At Speculative Chic, we feature a lot of authors who share everything from their favorite things to the inspiration for their work. But why not also share their fiction? Welcome to Fiction Friday, where you’ll be able to sample the fiction of a variety of authors, including those who write at Speculative Chic! Today, we’re featuring Errick Nunnally, whose name you may recognize his name from a few posts last fall. His latest, All the Dead Men, is the long-awaited sequel to Blood for the Sun and comes out Monday, July 20th from Twisted Publishing!
About the Book
All the Dead Men (2020)
Written by: Errick Nunnally
Genre: Dark Urban Fantasy/Mystery
Pages: 252
Series: Alexander Smith, Book #2
Publisher: Twisted Publishing
The plot was broken, but something more sinister has taken its place: a vampire church built around the image of a woman who seems strangely familiar to Alexander. These zealots are hellbent on restoring what they believe the status quo to be, one of vampire over human, and Alexander wants nothing to do with it. Until a child—one he’d rescued decades ago, now an adult—turns up in a pornographic video made by a film crew that has been slaughtered. His adopted daughter, the vampire Ana, seems to be missing. At wit’s end, Alexander has few allies. With Majispin in hiding, the pack decimated, and only a few willing to both hate and help him, Alexander must confront The Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Death and deal with the unexpected threat of Ana’s grandsire, an old and powerful vampire who has consumed his own soul. The monster wants nothing more than to possess the only love Alexander has left in the world.
Currently Available from: Amazon || Barnes & Noble || IndieBound
Catch Up on the Series
All the Dead Men Excerpt
I pulled the car off the road into a secluded area about a half a mile from the Thomas home. When I’d driven by it, the place was dark and the neighborhood quiet. The area remained still and I didn’t want to alarm any of the neighbors by letting them see a strange car nearby. No need to draw that kind of attention. The entire neighborhood was carved into the woods, a beautiful development with plenty of space and trees between lots. Private, plenty of places to hide.
Where the road curved and the wooded area thickened, I was able to hide the Impala from anyone not looking and slip into the woods straightaway. Without incident, I passed through several backyards, giving wide berth to those with dogs, until I came to the home in question.
It shared the same outward characteristics as all the others in the area. A ranch-style home, sloping roofline, with sliding doors set above a small concrete slab on what should have been a manicured lawn. The Thomas yard was going to pot fast. In this lush environment, the grass was more than twice as long as the neighbors’ and the bordering green encroached, leaving a blurry line between where the trees ended and Man’s dominion began.
There were no outdoor lights on, and after observing the dark home for a few minutes, I slipped across the lawn and took a close look at the sliding door. According to my nose and the appearance of the slab, there’d been plenty of foot traffic in and out. The investigators. How careful had they been when finishing up? I couldn’t see any kind of alarm system or bracing bar inside. I tried the door and it slid open easily. People in these areas rarely developed the habits of inner-city residents who locked every door behind them.
Inside the home, I was just off the black-and-white-tiled kitchen. At the corner of the kitchen, a well-used pea-green electric stove was cornered against a yellow-speckled Formica countertop leading to a bulbous refrigerator the color of squash. I still couldn’t get used to the unnatural color schemes introduced after the Second World War. Progress, indeed.
The air was stale and I confirmed Rooster’s assessment of the décor. It seemed less a home and more a place where people stayed. I didn’t bother with the lights; I could see well enough and, more importantly, I could smell even better. The mother had been murdered here in the kitchen. There weren’t any bloody smudges, but they’d clearly done a poor job cleaning up. More scents lingered here than anywhere else, trapped in the house with the dead air. I could smell the old death and dozens of male scents. Guns, boot polish, tobacco and coffee. It was an olfactory blueprint for law enforcement around the world.
According to Rooster, Mr. Thomas had killed his wife with a butcher knife. Classic. A glance confirmed one missing from the knife block. The largest. They must’ve argued in the kitchen — or he caught up with her there — and he decided a course correction was in order. I decided it must’ve been an argument. The mother couldn’t bear it and confronted him as far from the bedrooms upstairs as she could. Far too many men of David Thomas’s ilk operated for years right under the noses of friends and family. Sometimes with tacit approval or an iron fist.
It looked like David had been sucking the life out of this home for years. Iron fist, then. Years of hidden atrocities that overflowed when confronted, revealing him for who he truly was. All the claws and teeth he’d kept tucked safely away bristled, and no one was safe. No human, anyway. I grinned to myself. Western society continued to produce the perfect fodder for my continued survival. David was going to be worthy of death.
There was nothing more of interest downstairs. What I wanted at that point was a clear scent profile for Kelsey and her father. Upstairs, fewer scents lingered. They’d focused much of their investigation downstairs. Thick carpet covered the stairs and the entire upper floor. My movements were disturbingly silent on the plush surface. There were four rooms. Three were bedrooms and one was an office and storage space. The master bedroom was messier than expected, considering the sterile state of the rest of the home. I peeked into the adjacent bedroom — clearly a guest room. It was neat and had been inhabited by Mrs. Thomas. Perhaps life in the grey zone had been off for longer than anyone knew. I wondered how long Mrs. Thomas had known about her husband’s proclivities. The main bedroom must’ve become David’s nest. I stood in the center of the room, breathing in the patriarch’s scent with confidence.
Inside Kelsey’s room, I sat on her pink twin bed. The room, sparse like the rest of the house, barely radiated much more than “this is a girl’s room.” I sat and breathed in Kelsey’s identifying scents for a few minutes and looked for any clues that might help later on. What little theme there was in the room soon became apparent. Kelsey loved dogs. There was a dog calendar on the wall and a few stuffed ones on the bed. I peeked under the bed and in the closet. Nothing of note except a few books on dog breeds. I stood there for a few minutes more and then ran my hand along the wall at the top of the closet, just out of sight. Then I pulled the drawers of the dresser out one by one. On the back of the drawer third from the top, I found something. A piece of mesh thumbtacked to the back. Inside it, several sheets of folded paper with neat, girlish writing. Some were in pen, others in pencil. From the first page, I gleaned that this was Kelsey’s version of a diary. At least, the kind of diary she wished her life reflected. I pocketed the papers and returned the drawers.
I poked around the office for a while, getting to know David Thomas, what he spent most of his time doing. He was a clown. In every sense of the word, to me, but only occasionally to the locals. Here and there, on shelves and walls, were photos of David at events, with clients. Faded color photos with various people of all sizes and shapes with conservative haircuts and pink faces. All white, of course, the better to hide in plain sight and get comfortable. In all of the photos, David looked plain. His hair was always cut and styled the same way, his clothes were similar in every photo. Looking at the repetition, I thought it might be hard for the police to circulate a photo of this guy for help. If he changed his look, he’d be a completely different person.
He ran a small business that served a wide area. A party supplier with all the entertainments, living and otherwise: ponies, clowns, balloons, games, popcorn machines — you name it. Sometimes, when needed, he slipped on the greasepaint and filled in, entertaining children in his lap. Parents trusted him. An upstanding businessman who provided parties for children? Gold. He got into schools, daycares, homes. Every job must have been like a victim interview. Since he needed to know the spaces he was working with, he would often have unfettered access. Children look to their parents for whom to trust, and there he was; being trusted. Society at large was unwilling to believe the extent that pedophiles would go to satisfy their needs. I knew how patient and dedicated predators could be to claim their prey. I wasn’t surprised when a dangerous beast came in human shape rather than some other animal on the plains of Africa or from the depths of the ocean. Murderous creatures came from both of those places and everywhere in between, but none compared to what Man could do. Maybe one day, humanity would learn.
Downstairs, back near the kitchen, I didn’t pause to think. I just slipped out the back and kept following the clues. Surely the police had the same information I had managed to glean from the Thomas home — excepting Kelsey’s fantasy journal pages. They couldn’t follow a scent trail like I could, however, couldn’t use their other senses to pick up details that would go unnoticed. It would be dawn soon and I needed something to eat before going door to door and figuring out who really knew the Thomas family. At my car, I shed my clothes and then my skin to do a little hunting that didn’t involve humans.
***
From what Rooster had told me, David Thomas’s parents were deceased and he didn’t have close family in the area. He was estranged from his only aunt and cousins. Telling, I think. Kelsey’s mother, Sarah, however, was a somewhat different story. Her parents had been a hurricane in the area for the past two months; everyone knew them. They were back home in California, so that day I would work for them, that day I was a private detective. They’d hired me due to frustration that the police hadn’t made much progress in locating their granddaughter or their daughter’s killer. That was my story. With no legal constraints and nothing but time on my hands, I could learn more about David Thomas than they already had.
People still wanted to do the right thing; they wanted the world to be good and clean. And they were willing to talk to force the matter in this young and remote neighborhood where residents still neglected to lock their doors. I could use the authorities’ lack of progress to pry open doors and mouths. I pinballed from home to home, inhaling a heady mix of potpourri, dogs, and children while absorbing story after story defining David and Sarah Thomas.
I learned that David was well liked and respected — an entirely different personality than the truth of him, the personality able to murder the mother of his child and steal his own daughter away to play with. Unsuspected, as they always were. He was handsome, helpful, and committed to building a successful business. His few employees didn’t have much to say about him other than that he was fair and professional. He was the owner and manager; they did what he told them to do and it didn’t involve becoming friends.
David Thomas was involved in the community, but not too involved. He never took the lead of his own volition, but occasionally he would be volunteered and he’d do the job good-naturedly. People liked that about him, liked that he’d pitch in when called. He seemed to know everyone, but few people knew him. What I did find were the couple’s friends — some dating back to high school, neighborhood pals from way back. Through them and their guilt and loss and disbelief, David’s life as an emotionally abused and wayward youth could be cobbled together. I was able to follow this bland trail to one of his estranged cousins, someone who knew David before.
Phil Thomas lived off the beaten path, to say the least. He stayed in a small trailer off a short, broken road. I stopped on the main road and took in the area. Tall, golden grass surrounded the trailer for hundreds of yards, getting thicker at a pine tree line in the distance. It would have been beautiful but for the pile of crap Phil lived in that had clearly been sitting in the field for some time. A smaller pile of discarded junk sat next to a rusted red pickup. Two dirt lines were scored into the grass leading to the truck.
Before I was within fifty yards of the thing, I could smell the weed and corn liquor, greasy food, and dirty humans. More weed and liquor than any one man would ever need for recreation. Phil lived with a pregnant woman topped with thin blond hair who looked like a hundred miles of bad road. Her five-year-old had the same empty look her mother did. The resemblance was stunning. When I met her pale, blue eyes, there was nothing there, no curiosity. The kid was barely alert. She picked over a ruined plastic bowl of corn flakes.
I wondered if I’d be back in the neighborhood for Phil one day. We spoke in the dirt patch of the front “yard” under a tattered awning tacked to the side of the trailer. Phil was shirtless and skinny, wearing tight jeans that flared at the bottom, a patch on either knee, and thick tan boots. An intricate belt buckle of tarnished pewter with a center of turquoise on a thick leather belt did little to hold the pants up. His long head was constantly in motion; dirty blond hair hanging down past his ears waved with every movement. I could smell cigarettes and gunpowder on him, but I didn’t believe he was armed. That didn’t mean the woman in the trailer wasn’t. Or that she didn’t have a weapon trained on me right now. I shadowed Phil and kept him between me and the trailer. It seemed to agitate him a little.
“Davey wasn’t no angel, none of us were, but we wasn’t so interested in some o’ the things he was.” Phil’s thick horseshoe mustache danced when he spoke.
“Meaning?”
Phil spit and kicked some dirt at the wet spot. “Shit, I always swore I’d never talk about family like this.”
“David turn out like anyone else in your family?”
“Hell, no! Man, you believe he’s messin’ with Kelsey, y’know, like that?”
I just stared at him and waited. Waited for the rusty gears in his head to turn and pull the curtain further back. It took time to unravel belief.
“Shit, man. That’s… Shit.”
“You were telling me what David was like when you were younger.”
“Yeah. Yeah, we wasn’t tight. Y’know? But we was cousins — by marriage — and we got together often enough. The usual goofy stuff as kids. Y’know?”
I didn’t know, but it also didn’t matter. Again, I waited, leaving dead air for Phil to fill.
“There was a couple times we found dead animals and he wanted to — I dunno — dissect ’em or whatnot. Weird shit. I remember one time he tried to get a few of us to do some really crazy dares.”
“Like what?”
“Ah…” Phil looked around, avoiding my eyes.
I bent over and met his eyes, followed them, stayed in his field of vision. “Like what, Phil?”
Phil sighed and relented. “Man, he always wanted to stick his dick in something or watch someone do it. Girls, boys, whatever. He didn’t bring it up often. Y’know?”
“No, Phil, I don’t know. Explain.” Phil gave me a hard look, the kind of glance that served as a warning. I resolved to take the easy way with him and reminded him that I was working for his aunt and uncle.
Phil spit. He liked to spit when he was thinking. “He never missed an opportunity to try and worm it in. Okay? Got a little reputation for it, for a while, then nothing. He cooled it. No one ever let him do it ’cause it was fuckin’ weird. Right?”
“Yeah. How did his parents treat him?”
“Aaah, his mom was cool. But his dad was mean. Not mean like he beat him a lot or nothin’ for no reason. Y’know? Just, like, cold. Never did much for Davey other than to tell him to do shit around the house or remind Davey that he was worthless. A real prick to his mom, too.”
I heard the motor before Phil’s eyes glanced over my shoulder. I looked and saw a black muscle car grind to a halt at the turnoff onto the road. I couldn’t make out how many people were in the vehicle. Customers, no doubt.
I nodded at Phil. “Where’d David like to hang out when he got older, in his teens?”
“Aw, I dunno. We sorta drifted apart before then. Our moms wasn’t draggin’ us around no more, so we was doin’ whatever we was doin.’ All I know is he started runnin’ away when he got older.”
“Yeah? Tell me about that.”
Phil chewed his lip, thinking, then spit. I hoped he wouldn’t embellish too badly. “He’d disappear for a couple o’ days before coming back. That I know of, he took off three times.”
“Each time longer than the last?”
“Yeah! How’d you know?”
“I’m a private dick.”
“Uh, sure, right.” Phil’s eyebrows creased.
“So, how long each time? Do you know?”
“Uh-huh. The whole family’d go on red alert. He’s gone two days the first time. Like, four the next. And I think over a week the last time.”
“Consecutive?”
“Huh?”
“Like one time after the other. Right away?”
“Oh, no. Second time was ’bout a year later. Third time I know of was more’n two years later.”
“I see.” Practice runs, reconnaissance, the son of a bitch. “You remember anything else that might help us find him?”
“Um, no, I don’t think so. Anything else I can do to help my family?”
“Love your children instead.”
“Instead o’ what?”
I turned and left Phil with his busted-up trailer and waiting customers.
About the Author
Errick Nunnally was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and served one tour in the Marine Corps before deciding art school was a safer pursuit. He enjoys art, comics, and genre novels. A designer by day, he earned a black belt in Krav Maga and Muay Thai kickboxing by night. His writing has appeared in several anthologies and is best described as “dark pulp.” His work can be found in Fiyah Literary Magazine, Lamplight, Transcendent, Monarchies of Mau, The Final Summons, Protectors 2, Nightlight Podcast, and the novels, Lightning Wears a Red Cape, Blood for the Sun, and All the Dead Men. Visit erricknunnally.us learn more about his work.
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