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Prologue: One Year Ago - The Day The Veil Ripped
Stephanie Kippenberg sat on her front porch sipping an ice cold glass of her famous (in her own mind, at least) homemade lemonade. Just the right amount of sweet and just the right amount of tart. That was how she explained it to people when they asked her what her secret was. The Sun was winking its last rays of the day, casting a pink glow on the undersides of the puffy, mid-summer clouds. What was it her father use to say about a sky like that? Red sky at night, sailors’ delight. Red sky at morn, sailors take warn. That was it. She guessed that meant they were in for yet anther gorgeous Clearwater, Kansas day. Heck, she thought, maybe I’ll even take a drive up toWichitatomorrow, do a little shopping.
Stephanie lived for the summers. As a 34 year old high school math teacher, the summers meant freedom. Freedom from the endless excuses as to why her students didn’t bother learning Pythagoras’ Theorem. Freedom from the old guard of teachers who spent their days smoking in the lounge and bitching about how students these days wouldn’t know respect if it bit them on their asses. Freedom to go out on a Tuesday night, if the mood struck, have a margarita, and possibly talk to a cute guy. Freedom—
Before the next thought could grace her mind, the porch, the house, even the ground beneath her, started to rumble. Not shaking, exactly, but rumbling. Less side to side, more up and down. It was like her house was suddenly placed directly adjacent to an Amtrak line.
She stood, placing a hand on the porch’s wooden railing to steady herself. If it was an earthquake, it would end soon. IF it was an earthquake?, her mind challenged. What the heck else could it be?
But instead of losing intensity, the rapid up and down rumble grew larger (and louder). The world had suddenly turned into some twisted carnival ride, and Stephanie wanted off. She tried to take a step toward the front door, but as her leg moved down, the porch suddenly shot up. Her foot met the porch sooner than she anticipated and rolled inward. There was a quick pop, then a loud snap, and white hot pain flashed up her leg. Her mind tried to shut down for a moment, attempting to spare her from the agony pulsing around her now broken ankle. A dark cloud started at the periphery of her vision and began closing in. No, she thought. I will NOT pass out!
She forced the black clouds to clear, concentrating, instead of ignoring, the pain in her ankle. Another jerk from the ground beneath her caused her to try to keep balance with both legs. Bad idea. A lightening bolt of pain raced up from her ankle buckling her at the knees. Her body lurched forward as the rumbling intensified further and she had to brace herself with both hands on the floor of the porch.
Holy cow, she thought, if this is an earthquake, it’s the longest darn earthquake in history!
She closed her eyes, determined to simply ride it out. She’d learned her lesson about moving as the earth shook beneath you. But then she heard it – not the grumbada-grumbada-grumbada of the shaking earth – but a new sound altogether. She thought it sounded like the whine of a airplane engine as it was starting up. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, and it was getting louder.
She fell onto her side, pressing the palms of her hands against her ears. The rising whine closed in, piercing through her pressed palms and stabbing straight into her brain. The sound had weight to it - immeasurable weight - and power.
It was at that moment that Stephanie Kippenberg, the 34 year old mousy high school math teacher from Clearwater, Kansas, started to scream. She screamed into the suffocating whine, the gravely sound that should have been coming from deep within her throat rendered all but silent. She wasn’t even able to hear the scream in her own head. Blood leaked from her ears, nose, and the corners of her eyes. The whine was crushing her, turning her insides to mush. And she could feel every pulsing wave of it.
And then, just as suddenly as it had all started, it stopped. The whine. The rumbling of the earth. Everything.
A sickening stillness fell over Stephanie. Her trembling hands slowly moved away from her ears. Her palms, hot and slick with blood, wiped absently at her eyes. She blinked away bloody tears and tried to pull her vision into focus. Everything looked normal in her yard. She expected to see some massive crack in the earth – half expected it to lead to Hell, truth be told. But there was nothing. Just her hand laid stone walkway leading to her cream colored picket fence and beyond it, quiet little Dandilo Street with its multitude of pastel colored ranches and split-levels.
Her instinct was to stand, to walk out into the street and wait for her neighbors to do the same. Then they could compare notes about the incredible phenomenon they’d just experienced. But she fought the urge. The throbbing pain from her broken ankle was back, and she wasn’t about to try to put weightt on it.
No thank you, she thought. I’ll just crawl into the house, grab the cordless, and get someone to kindly take me to the hospital. They’ll slap a cast on my ankle and try to figure out which of my organs went and got itself frappéd by that god-awful noise.
Stephanie slowly rolled over on the porch, hoping the earthquake (or whatever it was) hadn’t done too much damage to her house. She figured she was bound to find some broken dishes, a bunch of knocked over knick-knacks, and even some—
Her eyes widened, squeezing free a fresh droplet of blood from the right one. Her breath caught in her throat and something deep in the pit of her stomach dropped. The center of her house, from the front door to the large picture window in her living room, was missing. Just gone. The edges of the missing area looked like a painting that had gone through some serious water damage. Instead of broken and splintered wood, it looked — smudged. It looked as if something had taken the very fabric of reality and ripped it open with a knife.
As Stephanie looked into the rip, that impossible to comprehend tear in reality, her head started to swim. A sense of vertigo gripped her and her stomach lurched. Before she could control it, she vomited onto the porch – a mixture of homemade lemonade and bright red blood (just the right amount of sweet and just the right amount of tart). Her eyes lolled in her head. Things were moving within the rip. She could see them swimming in front of her eyes. Terrible things. And in numbers beyond anything she would have dared to guess. Gray and hulking and evil. She was sure of it. Pure evil.
One of those hulking things stepped through the rip, as easily as she would have walked out her front door. It looked down at her, grunted, and swung some massive bludgeon it had been holding in its gigantic hand. And then Stephanie Kippenberg’s life went forever dark.
Life & Death in a Wal-Mart Parking Lot
A year ago Karl Jeffers didn’t even possess the imagination to conceive of the scene in front of him. How could he? He was busy running his Brown Coffee Bean Bistro and worrying about whether or not the shit-tanking economy was going to stop people from spending $7 for a glorified cup of Joe. The thought of a quartet of 8 foot tall, 350 pound, grey skinned Orcs standing around a garbage can fire in the middle of an abandoned Wal-Mart parking lot was ludicrous – nothing more than the barely readable ramblings of internet nerds writing Dungeons & Dragons fan fiction.
And yet facts are facts. Here they were, three Orcs, or Bludden, as they called themselves. Very much alive. Very much real.
As real, Karl thinks, as the ridiculously oversized sword clenched in his fists. The blade is more rectangular than a typical sword, about four inches wide running the entire 3 foot length from base to top. He can’t quite remember if it had started life as the bumper to an old Cadillac or a Saab. He wants to think it was a Caddie, simply because that was the
