7th son, p.1
7th Son, page 1
7th SON:
DESCENT
J. C. Hutchins
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
For Eleanor
God only knows.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a book is a lonesome task. Delivering that book into readers’ hands is not.
What you’re holding is the result of hundreds of hours of effort, put forth by thousands of supremely generous and talented individuals. I’ve had the great pleasure to meet some of these people. Others, I never will. All deserve my sincerest gratitude.
Kristin Lindstrom, thank you for believing in this book and its author, and seeing something here that others did not. A thousand-thousand thanks go to you for your relentless support, and for representing someone who likes to color outside the lines.
Joel Gotler, you have been a tenacious advocate of my work. You’ve also taught me the value of good ideas. I cherish both contributions more than I can express. Thank you.
David Moldawer, I’m convinced that I wouldn’t be typing these words right now were it not for your sincere belief in my work. Thank you. The beer will always be on me.
To Michael Homler, Matthew Shear, Lisa Senz, Sarah Goldstein, Katy Hershberger, Michael Storrings, Phil Pascuzzo, and the rest of the wickedly talented team at St. Martin’s Press: Thank you for embracing 7th Son: Descent, and championing it. I’m honored to be a part of the family. Your invaluable contributions and perspective made 7th Son: Descent a better book.
Scott Sigler, you are a wily, boundlessly creative man, and your professional drive provides daily inspiration. Thank you for being a tireless advocate of my work, for our collaborations, and your advice. The world’s yours. Just let me keep the 7thSonShine State.
Evo Terra, Tee Morris, and Chris Miller: Muchly gratitude to you three, who experienced 7th Son before darned-near anyone else. Thank you for the encouragement, and for accompanying me on this wild ride.
Big thanks to my family, friends, and MotionPoint coworkers, for their cheers as I wrote 7th Son: Descent. It made all the difference in the world.
To my many creative social media colleagues, particularly my podcasting and “podcast novelist” friends: Thank you for your dogged evangelism and support. Special thanks roll out to authors Sigler, Morris, Mark Jeffrey, Matthew Wayne Selznick, and Jack Mangan, whose stellar work in 2005 helped convince me to release my own fiction online. A special hat-tip goes out to authors Mur Lafferty and Matt Wallace, who—in addition to being unbelievably talented—are two of my best friends. You have all been both wind and anchor during this journey.
And to the tens of thousands of people worldwide who listened to 7th Son: Descent online, evangelized it, believed in it . . . and believed in me: You, more than anyone else, made this book a reality. Your support, more than anything, convinced me the tale I was telling was worthwhile. Your e-mails, your calls, your comments, your instant messages . . . your vociferous belief made 7th Son: Descent more than words on a screen, or a voice in your headphones. “Thank you” does not convey what I wish to express to you, but it is all I have.
From the bottom of my heart to the tips of my fingers, thank you.
Now, let’s go tell more stories together.
E-mail J.C. at 7thSonNovel@gmail.com.
PROLOGUE
The president of the United States is dead. He was murdered in the morning sunlight by a four-year-old boy.
It was a simple stumping rally in Kentucky, no more than a pit stop on Tobacco Road. The Bluegrass State would vote Republican in next year’s election, just as it had in the past two. At least that’s what President Hank “Gator” Griffin said on this crisp October morning at Bowling Green College.
His speech was a barn-raiser, a helluva thing, roiling with Bible Belt–friendly sound bites. Keep the country strong. Reelect morality. Reelect character and faith. Next November, reelect Griffin and Hale.
God bless America. Waving now, working the crowd. Pump-pump handshake. Wink. Thank you. Kiss the lady. Hold the baby. Listen to the cheers.
Listen, as they turn to screams.
It happened so quickly: a smile and nod from the four-year-old’s parents, a kiss on little Jesse Fowler’s cheek for the photographers, a glint of silver in the boy’s hand, the president’s carotid artery open at the jaw, the scarlet wound arcing across his throat like a comet. The child’s face spattered in red mist, the president’s mouth forming a question, the boy’s tiny teeth glittering white in the camera flashbulbs, a cry from a Secret Service agent.
The president did not stagger, did not sway; he crumpled at the knees, face white as bone. His forehead split open as it struck the sidewalk. There were many screams, many arms around him. A Secret Service agent grabbed the murderous boy as he dashed between a photographer’s legs. The agent lifted Jesse Fowler high, by the ankle. The boy was furious, screaming obscenities no four-year-old should know. He swung his switchblade at the agent, knocking off the man’s sunglasses. He swung again. And again.
More hands around the president. More screams from the crowd. Fowler’s parents rushing the agent in shock, trying to protect their son. Secret Service agents covering Griffin’s body with their own, his blood seeping into their suits. A scream rising from the child as he swung upside down by his ankle.
A chopper soon descended onto the campus’s common field, its downdraft ripping the GRIFFIN/HALE signs from shocked spectators’ hands. The president and an army of Secret Service and medical agents arrived at the Bowling Green hospital three minutes later. But Hank “Gator” Griffin was already dead by then.
During the chaos at the college, little Jesse Fowler had been disarmed and tossed into the backseat of a police cruiser. His parents were also apprehended.
Just before the vehicle carrying the world’s youngest political assassin peeled away from the scene, a photojournalist snapped a picture of the child. It would have been worthy of the Pulitzer Prize, had it been published. In the photo, Jesse Fowler’s tiny bloodstained hands were pressed against the car’s rear window. He gazed at a spattered GRIFFIN/HALE sign, which was reflected in the cruiser’s window in one of those remarkable moments of photojournalism.
The child’s bloodshot eyes were wide. He was laughing.
By noon that day, Vice President Vincent Hale had been sworn in as the leader of the world’s last superpower. Secretary of State Charles Caine was appointed VP.
The child’s parents, Jennifer and Jackson Fowler, were arraigned on charges of conspiring to murder the president of the United States. The small Bowling Green restaurant they owned would never open again.
Their son was placed under maximum security in an undisclosed government facility for evaluation and interrogation. A week later, a nurse and an armed guard discovered Jesse Fowler’s body. The four-year-old was lying in bed, his mouth and eyes open, dead. There were no signs of self-asphyxiation. There was no overdose, no theatrical cyanide capsule, no reasonable cause of death. Just the dried remains of a nosebleed, and eyes so bloodshot the whites had gone completely red.
Jesse Fowler had said only one thing during that week of confinement and examination. A balding, bearded doctor had asked the boy if he knew what he’d done to the president.
Jesse Fowler had looked at the doctor and giggled.
“Go fuck your mother,” he’d said.
ONE
Saturday sex with Sarah was the best, John Smith decided. The very best. It was long, sweaty, dirty; nipple nibbles, fingernails raking the back and chest, obscene whispers, incomplete sentences. Headboard practically banging into the neighboring apartment’s living room. Open windows to let the November Miami breeze cool them—and to let the rest of the world shift uncomfortably with envy. That sort of sex.
John marveled at this as he pulled himself off her body, panting, staring up at the ceiling with an expression that was half self-satisfaction, half awe. Sarah grabbed a sheet from the floor, laughed long and loud, and rolled sideways to face him. The sheet stuck to her sweaty breasts and hips. She brushed a red curl from her face.
“Unbelievable,” she said.
John gazed at the ceiling and shook his head. “I know.”
“It’s getting better.”
He shook his head again and blinked. “I know.”
Sarah smiled. “You should write a song about it.”
“Uh, how about ‘Christ
“You could’ve done better than that,” she snorted, and climbed out of bed. John watched Sarah’s hips as she gracefully stepped through his cramped bedroom, traversing the thirtysomething’s version of hopscotch: a pile of books on the floor, last night’s clothes, several ratty folders filled with sheet music, an empty box of Trojans, his Gibson guitar. She was nimble and beautiful, and John wondered, not for the first time, what she saw in him.
She opened the bedroom door. John’s fat, fuzzy cat scrambled past her legs and leaped onto the bed. He stomped onto John’s chest and meowed, malcontent.
“Buzz off, Cat,” John said.
“You need to buy him food,” Sarah said, stepping into the living room on her way to the bathroom. “You said it yourself last night. And, Jesus . . . you should really clean up this place.”
“Right,” he called. “Wanna help?”
Sarah laughed. “Your house. Your mess. You clean it up.”
“Mañana.”
John reached over and plucked a lighter and crumpled pack of cigarettes from the far end of the bedside table. He shook the pack, and two bent—but, thank God, not broken—Camel Lights rattled out and into his palm. He lit one, inhaled, and gazed at the ceiling.
Cat meowed again, sounding more surly this time. John absently scratched the critter’s head, regarding him with a mixture of disdain and fondness. As Sarah showered, John watched the palm trees sway outside the window, stroked Cat, and finished his smoke.
He’d already put on a T-shirt and pulled his hair into a ponytail when Sarah came back into the room.
“Where ya going, stud?”
“Nowhere. Just to the Castle,” he replied, slipping on a pair of jeans. “Gotta get the cat his food, and get me some more smokes.”
Sarah looked at the unlit Camel by the ashtray. “I’m out, too.”
“Have that one,” John said, and kissed her. “Try to live through the nasty nonmenthol flavor. I’ll take the bike. Won’t be long.”
Outside, as he pedaled his ten-speed into the apartment complex parking lot, Sarah called down to him from the balcony. She told him to hurry. She made a joke about how red-haired maidens reward bicycle-riding knights with breakfast and “muchly” hot sex . . . particularly if they come bearing cancer sticks.
John laughed, imagining her in bed, his head between her thighs, and said he’d pedal as fast as he could.
Alleys—honest-to-goodness damp, dark, well-worn shortcut alleys—were one of the things John missed most while living in Miami. Cycling always reminded him of his childhood in the Midwest, and of bike races with neighborhood kids, up and down the alleys. Miami was a driver’s city, a twentieth-century city, a pink place that had no love for kick-the-can or cobblestones. This was the land of the planned community, where “historic home” meant that the paint on a house’s shutters had just dried.
As he pedaled to the Castle convenience store—Zero Hassle at the Castle!—John pined for alleys and shortcuts, redbrick roads that led to scrappy basketball rims and tree houses. But there was no sense begrudging it. Miami was different. Neither better nor worse, just different. And since Miami had been around a lot longer than John had, he thought it best to adapt.
Besides, Miami had palm trees. And November weather like this.
He was making a quick turn onto Flamingo, a scenic residential road that would add a few minutes to his ride—but what the hey, it was Saturday—when he spotted the white van barreling toward him.
I don’t think it sees me, he thought. If it did, it wouldn’t be going so fa—
John yanked the bike to the left, gripped both brakes, and nearly flew over the handlebars. The van’s tires screeched. John’s bike swerved between two parked cars, a Lexus and a very old, very cherry Beetle, and isn’t it the damnedest things you notice at moments like this? The bike’s front wheel struck the curb. John spilled onto the sidewalk, felt the flesh tear on his palm and chin.
He heard the van’s front doors open, the rear slide-door whoosh along its rail, and the click-click of expensive dress shoes. John tried to slip out from under the ten-speed, but his foot was stuck on the chain. He looked up. Three men sporting sharp suits and crew cuts surrounded him.
“You know, a little help here would—”
“Grab him,” the biggest suit said, and the other two pounced. Their gloved hands locked on to John’s upper arms like talons, yanking him from under the bike in one fluid motion, as if he were in some street-fighter ballet.
One of the men twisted John’s left arm behind his back—say uncle, isn’t it the damnedest things you notice?—and John howled. The other suit held John’s right arm out straight, like a wing. John couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. They were going to break his arm; John could feel the muscles pulling apart.
The third man, the big suit, stepped before him. The stranger had gray eyes, a flat nose, a cleft in his chin, cheekbones carved from marble. No emotion was on that face. The men stood there on the sidewalk for what felt like an excruciating eternity.
Finally, the man raised his eyebrows. “You want it to stop?”
John nodded his head furiously.
The big man inhaled and exhaled slowly. “Good. Now. You’re going to take a little ride with us.”
The pain in John’s left arm eased a little, and he used the moment to heave his body from side to side. His outstretched arm tore away from its captor and swung outward. He screamed for help. The talon on the throbbing wrist behind his back slipped slightly. He was going to do it, going to do it, going to run, going to break—
No air. No air.
The leader, the one with the Superman chin, punched John in the stomach a second time. Then a third. John fell to the sidewalk, clutching his midsection, cradling it like a squirming baby. Through the haze, he saw one of the men toss the ten-speed into the back of the van. He spotted the other with a syringe, felt the bee sting of the needle, then things became pleasant, sweet, dark, darker.
He heard one last thing before he lost consciousness, the leader’s voice.
“Should’ve come quietly, Johnny-boy.”
When Michael was a child, his mother and father took him for a drive through Indiana’s corn country, the place where that state’s true heart would always beat. American flags, high school basketball, Old-Time Religion. Those things were in the soil of the state—no, deeper than that even, a layer of bedrock geologists could never fathom. The drive into the heartland took two hours from where they lived in Indianapolis.
Michael had been only nine at the time, but he had noticed the transformation of the horizon during that drive: the mortar and steel of city giving way to the bland homes of the suburbs. Then, with the abruptness of a beachhead, the land of station wagons and culs-de-sac relinquished control to the flat expanse of Indiana’s heart. The corn. It was a sea, Michael thought back then. Bright green combines occasionally slipped through its waves like barges. And like the sea, the corn could barely be contained; it ebbed just feet from the road.
There, at a family picnic by the roadside, Michael’s mother had told him that places were like people; they had personalities. More important, she said, they had emotions. Souls. Sometimes you could feel the soul of a place. Michael had munched on a peanut butter sandwich and asked her what she meant.
“Close your eyes,” she said. “Listen. Just breathe and listen. Listen with your ears. What do you hear?”
Quiet, he’d said. Grasshoppers. Corn leaves slapping against each other. A bird. The wind.
“Now what do you feel?” she asked.
Nice. Peaceful. Love, maybe.
“Maybe that’s what this place is like,” his mother said. “Maybe this place is peaceful, loving. Gentle. Maybe that is this place’s soul. It’s important to listen to a place sometimes, to hear what it thinks. Understand?”
Michael said he did, a little. Maybe. His mother laughed and kissed him on the cheek and said that maybe he would understand when he was older. He’d finished his sandwich, took a sip of cherry Hi-C from his thermos, and went to play Frisbee with his father.
Michael had never forgotten that conversation. And while he understood its mysteries now about as much as he had then, he always made time to close his eyes and listen to a new place. It had come in handy years later when he went to Parris Island, and then to Kosovo and Afghanistan and other countries with alien names and landscapes. Those places held power over their inhabitants. That faraway day’s lesson had dovetailed with what he learned in boot, and later in Force Recon training. Know the land, and you’ll know the people.
