The Diffident Hero

By Gord McLeod

Brandon Burns is an artistic homebody who just wants to be left alone, but that's the last thing his future has in store for him after he accidentally saves the life of a newborn baby of the People!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gord McLeod
• Release date: Nov 9, 2012

Gord McLeod

I won NaNoWriMo 2011 after live-writing my stories. I continue to write daily at http://www.fictionimprobable.com where all of my work is available for free. I have terrible difficulty deciding between writing under the name Gord McLeod or Gordon S. McLeod. Currently, Gord McLeod is winning. Once upon a time, I designed video games for Ganz Studios, the makers of WebKinz and the announced Tail Towns project. Many many moons ago, I wrote and drew a short-lived forgotten web comic. I'm a tech blogger for Livid Lobster at GeekBeat.TV and One Man's Blog.

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Copyright

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 by Gordon S. McLeod

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

All other rights reserved.

Table of Contents

The Diffident Hero

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Author's Note

Excerpt From The Ship of the Unforgotten

Fiction Improbable

Chapter 1

So I was walking down the street just keeping to myself, and suddenly the whole block explodes.

I know that part, I watched it on the news. C’mon, tell me about how you saved that baby’s life!

Brandon sighed. I’ve told you, it was an accident! She fell into my arms. She literally just fell right into my arms as I was walking. That’s how it happened!

But how did you know it was falling? How did you catch it? Derrick was eager, talking as much with his hands and arms as with his voice, was clearly not listening to a word he said.

Brandon grunted in exasperation. I didn’t know the baby was falling. I was just walking. How many times do I have to go through this? She basically just hit me in the chest and I caught her by reflex.

It was completely true. It had happened just about an hour before. Brandon had been walking home from work, planning nothing more special than a stop at the coffee shop between the office and his place. Before he’d reached it, a building had exploded with fire and debris. It had certainly felt and sounded like a whole block had gone up a the time, though.

He’d barely had time to react or even panic when he’d been hit in the chest by a heavy falling object, and had instinctively grabbed it. It had turned out to be a baby; he’d saved the little girl’s life. And with just that one single, instinctive action, his life for the past hour had been turned upside down.

He hoped it was just for the hour. There’d been something about that kid that had unnerved him slightly, and it was more than just unfamiliar human contact. Brandon led a very solitary life, with just a few close friends and coworkers, but …

It had been the eyes, he thought. The little girl had looked at him after he caught her, and he’d been transfixed for a moment. Those eyes never belonged in a baby’s face. They were old, and deep. They knew things; they saw things. They’d seen him. They’d smiled at him, and he’d felt a shiver, then, as though a chill breeze had blown across his spine.

He’d been stunned, of course. Not just by the baby he held, but by the blast itself, and by the sudden wave of applause that had gone up as people around him realized what he’d done. The cheering and clapping had gone on for at least five minutes, though all he remembered was the shocked gratitude and joyful tears