Cobe II: A Slightly Twisting Path to Neither

By Greg Alldredge

Living a dog’s life.

Fixers, that’s what they’re called, a group of supernatural beings that keep the world they live in working. Things break, they fix them.

Lucky is an Immortal Fixer, but what happens when Immortals start showing up dead?

Lucky and Death need to discover what is happening to the Fixers before the world as they know it ends in chaos.

With no heaven or hell to speak of, who could be behind this latest mess?

Read Cobe II: The Slightly Twisting Path to Neither to learn Lucky’s fates.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Mar 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781949392159

Book preview

21:

Chapter 1:

Hello, I’m Cobe, or at least one time I was known as Cobe, then I took to calling myself Jinx, and now through a series of unfortunate events, my name is Lucky. You can’t see this, but I’m a dog. No, I don’t mean I chase every female I can find in search of sex… which I do, but that is beside the point. I am a real dog, fleas and all. A one-eyed, one-eared, one-balled dog named Lucky. Can you see the irony?

See that woman walking ahead of me… of course you can’t. This is a book, but trust me, she is the love of my life. Dogs usually walk in the front… I prefer the view from the rear. I watch over her literally from behind whenever possible.

Because of her, or in spite of her, I was saved from an eternity of Torment to go on living after death. I serve Potent, the sleeping god of my world, or as I like to think of him, Im-Potent. I can’t call him that aloud, I’m on probation. Bad things can happen when you piss off the beings in charge.

In this world, after death you are greeted by a never-ending line, at least the humans are. Im-Potent granted us souls he can play with. The dragons don’t have them. Dragons hate to be reminded they were created as the first mistake, to be replaced by humans, the second mistake. If you really want to get under a dragon’s skin remind them of that.

Most mortals don’t know this information or any information. They are too busy trying to scrape a living out of the dust. You see, many things here in the land of Im-Potent are broken, and this makes life difficult for the men of the world to survive.

The first thing that is broken, or at least bent: Our male god has decided in his infinite wisdom to have wealth and power pass down from mother to daughter. Men are left without… well without power. As a man, I find that in extremely poor taste. I mean if Im-Potent were a woman, you would kind of expect it, but since he is a man, for him to favor the women over men makes me believe he has serious mommy issues. I can’t confirm or deny the rumor, but maybe our Lord walks like a Lady instead.

All this struck me hard. It wasn’t until after I died that I learned this information. I’m a fixer, so my job is to fix things. I travel about human- and dragonkind setting things right… as a dog. I understand the whole thing seems strange, but I guess the powers that be decided it would be easier for a dog to move about and right wrongs more than…

I’ve devoted too much time thinking about this, but I feel a creature, ten-foot-tall with leathery wings made of iron, that flew in and stopped all sorts of disagreements would be best. If anyone argued with the creature, he could shoot lightning bolts out of his eye to smite any disagreeable sorts. That is my idea of a fixer… but no one asked for my opinion. I did suggest it, but I was ignored.

I digress… Our bent/broken world has a significant number of fixers and other levels of creatures that go about putting all the messed up half-baked parts of our world right.

I have a vulpine friend called Smigget; he looks like a short red dog with unkempt hair. His job is a simple one, to go about pissing on mushrooms. That’s his entire existence in the afterlife. To urinate on mushrooms with his urine that smells of rotten cabbage. That, my friends, is a broken world by anyone’s standards.

To keep track of all these fixers is a vast bureaucracy to ensure the world we protect does not come apart at the seams. Layer upon layer of supervisors. I work for a bitch called Kampot. She’s not a dog but a crazy old woman that tricked me into being a dog. As you might guess, I don’t like her much. Thinking back, I had little choice in my decision to become a fixer, but I could’ve been recruited by anyone but Kampot the Crazy.

I understand you might think a paradise awaits all those that serve the sleeping god, as set forth in the holy scrolls and passed down by the priestess of the faith.

Believe me, it’s all a lie; the whole story is a grand marketing scheme told by the temples to extract as much coin as possible from the faithful. I was not one of the faithful but one of the blasphemers, the foul-mouthed, and the disrespectable. I was destined to wait in line on the floor of Torment for a body. My soul would never be reincarnated, a body would never open up for me. I might have stated my displeasure for the current state of affairs more than once… All right it was thousands of times in my short life. (Trust me, I saw the list. I found the scroll awe-inspiring.)

Listen, I could go on about what happened in the first book, but is that really necessary? I’m sure you finished it, only moments ago, and have since begun this book… If not, what is wrong with you?

You will miss the meet-cute between myself and Adriana. The death and destruction that happens along the way, plus how I became the one-eyed, one-eared, one-balled dog. Who would want to miss that?

Some things you need to know:

Im-Potent sleeps for thousands of years at a time.

No one knows where he came from, and he isn’t all here in the brain.

Our world will one day collapse because of the inherited errors built into the system.

Things need to be fixed, yet we only hold the systems together by wrapping them with twine… metaphorically speaking.

Not all the fixers get along swimmingly. There is a rumor that can only be whispered in the darkest recesses of the world that a group of fixers are rebelling, but you didn’t hear that from me.

I’m sure I left something out. In this world, important details seem to continually go unnoticed or get left out.

You might guess I’m not one of Im-Potent’s loyal followers, and you would be correct, but I’m not stupid enough to fall in with any rebellion against a god. Insurrection is a path that will only lead to really bad things happening to myself.

Now I need to follow Adriana. She heads for the desert, and I need to go search for these butt-ugly sand squids that will pull your ass right under and have you for breakfast. I find it a pleasure to follow behind this woman. She has problems talking to others, but the swish of her hips is enough to make even an old dog stand up and take notice.

Chapter 2:

Adriana stood back from the falling rocks that littered the canyon floor. Somewhere under that fall of debris lay Jinx. Not certain how far back the building cut into the canyon wall, she was certain Jinx was dead. There was no way… she reached up and felt a tear partially run down her cheek. Strange, she never cried when her mother died. This must be something new. Maybe the dry of the desert made her eyes water. That must be it.

The dog sat between her and the rock-filled narrow gorge. It was just a dog, but Adriana felt it stared at her with a strange look for an animal.

The teen boy that she and Jinx had been commissioned to rescue sat slumped in a cleft of stones. The mayor offered to pay her well if she returned him safely. A large sum of coin would be needed to start a new workshop to replace her mother’s, the one bad men had burned down.

She desperately wanted to return to her simple life as a tinker. Traveling the back roads in these mountains, she felt highly unorganized and dirty.

The dog barked and wagged its tail. What a strange creature, it never seemed quite right in the head. One moment it would sit and stare at her, the next it would bark and run off chasing Potent only knew what.

Let’s go, boy, Adriana said to the young man she was dragging home to his mother, the mayor. The animal answered with a bark and ran down the path, not the drugged teen.

Adriana wanted to get back to the city. Instead, they’d traveled through a vast desert to the mountains, through a cave and mine system to reach the path she now stood on, and in reality, she wasn’t sure where here was in relation to the city.

Thinking back, she couldn’t even remember the name of the city. It hadn’t been a particularly pleasant visit, a burned down temple and a dead stone merchant. Jinx lost an eye in an attack and they escaped from the city to the open road.

Jinx had been the one to take care of the little details like names and people. She preferred to remain in her mind, thinking of how to make life easier for those around her. One thing her travels did provide was plenty of raw material for her mind to work on for new inventions.

Now there was little choice. Climb out via the vertical cliff walls or follow the path. There was only one viable choice, the path. The arm of the youth in hand, she started walking, sticking to the shade as much as possible.

The dog had disappeared again. She didn’t worry much about it; the animal had a knack for showing up when time came to eat. As far as Adriana could tell, the mutt hadn’t missed a meal yet.

<=OO=>

Jinx had been sitting there waiting for Adriana to cry, to break down over his heroics and the ultimate sacrifice he had just made. As far as he could tell, she shed a single tear. He would need to settle for that. He had followed the woman twice now, a few months as Jinx and now as Lucky… It was complicated, he didn’t fully understand the whole going back in time thing, so he decided not to think about the subject. Many things he didn’t understand he decided not to think about, he found life easier that way. His motto should be, don’t think, act.

He could’ve sat there waiting for her to cry until the world stopped turning or he was promoted to supervisor, it was a race to see which would happen first. More than a few people wagered on the outcome. He found the whole idea rather uncouth. However, he caught a scent, a feline scent, which in his world only meant one thing: Dacca.

The creature Dacca was a messenger of sorts. The supervisors or maybe Potent himself created the cat creatures of Dacca as messengers to the god, or at least the supervisors. Lucky thought of them as a big pain in the ass. Disrespectful and annoying, they walked about like they ruled the world, when in reality, they were little more than messengers, one of the lower jobs in the bureau, but they strutted around like they were Portent himself.

There was little choice, he needed to run ahead of Adriana to meet with the crazy cat woman to find out what message she might have. The sooner he met with her, the quicker he could ignore the orders from whoever sent them.

The stench of feline grew unbearable, yet he couldn’t find the dreaded creature. A hiss from above sent a cold shiver down his spine.

Must you be so stupid all the time? Contempt filled the hiss when Dacca spoke. Lucky looked up, and there sat a woman.

This was the strangest thing about the supernatural creatures that really made the world work. Mortals saw the fixers as animals as they went about their assignments. Supernatural creatures saw each other as human with strange animal features. Dacca appeared like a cat to any mortal that saw her. To Lucky, she looked like a tall, slender woman with feline features. He found her looks alluring but her personality loathsome.

Listen, you foul creature, give me your message and be off with you. I have little time for your games, Lucky