The Darkest Sum

By Micki Miller

The embodiment of the world's evil has but a single fear, one homeless girl. Twenty-two year old Liz Linden and her nineteen year old brother, Jacob, have lived in the storm drains that run under Las Vegas for almost one year. There are many others living in the makeshift camps. She does her best to make their concrete camp into a home until she can save enough money to get them out of the tunnels and into an apartment. Of late, her wish to get out has become desperate, as she's come to realize something else is down there--the offspring of malice and hypocrisy. It lives, it grows, and if not stopped, it will fully exist. It is the total of mankind's evils--The Darkest Sum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
• Release date: Aug 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781509215775

Micki Miller

I lived most of my life in the wondrous city of Las Vegas, Nevada. For a while I lived in an R.V. with my husband and I was fortunate to see every state in this amazing country. Now I live in beautiful Michigan, where I've learned about layering clothes and that boats don't have brakes. ~ Visit Micki at: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ Twitter: @millermwriter Instagram: micki.miller TikTok: @mickiwriter YouTube: @mickimiller1474 Instagram: micki.miller

Book preview

Inc.

The air in the tunnel was thick and dank,

and as black as a shadow’s shadow. Our single flashlight was woefully inadequate. Darkness encased my brother and me while its offspring prowled the concrete corridors searching for us. I’d been fighting for survival my whole life, but never before had I so thoroughly felt it.

The Darkest Sum

by

Micki Miller

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

The Darkest Sum

COPYRIGHT © 2017 by Micki Miller

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Contact Information: [e-mail]

Cover Art by Rae Monet, Inc. Design

The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

PO Box 708

Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

Publishing History

First Mainstream Fantasy Edition, 2017

Print ISBN 978-1-5092-1576-8

Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-1577-5

Published in the United States of America

Dedication

To my dear Vegas friends.

You keep the monsters away.

Chapter 1

I wondered, not for the first time, if the thing had eyes.

Did they shimmer within its unformed shape and blend with the traces of it I could see, or were they, like the rest of it, still undeveloped? If it did have eyes somewhere in that faint mass of shadow against shade, I may well have been staring into them. The thought was disconcerting, yet I did not look away.

In the unlikely event some lost soul who’d wandered this far down the east end of the Las Vegas Strip should see me standing there, I would certainly have looked the fool, roasting in the blistering sun, staring into that dark-as-deep-space opening to the storm drain. But even though I could not enter, I couldn’t leave.

Blessed shade, a commodity of jackpot proportions waited only a few feet before me in what to anyone else would appear as nothing. Still, I stayed where I was, burning beneath a sky so bright and so hot it blanched the blue. I stayed where I was because I knew a portion of that shade was alive, and hungry in ways I was too terrified to analyze.

Before me were two six by six openings bisected in equal parts by a vertical cement divider. Both tunnels led to the storm drains, though to different parts. The three hundred or so miles of subterranean tunnels housed approximately two hundred people beneath the glittering city.

For almost a year now my brother Jacob, three years younger than my twenty-two years, and I have called this place home. I need to get back. He was sick, awaiting the return of his big sister, and though he would never admit it, he was afraid.

Using my hand to shade my eyes, I glanced up toward the street where cars passed by in a steady stream. Far off to the left, palm trees front the ever-golden Mandalay Bay. Beyond that was the massive, black pyramid of the Luxor. Its Egyptian theme appeared a transplant from one desert to another, except for the reflective shine and the valet parking.

No one was walking in my direction. I turned my head the other way and mostly I saw desert.

Fifty or so yards to the right in the middle of the street sat the legendary ‘Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas’ sign. It’s often busy there with tourists waiting in line to get their picture with the famous landmark. Sometimes movie crews are set up there half the day to get a five second shot. On a day like today, when the afternoon sun was aggressive and the temperature was well into the triple digits, I didn’t see a single car parked in the small lot.

Looking back toward the tunnel entrance, I saw the thing was still there and wished for the millionth time we had an actual home where we could go and live in blissful ignorance of its existence, like everybody else who doesn’t live underneath the city. We can’t, though, not yet.

Another difference between the open world above ground and those of us who lived down here, was more than the obvious cash flow and often ill-gotten clout. In fairness, it wasn’t all the people up there, in my estimation at least, causing this trouble before me. It was a segment. However, they were a powerful segment.

I lay this trouble at the feet of people who talk a good game of scruples, but didn’t nuisance themselves with the rules. They affected those of us living down here in ways their smug minds could not imagine.

You see, all the wickedness they sloughed off with their loofahs of sanctimonious bluster found its way down here. Much like Frankenstein’s monster, the evil genius of happenstance stitched the dead parts together without benefit of a normal brain, and in the many shadows of our domain, created a new and very frightening kind of life form.

There was a convention in town. Some ultra-conservative political group, according to the newspaper I’d skimmed while waiting in line at the drugstore. I didn’t spend even one moment reading the backs of any books, though I very much wanted to. Their covers drew me with pictures and titles that left my brain pining.

I loved to read. I missed it. At our camp, I had one battered old book, and I’d read it many times. I planned to read it a few more. Not being able to buy a book, or get to one of the libraries to check one out, was a loss that often kicked me. I learned not to let a new book tease me with an invitation to a good story I can’t afford to buy. So, I stuck to skimming the newspaper and the monotonous nonsense of politics.

Having so much of my life consumed with survival, I’d never had the time or inclination to explore beneath the shallows of how our government worked. All I could claim for actual experience was that Uncle Sam pocketed a fair amount of the measly paychecks I used to earn, and used a good chunk to pay elected officials way too much money.

Some of these people, the extreme moralistic types especially, fed the thing that blocked my way. They’re the kind of people who would blame the very evil they enhance on some segment of citizens who don’t measure up to their particular brand of moral standards, or rather, double standards.

Politicians and religious leaders always generated the most sin here in Sin City. I knew this because that was when the evil in the darkness underwent its most notable growth spurts. When the porn convention was in town, or a gay pride event, a march for animal rights, or even a legalize marijuana demonstration, the evil diminished a bit, as if oppressed by the candor.

It swelled whenever a politician screamed family values as his eyes roamed in search of his next extramarital affair. It flourished when a religious zealot preached his puritanical, anti-homosexual rhetoric, so often committing treason against the people of his own true self. At those times, the evil grew fervent, thriving on all that boisterous duplicity.

I think the hypocrisy nourishes the thing. It’s one of the more potent evils. That’s probably because it required so little effort and yet could gain so much. All a person had to do was shed their conscience, perfect a sincere smile, and learn to speak in virtuous tones. Money and supporters would not be far behind.

Of course, those were just my opinions and were worth less than the journal I’d write them in if I could afford such a splurge as a journal. Long hours with little to no light, depending on our candle and battery situation, were fertile ground for a mind sober enough to insist on thought. While I was not so drunk on sobriety (pun intended) as to believe all my thoughts were indisputable, on this I truly believed I was right. For I had witnessed cause and effect.

The high and mighty perched upon their holey holy vows, their right hands raised in pledge to God and country while with their left hands they pilfered and profited. They had no idea how, in fact, they fed the evil against which they so heartily declared themselves.

Padded by the fat of their yields and blockaded from true grace by their fortified, squeaky-clean facades, they did not understand the malevolence they nourished; did not notice a bite or two missing from their rot.

As things were, that very malevolence suckling on the foulness of lies upon their collective breaths stood between my wretched home and me.

The two entrances before me led to a complex system of storm drains running beneath Las Vegas. To the left of the concrete divider was simply a shadowed square. Our camp was through the entrance on the right.

I wondered, as I had in the past, whether the thing could pass through cement. I didn’t think it could circle the front of the divider. Doing so would take it into the sunlight. It lived strictly in the shadows.

I wished I had given a more thorough exploration to the left entrance. Maybe there was a roundabout way to get to our camp, a side door of sorts. It wasn’t the time, though. The tunnel on the left could take me miles from where I needed to be. So, I stood in the blistering sun while the monster coated the shade, and waited.

Through that dense and terrifying portal and about three quarters of a mile in, my baby brother was sniffling from yet another cold. Jacob was only nineteen years old. His immune system, however, had suffered six years of serious alcohol abuse, as well as a fair amount of whatever drug his eager hands could grab.

In my hand, I held a plastic grocery bag containing generic cold medicine. The nearest drugstore was a mile and a half walk, one way. Beneath the desert sun burning over Las Vegas in late July, I swore I could feel the seeds of melanoma burrowing into my pores. I imagined it waiting until I got our lives up and running before dumping another tragedy on the last two remaining members of the Linden family.

I spent the bulk of our precious dollars on cold medicine for Jacob. I didn’t buy the box of feminine products. This month, again, I would do as our foremothers did and use rags. Sunscreen was also a luxury we could not afford.

As I stood there on the downward slope, sun-roasted concrete beneath my tattered sneakers and eight feet up on either side of me, I felt more than saw the evil.

It showed itself with a subtle sheen in the darkness, a sporadic, spastic shimmer. An occasional splash of wetness, as if the monstrous part of that darkness salivated in anticipation. Mostly, though, I felt its presence on my nerve endings, where no one was sure of its existence but me.

I’d never seen more of it than vague traces, a movement where there should be none; a momentary sheen I wished I could blame on tired eyes and a goaded imagination. Nobody else had seen even that much. In fact, its very existence at all was a periodic point of debate within our underground community.

Some of the few people we knew in the tunnels disagreed with me. They thought I was too free with my imagination. Of course, many of them were either riding some kind of a high or falling from one. Not all of us, though. Hard times can generate despair, and then unite with it, to strike down even those of us who made the best efforts.

No matter how vehement the opposing arguments, they had never been able to convince me what I saw was a manifestation of my many fears. I wanted to believe that was true. I so wished I could. But as I said, I felt its existence, and my feelings were rarely wrong.

My most shameful fault lay in my unexplainable resistance to follow the good instincts nature had given me. If that thing, that entity, had a positive, it was instilling a lesson my parents should have taught me—Listen to my instincts.

I’d been trying very hard to not rebel against what few positives I possessed. I did that sometimes. I used to do it a lot. Again, I didn’t know why. Maybe I was afraid there was some sort of trick involved. Sometimes I felt like if I showed such arrogance as to believe in myself, I’d be punked by life yet again.

I had gotten much better at making use of my instincts. Which was what I was doing, as I stood beside the shallow stream of water. It rolled in a slow flow down the center of the storm drain and into the mouth of the tunnel.

Benny had hinted at belief. Chester, Silvia, and several of the others in the tunnels who we’d become friends with over this past year would say I was being ridiculous. They’d shake their heads at me standing out here and frying to crusty embers. I continued to wait it out, though. I truly believed it was there.

If it was as mindful as I thought, it thought of me. I heard the conceit there, but I felt it to be true. On several occasions, our minds had grazed each other. That is how I knew it was dangerous. I also knew it was vulnerable, though I didn’t know in what way. And I had to wonder how much it knew about me, and if and how familiar it was with my weak links.

Though it had never harmed me, at times I felt it wanted to. Whether it was practicing restraint when it came near or whether it for some reason was reluctant to touch me, I am unsure. Whenever possible, I kept my distance from it. It had been a very, very long time since I’d had a good night’s sleep.

The base of my skull was stiff and at times, felt electric. When I felt the tingle, I knew if I looked around, I would see a dark layer of living shadow. When the tingle became a buzz, I could see its dampness. For me, its existence was not in doubt.

If the manifestation in question had eyes, it was staring at me. I was equally sure if it had a mouth, it was grinning at my predicament. I sensed a certain giddy humor in it, like a Bond villain on the verge of world domination.

Having left our jug and a half of water in the tunnel with Jacob, after my long trek in the dry and brutal summer heat, I was in a bad state of dehydration. Whatever perspiration my body had been able to produce had long evaporated into the desert furnace.

I swallowed, thinking the act would produce some saliva. It only made my tongue stick to the back of my throat. It was as if some kid had painted my tongue in lumpy paste. For a few seconds, I feared choking on my own thirst.

Jacob must have been getting pretty worried. He knew his big sister would never desert him. If I didn’t get back soon, he’d be sure something bad happened, and he would panic. For Jacob, panic would be a more than worthy excuse to backslide.

Poor as we all were down in the storm drains, somehow alcohol and drugs were not hard to find. It both saddened and angered me, but an excuse to drink was a scenario Jacob might welcome.

Ten feet in front of me, the damp-patched monster in the dark, of the dark, waited. Maybe it was curious to see what I would do. All I could do was squint at its varying depths.

I couldn’t pass through the thing. True, I never tried. Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe it was all shiny intimidation and its power wasn’t more than psychological, but I didn’t think so.

We’d all heard screams in the tunnels; had known someone who one day just vanished. It was far from unusual for people to pick up and leave the tunnels. Still, I had to wonder if the others believe the short-lived screams of terror we sometimes heard meant little. That they were no more than vocal expressions of frustration by someone who could not believe what their life had come to. I always thought that was something the people down here told themselves so they could go to sleep. I envied their delusions.

Far above me, a foolish, arrogant cloud had the gall to mosey beneath the sun that burned most clouds away without mercy or regret. For a brief moment, I relished the reprieve as the temperature dropped to, oh, I’d say a frosty one hundred and four degrees.

I squinted at the sky, hoping for more clouds. There weren’t any. When the lone cloud passed and the sun made its victorious return, I looked back to the tunnel entrance. By sight, it was almost the same. But the evil that lurked there a moment before was gone. The darkness was once again flat, harmless, and its implied coolness inviting. My nerve endings no longer sizzle.

I crossed the threshold.

Chapter 2

My steps were cautious so as not to splash the widened stream of runoff water from the city and get my socks wet. A few yards in, I retrieved the flashlight from my old patchwork purse. With the continuing downward slope and after the first corner, twilight squashed almost all the sunlight coming in through the entrance.

Before rounding the turn, I glanced back. Pale gray concrete made a square telescope out to the desert. Traffic muffled to almost nothing. There wasn’t a chance of anyone out there seeing me now. To man and beast, I had once again become a nonentity.

Though the batteries in my flashlight were new, after the turn, the beam would shine no farther than a few yards. It’s as if the darkness was compressed, packed as thick as the surrounding concrete. It was night tenfold.

I couldn’t tell you how many times I came upon a stranger, my light shining in his face with a suddenness that can frighten a person right into a heart attack. Sometimes I got an abrupt grumble or a cursing out. I tried to ignore strangers, and after their initial reaction, they usually did the same. Nobody was here to socialize.

Every now and then, I passed someone else walking with a flashlight and got a brief but friendly hello. That’s nice, a brethren of the downtrodden. Other times, my light found a tooth-rotted leer over a smoldering crack pipe. Those are almost as scary as the monster.

Eventually, I came to the part of the tunnel where the cement floor starts angling upward a bit. This is so during the infrequent rains we get, the rush of water coming through will slow.

Although real downpours were rare, they did happen. It didn’t take a tremendous amount of rain to send water gushing through the storm drains. The desert ground was hard and doesn’t absorb water well. Even a light rain can transform the stream to a raging river in the time it takes to see your life flash before your eyes.

Some have died trying to ride out a storm down here, or when they were too far gone in a drug-induced haze to realize what was happening.

A few months ago, in one of the more dangerous tunnels, a middle-aged man named Luke who had never climbed out of the depression of a divorce he’d not wanted, was carried off by the fast-moving waters. Two days later, someone found his body in the Las Vegas wash. The papers called it an accidental death. I call it suicide by nature.

Black widows enjoyed the damp climate down here enough to invite their friends and family to come and stay. Other spiders and bugs made their home in this concrete maze, too. They crawled about the filth and debris and the innumerable mounds of hopelessness. In some areas, there were crawfish. They gave me the creeps with their pinchers and blood red shells. Some people in the storm drains eat them. I had a great fear of becoming that desperate.

Occasionally, there was a freak out that could turn dangerous. Drugs and disparity can be a volatile mix. Along with of all of that, there are particular fears for a woman that men cannot truly understand.

Often I was utterly alone in a place where no one would hear me scream. And even if by chance someone did, I would have to beg hope for the unlikely combination of sobriety, compassion, and heroics.

Those are some of the many cons of our life in the storm drains. There were, however, a few pros.

The police tended to leave us alone. Those down here who do drugs, which are many, could do so with far less anxiety than what plagues them and often spoils their highs when above ground.

We were not an eyesore for business owners and their patrons who looked at us the way I looked at the crawfish. We had walls, a roof, and the blessed coolness (a twenty-degree drop), was great incentive for those of us with few if any options.

Some, like Jacob and me, have been able to create a threadbare semblance of a home with odds and ends others have discarded. Chester, a sweet man with a terrible gambling problem who lived two tunnels