The Daily Novel

Fourteen
It was Tuesday, but gravity was ahead on points. Something clonked, and I started to crawl up out of sleep. Clonk. What the hell?
It clonked again. And rattled. And it was in my room.
Jesus. I rolled out and hit the floor, scrabbling for my gun. Damfool! I thought. Make yourself a target and then sleep [...]

Chapter Thirteen
Lauren heard the page from the nurses’ station just as she finished hooking a new vial of morphine to Mr. Oliphant’s self-dosage machine. She patted the man’s arm. “See you later.”
He managed a weak smile. “Okay, Lauren.”
She hurried to the nurses station. Olga Herrera handed her the telephone. “Lauren Miles,” she said.
“Lauren, this is [...]

Eleven
    It wasn’t seven when I went through Belmont, but Bob Miller had already finished humping open the big tin doors. He gave me a big wave from the truck ramp. Seeing me in an aged white Valiant didn’t seem to shake his faith in a stable universe. The man was more cheerful than my [...]

Ten
I dropped sideways on the seat and stomped the brake. Compression had almost stopped the car anyway. With its last breath it veered across a strip of gravel and canted onto a weedy little bank with the remains of somebody’s flowers wilting limply in the early summer drought. I had the passenger door open before [...]

Nine
I didn’t have a good enough grip to pull myself up higher, so I dropped back to the dirt. My hands were gritty, and the front of my shirt was streaked. The day was still completely soft and silent. It still smelled of warmth and dust and weeds and June sunlight. But the mausoleum of [...]

Six
Belmont was a big elevator on the railroad, an ancient and boarded-up brick schoolhouse on the hill, and three or four houses scattered east of the blacktop. Across the tracks from the elevator, a little yellow building with a wooden awning huddled among mangy willows. It looked like it had once been a prosperous little [...]

Four
Carol Case was not at school. Tammy Manchester was, but she didn’t like being accosted by strange men. At least by this strange man. She had very pale skin and extraordinary red hair, very long. I got her seated on the edge of a concrete planter with a flagpole growing out of it and asked [...]