Trick or Treat: Tenebrosities, #4

By DeAnna Knippling

What's the matter, Jake? Chicken?

 

It's Halloween. Just over a month ago, Jake's brother Dave died in Afghanistan, killed by an IED bomb. Now Jake is going trick or treating, dressed like a solder. Dressed like his brother.

 

He decides to take the same route that he and his brother took, cutting through a junkyard, walking down a big hill, and scoring candy at the kind of neighborhood where the neighbors actually leave the lights on and don't pretend not to be home.

 

But something is waiting for him in the graveyard.

 

Is it the ghost of Jake's dead brother?

 

A creepy horror tale about what finds us when we're vulnerable, on Halloween.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wonderland Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781952198106

DeAnna Knippling

DeAnna Knippling is a freelance writer, editor, and book designer living in Colorado.  She started out as a farm girl in the middle of South Dakota, went to school in Vermillion, SD, then gravitated through Iowa to Colorado, where she lives with her husband and daughter. She now writes science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime, and mystery for adults under her own name; adventurous and weird fiction for middle-grade (8-12 year old) kids under the pseudonym De Kenyon; and various thriller and suspense fiction for her ghostwriting clients under various and non-disclosable names. Her latest book, Alice’s Adventures in Underland:  The Queen of Stilled Hearts, combines two of her favorite topics–zombies and Lewis Carroll. Her short fiction has appeared in Black Static, Penumbra, Crossed Genres, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and more. Her website and blog are at www.WonderlandPress.com.  You can also find her on Facebook and Twitter.

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Trick or Treat Copyright © 2012 by DeAnna Knippling

Cover image copyright © valik4053022 | depositphotos.com

Cover design copyright © 2020 by DeAnna Knippling

Interior design copyright © 2020 by DeAnna Knippling

Published by Wonderland Press

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Trick or Treat

Jake stood at the edge of the junkyard, dressed as a soldier and holding a fake rifle on a strap over his shoulder. The rifle had an orange tip in case anyone was stupid enough to think it was real. The sun had set and the dark sky was covered in low clouds, turned orange from the streetlights. Lone flakes of snow descended here and there. Did that really count as snowing or not? The air smelled like rust. A ton of sirens were going off on the far side of the junkyard, more of them every second, like they were headed toward a fire or a big accident.

This morning—Halloween—he’d decided to cut through the junkyard on his way to go trick-or-treating at the bottom of Cliff Avenue. Now he wasn’t sure.

Stuff had changed at the junkyard since the last time he had been there.

The fence had a new line of barbed wire at the top, one that hadn’t been there before, and there was a new sign up on the fence.

Beware of dog.

Jake had cut through the junkyard once before with his older brother Dave, when he was ten. But that was two years ago.

Last year Dave had graduated early, joined the Army and gone to Afghanistan. And then in September he had died from some stupid homemade bomb buried under the road. Mom had told the Government to cremate Dave’s ashes. They were in a memorial building that looked like a post office, with Dave’s name on a brass plate.

Nobody was okay at Jake’s house. Not Jake, who was always in trouble at school, and not his mom, who was an EMT and had a pretty good

Reviews for Trick or Treat

[bmarple · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Good short story. Enjoyed how the book was written. Could have been more detailed as to what the relationship meant to the story. Would definitely recommend to a young adult or teen. Story line would make a great long story starting with sibling relationship all the way through to this ending.