II’m giving readers an inside look at how one
of my next series is being written, and why it’s being written that way. This
will be a five volume series titled “There Are No Beta Males, Only Losers.”
Overall then length should be only a little longer than the first “When We Were
Married,” volume. So I’m assuming that each volume will be 40-50,000 words
This is, to put it mildly a multi-theme work.
It’s partly about the way that Alpha Males and Beta Males exist and work
together. It’s also in the first volume a pure out adventure story about how
two very different men survive on a plane bombed out of the air over the
Atlantlc that is being swarmed by hungry sharks
As the series goes forward, the central
characters will learn that living through a nightmare doesn’t mean leaving it
behind and that for at least one of them, there are worse things than being
eaten alive by sharks.
At least that way the pain stops; If you lose
your heart, the pain is with you forever and you can’t escape it.
The story is written so the first volume
introduces most of the five main characters. There are Bobby Blue and Bobby
Black, childhood friends, Susan Sheridan who is the love interest of the
series, although. She takes a long time
to decide how she feels about Bobby Blue, and the Alpha superhero, Callan
McNeil.
It will be obvious that Blue will be the focus
of the series, but it carries over five
volumes and Blue won’t make it out of the first book unless Callan does
something heroic to keep him alive. Now if you read closely it’s obvious that
although Blue and Callan share a good relationship, they are not close friends
and Callan will be called upon to do something that makes no sense from a
friendship/employee perspective.
Which is why I added the following 3000 word
section before Callan appears to lose his mind, to explain why he does what he
does for Blue. His actions will set the relationship between the two men. For
the rest of the series.
Blue burst into another fit of shivering. He
seemed to be closing his eyes as tightly as he could. McNeil felt his forehead,
He was still burning up. Fluids would help, but what he needed were some strong
antibiotics. And in the short term:. A clotting powder that could be sprinkled
on the worst bleeding sites and a wrap that contained an even stronger
concentration of similar medicine Together they might slow blood loss enough to
give him chance at survival.
The ONLY Problem was that all the medicines
were near the pilots on the main level
below his feet – under three to four or more feet of sloshing salt water,
guarded by God knew how many hungry sharks.
He could re-load the Desert Eagle, And climb
down to the flooded main level. but with
only one good arm and crappy vision, he probably wouldn’t ever make it back up,
or down.
******* ******* ************* ******************
Callan
squatted on thighs heavily laced with muscles he’d worked on for decades,
accenting an already thick midsection. He was a very big man, but it was the
core, the abs, the thighs, that had made him harder to put down in fights than
his opponents expected. And it was those
muscles that allowed him to balance
swooning females who screamed out orgasms balanced on his cock in mid-air, or
to pound them into incoherence under him.
Even in
this position he was able to maintain his balance as the floor shifted and
rolled underneath him. He couldn’t afford to fall against his left shoulder or
arm. As it was, it throbbed inside his
chest so fiercely he was afraid at any second that his heart might burst out of
his chest, And each throb resonated in his head like a second echoing gong.
The pain made it hard to think, but it wasn’t
hard to know what he should do.
“It isn’t
hard knowing what to do .It’s hard doing it.”
The old black man who’d told him that – he
was old to Callan at the time but was
probably only in his 40s – had died fighting a fire on a rig in the Gulf of
Mexico on one of Callan’s first jobs. He’d raced without seeming to think about
the options as the fire erupted. Callan had been a little behind him so the
fireball that had engulfed the old man only blew Callan across the floor of the
rig and into the ocean.
The men
who’d plucked him out of the ocean had called him “Scrap Iron” after that, believing
he was as tough as his nickname implied.
But the
nickname had only been a nickname. He’d
been 14 when he’d learned what he wanted to be for the rest of his life and it
had changed him forever.
He’d run
away from his home and his crazy father and his crazier mother and found a
crazy and cheap old man who was paving parking lots in small Texas towns
cheaper than any of the other, bigger paving companies could afford to. He’d
done it the old fashioned way: load a
dump truck up with a few tons of hot tar steaming at 350 to 400 degrees, get a
couple/three desperate or ignorant men,
give them shovels and tell them to shovel the hot tar out and get a grader in
to smooth it out when they were done.
Callan had
walked into his future ignorantly. He walked into the yard that housed two dump
trucks, one empty and the other steaming with black tar and approached an old
man with white hair longer than a woman.
The white haired old man was built like a football linebacker and was
putting the boots to a slender white man who lay on the ground curled up into a
defensive position.
“You
miserable son of a bitch, you goddamned,backstabbing bastard. You cocksucker,
you think you can come in my yard and blackmail me for more money than I’ve
ever paid for a paving job and I’m just going to sit here and take it. You
expect to walk out of here alive?”
The man on
the ground spit out blood and a tooth and lisped, “Look around, Honey. No
one’s here, no one’s gonna work for you.
You down to one truck and no help. You screw this job up and you’re done. Don’t matter the sheriff’s your cousin. No
one will hire you.”
The old man stopped kicking and
spit on the man on the ground.
“You think you're the only
pissant that I can hire. There’s plenty other idiots with strong backs who
wwould work for me.”
The old man noticed Catlin standing behind
him.
" What you want
boy?"
“a Job if you got one.”
the old man
stepped closer to Catlin and looked him up and down. He had to look up a ways. At 14 Callan stood 6 foot 2 and weighed a good
200 pounds.
”how old are you boy?"
“17 … going to be 18 in under a month".
After looking at him for a moment: “you ever
shoveled any tar, boy?"
“Worked with my cousin near Austin last summer. We
worked a couple months out of trucks pretty much like that."
“Think you could handle a little country convenience
store parking lot? Without needing five guys to hold your hand while you do it.
I need this done today and most of my help is showing their asses. Think you
can do it by yourself. I can't get anybody else to help
“ Yes or
I can do it. If you got help I can work
with them or if you don’t I can do it
myself."
"do you have a drivers
license?"\
“yes or."
He pulled the wallet out of his pocket,
handed the wallet with fake ID he’d only gotten a week before. He could
probably pass as legal.
The old man looked it over and threw it
back to him.
“good enough,” he said as he handed Callan a slip of paper with an address and a
receipt and order form.
“Show this to the owner or the clerk and
get to work,” he said, “I need this done, finished by 5 PM . I’ll come
by about three to check on you. Got
that?`
‘You have my word on it Mr. honey I'll get
it done and on time. You got somebody else to send out , send them. Otherwise I'll do it myself.”
“Big talk,
but you're a big fella. I hope
you can do i. If you can, I’ll put you to work more later. Now take the keys,
get out here and get started.”
It took 15 minutes to get to the store. He
drove carefully within in the speed limit without running red lights. First
thing he had to do was get there without cops stopping him for a ticket. He
needed to get this job. He needed to make some money and he needed more than
anything else never ever to go back to the small house where his crazy mother
and crazy father and three helpless siblings lived.
“When he got there he pulled into the parking
lot which already had barricades up. He
showed the job order and the address and
the Old Man Honey truck to the clerk a, tall,
raw- boned man.
“Keep the barricades up andmake sure no one comes in, the clerk
told him. II'll be inside with the front
door locked from the inside doing some inventory work. You need to drink,
bring me a dollar and I’ll get
you a drink. Okay, that sound good to
you."
Callan just nodded and went to move the
truck into position, where he could maneuver it round and hit most of the lot.
Since the tar was kept boiling, there would be time for a professional grader
to get there and put the finishing touches to it. He kept his shirt on for an
hour or so, but finally had to get rid of it.
As
he worked, he trie to keep his
mind off his feet. He wore only tennis shoes and the old man had made no move
to provide him with boots. At first they burned, then they hurt, then he saw
the smoke rising. It finally got to where he cou ld look down and see that the
soles had been burned clear away. When it got too bad, he ripped his shjrt
apart and stuffed the fabric inside his shoes although it hurt like hell to
place them against the flesh of the soles of his feet.
When it got to the point that he couldn’t
stand it any longer, he stepped across the hot tar and jumped trom the front of
the truck to the pavement he hadn’t reached yet. He hobbled to the front of the
convenience store and knocked on the door.
The clerk opened the door and said. “U got
a dollar for a drink?”
“Not really. But I have five if you can
sell me anything that rubber or plastic
or thick cloth. Like insulation? You sell anything like that?”
“Some old insulation we threw away
yesterday and a coat I was getting ready to give to Goodwill. But I can’t give
you all that for $5. Come up with $15 and we can talk?”
“I only got $5.”
“Sorry, maybe some of the throw-away
insulation?”
“Please, mister I gotta finish this job
before old man Honey gets here. Can I do something to get the stuff for $5?”
The clerk thought about it, then pushed
the door open and told him, “Follow me.”
Even walking on the floor hurt but he
hobbled behind him to the back freezer.
Inside was a long, three foot high portable freezer.
“I need to
move that to the other side to clear the area behind it;. It hasn’t been
cleaned in10 years, But the bastard must weigh a thousand pounds. I can’t
handle it myself. Think you can shove it over there?”
Caallan just nodded and got to one side,
bent his knees and straightening, half
shoved and half lifted. For a long few
second he thought it wasn;t going to move, but inch by agonizing inches he shoved
and it moved. Apparently it had been there so long it had almost rusted into
position. But it moved.
The clerk stared at the freezer and
whistled.
“By god, kid you got some arms there.”
When the clerk said it had gotten where he wanted it, he motioned for callan to
follow him and led him to the back of the store where the insulation and old jacket was kept.
Callan started ripping up the material. He had to hold onto the wall as he felt
himself grow dizzy. He’d already given the clerk his $5, but he asked the man
if he could havea bottled soda anyway.
“Sorry kid “ the clerk said. “The $5 went
for the insulation and the coat. There’s a hose out back. You can drink as much as you like.”
Callan spent thirty minutes ripping up
the insulation and fabric and stuffing it into the bottoms of what was left of his
shoes. Then he hobbled over to the water hose and turned it on. The water that
came out warmed by the Texas sun burned his mouth so badly that he couldn’t
breath for a ,moment. He let it run
until it reached the temperature of hot coffee and he gulped until his stomach
couldn’t; hold any more.
But, this had wasted time so he hobbled at
the best speed he could make until he got to the front of the store and the
dump truck. He checked his wrist watch
he’d found in a dumpster near his school
and saw that it was noon. He only had three hours to finish the job. He got
back into the rear and started shoveling again. For a minute he didn’t know it
he could. It felt like he’d sprained something – a rib or maybe pulled a
muscle. But he couldn’t stop.
And so he kept shoveling and maneuvering
the truck round and kept shoving while the fabric and insulation burned and
then the cloth began to smoke and eventually he had to stop long enough to
clean the cloth out of his poor pitiful remnants of shoes.
And the lot was covered and the grader was
pulling up..
His head was spinning and he had to keep
taking breaks that he thought were only
30 seconds but turned out to be five minutes. But finally, he finished. The
truck was empty, And the grader was pulling up.
He knew Honey would be along, so he
grabbed the front of the cab to swing himself over and not fall onto the hot
tar. HJe missed the step up and fell like a rock onto the concrete entrance to
the store. He didn’t burn in the asphalt, but it seemed like the inside of his
head rang with the impact. He tried to hold on to consciousness, but the
darkness swept over him.
Someone was kicking him. They worked on
his ribs but it was the kick to the bottom of his feet that brought him out
screaming.
“Stupid son of a bitch.“ was th first thing he heard and he
knew it was Honey. He opened his eyes and saw Honey glaring down on him.
“You stupid son of a bitch. I hire you to
do a simple job and you screw it up royally.
I’ll probably have to redo the lot and you’re probably going to expect
me to pay you and pay your hospital bills. LIKE HELL!”
“Mr. Honey, don’t you think we ought to
call rescue?” the clark said. “He looks in pretty bad shape.”
“To hell with him. I didn’t hire him. No
matter what he told you. I told him to come out and shovel for awhile and
I’d see if I wanted to hire him. He’s
got no contract, no papers. I don’t owe him anything. No worker’s comp. No nothing. Let him walk to the
hospital.”
When Honey had walked round the edge of
the lot to talk to the grade operator, the clerk leaned down and whispered,
“He’s one prime son of a bitch. But I called rescue. They’ll be here in a
couple of minutes.”
As he lay on the concrete listening the
booming of his heart, he thought this just be what it felt like to die. He was going to the hospital which meant his
crazy parents would be notified. God
knows how bad the damage to his feet was or if he would walk again, or if he
would survive his parents’ rage this time.
Sometime later an ambulance pulled up and
two EMTs approached him.
“What the hell did you do, boy? Smells
like cooked pork.”
It took too much time and energy to answer
him so he just lay his head back on the concrete and concentrated on breathing
between pulses of pain that ran from his feet to his brain and back, like
spears being thrust into his feet and all the way up his body.
Sometime later he was on a gurney in a
crowded emergency room. As he glanced around he wondered what the hell could be
so much more urgent than a kid who’d burned his feet off, He got his answer: a
woman whose child had a metal spike rising from his abdomen, a man holding a
bundle of what looked like his fingers on the other hand, a man whose every
breath sent blood gushing from his ,mouth.
Finally he was back in an examining room
where a young bald doctor examined his body and then focused on his feet. He
didn’t asked any stupid questions.
“You’ve got some bad burns down there. How
in the world did you do that?”
Fortunately, the doctor took pity on him
and gave him a couple of shots that reduced the pain from a burning inferno to
merely, intolerable. He could think and speak.
“I was shoveling hot tar for old man Honey
at a parking lot job.”
He stopped to catch his breath.
“I only brought tennis shoes. Only other
time I did It I had boots and there were three other guys helping.”
“When It got bad, why didn’t you quit or
wait for help. I’ve heard about Honey. I’m surprised he could find anyone –
foolish – enough to work for him. Why did you keep working?”
“I gave him my word. I promised I’d get the
job done.”
The bald doctor told two nurses to get
Callan’s his jeans off, put some salve on the burns and check his vitals to make sure he didn’t go into shock.
Then he walked out. Callan never saw him again.
Forty minutes later another EMT crew
showed up. Talked to a few med types, and rolled him out on a gurney to a newer ambulance
that looked and smelled better. The next hospital had a waiting room not nearly
half as full and he didn’t spend more than a few minutes before he was taken up
to a private room.
Doctors appeared almost instantly, took
his vitals, did some things to his feet that had him screaming in agony while
they told him they couldn’t give him
anything for pain to assess the extent of the damage from burns.. It seemed to
last forever, and then it got worse. They only told him they had to do things
to the burned skin to help in the eventual healing.
Finally that night, he lay in a clean,
soft hospital bed. It still hurt. But it
wasn’t in the same hemisphere as the previous agony. This he could stand.
He noticed a man sitting by the bed. He
didn;t look like a cop, or anybody he’d ever seen before. Tall, in his 50s or
60s – it seemed old to him – he wore a dress shirt but blue jeans and he was
studying Callan.
“Please, please don’t call my parents.
Whatever the bill for my treatment is, I’ll pay it off. But don’t call them.’
Then: “Callan, Tell me what happened.”
His name
hadn’t been on the fake driver’s license.
“You’re not in trouble and your parents
haven’t been notified. You’re okay. Tell
me what happened out there and how you got injured.”
Figuring there was no point in lying if
the man knew who he really was, he told him. The whole story. The man listened
without speaking, rubbing his chin from time to time. After while he took a
cigar out and lit it, despite the hospital signs saying smoking was a non-no.
A nurse came by and stared at him but he
just shook his head and she kept walking.
The tall man rubbed his lower lip and
then said, “I’ll ask you what the doctor at the previous hospital wanted to
know. Why did you do this? Why not just quit. Walk away. You had to know you
were injuring yourself, maybe permanently… for a one-day job.”
Callan was getting sleepy again but he
felt like the question was important.
“Because I promised Mr. Honey I would do
the job. I gave him my word. And that is important. I can never count on
anything my mother and father tell me, or promise me. They lie. I don’t want to
be like them.”
The man reached out to touch Callan on the
shoulder.
“Okay. That fits the facts. Don’t worry
about the hospital bill. It’s being taken care of. You’re going to need treatment and rehab, but
that will be taken care of too. The doctors say it may take a couple months to
completely recuperate, but you will walk again.”
He looked into Callan’s eyes and said, “It
will take a few years before you turn 18 and get out of their grasp but they
won’t be bothering you. There is enough dirt on them they’re going to walk away
. You will be going into a group home where there won’[t be anybody abusing
you. I expect you to graduate from high school with honors and then go on to
college. I’ll cover your expense and college tuition and I’ll expect you to
work for me for five years after you graduate.
“You understand what I’ve told you?”
Callan could only stare as if he’d
forgotten how to speak.
Finally, “Why? I don’t know you. I’’m
nobody and you’re obviously somebody. Why would you do this for me.?”
The tall man stood up and he seemed bigger
than he looked sitting down.
“My name is CK Westland and. I run one of the biggest oil companies
in Texas.. I’m not doing any of this because I feel sorry for you or I’m feeling charitable. What you did today was
one of the most stupid things I’ve ever heard of. But…you’re young and you gave
your word and you weren’t willing to break it, even to a piece of Texas trash
like Honey.”
Westland walked to the front of the bed
and stared down at Callan with,an expression Callan didn’t understand and
wouldn’t for many years. Later he realized it was a look of respect. And he
would never forget it.
“What you did was stupid. And it nearly
got you permanently messed up. But there
are a lot of smart guys out there,
clever men. A lot of them work for me. There aren’t many men who would have
done what you did to honor a promise. You’re the kind of man who if he gives
his word, would die rather than go back on it. You’re the kind of man I want
working for me, if only for a while. Youre going to go places and you’re not
going to be willing to keep working for me. But if I can have you for a few
years, that will be enough.”
He stood for a moment as if deciding
whether to stay or go.
Finally, he said, “you - Callan McNeill -
are a man of honor, and there are not enough guys like you around. For now, get
some sleep and get better.”
*****************************
CK
Westland walked out of the room and
everything he had said came true. There were no false promises and he never saw
his parents again. Callan would never forgive himself for abandoning his
rothers. Ck had used his influence to
try to get them removed from his home, but his crazy mother and father had
fought like hungry wolves to keep their family together.
Until two years later his crazy mother
stabbed their father to death in his sleep, then stabbed all three little boys
and set the house on fire; not to hide what she had done which she told cops had been to remove the
demon seed ‘things’ from this earth, but to make sure they were really dead.
Callan had never seen her again. Nor
wanted to. She still lived in a hospital for the criminally insane and Callan
had never stopped spending whatever was necessary to see that she never
breathed free air again. When he had made his first million he’d gone back to
the little Texas town where his brothers
were buried in graves provided by a local church and had their poor
scorched little bodies removed into graves with beautiful headstones giving their names and ages at the
time of their deaths. And he paid to make sure no weeds ever grew anywhere
their graves, only beautiful flowers that changed with the season.
It wasn’t enough. it never would be. He
would never forgive himself for what he hadn’t done. So he went on with, his
life.
As a man of honor. He had been a hard
businessman and he had ruined rivals, bankrupted those who made themselves his
enemies and for those who used violence
because they thought he was just another soft businessman, he made sure they
died hard. He had never extended compassion to those who lacked it for him or
others.
It all went through his mind as he
stood looking over the shivering form of
Bobby Blue. Blue had risked his
life to save him twice. And you couldn’t pay a man enough to do that. Now Bobby
was dying and he would die unless Callan risked HIS life.
Looking down at the opening that led to
the top level of the craft where the pilots had flown and a lot of the medical supplies were kept, he
saw the sloshing ocean waves. The plane wasn’t submerged. But It looked to be
about four or five feet deep.
But he saw movement in the water. Damn his
eyes. He had no idea what damage had been done. He couldn’t be sure what he was
seeing. Still, he was pretty sure it was sharks.
*******************
He probably had a way of dealing with the sharks – for a
short time. Even with a technological trick up
his sleeves it would be a BIG gamble to go down into the sloshing
waters, even if he could handle the sharks, and reach the medical supplies.
That was only half of the problem.
Before the plane had flipped, stairs below led up to the top level and down to
the passenger section,
Flipped upside down, it meant he had to
pull himself up and into the passenger compartment. The real problem was that he was right
handed, but the damage to his left shoulder was so bad that putting nressure on
the right caused screaming, intolerable
pain to his left. He wasn’t at all sure he’d be able to get back to Blue.
But what choice did he have? He could sit
here and watch Blue die slowly. Or he could take a suicidal risk and if he did
meet CK Westland in the afterlife, if there was an afterlife, he could face the
man who’d been more of a father to him than anyone else. He could meet Westland’s
gaze and know he had done the honorable
thing, that he’d died a man of honor.
