Shermy: Public Domain Agents, #4

By Christopher Menkhaus

After a lifetime of manipulation…

 

And the loss of home, family, and security…

 

Can a left-over boy and a broken girl find a happily ever after?

 

No one ever asked Shermy if he wanted to live his life as part of a secret organization carrying out a dangerous, and ultimately futile, experiment.

 

In fact, he didn't even know that was his life, until the night he lost everything. Well, not everything.

 

His neighbor Patty had also survived the events at the end of Neighbors, and together they are on the run.

 

Now, all they have are each other, and an address to a safe house, given to them by a man they don't entirely trust. Is it a trap? Where will they end up?

 

Visit the Neighbors one last time. Buy Shermy today!

 

Love, family, and even a chance at redemption are waiting for Shermy. Is he brave enough to reach out and take them?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christopher Menkhaus
• Release date: Dec 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781956720099

Book preview

1

THE SUN

Shermy turned his car down the dead-end street. That was his life now. It was a dead-end street. He lived in a dead-end town. He worked a dead-end job that was located, coincidentally at the end of the street he just turned on to.

Not long ago, Shermy had dreams of becoming an artist. He didn’t know how he would make enough money to support himself, but that would all figure itself out along the way. Everything always did. No matter how many times his family had to move, he always continued getting better at painting.

After high school, he had even found his way into an art program at a prestigious university. That was all over now. There were a variety of reasons his life fell apart when it did, but it all started when his father and Reverend Othmar convinced him to say that another artist’s work was his, and lodge a formal complaint of plagiarism with the university.

That never felt right to Shermy, and soon after that other student was expelled, Shermy’s life came crashing down around him. First, Shermy and Patty had almost ended up like Shermy’s mother and poor little Sally, dead at the hands of that monster, Chase. The monster that both of his parents had spent more time with than their own son.

Shermy had never really understood what Chase was, or why everyone on the block seemed obsessed with him, but what he understood was that Chase was something important, whereas someone like Shermy was not. Shermy was only good for monitoring Chase when the grownups weren’t around, and reporting to them afterward about every little thing that their precious little Chase did or said.

It was nauseating. Why didn’t his parents love him at least as much as the neighbor kid? Now that Shermy was a father himself, he understood it even less. He couldn’t imagine loving anyone else’s kid more than his own son. Shermy didn’t feel like he was the best father in the world, but he felt like he had learned enough in five years to know that he would do anything for his kid.

That included keeping their family hidden from his father and Reverend Othmar, both of whom tried to kill him when everything fell apart. No one had any idea when either of them would show up again to finish the job that Detective Wudestoke had interrupted.

Shermy had to admit, he didn’t have any idea that Detective Wudestoke cared the least bit about himself or Patty. He was always just the laconic, depressed rent-a-cop that they had picked up in Indiana, who sat on his porch all day and only opened his mouth to chide someone about something.

No use thinking about any of that now. Shermy pulled into one of the employee’s parking spaces at the Round Barn Pub-lic House. He slowly got out of his beat-up car, tied on his beat up apron, and headed inside to get beat up by customers for ten hours.

Every detail of that night, back in Indiana, when everything fell apart, was burned into Shermy’s memory. He liked to replay those days that followed in his head, though. Despite the situation they were in, those were some of the best days of Shermy’s life. He wondered if Patty felt the same way.

Sure, they had literally lost everything but their lives when their fathers had tried to kill them, but that was looking at the glass half empty. They were finally free of the suffocating web of control that they had been under since birth. Shermy knew his life was unusual, but he did not know how unusual until he had gotten out among the other