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  Copyright © 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, uploaded or distributed in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotation embodied in reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  The publisher and author acknowledges the trademark status and trademark ownership of all trademarks, service marks, and word marks mentioned in this book.

  First edition: 2019

  Published in print and electronic formats.

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  Others Books By the Author

  Infinite Limit

  The Three Brother

  Eightteen Hours

  Pillow Scars

  Wild And Dark

  The Day Off

  The Muse

  Delayed Gratification

  The Honeymoon

  Camp In Shadow

  Replay Message

  Her Best Moment

  Friend And Sister

  The Sex Therapist

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I need to thank my wife, Angie, for letting me spend so much time alone with my characters. It would be easy to get jealous, but you’re legitimately great when it comes to sharing me with horny, make-believe ladies. Yet one more reason we’re so well matched.

  I’m also grateful as ever to Shelley Thrasher, who never fails to make the editing process a true joy. If only I could stop overusing clichés and finally conquer the difference between lie vs. lay, maybe you’d feel like you were finally getting somewhere with me. For everyone else at Bold Strokes Books: thank you for the support and the community. It feels good to be part of this team.

  And now the obligatory note to my beloved family: Kathleen, the cover may have already tipped you off, but you’ll need to keep your students the hell away from this one, too. Sorry. Maybe next time? Mom and Dad, this applies to you as well.

  If ever you can’t help yourselves and choose to read one of my books despite my dire warnings not to, for the love of God, please…don’t make it this one.

  About The Author

  Author is a USA Today bestselling author. He’s the husband of a rock star, and the father of two young adults, but he’s also been a ballerina, a typographer, a film composer, a piano player, a singer in an all-man rock band, and a voice in those violent video games you won’t let your kids play.

  He does his best writing on cruise ships, on his husband’s tour bus, and at home in his sunny garden. Author loves to play medieval matchmaker, transporting readers to a place where the bold heroes have endearing flaws, the man are stronger than they look, the land is lush and untamed, and chivalry is alive and well!

  Contents

  Copyright

  Others Books by Author

  Acknowledgement

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Appendix

  Back Cover

  Thanks You For Reading

  Before You Start

  Again

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  Please check out blue hyperlink throughout this book to receive:

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  BONUS

  (You might skip this story as it do not relate to author’s story)

  1000 Words Short Story Submitted By Our Reader

  A small boy is playing down by the creek that runs thru Marysville. I can see his frame a number of the trees and trees in intermittent flashes whenever he rises like a touch pop-up toy and movements farther down the flow. Something within the water has grabbed his hobby, due to the reality he stays rooted to the direction along the speeding water for most effective a 2nd or , and then he’s off again. His hair is red, and with each movement wildish strands grow to be silver-gold in the morning daylight dancing off it. He’s wearing a stick in his proper hand, and he jabs it into the water on every occasion he stops.

  I don’t know him, even though I need to. I’ve met each dwelling soul in Marysville. Many of the lifeless, too, earlier than we buried them. Those we knew in element—our fathers and mothers and friends, lengthy inside the beyond given back to the rich, black consolation of the earth. Those we didn’t recognize who lay for months and months rotting because there have been so many that we in the end gave up trying…

  I am now not saddened through the use of those hundreds of different souls I by no means had the possibility to meet. They’re just long long past.

  The boy stops yet again and jabs the stick out as a long way as he can stretch. He pulls it lower back in a whisking motion, and then reaches out another time. Whatever it's far that pursuits him a lot ought to be surely beyond his attain. But, he’s persistent, as youngsters may be.

  I’m concerned that he’ll fall into the water, jogging excessive in this month of April, fed by means of manner of tiny streams a ways away within the Santa Ana Mountains to the east. It end up a moist iciness. On the nice peaks there are pockets of snow despite the fact that seen. I decrease the basket I convey onto the course and start to move quietly in his direction. I don’t want to startle him.

  If fine I have been certainly one of them…if I have been, I’d clearly whoosh as silently as the wind to his facet, and there I’d protect him with my palms of smoky substance. Perhaps I’d ease the item of his hobby in the direction of the financial institution.

  Perhaps I’d sincerely allow him fall and be taken away within the rush of water.

  Even despite everything the ones years we although don’t realise precisely who they're, or why they got here and did what they did. Only that many nevertheless remain. They watch. That is all we comprehend for sure.

  I’ve not noted the little red-haired boy, however I listen the splash. Now I am strolling as rapid as I can. He come to be born best days in advance than the calamity struck, I'm satisfactory, judging from his period, and if they acquired’t assist him, I must. He is innocent ultimately. Surely they need to recognize this, but this morning they may be nowhere to be seen.

  Maybe they don’t care. Maybe they in no way did. They simply desired us long past, however we refused to depart.

  Jason had just left that afternoon. We’d been watching TV collectively in my bed room. Looking returned, I discover it so ironic. Aftermath, a sequence about a group of teen children who through hook or through criminal live on a global disaster. It was sort of lame, however I liked the lead man or woman—a woman approximately my age. Mom have become within the kitchen. She didn’t care, or at least she in no way involved about Jason being in the bed room by myself with me. He became brazenly gay, you notice, and add to that the reality that he attended church together together with his mothers and fathers and little sister each Sunday
…nicely, she trusted him. Daddy become a hint extra suspicious. I bear in mind a 12 months in advance even as Jason first started out out coming over. Daddy showed him his gun series, of all things. Jas and I laughed about it later.

  It turned into raining. Jason were sitting at the floor at the quit of my bed, right under the TV on my wardrobe. He were given bored searching Phoebe combat off a p.C. Of zombies, I guess, and so he finally stood up and left. I’d been texting to and fro with Anna Merovich, my extraordinary buddy at Marysville High, mendacity on my belly at the bed, just over Jason’s head all the at the same time as. I set Anna apart on the duvet, and determined him out of the room.

  “Later dude,” Jason said as he pulled the the front door inward. He started out cussing proper away. He hadn’t thought about bringing an umbrella, even a jacket. I watched him jump off the porch into the rain, and through the downpour till I lost sight of him three doors up the street. Mom walked out of the kitchen maintaining a spatula in her right hand right then. I wager she’d heard him cuss.

  “He’ll be soaked loopy by the point he receives home. And 1/2-frozen,” she said type of indifferently. Well, yeah. It’s December, Mom.

  “Does his mother cook dinner?” she requested. But before I even processed the dumb question, she’d have become and long gone again into the kitchen.

  How ought to I understand?

  My mother became a cooking freak. I have to fragrance a few bizarre new cookie concoction she’d been busy with all afternoon. Two days in advance than Christmas. There need to had been a hundred plastic containers and homosexual-searching tins piled up anywhere within the region. Platters of them sitting everywhere. Gifts for all of the pals. Gifts for own family and teachers and the mailman. Christmas crap to make me advantage weight, however I wasn’t going to fall for that. Not me.

  She grew to come to be and went again to her industrial business enterprise after I laughed and shook my head.

  “He’ll live to tell the story,” I shouted after her.

  But he wouldn’t for extremely tons longer. Nor should she.

  I walked decrease lower back into my bedroom and grabbed my phone, and then wandered back out to the residing room, debating which to expose on first; the Christmas lights, or the huge flat display Daddy had bought remaining month. The TV turn out to be simpler. I clicked the far flung, and then plopped onto the sofa and resumed texting Anna.

  Hiya what’s up? Sorry jason was proper here.

  I waited for her to textual content me once more, curled my legs up on the sofa. Grabbed the far off once more and modified the channel to find some thing other than information. Out inside the kitchen, Mom became humming a Christmas tune. I checked to see if Anna had spoke back. It changed into 4:39, and Daddy ought to come rolling into the storage by using the use of 5:00. Like punctually at five:00. He changed into an accountant, and lived the non secular existence of “the whole lot in proper order.” Every “i” dotted, every 2nd accounted for. The remaining sincerely clear component I bear in mind wondering changed into that Mom had better be cooking dinner instead of cookies, and it had better be at the table by way of manner of precisely five:15. If it wasn’t…

  The extreme burst of mild greatly surprised me. I imply in fact extreme, like a million flashbulbs had popped all on the same time, right outdoor the window across the room. But there wasn’t an explosion, even a valid, except for the spatula Mom had had in her hand hitting the floor, after which a clump whilst her frame observed.

  The TV went black. The lighting inside the room didn’t even crackle, they simply poofed off. I sat there blinking for a 2nd or .

  Mom?

  I had been given up, threw the telephone apart, and raced into the kitchen. I freaked! She lay on her again with one leg bent awkwardly sideways, and her fingers unfold out as even though she’d attempted to interrupt her fall. The spatula have become a few inches away from her proper hand, and the oven door changed into open.

  “Mom!”

  She didn’t flow into. I ran at some point of to her and hit my knees.

  "Mom?” I shook her, however there has been no response. I placed an ear to her chest, and then my hand. Nothing. Nothing.

  “Oh God, permit her be alive. Let her just be in a coma or...” But humans in comas breathe a hint, don’t they? Their hearts nonetheless beat? I shook her some more, after which kissed her over and over, begging her to evoke. She didn’t. I stayed there beside her for severa agonizing mins, crying, dropping it an increasing number of with each 2nd that ticked with the useful resource of.

  It have become already darkish as a tomb out of doors. The rain stored banging at the roof, however my coronary heart had stopped pounding so fiercely through then. I left her there and ran once more into the dwelling room. Daddy might be home soon. What time have become it? I picked the telephone up off the floor and checked out the show display screen. Black. I shook it stupidly, like that could wake it up, after which tried to reboot it. That didn’t paintings, and so I threw it apart yet again. The Christmas lights. I crawled within the lower back of the tree and jiggled the plug, pushed the button at the electricity strip time and again, and subsequently gave up.

  I began to go back to the kitchen, but my mind emerge as throwing commands at me that had been contradictory; worse than jangled. I attempted the wall switches rather. Click, click on, click on. Useless.

  I cursed, stumbling for the duration of the room to the mantle, determined the candle lighter there and clicked it. The clock setting above the polished ground stated 4:39, the very same minute that the cellphone had stated once I first threw it down. But I knew at least 5 mins had passed.

  Daddy, get domestic. Help me!

  Whatever that mild grow to be, it needed to had been the cause. I rushed to the the front door and yanked it open. I didn’t apprehend what to anticipate when I landed out on the porch. Would all of the houses up and down the street be incinerated? All the bushes grew to end up to blackened ghosts? But the whole lot appeared so normal as I stood there looking proper and left and up at the indignant black-grey sky. One factor stuck my eye, even though. Not normal. At the surrender of the block, three homes down, an SUV sat all cock-eyed with the engine idling, its right front fender smashed into the Rainey’s Mazda at the scale back. Why hadn’t I heard the collision?

  I glanced decrease again into our house, after which became and leapt down the stairs and headed thru the rain to the SUV. I anticipated…what did I assume? To see a few man or woman inner, shaking his head? Like, What happened? He wasn’t moving. Whoever he changed into, he became leaning in opposition to the door, slumped ahead towards the guidance wheel. I pulled the door open. He tilted slowly, after which fell out onto the road. I screamed and jumped up and down in horror whilst he hit. I left him there. Across the hood I need to see the Rainey’s residence. The home home windows were all black. The identical on the Joslin’s next door. The Jackson’s. Our residence. Every house on every facets of the street. Panic set in, because if they had been all useless; if this man lying on the street, and who’d been the use of peacefully along, turned into useless, what might have befell to Daddy?

  No, no, no. Whatever took place, it happened great on our block, or on the very worst, in our neighborhood.

  Daddy in no way came home that night.

  I Meet Crazy

  It changed into the longest night time of my lifestyles. I knocked on each door, banged on each window, screamed for someone to awaken and tell me what had passed off. I become soaked, too, on the give up of it some hours later after I subsequently gave up and returned to our—my—residence.

  Mom became nonetheless inside the kitchen, mendacity there together along with her fingers unfold out as even though searching forward to the pass to be dragged in. I cried some more, after which walked away.

  I hated the darkish, certainly the quiet, and so I found every candle I should, unfold them out within the dwelling room on the tables, and lit them one by one. Have you ever sat in a
room illuminated excellent with the resource of candles? The flickering made it look like ghosts were whisking via the flames. I should see their dim shadows dancing at the ceiling and partitions. I could listen them whispering unsightly feedback.

  You’re all by myself, now, besides for US!

  Stand up! Come right here!

  We omitted you, however now we’ve determined you!

  Want to look your dad and mom once more?

  Laughter.

  I screamed to make the voices forestall, but I knew there virtually weren’t voices anywhere except in my head. I screamed extra besides, possibly really to make the silence live away. And as soon as I have to scream no more, I cried again till I fell asleep in exhaustion and depression.