AND BEER is the sequel to my first horror/adventure novel, NOODLES. I am currently about 120 pages into it and have been distracted by other writing projects, but I’m determined to finish it soon. The title is in keeping with NOODLES and may be subject to change if a better idea comes along. No ideas for a cover yet, unless you have some…
Here’s an excerpt:
Doug raised his head and peered over the windowsill of the deserted school. Tom watched him scan from side to side twice.
Doug dropped again, “Bingo. It looks like an office. Desks, chairs, and a couple partitions. A long counter against the far wall with two doors behind it that probably lead to the main hallway. All quiet. Floor is clean and no damage.”
Tom nodded, “A good sign.”
Doug pointed at Bill, “You head right. It looks like there’s a door on that side.” He pointed left and spoke to Tom, “One on the other side too. You head that way. I’ll sit in the middle with an eye on the main doors and watch your backs.”
Bill nodded, “Okay then.” He inclined his head, “Ladies first.”
Doug led and they slowly eased themselves over the waist-high sill. They dropped softly onto the carpet the other side, holding their breath. The carpet was wet and squelched underfoot but that was the only sound.
As Doug said, there were two doors on the other side of a long counter opposite the windows. Both were closed but the top half of each had been glass until recently. All Tom could see through the broken shards lining the frames was darkness.
Weapon up, Bill nodded at the door on the right side of the long room they were in, “On my way.” He moved away, duck-walking across the floor in a crouch.
Tom nodded at Doug and moved off quietly toward his assigned door, staying away from the wall and any piece of furniture near him. A man-sized Blackie could hide in the shadows under a desk or next to a small cabinet and launch itself at you in a heartbeat. You’d only hear a slight rush of wind before a black shroud descended over your head, drowning out all light and sound, all life.
And that wasn’t even the scary bit.
Going out that way was at least fast. If a Blackie ever glommed onto you and sucked you in whole, you could count your blessings.
If it only got a piece of you – or rather, if you only got a piece of it, like a particle of one stuck on your skin or even just on your shoe – then it would eat you from the inside-out, taking you over cell-by-cell, slowly at first but at an ever-increasing rate, until you weren’t you anymore.
You only thought you were still you, even while the Blackie was churning around in your guts, replacing muscle and organs with its own substance, liquefying your brain and ultimately becoming you without you even knowing it. Until you were nothing inside but a black mass of alien synaptic matter, merely going through the motions of being human.
He’d seen it happen to others many times. They all had.
He sidled up to the wall next to the door, staying to the side where he would be behind it when he pulled it open. He flicked a glance back at the other two.
Bill had his back against the wall on the opposite side, his hand on the doorknob. Doug was in the middle up against the front counter so he could see them both easily, his back to the two doors that led into the main hallway.
Something caught Tom’s eye and he jerked his head to the left, his heart rate kicking up a notch. There was one intact window that looked out onto the sports ground they’d just traversed, but it was cloudy with grime. He wasn’t certain but it looked as if…
There. A subtle darkening outside. He couldn’t see any detail, but it didn’t look as if anything was moving out there. He watched it for several seconds to be sure. It was likely the shadow of denser cloud moving across the sky, further obscuring the smeary sun.
He took a breath and looked back across at Bill. The deputy nodded at him, signaling for him to try his door first.
Tom gripped the doorknob and slowly rotated it. The knob was loose and rattled softly in his hand. He realized he was holding his breath and let it out slowly as he pulled the door open toward him. He got it open about a foot and stopped, squinting through the crack where the hinges were.
It was dim, but there was enough light coming through the doorway that he could see a wall of shelves only several feet away packed with files and books. It was obviously a small space – likely too small to be a nurse’s room.
There was no sound or motion within, which was no guarantee anyway if a Blackie was in there. They preferred the dark, though, and would usually react quickly to the introduction of any light, no matter how diffuse.
He pulled the door all the way open and moved around it, keeping his rifle aimed at the interior.
It was a storage room. The entire wall opposite the door was full of files and stacks of paper. There was a desk under the one window on the right, which had a curtain drawn across it, and he saw a microphone stand and a small metal console on the desk. Several boxes were on the floor next to the desk but looked to be full of nothing but paper.
He pulled his head out and mouthed, “Storage.”
Doug nodded understanding and turned to Bill, nodding at him in turn. Bill grabbed his doorknob and pulled the door swiftly open, favoring a surprise approach rather than stealth.
The deputy stuck his head inside then stepped through the door, disappearing completely. Tom gripped his rifle tightly, in anticipation of having to use it.
But Bill stuck his head out a moment later and signaled him to come over.
He moved as quickly and silently as he could, heading toward Doug at the front counter.
Doug pointed his rifle back at the storage room and whispered as Tom went past, “Anything useable in there?”
“I don’t think so. Just books and papers.”
Doug tilted his head, “I’ll check it out anyway. You go ahead.” He angled his head at Bill.
Tom nodded and continued past. Bill was waiting patiently at the door and hissed at him, “Nurse’s room for sure.”
Tom slid past him into the room.
Bill followed, “For a school this looks pretty well stocked.”
Tom gazed around, “It is that.”
He quickly eyed the glass-fronted cabinets and shelves, seeing everything from heat pads to cooling sheets for fevers, rolls of gauze wrapped in plastic, boxes of band-aids of every size and – importantly – a few bottles of topical disinfectant.
“What do we need?” Bill asked.
Tom pulled his backpack off, “Everything. Take it all.”
He pulled open a cabinet and started cramming stuff into his bag, keeping a mental list as he went; hydrogen peroxide…two bottles, alcohol spray…three, roller bandage…five, tensor-tape…four rolls. It was hard to keep a smile off his face. This stuff would go a long way for them.
He waved Bill toward the desk, “Have a look over there.”
“Roger,” Bill moved over to the nurse’s desk. There was nothing on top except some papers.
He tugged on the top drawer, but it wouldn’t budge, “Damn,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Locked.”
Tom gazed around the room, “That could be good. It might mean there’s some actual medicine in there. I don’t imagine anything too strong, because this is just a school, but you never know. Look for a key.”
“Hang on,” Bill started digging around in his vest pocket, “Ah, here it is.”
He pulled out a multipurpose tool and held it up, “Great for jimmying locks.”
“Fine, just do it quietly,” Tom went back to stuffing his backpack.
Bill pried out the short flathead screwdriver implement and went to work on the lock. A few squeaks and a light snap later, he eased the drawer open, “Well, looky here.”
“What you got?”
Bill held up several plastic bottles, “Need any aspirin?”
Tom stepped over to him, “Holy shit, do we ever.” He took the bottles from Bill, “Acetaminophen, Ibuprofen…even Naproxen. Jeez, whoever this nurse was, they were pretty prepared.”
He held up a smaller bottle, “Hm, children’s aspirin. Even these will be-”
A loud crash and clatter echoed outside the door and both men jerked in surprise, weapons coming up in unison.
They spun and stepped to the door in time to see Doug emerge from the room opposite, his hands up, waving in a gesture for them to stay down.
They all froze, listening.
After five seconds, Doug started back into the main room. Tom and Bill rapidly tip-toed over to meet him in the middle.
Tom spread his hands wide, hissing, “What the hell was that?”
Doug tilted his head, looking anything but apologetic, “There were a couple boxes over by the window. I was digging through one and bumped a console on the desk that fell.”
“Jesus Christ,” Bill muttered.
Doug narrowed his eyes at him, “Regardless, it looks like we lucked out. No sign of-”
A loud thump sounded from the floor above, directly overhead.
They all dropped to a crouch; eyes and guns aimed at the ceiling.
Bill rasped, “You were saying?”
The thump turned into a scraping sound – something heavy being dragged across the floor overhead.
Their eyes followed the sound as it moved across the ceiling.
“It’s headed in toward the center of the building, away from the light outside,” Bill breathed.
“Has to be a Blackie then,” Doug said. His voice shook slightly, either from fear or adrenaline.
“Could be a central stairway in this place,” Tom whispered, “We better skedaddle. We have what we came for.”
“I’m for that,” Bill said, “We’re going back out the way we came.”
Doug flashed him a brief glare, as if resentful of Bill giving an order, but he couldn’t argue with the logic. Their best and most obvious exit was the window they’d entered through.
He nodded curtly, “Hurry up, then.”
They rose and moved toward the windows, still treading as lightly as possible. Behind and above, the scraping turned into a series of rattling thuds as whatever it was decided that moving around like a giant slug wasn’t fast enough.
Bill said, “Uh-oh, it grew legs. Let’s get the fuck-”
He was almost at the middle window when a dark shadow eclipsed what little light there was outside, and a huge black shape dropped down from somewhere above. It smashed through the remains of the window frame, sending glass and pieces of aluminum into the room.
The three men skidded to a halt as the shape became a mass of coiling black tentacles and stiff, multi-jointed legs that splayed out in all directions, blocking their way.
A Blackie.
And a big one. One that had no doubt consumed many people, the remains of whom would be swirling around in its guts. Blackies fully dissolved the victims they ingested, but somehow the consciousness – or at least the information people carried with them – was preserved. Blackies destroyed the bodies of their victims but kept their minds, emptied of emotion and twisted to serve their predatory purpose of taking over every living, conscious thing.
A virus preying on the entire world.
The Blackie crashed down, shaking the floor under their feet. The bulky center of its mass held three large, bright blue orbs – its eyes – arrayed around a gaping hole lined with glassy fangs. Blackie eyes had no pupils but somehow you always knew what they were looking at.
Each eye locked onto one of the men and the blue light pulsed.
Bill had a couple grenades on his belt and reached down to grab one. He felt Tom’s hand on his, stopping him.
The doctor whispered, “I think it’s too big to burn down, and you’ll alert every other Blackie in the neighborhood.”
Doug snorted, “As if they don’t know already.”
“No sense advertising unless we have to. Let’s-”
The body of the Blackie convulsed. Its gelatinous black skin split in a dozen places and tentacles shot out toward them. The men threw themselves in all directions, rolling across the floor and coming up to scramble through the maze of office furniture toward the front counter.
Doug reached it first, yelling, “The hallway!” He vaulted over the counter and made for the double doors, his equipment clattering noisily on the countertop. He grabbed both door handles and wrenched them open. The hinges groaned and the doors banged against the wall on either side.
He ran through into the gloom of the hallway without a look back.
No point in stealth now.
Bill and Tom launched themselves over the counter on opposite sides of the room and ran toward the doors Doug had just slammed through.
His voice echoed from the dark, “Hurry up!”
Tom yelled, “Doug! Hold up!” He didn’t want them to get separated in the dark building.
Bill made it to the open doors first but waited for Tom to catch up, “Asshole’s advertising us to every Blackie in the goddamn city.” He gave Tom a quick once-over, “You okay, Doc?”
A flicker of fear went through Tom, but he knew he hadn’t been touched by the Blackie, “Yeah. You?”
“I’m good.”
Tom shot a look back at the creature by the window. It hadn’t followed them. It seemed content to merely block access to the windows. Its body shifted and rippled, multiple limbs twitching and scratching at the ceiling and wall behind it. It was completely blocking access to all the windows like an enormous, fleshy spider’s web, but it wasn’t coming after them.
Tom paused for a moment, Why?
Bill grabbed his sleeve and pulled him along, diverting his attention to the hallway outside, “Come on.”
Tom allowed himself to be dragged along, “But it’s not-”
They entered the hallway, Tom still gazing back at the creature by the windows. He bumped up against Bill, who’d abruptly stopped, “What?”
Bill gripped his shoulder hard as Tom turned to face ahead.
They’d come up behind Doug, who was standing in the middle of the dim hallway with his rifle up, aimed into the darkness in front of him. His arms were shaking, and the rifle barrel bobbed up and down.
Tom squinted to see what he was aiming at, his stomach twisting with fear.
About twenty feet away on the left was a stairway.
And filling the hallway at the bottom of the stairs were figures.
Kids.
It looked like a class of teenage kids dressed in rags, just standing there in the dark, silent and grey-faced.
Until they all opened their blazing blue eyes, lighting up the hallway with cold fire.
I hope you enjoyed this excerpt. I’m trying to get AND BEER finished in 2023 and will keep you posted. In the meantime, you can find NOODLES on my author page at HellBound Books Publishing:
https://www.hellboundbookspublishing.com/authorpage_gould.html
And my other books can be found at:
amazon.com/author/jaygould
Author Jay Gould 