Shiny’s Kid

By John T. Bresnahan

About the Book
After the suspicious death of his parents, a toddler is dumped in a horribly abusive orphanage by his greedy grandfather who expected him to die there. But he didn't. He survived and escaped, landing under the wing of a homeless Army veteran, who taught him how to keep right on surviving.
Known on the street as simply Shiny’s Kid, James Flint is anything but simple. He’s a highly intelligent young man raised to remain aloof and distant for his own protection, but who reaches out for a sense of friendship, community, and family he never had growing up. Flint, ends up inheriting the estate his late grandfather stole as well as property in the northwest. Once there, he begins building, building a home, friendships, building that community and family he’s always sought. Along the way he helps a growing number of people who embrace him, and despite any setbacks he faces, he does not give up and keeps trying, seeing how his positive actions affect those around him. The only alternative to this is reverting to how he was raised—cold and alone in a “kill or be killed” atmosphere. Can a kid who began poor, abused, and raised on the streets overcome it all, do well, and make a difference with and for those around him?

About the Author
John T. Bresnahan was born and raised in New England. His favorite holidays are St. Patrick’s Day and Fall Festivals. He joined the Air Force and served over twenty years, and got to see most of the world. Bresnahan retired and finished his master’s degree, going on to teach elementary school, mostly fourth grade, which he loved, until he retired in 2018. After surviving in his house through Hurricane Michael’s fury, once he got power and water several months later, he started getting ideas that he just had to put down on paper. It was really weird at first, as he has gone off in several directions, and now has ten books started—from adventure, to Sci-Fi, to romance. Bresnahan’s two sons are his life; though they are both grown, he will always see them as young boys, whose only goal in life, (it seemed to him at the time) was to challenge him. His family in Massachusetts is far away, but it is wonderful when they get together to talk and socialize. Bresnahan likes to do small woodworking projects, painting, mostly acrylics, and drawing. His grandmother started painting in her sixties, and was pretty good. He suspects his family tends towards late bloomers in the talent category.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Aug 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889258384

Book preview

Chapter 1

R

He crouched there silently, and to all intents and appearances he was very relaxed; in actuality, though, his senses were razor sharp and attuned to the hostile environment surrounding him. The dim, still green forest around him was as deceptively silent as he was, awaiting the age-old contest that was soon to come.

The woodland animals were seemingly holding their breath in anticipation, knowing that the two sets of predators in the woods knew exactly what was happening, and where their opponent was in relation to them. The combatants smelled the odors of the moss-covered pine trees around them with their musky aromas, and sniffed the wind for predators and prey alike. All sounds around them, every twig snap and slight rustle of movement of the air was measured, examined, and stored away in their brains to prearrange for their attacks, defense, or retreat.

On one side of the coming conflict were the three wolves—their training and instincts honed by millennia of successful life-and-death contests, including their atavistic genetic memories. Their ancestors, consisted of only the survivors of past conflicts just such as this.

A single human was on the other side of the equation, but if the wolves thought he was their average prey, they were wrong, and soon, likely to be dead wrong. This human had grown up just as feral and violent as they had on the streets of big cities like New York, facing life-and-death situations as they had every day of his life, until eventually he had worked his way out and away. After his lessons of surviving on the streets of the big city, and then in its wooded parks, his mentor, Shiny, had led him elsewhere, and continued his training, following the river up into the Catskill Mountains. Few people his age, in more than one hundred years had received an education equal to the kid’s, but in today’s overregulated society, few had any need of one.

Shiny had immediately known when he had seen the kid, appearing to be dying from a gunshot wound, under the rotted porch of a burned-out tenement, that he had found a kindred spirit. He saw that even then as he approached, that the small child’s hand held a long sharp piece of broken glass, wrapped in a piece of cloth, as an improvised type of shiv, and that he, too, was a fellow survivor!

Now the kid was much older, and, as he listened to a small twig snap to his left, he internally snickered. Shiny had taught him better than to give anything away like that, or trust anyone or thing that did. As if a wolf, hunting its dinner, would make a mistake like that; it was obviously a ploy to draw his attention from the real thrust of the pincered attack. The sound was a trigger in his brain that instantly had him diving and rolling as he thrust and swung his long, steel, razor-sharp machete up and through the innards of the large wolf that had thought that it could take him so easily.

Even as he eviscerated this opponent, he was again turning to meet the second one who had come in low from the other side. He quickly sidestepped his newest attacker and cut through its spine with one practiced powerful swing of the heavy weapon. As the second one fell, lifeless, he stood and turned towards what he had always known was the real danger, the older one who had coordinated the attack in the first place. Strangely, at this time as he waited, he remembered listening to some old TV show about a description of a group of velociraptors attacking someone very similarly, and thought to himself that very little had changed in all that time.

This one was older, bigger, and much more dangerous looking, as it slowly emerged from the shadowed depths of the underbrush. This was a pack leader, and he had sent his minions to kill, wound, or at least tire out the prey for him. But instead, he had seen that their attacks had been ineffective in this case, and that they had paid the required price for their failure.

Seldom had it seen a single human fend off one, never mind two clan members, and never, ever, without being wounded himself in the attack. It also recognized, with its own level of raw predatory intellect, that this opponent was different, it might actually be considered dangerous. The wolf was fully grown, weighing about one hundred pounds or more, with mottled gray and black fur, and a mouth full of large dagger-looking teeth that any sane human would have run screaming from. Its yellow circled eyes narrowed, and the long pinkish tongue seemingly licking its lips in anticipation of the large meal in front of it.

The man knew better than to look into this predator’s deep gleaming golden eyes, which would also be but another distraction in the conflict. He was now in a low crouch presenting a poor target, he had learned that in the Catskills, where he had gained a jagged scar on his side, that wolves usually went first for the shoulders, or the flanks.

It had moved slowly as it had been threading its way to within less than a dozen feet of him, almost casually, when the man suddenly stomped his foot on the hard ground, freezing the wolf in place like a stone, as the man himself leapt forward. The confused beast’s brain took a second too long to reanalyze the situation, a second that had already cost it the battle.

As the kid sprang, his whole body moved like an uncoiling spring, easily covering the distance to his prey; the wicked looking, overly long machete in his hand, swinging below him, decapitating the big wolf with a single swipe in a scene that anyone living a thousand years ago would have found very familiar. They would have seen that one or both of the contenders was dead on the forest’s floor, and for the survivor, life would go on, at least for now.

He crouched there quietly for some minutes afterwards, his senses searching the forest for any more enemies as the wolf’s heart finished its final crimson pumps onto the mossy green carpet. As he crouched there silently, he went over what had just happened in his mind, thinking back to Shiny’s daily combat and martial arts training sessions, which allowed for no mistakes. Anyone casually observing this child’s rearing would’ve sworn an oath that he was the product of extreme physical abuse, but he himself would have strongly disagreed. Shiny had explained to him with his first words to the kid, that he would show him how to survive, but at the same time he had cautioned him, that learning how to live with it afterwards, would be his own concern.

The kid’s senses were still working at 100%, as he thought about his daily training sessions in both hand-to-hand and armed combat; learning to critique himself on every move that he had made, and asking if he could have done it faster, more efficiently, and even more importantly, more quietly. He had mastered many lessons of defense, but Shiny had insisted that defense was only a temporary thing, and without a successful attack, there was usually no true victory.

He had been taught to hunt many animals in the streets, as well as in the woods, but had been told that the most dangerous of all, was man. Shiny had trained him how to stalk people wherever he needed to, without their knowledge, and set them up for attack scenarios. He was always critiquing him about what if this, or what if that happened, insisting that even the best plans, never survive initial contact. And that’s how the small boy had learned, and learned well, that life was planned conflict, and that he could not afford to lose even one battle in the war.

After he had waited a sufficient time to ensure that there were no other predators nearby, he quickly and efficiently skinned the three wolves, and removed the sections of meat that he would be needing for his next several days meals, and put them in the large sealed plastic bags in his big camo patterned assault backpack. He cleaned, honed, and oiled his weapon, sliding it into its canvas covered sheath, and faded back into the dim forest as quietly as he had first appeared. He knew that the results of his battle were already known to the woods and its inhabitants, and that nothing that was left behind would go to waste.

Continuing the long trek to this, his destination, he glided his way along noiselessly, attempting to disturb as little of this beautiful lush wilderness as he could as he went through it. He was slowly closing in on the clearing, which had been his destination for so many months; it didn’t seem possible that it had been almost 4,000 miles that he had traveled, to get to this point. Almost 2000 miles to Austin, and then about the same distance to his present location. He’d traveled many long distances before this with Shiny, but never that far, or on such long continuous journeys. Soon he would be where, what he hoped, would be his final destination. He intended to live his whole life from now on, as peacefully as he could from this single location.

Waiting there, crouched silently, just another piece of the shadowy forest background, he was watching the large empty clearing that he had come so far to claim as his own. After all this time on the road, he did not intend to rush right into his destination; he wanted to be absolutely sure that the area was secure from anyone else before continuing.

Treating this exactly as he had been trained to was normal to him, like any combat exercise where foes could be all around him, just waiting for him to make a mistake and pounce! He gazed over the large sandy glade, checking each bush, tree, and clump of grass to ensure that he was alone before he revealed himself. The opening in the forest was about three acres wide on each side, mostly sandy, with lots of tall wild grass.

As he looked to the northern edge, he ran his eyes over the front of the 1940s vintage bomb shelter door at its northern edge. It was on the right edge of the clearing, well out of sight from the main road and gate. He couldn’t help but wonder at the waste of the American tax payer’s dollars that had gone into its construction. Having thoroughly researched the dwelling’s history, he had come to the conclusion that some rich politician had used the money so that he, and his bevy of secretaries, could repopulate the earth after an atomic war like in some bad B movie. He’d laugh at the thought of it, if it hadn’t been so sad.

What he saw was just as it was described in the schematics that were hidden away safely inside his backpack; a 20 x 10 concrete apron fronting a well-hidden steel exterior. It had originally been covered in concrete and painted in camouflage to match its surroundings, but after about seventy years, it all looked the same; they didn’t really need to have wasted all that time painting and camouflaging something that had been so obviously unimportant, and was now long-abandoned.

Knowing, from the specifications, that the complete front of the structure was covered with thick battleship steel armor, that had been salvaged from after the war, he knew that it hadn’t been breached. The whole thing was over twelve inches thick, and case-hardened, so that it would take, literally, an atomic weapon to open it up without the keys.

It was quite obvious that drunken hunters had been shooting at it for decades, by the tiny little scratches that had only cracked the brittle concrete, and barely marred the metal. His next goal was two-fold, first he’d have to clear the debris out the right side of the entrance, where the emergency power pack would have to go, to be able to open the heavy steel door. Secondly, he’d have to make sure that the door track was completely clear before he used the power pack.

As he was just about to enter the clearing, his senses picked up on something that meant danger. Trained since infancy to pay attention to his senses, he remained perfectly still, just another part of the thick brush and tree that he was next to. As he slowly scanned the clearing, he sensed rather than saw that there was someone or something, on the other side of the glade, just past the dark tree line. He zeroed in on its location and waited. The only motion that he made was with his eyes. They scanned from near-to-far and back again, looking for anything and everything; soaking up all of the information that was being offered, and processing it for any danger.

Few today would have had his patience, to just crouch there motionless like that. For almost an hour he remained still until he sensed a slight movement on the upper slopes across from him again, the other was at home in the woods as well, but obviously not an apex predator like he was. He could remain still all day if that is what it took. Survival after all, was much more important than personal comfort.

Feeling rather than seeing that someone or something was over there; it was the little things like the sounds of the birds and the insects, or the lack of that same sound that gave the other person away. He followed its movement away from the clearing until it was completely out of range of his keen senses, and then he waited a further two hours where he was, before he finally felt it was safe enough to move.

Initially after his wait, he circled the clearing south, all the way around until he picked up the trail of his prey; and by the size of the few shoeprints that he found, it was a teen or a woman maybe, judging by shoe size. They weren’t bad on the trail either. He thought, he’d have to be cautious to ensure that he continued to vary his approaches to keep them guessing where he was headed to. He followed the trail north carefully for several miles before turning back, confident that they’d left his area of concern.

Next, he went directly to the east side of the shelter where his plans showed that a neatly hidden piece of concrete opened to reveal an emergency power input panel; and it was there! He attached the power pack that he’d designed for the job, and went to ensure that the door’s trackway was completely free of debris, to allow for smooth movement, with as little noise as possible.

Going over to the south side of the clearing, staying in the shelter of the timber line, he pressed the remote control for the power pack, and felt great self-satisfaction that it worked the way it was supposed to! He hadn’t been sure that it would, because he’d had to integrate current technology with that of the 1940s variety. It wasn’t as if he could call a repairman or anything for assistance if it didn’t work. The heavy metal door moved inward, and then, almost silently, began sliding to the right onto its rails as it had been designed to do over seventy years before. He knew for a fact that it hadn’t been opened since this military reservation, backing on the National Forest, had been left to nature in the ’50s; although the exact reason for the facility’s abandonment was strangely vague.

Carefully examining the dark maw that had been revealed with his small, well-used, Zeist field glasses, he saw something that told him that he’d better be careful until he had fully investigated the whole interior of the structure. He approached from the east side and, using a mirror, examined what he thought that he had seen from afar; a thin gray rusted wire was stretched just inside the doorway! This was very strange, as there was nothing in the military base closure papers that had indicated that there had been a problem, or that there had been a threat of any kind, so this didn’t make any sense at all! As he shined his powerful flashlight around the inside, working its illumination deeper into the gloom, he froze and gulped. There, hidden under some trash in front of him, was a very large muzzled weapon, mounted on a bipod, pointing right at the entrance to the bunker, right at him!

Knowing now that there was real, not just perceived danger here, he took off the power pack to prevent the door’s closure, stripped off his worn denim jacket, and loaded his canvas tool belt with the things he believed he’d need to make this place safe. He slowly breathed in and out several times, doing the mantra for calm that he’d been taught, and then carefully stepped over the decades old wire, into the cool dark gloomy interior. He carefully traced the wire all the way one way, and then the other, and then sighed quietly to himself. This should have been the time where a professional EOD, Explosive Ordinance Disposal, expert should have gone outside and had a smoke, or two before continuing.

A rookie would have cut the door wire, and then, they’d have been dead, very dead! For hanging on the wall, on each side of the doorway, were five MK 2 fragmentation grenades, rigged to spring into the air when they were triggered by the wire. Ten grenades and a machine gun? Whatever was really going on here back in the ’50s, it certainly wasn’t what the papers he’d acquired had described. It was bad, really bad! Some official, was definitely scared that someone would find a way to get in here, for some unknown reason; what were they hiding?

He had just carefully safed the ten grenades, removed them, and placed the old ordinance outside for safe disposal later, when a thought hit him; how many of those type of grenades come in a single box? His laptop search informed him, to his dismay, that the MK 2 grenades came twenty-five to a box; if he really believed in a higher power, which he wasn’t really sure of, then this is when he would have been cursing his luck, which was something that he definitely did believe in. It was time to stop and set up his camp, as this was going to take a couple of days, or more, to safely clear, if he wanted to live through it.

Chapter 2

R

It was still a little chilly out today, but not intolerable weather, almost 60 degrees and very pleasant in the sun, so he started making his camp on the edge of the forest on the lee side of the clearing to the east. He began to cut a setback, for a large, cup-like campsite, with a place in the middle for a firepit where the smoke would dissipate through the overhead tree branches, and not so easily give his position away.

Around the back of the cut, he cut and placed brush and poles to keep smaller pests out, and to warn him of the larger ones, and dug a sleeping area inside. He put a latrine on the outside, and downstream, as he liked good tasting coffee, he thought with a smile.

After setting up a few tripwires of his own in the trees around him, he was now, temporarily, secured for the afternoon. His camp basically finished, he went back, safing and removing the bipod mounted weapon, and returned it to his camp. The gun turned out to be an old BAR, Browning Automatic Rifle, along with four more grenades, which were rigged to the weapon itself. At this point he figured that he’d stretched his luck as far as he cared to for his first day at the site, so he started a small smokeless fire, and cooked one of the steaks that his earlier conflict had provided for him.

Flint sat on the ground, working on his laptop for about an hour as he did almost every night, filing or improving the patents that he had developed over the last five years. He did not want to file for the money while he was still in school, because of the possibility of the school claiming whole or partial credit for his work. Tonight’s work brought the total up to forty-two patents that he had filed so far, most of them minor things that had brought in $1000 or two each when he sold the patents, along with arranging for royalties. As evening drew near, he let the fire burn down low, put his sharp machete by his side, pulled out a well-worn copy of The Moralia by Plutarch. While he did not agree with many of the man’s ideas, Shiny had taught him that knowledge was power, and a way to understand your opponent, so he read for a while until sleep overcame him.

As the first rays of light hit the clearing, he was already awake, cleaning up, and getting ready for his new day. During the night he had heard and felt soft scrambling in the underbrush around him, but nothing had come near enough to bring him fully awake. He scouted around and found two sets of small wolf prints around his camp, and that was very strange, these prints were of animals too little to be out hunting alone. As he scouted further out it was clear that they were in fact alone, as there were no accompanying tracks of any adult wolf. They had also nestled into the brush behind his campsite and slept there, where some of the warmth from his campfire had leaked through. This was really weird, even to someone who’d lived his life, and he’d have to be even more cautious now until he’d solved the puzzle.

Clearing and wrapping the BAR in the large tarp of oilcloth that had hidden it, he dug a hole with his camp shovel from the backpack, and buried the weapon with its three accompanying boxes of ammunition. Next, he dug a deeper narrower hole, safed and taped the 14 grenades that he’d found so far, and covered that with heavy deadfalls. Hopefully, only eleven to go, but he would not bet his life on that, not with the looney tunes in charge that it seemed had set all this craziness up in the first place. All he’d need now would be for the curious little wolves to play with the grenades and it would sound like World War III up here, and he didn’t want, or need, any of that kind of attention.

For the whole long morning, he worked his way, slowly, from the front to about the middle of the shelter until, after finding five more grenades, he’d had enough stress, so he stopped for lunch. Safing them, he put them with the others for safe keeping in the same hole and recovered the trench.

Digging into the coals of last night’s fire, he stirred them up and got them going again. He was now glad that he’d taken the time to dig a pit in the sand, and line it with big river rocks; as the coals lasted longer this way, and provided better heat throughout the night. Taking out several of the wolf steaks, he got the fire going, and started to prepare them. He sliced them up into thick strips, and hung them on sticks over the low fire to cook. In this way he would also have a sort of jerky and he wouldn’t have to light the fire so often and risk any attention.

After he had started his dinner cooking, he began stretching out, as he did every day for his Bōjutsu training, which was a Japanese staff technique, the martial art of stick fighting using a bō, the Japanese word for staff. Over the years with Shiny, he had become very proficient with this, although the way that he had been trained, he was sure looked little like what would take place in a normal dojo. While he had learned to perform all of the katas, or movements of the style, perfectly, the emphasis had been to injure, disable, or kill your opponent, not to win points, as the streets they lived on didn’t show mercy, and the loser wouldn’t expect any.

As he relaxed by the fire, still keeping his eyes on the clearing and everything around him, he began to get the feeling that he was being watched. He slowly pulled the machete from its sheath, and carefully began looking around him, using all of his senses, seeing if he could find out who or what was watching him. His mind kept coming back to the tracks of the little wolves, wondering if they were somehow stalking him. He couldn’t believe that they would stalk someone his size, but it could be that they didn’t have a choice, and that they were very hungry. They must be smelling his meat cooking by now, and he knew that if they were actually that hungry, they would be drawing near; most likely from both sides at once, if they had any training at all from their parents.

Taking some of the warm, but not yet cooked meat off of the sticks he decided to take a chance. Walking around behind his meager shelter, he started calling out as if they were people that he was looking for, not wolves. As he did so he could feel that there was one behind him and one in the front just, as he had thought, and smiled to himself. To the one in front, he threw a piece of meat saying, Here you are, while at the same time turning around, he threw a piece to the one that he knew would be advancing from behind him. They both looked at him not touching the meat that had been thrown to them, until he walked back around to his shelter, and sat down by his fire. He was surprised that he didn’t hear them chewing and gulping down the meat, but he thought that it would be better to wait and see what they really wanted of him.

About fifteen minutes later, he began to hear them both creeping stealthily around his barrier, this time they were both together. He’d noticed, when he’d thrown them the meat that they both seemed to be white in color, a very unusual thing for this area, where most wolves were dark colored Timberwolves. As they crept around the brush that he had laid around his camp, creeping towards his fire, they didn’t seem to be showing their teeth, or giving any outward signs of aggression. Well, boys, what is it you really want from me, he said as if he was having a normal everyday conversation with people instead of feral animals.

As the three of them carefully examined one another, he also noticed something else different about them, they seem to be wearing tight leather collars around their necks, could they really be someone’s pets? I mean, no sane person would try to make a pet out of wild wolves, would they? Visually, as they got closer, he noticed that the collars were much too tight around their throats, as if they had been pets that had gotten away, and they were both probably starving by the look of them.

Taking up his knife he took several more pieces of meat out, and on his mess kit plate cut and diced them up into very fine strands. Dividing the parts of what he’d cut up between two plates he slowly, very carefully, put them a little nearer to the two baby wolves. He also filled a bowl with some clean water that he’d gotten from the nearby stream, and put it between the two plates of meat.

After he’d done this, he backed himself up, way up into the shelter, giving them even more room, and somewhat of a feeling of security that he wasn’t about to attack them. He’d notice that one was a male and one was a female, and that the male slowly moved forward sniffed the meat and the water before gesturing for the female to join him and start eating. It was obvious that it was very difficult for them to swallow even these small pieces, with the tight collars around their throats. That was probably why they were following him, they had smelled the fresh meat that was in his bag, and weren’t strong enough to compete with the others where the three wolves were lying there dead. After they had both eaten their portions, they looked at him expectantly as if to say, Where’s the rest?

I think I’ll call you King and Queen, the man said with a laugh. You sure are different from any wolves that I’ve ever heard about, so you must therefore be royalty! This next part is going to be dicey, he thought to himself. I’ve gotta figure out a way for them to get to trust me enough, that I can cut those nasty collars off them without them eating my hands for dessert.

Deciding that they must be pretty smart, or they wouldn’t have gotten this far or this close to him, without figuring out what they wanted him to do for them. Sometime in their short lives they had been collared by human beings, so they must be pretty used to dealing with them. Figuring that most humans show and do things by example to pets, he took a piece of leather from his backpack and slowly gestured towards it and his knife and then towards his neck to show that the leather would’ve been around his neck, he held the leather near his throat and cut the tough leather through, in demonstration.

It was obvious that King was in charge, and wouldn’t let anything happen to his Queen, as he seemed to check everything first, so he’d have to be first at this also. He gestured for King to come closer and towards his neck so that King would have his collar removed. King looked at him and looked at the leather and for some reason seemed to understand what the man had been telling and showing him. He slowly came to just barely within arm’s reach of the man, and stood quietly as his leather collar was slowly cut free as gently as possible.

Slowly peeling it off from around King’s badly abraded and swollen throat, he examined the collar more closely. There was no tag of ownership but there was what appeared to be a large tracking chip of some type, fixed permanently to the collar.

Looking at King who was still standing there staring at him, he spit on the collar