after working for over forty-five years with a daily routine and responsibilities, he just couldn’t turn it off. Not yet, anyway. There was still plenty of time for him and Todd to spend together on his off days, and he was home every night, anyway. Janine tried bringing up the inherent danger of his job, part time or not, guarding the bank. There wasn’t really any danger, not in today’s technological world. Criminals were stupid, but most had sworn off trying to knock over banks. His was a position of symbolism and little more, even with the revolver hanging on his hip through his shift.

However, as much as Ken wanted to keep himself busy, he could tell he wasn’t going to be able to stay on at the bank indefinitely. The pay was hardly anything, but the real issue was his age. Staying on your feet for eight hours, even stationary, wore on a man of his age. Twice he’d taken the chair offered by the manager and both times he had dozed off. Leonard had chuckled when he shook his shoulder, and no one had any ill feelings towards Ken for nodding off, but it had burned Ken all the same. He took pride in doing his job—whatever it was—to the best of his abilities and taking the responsibilities he was given seriously. Symbolic or not, an armed guard should be alert at all times. So, he’d begun refusing the chair and stayed on his feet. But now it was wearing on his back and joints enough that the creams Janine rubbed into his skin in the evenings were having less and less effect. She was right, he was going to have to give it up. Maybe he could find something else to do. Something that would keep his mind and his hands busy enough that he wouldn’t lose his sanity in retirement. He liked to fish, but not the way a lot of other guys his age did. If he went once in a month it was lucky. He wasn’t a hunter. Didn’t care anything about tinkering with cars, either. He loved to read, but he found the older he got the fewer pages he could scan before his eyelids grew heavy, no matter what time of day and no matter how many cups of coffee he’d had. Maybe he would try to write something of his own? The thought had come up more than once. He had plenty of stories to pull from from his time with the security firm. Maybe he could put together a collection of short stories? Or a memoir, maybe?

Or maybe he would fall asleep at the keyboard, too.

He rounded into the hallway that led to the front door, rubbing at an ache in his neck. He twisted his head a couple of times, but nothing popped. Rarely did anymore. He sighed, a frustrated huff whistling between his teeth, and again thought about etiquette and people bothering others at their homes in the evenings. He could see two silhouettes in the window as he approached the door and his face scrunched. Their neighbors on either side were women, but these were clearly men. Tall, broad shoulders. Hats, too, from the look of their shadows. He hoped they weren’t from that men’s rehab in town. He had nothing against them or what the rehab was doing, but when the guys would come door to door selling homemade loaves of different types of sweet bread—banana nut, blueberry, zucchini—it bugged the hell out of him. They would always start with a brief story about themselves, though they were all the same. They were young, liked to party, tried some different things. Before they knew it, they were strung out on heroin or meth or whatever else they could get their hands on, and it was only by the grace of their now Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that they ended up at Restoration Rock, where they got clean and found purpose in their lives. This was their segue into hustling their bread, raising money to help offset the cost of operating the rehab, and only the stingiest of assholes would tell them to get lost at that point. Ken had wanted to tell them just that more than once, but had instead sighed and pulled out his wallet.

When he opened the door, however, he realized these men were not from Restoration Rock and they did not have any bread.

But they did have guns.

J-just let me— Ken starts but his body spasms again when he hears the chime of the door as it slides open automatically and the robotic female voice comes on to greet the customer.

Welcome to First United Bank, it says in a cheerily condescending tone. We value your business.

The woman walking in hasn’t seen what’s happening yet. Her sunglasses are still on and she’s digging in an oversized purse that could have been a backpack with a little reengineering. Her heels are clacking over the tile and the cadence actually matches the Muzak on the speakers and sweat starts to trickle down Ken’s face as he sees Janine and Todd in his mind’s eye, their faces streaked with tears and torn with gasps of terror as the men held guns on them while they told him what they wanted him to do and what would happen if he refused.

His temples are throbbing with his pulse and he feels like he has a frog’s throat as he struggles to breathe and his eyes flick up just over the woman still digging in her purse and he sees the digital clock readout over the door.

7:58AM.

Shit.

He has two minutes, maybe a couple more if they aren’t very punctual, and they will be calling. He has to answer. If he doesn’t answer, they will make good on their promises from last night. If he does answer, but hasn’t done what they asked, they will make good on their promises from last night.

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Get on the fucking ground! he screams and the woman looks up and drops her purse at the same moment. Her mouth is round and indignant, but that changes fast as shock and fear seize her and beat her indignation to a quivering pulp of unimportance.

She drops, one of her heels slipping off her foot and she’s saying something as she starts to cry and tries to fuse with the polished flooring. Terry glances nervously at the woman, motions with his hands to her to stay put. She starts to sob.

"Kenneth, what are...why are you—" Leonard begins, but Ken’s shredded nerves do nothing to hold back the panicked bark of his response.

They’re going to kill my family! he says through clenched teeth, the words hissing around his incisors and spraying spittle on his boss, who doesn’t seem to notice. Just open the fucking vault!

Leonard smacks his lips and does an exaggerated dry gulp before shallowly nodding at a furious pace. Tears sting Ken’s eyes as he takes a step forward behind Leonard as he begins fumbling with his keys and then with the wheel of the vault. Ken knows Leonard is moving as fast as he can manage under the circumstances, but his nerves are no less eased for this knowledge. Time is ticking away, his wife and grandson are home with guns to their heads—or worse, for all he knows—and he’s seeing black spots at the edge of his vision. Black galaxies swirling in, threatening to supernova into eternal blackness if he can’t pull it toge—

His eyes fall on the digital clock above the entrance once more as the vault sucks open.

7:59AM.

He looks back and sees Leonard swinging the heavy door open and stumbling over his own feet in terror. There’s still time, the door is open, he can get what they need so long as there are no more prob—

Welcome to First United Bank. We value your business.

Sound seems to be sucked into the vacuum of space as Ken looks back and sees a very confused police officer standing in the lobby, his eyes wide as he glances around at the scene unfolding before him.

Then his hand is going for his own gun.

Officer Brandon Wallace sighs as he watches the clock in his cruiser slip from 7:44 to 7:45. Close enough, especially for a Sargeant. He can call it a day and get started on his long weekend. It isn’t really a weekend, being a Tuesday, but with his schedule, that’s exactly what it is for him.

He’s going to take his wife, Angela, to the city to celebrate their twentieth anniversary. The hotel is booked, dinner reservations are made, and there will be a chilled bottle of champagne waiting for them upon their arrival—there had better be after what he’s paid for this getaway—all to celebrate the ups and downs and sticking it out all these years. He smiles thinking of the trip. It’ll be nice to have some time together, just the two of them. Jacob graduated high school last year and is still getting used to the dorm life at college, but even with an empty nest, they don’t get a lot of one on one time. Their jobs simply don’t allow it. He works the overnight shift for the PD and she is usually already gone to the clinic by the time he gets home in the mornings. And their schedules shift around a lot, so this trip will be nice. More than nice, it will be necessary.

Brandon glances over at his bag, lifts the lip, and glances in. The envelope with the deposit is there, the one he promised Angela he would take to the bank before coming home. He turns on his blinker and waits for traffic to pass before turning onto Main Street. The bank is just ahead, less than half a mile, but there is a fair amount of traffic, so it will take him a few minutes. He reaches for the stereo controls, but his cellphone buzzes, stopping him. He glances at it, sighs, and answers.

This is Officer Wall—

Man, I know who the fuck this is, a voice on the other end cuts him off. I’m the motherfucker who called.

Brandon’s jaw clenches and he puts on a forced smile for no one.

What do you want, Cecil? It’s early.

Bullshit, it’s early. It’s late for your ass. My ass, too. But that ain’t why I called.

You don’t say...

Motherfucker, you want a tip or not? I ain’t gotta waste my time with you.

Brandon lets out a silent sigh. He doesn’t want a tip, actually. Not right now, anyway. Cecil has brought him good information over the years, leading to more than a few convictions. But the guy has an attitude, and never mind that, Brandon and Angela have anniversary plans. The last thing he wants to be doing is getting in on a lead that will put him on overtime when he ought to be loading the van with his and Angela’s bags and heading out for a nice couple of days in the city.

But, on the other hand, he has to hear what the man has to say. If he’s lucky, it’ll just be some back pocket information, something to tuck away for future use. If he’s not...

Mousy little white dude up in The Rowdy Rooster last night, Cecil says, and sniffs, "doing lines in the bathroom, then gets a little liquid courage, starts bragging. Says he’s celebrating. Says he’s gonna be rich come tomorrow...that is to say, today, being this was last night."

I can keep up, Cecil, Brandon says as he rolls through a traffic light as it switches from yellow to red.

Yeah, yeah, Cecil says with a sarcastic tone.

So, what’s he bragging about? Got his hands on some smack?

Nah, man, nothing like that. This motherfucker starts sayin’ how he and these other two dudes is pullin’ a damn caper. They got it all worked out.

A caper? Brandon asks, finally interested in what Cecil is shoveling.

"That’s what I said, now let me finish. So, he and these two other dudes is pullin’ a caper. Only, he’s the backup plan. Motherfucker looking like Peter Parker before he gets bit by that spider, and he a backup plan."

Cecil makes a derisive laugh and Brandon is getting frustrated. His informant has never been what he might consider succinct, but he seems to really be taking the long way around this time.

Look, Cecil, I need you to get to the point. I’ve got a trip planned with Angela—

You and Ang takin’ a trip, huh? Cecil cuts in, suddenly cheery and interested. Brandon is flustered at this for a moment and stammers a few times.

"Y-yeah, but never mind that. Get to the goddamn point