Running with the Orc: Excerpt 1

The club was packed, the drinks were flowing, and Daisy LaRue was about to go on stage for another night of comedy burlesque when…

“You have to see who’s here. I can’t believe it. He came. He never comes into the camp unless someone trips the alarm leading to the portal.”

I watched the woman from my world, Claudette, curiously. “Who?”

She didn’t respond, but quickly pushed me to the edge of the stage to look out through the curtain. When I caught a glimpse of what was sitting in VIP, the gasp that came from my lips rattled me, and I quickly slammed the curtain shut. With a heavy breath, I pinned myself to the nearby wall and hoped like hell he didn’t see me. My heart was racing, and I couldn’t believe he was here. I hoped I would never have to lay eyes on that man again—that stupid, green-skinned, gorgeous man.

“Bramwell Gronk,” I breathed, barely able to contain the sudden fear that fell over me.

“The leading commander of the orc army,” she noted with a little too much cheery swoon for my liking. “His warlord horde was the group who brought you back here… twice… no, three times… Wasn’t it? The warlords typically don’t—”

“Show up unless hunting us when we try to escape to reach the passage. Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.”

Damn her for stating the obvious. The last time we met, he swore he’d kill me if he ever saw my face again. His words were I’ll take care of you. Yeah, I’m sure he would, in a dark, primal ritual where he’d rip my heart from my chest as his men bellowed war chants to the rhythm of my still beating thumper, right before he took a big bite to claim his barbarian hierarchy.

 That gnarly scar on his face from forehead to jawline is the reason I landed in an oubliette for two weeks… Or was it a month?

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Excerpt 

Back in the 60s . . .

 

On Wednesday October 13^th, 1968, a faculty panel recommended the dismissal of Professor John Harris—in absentia, as no one at Harvard had seen or heard from him in weeks. Harris later bragged about delivering his final lecture on “one shitload and a half of LSD.” According to the recording made available to the faculty panel, this was the sum total of that lecture:

 

“Good afternoon. Wow. American Literature, hunh? Let’s see. Moby Dick today. Right?”

 “Moby Dick?” asked a confused voice. “No. What happened to The Scarlet Letter?”

 “Right. Moby Dick,” Harris continued. “Great book. None of you have read it. None of you are going to read it. Nobody ever does. What you need to understand is that as far as I’m concerned—and I’m the fucking professor—Moby Dick is the same story as The Great Gatsby, which some of you may read. I call it, ‘the half-assed struggle of the individual to put their world to rights in the face of a failure that threatens to define their life.’ I think that’s from my thesis. Though maybe it’s not pretentious enough.”

Harris laughed. “Hey! How about this? Great Gatsby/Moby Dick: same story, different era, right? So, if someone someday tries to write that story for this generation, they should call it The Great Dick. That’d be perfect, wouldn’t it? The Great Dick. Alright, that’s got to be almost fifty minutes. See you next . . . whenever. Wow.”

 

 

SUNDAY, MARCH 21, 1982
Two Women and One Corpse

“Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to lie well.”
                                                                                        —Samuel Johnson

 

CHAPTER 1

  

            Okay, let me start out by admitting that I was an asshole. I know that. The ludicrous amount of fame and acclaim and money I’ve had dumped on me since that time only makes it more glaring. The fact that we lived in a different world back in 1982 is no excuse. It was the same world. It just wasn’t the world we thought it was.

            I remember it was a Sunday night. Sundays always feel different. Looking back now and Googling a 1982 calendar, I’d guess it was Sunday, March 21^st. I remember waking up and within minutes making the decision to leave. Quickly, before I could change my mind, I eased myself out of the rickety hide‑a‑bed.

            Immediately, Maria rolled over into the spot I’d just vacated, breathing loudly through her nose and mouth, not quite snoring. I hate to say it, but she looked every minute of her thirty years. Her thick dark hair clung damply to her face; her heavy arms stretched outward. The cast on her left wrist looked like a giant manacle.

The grandfather clock beside the cigar store Indian read 1:37, though a few minutes before, it had chimed four times. That made as much sense as anything else in my life. I was thirty-five years old, a Harvard grad who’d spent the previous two years faking his way through a $13,500 a year job as an territory rep for the Richmond Tobacco company. That $13,500 was the most money I’d ever made. You’re probably thinking that when you adjust for inflation and translate that $13,500 into today’s dollars, it’s a lot more impressive.

No, it’s not.

I slipped on my jersey and my jeans and gathered the rest of my things in my old gym bag. Fortunately, enough moonlight crept in around the edges of the tattered drapes to give the room a dim glow. I wondered if it would be safe to hitchhike out of there, or if Indiana had already notified the California Highway Patrol that I was wanted.

My situation was bad. But not bad enough to, say, crawl into a grave with a rotting corpse.

That would come later.