Jigsaw World
Authors: JD Lovil
Tags: #murder, #magic, #sorcery, #monsters, #parallel worlds, #tyr, #many worlds theory, #quantum jumping, #heimdall
Jigsaw
World
JD Lovil
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Smashwords Edition
Jigsaw World
Copyright © 2014 J D
Lovil.
Smashwords Edition, License
Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to
other people. If you would like to share this book with another
person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If
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respecting the hard work of this author.
PUBLISHED BY:
JD Lovil on Smashwords
ISBN:
9781311239143
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DISCLAIMER:
Jigsaw World is a work of fiction. Names,
places, characters, and events are fictitious and are purely the
product of the Author's imagination.
Any resemblance of the persons, events or
locations depicted in this book to those of events, locations or
actual persons, living or dead, are entirely
coincidental.
******
Also by JD Lovil
Fiction
Worldship Praxis
Shadow of Worlds
Vanguard of Man
The Worlds of Man
Non-Fiction
Becoming Libertarian
Tools for the Road
Whacking Happiness
Unknown Visitors
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CONTENTS
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been influenced in subject matter by a
number of Science Fiction writers over the years, and you will see
elements of style of some of my favorites in my writing. There may
also have been an unconscious attempt to pattern the general format
of the quest in this book after the examples I have read, with
tidbits from 'The Hobbit' and even from 'American Gods'.
Ebook cover was provided by Author Marketing
Club.
******
Dark
Storms
Tom stared out of the window at the
approaching storm. He was lucky to have found this shelter, even if
he was currently sharing it with four other refugees from the
weather. The clouds were weaving strange patterns in the sky as
they sought their prey along the highway.
As the clouds roiled above, one could see
faces in the shapes above, some almost human, others, not so much.
Nobody that Tom had ever talked to could explain the obvious
intelligence and predatory nature of storms these days. On the
other hand, everyone who could
see
knew that being caught out in the storm
was certain death.
The storm was focusing in on a delivery truck,
which was traveling at high speed down the nearby highway, moving
directly toward this stone house that Tom was watching from. The
clouds twisted above the truck like tentacles or worms, the strong
gusting wind was rocking the vehicle from side to side in its
headlong flight, and the lightning strikes were getting closer and
closer to their target.
Tendrils of the dark clouds and the vehicle
converged less than a thousand feet from the door of the shelter.
The lightning that was generated by the cloud was released in a
second upon contact with the truck; a glaring arc like the world’s
biggest arc welder lit the rapidly darkening world. The truck
seemed not so much to blow up as to vaporize.
Tom turned away from the window as the cloud
tendrils were being reabsorbed back into the parent clouds, and the
clouds began to drift lazily about in the sky in a lazy interlude
before finding their next target. The pretty little blonde teenager
named Nancy was huddled in the far corner of the room with her
mother, Susan, and the bald and portly Gilbert Taylor sat
nonchalantly on the couch drinking the hooch of whoever owned this
house. The serious expression on Bailey’s face put the lie to the
idea that dogs, at least collie-shepherd mixes, were incapable of
higher thought and the resultant concerns that higher thought
brings.
Tom had been traveling about the countryside
the last few months, a very unusual habit in these troubling times,
but Tom was an unusual man, and quite possibly troubled to boot.
Most people stuck close to home these days, ready to bolt for
safety at the first sign of trouble. Everyone had a knot in their
stomachs about the future, even though most did not know
why.
Not that Tom was in any way a peculiar man.
While it was true that he seemed to have a nose for when one of
these activities was going to happen, this was in no way a unique
ability. Somewhere between one in ten and one in twenty of the
people he had met had this ability to some degree. What made him a
bit unusual was that he depended on it. The others always seemed to
distrust their nose, and stayed in ‘safe’ areas most of the time.
The other people in this house must have been caught short of
safety. Lord knows why Bailey was here.
Tom could feel that the danger was over for
the moment. When the events were about to happen, he could feel
that the world was thinner, as though it were a painting by an
unknown artist god, and the time and place where the event was
about to happen was where the brush had laid down a thinner coat of
paint. Sometimes, when the temperature was in that niche between
cold and hot, and was 72 degrees in an almost warm spring day, it
would suddenly begin to feel chilly like the 72 degrees in an
almost cold autumn day.
He continued through the living room where the
others huddled, and searched the kitchen until he found a decent
bottle of single malt scotch whiskey. Feeling slightly cheered by
the discovery, he returned to the living room with the bottle and
some glasses, Bailey trotting by his side. It was not too hard to
convince Susan to partake of the hooch, and oddly enough, she
didn’t object when Tom poured a shot of whiskey for
Nancy.
Ten minutes found a Susan that looked much
more relaxed, and Nancy was showing a bit of redness in her
complexion, and an animated but slightly unfocused activity.
Gilbert was well ahead of all of them on the road to inebriation,
having started first and never stopped. In these strange days, this
sort of communal reaction to the events was par for the
course.
“
So, do you two live in Paradise
Valley?” Tom asked. “I never have understood that name, it is
definitely not Paradise, and it doesn’t seem to be a valley, except
by comparison to Camelback Mountain.”
“
Yeah, we live off of Tatum.”
Nancy said. “We had car trouble, and then we saw this house just
before the clouds came in. It is alright here, I guess. It is
probably someone’s idea of Paradise, compared to downtown Phoenix,
anyway.”
“
I guess. You are lucky to have
made it here. Well stocked, safe, and undefended. We all better lay
low here until daylight.” Tom replied. “It doesn’t feel like things
are totally over out there.”
Nancy had started doing all of those strange
woman signs that girls seem to pick up by the time they are two,
handling their hair, that oddly feminine eye dance and small smile
quirks, upward escalation to the vocal registry. The fact that she
was of that physical sort where one couldn’t be sure if she was
thirteen or seventeen didn’t exactly square with the promise of
that scared little smile she was putting out there.
Tom would have expected her mother to have
been the one to come on to him, but there she was, delivering a
thousand mile stare into the little shot of whiskey she was
nursing. Oh, well, the world was a little more accommodating in
these areas than it used to be, but Tom didn’t intend on letting
this little pubescent drama go any further. Fortunately, all he had
to do to stop it was nothing.
This little gang of desperados was a bit
special, in that they could see what was happening around them.
Even Bailey was special that way, even though animals did seem to
sense these events a bit more than humans did. Humanity-at-large
would attribute the results of falling prey to the storm by the
delivery man as simply a bad traffic accident, for some reason
never seeing the contradictory evidence.
Even members of this cabal of Experiencers
might find their memories of the more exotic parts of the event
sort of bleeding out of recollection, until one day, all they
remembered is that they took shelter from a severe storm, maybe a
tornado, which killed a close-by delivery man. Nancy or Tom would
probably remember it all, but Susan or Gilbert could very well not
remember any of the weird stuff by this time next year.
Tom had noticed in his travels that only about
five percent or so of people really saw what was happening in these
events, and they usually kept the people they were with seeing some
of the truth while they were with them. As soon as they separated,
the others would begin to forget and rationalize it all away. If
Susan was by herself right now, she would have already forgotten
the true nature of the storm.
Somewhere between ten and twenty-five percent
of the others who witnessed this sort of event knew something
strange was going on, but couldn’t tell for sure what it was. For
the five percent who saw it all, they seemed to pay a price for the
gift, or was it a curse?
Tom almost remembered some past time when
these things did not happen, but he can recall no details of that
idyllic life. He thought that he might have once had a family, but
he couldn’t remember who they were, whether they were wife, or
kids, or parents. He could not remember names, or places, or even
the faces of these possible family members.
One of the weirder things that Tom had noticed
was that while the general population could apparently not see
these events, there were venues galore, such as that late night
‘coast-to-coast’ radio show where many of these events were
discussed in nauseating detail. People apparently had no problem
accepting the events as being the paranoid delusions of some
hypothetical lunatic fringe, even though the persons testifying
that they witnessed such events ranged from the Mad Hatter’s crazy
cousin to Mr. So-Sane-I’m-Boring.