Massacre for Enginetown

By JP Lantern

Colonel Boyd has worked most all his life at making the frontier of Mars more habitable for humans. He's fought the mutant natives, survived deadly thunderstorms, and lived off the strange and often inhospitable land outside of the safety of the clan cities.

When the entire population of the Enginetown settlement goes missing, Boyd commissions a tracker, Doherty, to help him find the lost folk. Boyd knows Doherty to be his son, but has never met him before. As the two are drawn toward a violent confrontation with a pack of natives, Boyd also confronts the path of fatherhood he never approached. Regret swells within Boyd, and he must decide whether his long and often bloody treks in the frontier have transformed him into something even less human than the mutants he's spent a lifetime fighting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JP Lantern
• Release date: Nov 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311252302

JP Lantern

J.P. Lantern lives in the Midwestern US, though his heart and probably some essential parts of his liver and pancreas and whatnot live metaphorically in Texas. He writes speculative science fiction short stories, novellas, and novels which he has deemed "rugged," though he would also be fine with "roughhewn" because that is a terrific and wonderfully apt word.Full of adventure and discovery, these stories examine complex people in situations fraught with conflict as they search for truth in increasingly violent and complicated worlds.

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Massacre For Enginetown

by J.P. Lantern

Copyright © 2013 by J.P. Lantern

Smashwords Edition

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed herein are entirely fictitious. Any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the express written consent of the author.

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Captain Boyd saw him—the hunter what his Great Aunt said was his son—sitting on a chair at the edge of the emptied town behind an old trailer made for towing farming equipment. The young man was strumming a fiddle with his fingers, cracking out a happy little tune that did not match the reason for the meeting.

The hunter's wardrobe was all skins and furs. Mostly more skins than furs, it was the summer after all. Leather boots, lizard leather hat and vest, some furry trim around the forearms of his jacket and the edges of his pants. Even the leather straps of the breather wrapped around his face looked patched together with the skins of caught animals. The stitching of the wardrobe overall was haphazard, done by himself most like. Probably, he was of a sort not liking the long trips into the city for some proper clothes, even though he was full clanned and could take upon whatever he’d like for free, in exchange for a little work.

It was a little work what Captain Boyd had in mind for him today, a little work what had brought the hunter John Doherty out to Enginetown. Behind Captain Boyd were the rest of his regiment—twenty men, loaded down with enough ammunition and firearms and provisions for three days out in the frontier. As Whitehats, they were hired out to keep order along the frontier, in