Disturbance

By Veronica Moore

Seemingly normal people leading seemingly normal lives until that moment that causes disturbance.

Nine stories quickening heartbeats.

Recoil by Shawn Jones
Artillery & Apparitions by DJ Tyrer
The Night Clock by Kevin Wetmore
Feeding the Machine by Matt Kolbet
372 by Keith Keffer
All That Lies by IE Castellano
When Voices Call by Thomas Beck
Whitehall Down by DJ Tyrer
Curtains by Fred Adams, Jr.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Laurel Highlands Publishing
• Release date: Oct 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781941087251

Veronica Moore

Laurel Highlands Publishing Fiction and Anthology Editor

Book preview

Disturbance

Edited by: Veronica Moore

Disturbance

Copyright © 2015 Laurel Highlands Publishing

372 Copyright © 2015 Keith Keffer

All That Lies Copyright © 2015 IE Castellano

Artillery & Apparitions Copyright © 2015 DJ Tyrer

Curtains Copyright © 2015 Fred Adams, Jr.

Feeding the Machine Copyright © 2015 Matt Kolbet

The Night Clock Copyright © 2015 Kevin Wetmore

Recoil Copyright © 2015 Shawn Jones

When Voices Call Copyright © 2015 Thomas Beck

Whitehall Down Copyright © 2015 DJ Tyrer

Rights reserved.

Cover by JosDCreations

http://JosDCreations.com

Laurel Highlands Publishing

Mount Pleasant, PA

USA

http://LaurelHighlandsPublishing.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-941087-25-1

ISBN-10: 1941087256

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Recoil by Shawn Jones

Artillery & Apparitions by DJ Tyrer

The Night Clock by Kevin Wetmore

Feeding the Machine by Matt Kolbet

372 by Keith Keffer

All That Lies by IE Castellano

When Voices Call by Thomas Beck

Whitehall Down by DJ Tyrer

Curtains by Fred Adams, Jr.

About the Authors

Recoil

Shawn Jones

Some days change you. They’re like epiphanies. Epiphanal days, that’s what they are. My computer is telling me epiphanal isn’t a word, but it’s wrong. Today was epiphanal. It started normally. I woke the kids, took a shower, and picked up coffee on the way to the school where I volunteer once a week. The first couple of hours were fine. We worked on a science project in my daughter’s class. At recess, I taught the kids to play four square, the way I did when I was their age. I was helping in my son’s class a little while after that.

Then I had to kill someone.

It wasn’t the first time I had killed someone, mind you. I did it as a Marine. I did it when the other guy was wearing the wrong country’s uniform, or when he was making drugs to sell to the kids on U.S. streets. I didn’t mind killing those guys. It was my job. Besides, if I hadn’t killed them, you can bet your ass they would have killed me.

I walked from my son, David’s kindergarten class to the staff workroom so I could make some copies. The Riso machine was down, so I headed back to the classroom to get the code for the Xerox copier. Thanks to budget cuts, each teacher in the school is only allotted 150 pages per month on the Xerox.

I was on my way back when the lockdown bell sounded. In that moment, time froze. I ran to David’s pod, looked in the window of his classroom, and saw him on the ground, crouched under his table, with Chrissie, Mike, and Dawn. I turned around and headed across campus. Miss Thomas wouldn’t have let me in anyway. That’s just the rule. Once the kids are all in the room the doors are locked and stay locked, until an All clear sounds. I ran across to the C pod. That’s where the fourth graders are. My daughter, Carol, is a fourth grader in room C2. When I saw her under her desk in the same position as David, I felt my heart slow down. It was like changing gears. I changed gears from concerned father to predator. My focus went from worrying about my children to neutralizing the threat to them.

I went back to the workroom door and stepped inside the building. As soon as I crossed the threshold, though, I felt something akin to déjà vu. You know, the feeling you get when you’ve been in that spot before? Or maybe when a scent reminds you of something from your childhood? Like when you smell a warm apple pie, and it makes you think of your great-grandmother teaching you to play dominoes when you were little? This feeling of déjà vu was the exact opposite. When I walked in, I was reminded of Hell.

To me, Hell is the smell of my sound-suppressed MP5. The last time I had smelled Hell was when I had used that weapon to kill a child, who was running toward my team with a hand grenade. It was the kid or us. I chose us. We lived, and that little preteen boy, who was keeping lookout for a drug lab in a third world country, did not. I’m not proud of it, I didn’t like doing it, and I still have nightmares about it fifteen years later. I would do it again, though. I was closer to those men than I was to my own mother. After all, she only gave me life. They were the ones who kept me alive. Since that same excursion into Hell, I haven’t touched a gun. Until today.

I didn’t smell my MP5 when I walked into the workroom, but anyone who has been to that part of Hell knows that the smell of a weapon doesn’t make it Hell. The smell of firing it does. That smell is pretty much universal to every gun ever made. An acrid mix of oil, spent powder, and burned air. Yeah, burned air. All those little mold spores and pollen particles. They ignite when a gun is fired. Take any firearm, discharge it on a shooting range and smell the end of the barrel. Then take it into a field full of flowers and fire it again. It’ll smell different. I did smell Hell when I walked into the school workroom.

My first actions were base. Instinctive. First, I ducked down and caught the door, turning the handle so I could pull it closed silently. As I looked across the room, I saw the first body. It was Barbara Channing, another parent volunteer. She was lying on the floor with a neat dime sized hole in her forehead, and most of the back of her skull, along with whatever gray matter she’d had, was splattered on the already malfunctioning Riso machine. I doubt I will be running any copies on that machine ever again.

I crawled across the room and, after checking to see that the hallway was clear, got into a crouching position and moved towards the office. Some part of my mind realized my pocketknife was out, blade open, and pressed against my forearm. I know weapons aren’t allowed on school grounds, but I don’t go anywhere without my Swiss Army knife. I even have extra ones at relatives’ homes, so I can fly to those places with just carryon luggage, and still have a knife to carry while I am there.

I crept as silently as I could toward the office. As I passed through the room, which has all the teachers’ cubbies, I saw another body. I didn’t recognize this one at first. The man had been shot through the back of the head, and what I could see of his face was gone. The body was wearing a t-shirt with for embarrassing me, that is. printed across the back. I knew that the front of the shirt said, Thanks Dad. I was wearing one just like it. Granted, the one on Mike Richards’ body had bloodstains that mine didn’t, but other than that, they were identical. Our daughters had made them for Father’s Day last year, and it is, or was, our tradition to wear them on the days we volunteer at school. Unfortunately for the girls, we always lived up to the slogan, too.

Mike was a CHP officer who lived on my block. His kids aren’t in the same grades as ours, but they still play together a lot. He was a lieutenant and always wore his backup piece, even when he was out of uniform. I looked down at his ankle and saw the same bulge I had seen in my own living room a hundred times. Well, the odds were even then. I had a gun. I gave silent thanks to Mike, wherever he might have been at that moment.

Putting my knife away, I released the safety on Mike’s Walther, knowing it was now ready to fire. Mike had told me once while camping, that he figured if he had to go for his backup gun, he didn’t have time to slide a round into the chamber. That meant I had eight shots—seven in the clip, and one ready to fire. The bad thing was that the gun only had a three-inch barrel. That was going to make it a bitch to aim accurately.

I stayed low and crept into the office, where I saw one more body and two crying women. I’m not being chauvinistic, mind you, when I say that. Most people, male or female, who watch their friends and neighbors shot in cold blood, will become blithering idiots, at least temporarily. But for me, a deathly calm had taken control of my mind and body. Sandra and Mary, the office staff, were huddled in a corner near the principal’s corpse. It looked like she had been shot three times. I knew if they saw me holding another gun, they would scream, so I put the Walther behind me, and moved toward them. As soon as Sandra saw me, she started to say something, but I put my index finger to my mouth and got closer. No one else was in the room, but I didn’t want to take any chances. If the shooter was in the nurse’s office or the other hallway leading outside, I wasn’t going to walk into his sights.

I whispered to Mary, Where is he? It was obvious she was incapable of answering me, but Sandra seemed to know what I was asking. She pointed to the exit near the nurse’s office, just as I heard the door close.

Whoever he was, he was headed toward the students now. I had to act fast. I walked toward the door in time to see through the opaque glass, a blur moving to the right. He was moving away from the Kindergarten, A and B pods, but towards C, D and E pods. I couldn’t rush through, because I had no idea where to aim yet. All he had to do was turn around and fire at the door. Mike’s little Walther, while certainly an equalizer, wasn’t going to be accurate at any distance more than 50 feet, if I was running. This guy had already proven he had pretty good aim with two head shots. Granted, they