Somewhere Beyond the Fire

By S.A. Baker

Welcome to the world of S. A. Baker

A look at the eccentric writing of S. A. Baker in his free story from his imagination.

This ebook is offered to readers of all ages to introduce the world of Winterbourne, a place where fantasy meets reality, and the strange is ordinary.

Allow your mind to grasp his abstract writing as pure imagination meets expert story telling.

Walk the tracks with the hobos of Winterbourne with S. A. Baker and discover the curse of an idol handed down from one wandering soul to another. And just when one takes possession of the statue, the world changes, and not always for the better.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Science Fiction and Fantasy Publications
• Release date: Mar 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781928094401

Book preview

SOMEWHERE BEYOND THE FIRE

S. A. BAKER

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A division of DAOwen Publications

Copyright © 2018 by S. A. Baker

All rights reserved

DAOwen Publications supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing DAOwen Publications to continue to publish books for every reader.

Somewhere Beyond the Fire / S. A. Baker

Edited by Douglas Owen and M. J. Moores

EISBN 978-1-928094-40-1

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

Jacket Art by MMT Productions

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It’s all horseshit, Robertson spat.

The firelight flitted and danced in the cool wind blowing through our meagre campsite. The shadows it cast gave his face an almost liquid appearance, as if the skin itself had been replaced by roiling, molten steel.

It’s all horseshit, he repeated and hoisted the wineskin once more. There’s nothing inside of this forest that wasn’t here when we goddam come in.

The world had been kicked in the guts after a genocidal war followed by too many years in the fattening pens. A thick iron mallet crashed down onto our heads in the form of a worldwide depression and I found myself, like so many others, wandering, riding, walking – wasting away. Doing anything to stay occupied until the country stopped writhing and the last drop of blood drained from the bloated sow, forcing us all to accept that there was a price for roaring so loudly, and we were about to pay for it, in spades.

I had seen fourteen summers by the time the money and Father ran out. Mother tried to keep us afloat and me in school for nearly another two full years. But what little sense I possessed, told me to let her work to exhaustion at more occupations than any one person should, while I lived the life of a school boy. This was an injustice beyond measure. I packed a grip with what I imagined I might need: a change of underclothes and socks, trousers and a clean shirt. Toothbrush, wash cloth and towel and a pistol, left behind by a father who clearly, wasn’t going anywhere dangerous enough to need it. I vowed I’d be back and things would be different.

My thumb set me on my way out of town just past dawn, and by the end of my first day away from home, I was bruised and bloodied and minus everything but the clothes I wore.

Do you think that things like this just get made up? Boucher asked indignantly.

I met Boucher along the road to Goshen. A choleric hobo who kept calling me pal turned on me after I declined to share in some warm chicory and the pleasure of his company.

C’mon pal. He put an arm around me and breathed his withering, bathtub gin breath in my ear. My bed roll is big enough for the both of us.

The loathsome vagabond clamped a meaty hand around my wrist and, as I struggled to free myself, produced a bone handled hunting knife and vowed to see my bindle stick or air out my guts before death freed me. The ground rose up suddenly, and the knife pushed closer into my face as the itinerant man climbed on top of me. I felt his free hand move first to the fly of my pants and then, with hand shaking exhilaration to his own.

A repellant, ragged toothed grin peeled its way across the grubby face as he moved in and drew his equally grubby tongue leisurely across my cheek. The smile soon faded, replaced, if only for an instant, by a look of absolute befuddlement followed closely by unconsciousness as a thick, still burning fire log cracked off the back of his skull and his head erupted in a shower of popcorn sized, umber sparks.

An equally meaty hand thrust downward and hauled me up by the lapels.

You was damn near a hot lunch, my saviour said.

He stood at least a whole head taller than me and dressed as shabbily as I, though he somehow wore it far better than anyone I’d ever seen. Maybe it was the cleanness of him, the fresh shave and pomaded haircut or the fact he wore clothes that, though more patch now than material, were clearly struggling to contain his corpulence. More likely it was the way he stood, clean and neat, with the sun full in the sky behind him gleaming off the darkness of his skin. It gave him a decidedly cherubic appearance. An angel who was far too fat to ever fly, but an ethereal none the less.

You look like an angel, I blurted without being fully aware I had said it.

Hah!