Hot on the heels of my Random House novel Andersonville is With Sword And Pistol, my first fiction collection.
With Sword And Pistol assembles four dark adventure novellas.
Here’s a peek at the killer cover from Shawn King.
Grab FOUR IN THE MORNING for FREE
From now until Friday the FOUR IN THE MORNING collection is absolutely free in eb-book on Amazon.
Featuring novellas from Lincoln Crisler, Tim Marquitz, and Malon Edwards, it also features my supernatural gangsta novella GULLY GODS, about J-Hoss, a young gangbanger from the south side of Houston Texas who, after killing a rival in a parking lot, hides out with family in Chicago. Toeing the line doesn’t last long, and J-Hoss falls in with a violent crew of Liberian ex-child soldiers calling themselves the Trip Sixes, led by an ambitious youth nicknamed Hitler. As the Trip Sixes go to war with the local Mexican gang, J-Hoss learns the terrible truth of the Trip Sixes’ power, gleaned from their allegiance to a dark and terrible deity.
Read an excerpt here –
https://emerdelac.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/some-words-and-an-excerpt-from-gully-gods/
And here’s some words from co-author Malon Edwards (whose wonderful steamfunk story Half Dark kicks off the collection) about my novella –
http://eastofmars.blogspot.ca/2012/07/four-in-morning-gully-gods.html
So if you’ve been waiting to pick this one up, don’t wait much longer. It’s free till Friday, and in three months it’ll be out of print for good.
-Hasta pronto
Lincoln Crisler’s QUEEN in FOUR IN THE MORNING
Lincoln Crisler is the last guy you’d expect to write a middle aged woman fretting over her age lines.
Scratch that. Lincoln Crisler is the last guy you’d expect to write a middle aged woman fretting over her age lines so well.
The guy is active duty military, tattooed, and can just about quiet a room (or I imagine a lineup of guys in OD green – do they still wear that?) with his voice. His clipped, direct speech reminds me of a drilling precision cadence. He’s not a hardass or anything. The guy is quite affable. But he really is the live action GI Joe his website trumpets him as.
But man, he writes the woefully vulnerable, self-deprecating middle aged female psyche really well.
And you know how I can tell? Because I hated Rita (the main character of Lincoln’s Queen in Four in the Morning, the collection my novella Gully Gods appears in, along with works by Tim Marquitz and Malon Edwards) when I met her. But I couldn’t stop reading about her. That’s the mark of a good author and a good story, and Lincoln Crisler and Queen are both.
In Queen, Rita is obsessed with herself and her husband’s opinion of her. She’s a beautiful, mature woman, but she requires constant positive appraisal, and rebuffs it or is nearly oblivious to it when it actually comes her way. The woman can’t seem to just live her own life or fathom that her husband has a life outside of her. This drives every event of the narrative, from her decision to rejuvenate herself via an experimental age reversal treatment conducted by a shady, too-friendly pharmaceutical company, to her husband James’ inevitable conduct and the supremely bizarre conclusion.
The woman is a heavenly body (slowly made all the more heavenly by the helpful Dr. Cavelian) and the people around her are just satellites. It’s fitting really. In a way, she’s already a queen in her own mind when the story starts, albeit not the sort of queen you’d want running your kingdom.
This is a Lincoln Crisler yarn, so things are going to take a weird turn, and they do. But for the eventual strangeness and horror to be believable, you’ve got be grounded in the reality first, and Lincoln does this really well. Although I couldn’t stand Rita, I could follow and empathize with her thought processes, could almost predict her reactions to things around her. I wanted to shake her at times, but I understood her.
The treatment has side effects unforeseen by Rita, but not entirely unintended. And I don’t want to spoil anything, but there is a scene in the kitchen, and you’ll know when you come to it, that is positively stomach turning. And yet, none of it is so strange that it comes out of left field or feels non-diagetic. In fact, although Rita’s fate is somewhat tragic, it’s also sort of…appropriate. Everything comes together, culminating in a fitting end. In a way, Rita becomes the queen she always wanted to be, even if she didn’t know it herself.
In the end, what Lincoln’s created in Queen is a dark meditation on the nature of beauty and self-worth. You’re only as important as the people closest to you think you are. But it’s a reciprocal thing. To be needed, you have to need in return.
And as for beauty, it really only starts to fade when you dwell on it.
Here’s an excerpt –
Something moved, deep in her belly, accompanied by a brief flash of heat behind her eyes. She eased her head back to her pillow. If the doctor wanted her to avoid unnecessary stress, that meant playing dead until James took his ass to work. She lay still and focused on her breathing while her husband heaved himself out of bed and started his day. The hot flashes and queasiness passed, and after a moment, she didn’t have to fake sleep.
A sharp pain ripped through Rita from crotch to skull, waking her abruptly. She looked over at the clock as she struggled to raise herself up on one elbow. She’d slept until lunchtime. Fire and ice washed over her brain. Her legs felt like rubber as she attempted to stand. She fell to her knees beside the bed and pawed at the nightstand, scattering the clock and a cup of water before laying hands on what she was searching for; her cell phone. It was dead. There was no land line in the house, and she was alone.
The neighbors. The two nearest homes belonged to the Moores and the Clares. The Clares were childless and both worked, but blonde, bright-eyed Susan had retired early a few months back when her daughter started college. If she wasn’t home, her daughter, Jordan, might be. Otherwise, she’d have to cross the street and hope she didn’t get run over. Rita braced herself against the nightstand and rose to her feet. Her guts churned and static filled her head. She could hear voices through the haze, but couldn’t make out any of the words. The lurching in her stomach became rhythmic, and her hips ground painfully. Watery blood flooded from her vagina as she fell to the floor.
Oh God. What did those assholes do to me? She was in worse pain than she’d ever been in before. She crawled to the bathroom on her hands and knees, trailing fluid and mucus. She needed to clean herself up, get some pants on, and get some help. As she left the carpet for the hard, cool tile of the bathroom floor, she felt the first familiar sensation she’d felt all morning.
Birth contractions. Far too soon, but undeniable.
Pick up Four In The Morning on Amazon.
Four In The Morning Free On Amazon Till Friday
Hey all, just a very quick note this time around to let you know Four In The Morning, the dark fiction collection I did with authors Lincoln Crisler (editor on Corrupts Absolutely?) , Tim Marquitz (author of the Dawn of War Trilogy), and Malon Edwards, is available on Amazon (ebook and Kindle) completely free until tomorrow, Friday the 7th.
My weird gangsta novella of dark powers and cannibalism, Gully Gods, is contained therein. Read all about that (including an excerpt) right (here).
And you can pick it up right here – – http://www.amazon.com/Four-in-the-Morning-ebook/dp/B0084N3I1I/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1339092475&sr=8-2
Or in paperback for $8.99.
Hasta later.
-Ed
Music To Murder By: Aural Pleasures In Gully Gods, The Crawlin’ Chaos Blues, And The Merkabah Rider Series
A lot of writers I know talk about the music they listen to while they write, how it inspires them. I have never been musically inclined and I need almost total silence to write most of the time. I find music distracting, particularly if it has lyrics, or if I associate it with something else, like a movie soundtrack or something.
There have been three notable exceptions, Gully Gods (from Four In The Morning) The Crawlin’ Chaos Blues, and Merkabah Rider.
I still don’t listen to music while I’m writing, but for these three works there are certain songs I’ve found myself listening to (usually in the car) to get me in the mindset. Particularly for Gully Gods and Crawlin’ Chaos, which both mention a couple of these tracks in the body of the story.
‘It was real hot that night, August in Houston. Me and B and Cripto was chillin’ in the Subway parking lot smokin’ beedies and eatin’ footlongs over the trunk of his ride (a tricked out two toned black and grey’92 Buick Roadmaster nigga called The Batmobile – had chrome bats on the dub spinners) and listenin’ to ‘Face when a pickup full of Southside Cholos pulled up and got out…’
‘Face is Brad T. Jordan, the Houston rapper Scarface, formerly of the Geto Boys. If you’ve seen Office Space you’ve heard him. Apparently like me, Mike Judge is a big fan. He even appears as the pimp Upgrayyde in Judge’s Idiocracy.
Something about Scarface’s voice and delivery reminds me of one of my all time favorite musicians, Chester Burnett AKA Howlin’ Wolf. But I’ll talk about him later. Like the Wolf, Scarface has a distinctively deep voice, almost like a minister’s. I would call him a minister of rage and darkness. His lyrics are vivid and emotionally evocative (‘I’ve got this killer up inside/of me I can’t talk to my mother/so I talk to my diary – and ‘Outside I see the cop cars flashin they lights/Raindrops symbolizing God is saving the life/The sun shining so they say the devil beatin his wife/The body bloody underneath the sheet is waitin for Christ/The streets is hungry- so I know they watchin -waitin to strike/But anything you ever got for easy came with a price’), and he swings wildly from violent, reprehensible glorification of a violent life, to deeply spiritual condemnation – but in the latter, never preachy or accusatory. He’s a pioneer of the southern Dirty South sound, something the movie Hustle & Flow portrays pretty well.
The song J-Hoss and Bruce Wayne are listening to in the parking lot is an old but a goody that sets the tone for the entire novella – Scarface’s Never Seen A Man Cry Till I Seen A Man Die –
Another one from Scarface that I listened to again and again and sort of informed the mentality of my protagonist and the various characters was G-Code –
‘She so damn fine. She move perfect. Like a curtain in the breeze, her hips be swayin.’
She smile and come in close and we be grindin’ up against each other. She smell real good.
“You like this music?” she ask. She got to lean in close and talk in my ear, and her breath is hot and sweet like gum.
“Uh huh,” I say. “It’s old ain’t it?”
“Yeah,” she say. “A couple years. Tres Delincuentes. You know what they’re saying?”
She cross her wrists behind the back of my neck and watch me and I put my hands on her waist, feel it sliding side to side, warm under my hands.
“Uh uh,” I say.
The song in this passage is Delinquent Habits by Tres Delincuentes. It’s kind of a West Coast Mexican hip hop tune, but it’s a great party song. I love the incorporation of the mariachi brass.
‘Then I hear the music. It ain’t from the party. It’s this heavy 808 thumpin,’ comin’ down the ave. Ain’t no oompa doompa, neither. It’s somethin’ old school. Familiar.
I turn my head, cheek to the street, and see a pair of headlights comin’ slow down the block. Brights be on, bright as a pair of suns. They higher off the ground than a car.
It stop a couple feet away.
All of us be in the headlights, but nobody lay offa me. They just all of ‘em turn and look.
The doors open and the music gets louder. I ain’t heard that shit in forever. It be The D.O.C. My pops used to play that shit in his ride. Ridin’ with him with the stereo bumpin,’ be one of the only memories I got of him.
A couple dark shapes get out and stand in front of the headlights. Them lights is so bright you can’t see shit but two motherfuckers standing there like a couple of shadows.’
The song in this passage is ‘It’s Funky Enough’ by the D.O.C. It’s pretty old, but I figured the Liberians might’ve just been getting into it. It’s got a menacing beat, very aggressive sounding, well suited to the scene, but it’s probably one of the most G-rated songs on this page, funny enough. The D.O.C. is one of hip-hop’s great tragedies. He did one promising solo album and promptly lost his voice in an injury sustained in a car accident. He’s gone on to be a successful producer and I heard he might be at last getting some kind of corrective surgery this year.
Stallone and Merciless throw Pocho in the chair and grab hold of him. Gravefilla take the guns over to a table and start layin’ ‘em in a drawer.
I go over with the pliers. The brown brown make me feel like this a video game or somethin’ – like I ain’t even in my body. I ain’t even doin’ what I doin.’
Hitler turn on the boombox, and some heavy shit old school shit come thumpin’ out. Music to murder by.
“Yo, fuck you mayates,” Pocho yell. He sound all fucked up ‘cause his teeth busted. “You just better fuckin’ kill me. ‘Cause I get loose I’ma kill me some niggers.”
I reach out with the pliers and I catch that piece of skin and bone between his nostrils. His whole body lock up like I got him by the nuts.
“You like movies, mayne. How you like the Three Stooges?”
For that scene I had two songs in mind. Firstly the Boston-born group Gang Starr and their Take It Personal. The world lost a real talent when MC Guru (Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal) passed away recently. Talk about your distinctive voices.
The other was NWA’s Real Niggaz Don’t Die – possibly one of the angriest, most intense and vitriolic mainstays in their catalog. If you’re easily offended, don’t click on this one.
I’ve already talked about Howlin’ Wolf’s influence on my Lovecraftian blues short story The Crawlin’ Chaos Blues over at Greg Mitchell’s blog. I hate repeating myself, so go take a look at it.
Back?
OK then.
Songs that show up in The Crawlin’ Chaos Blues –
When I first seen King Yeller, he was leanin’ on a beer sign watchin’ that Lake Street L clackin’ overhead, one bent Kool stuck in his lips, beatin’ out ‘I Ain’t Superstitious’ as best he could on a rusty ‘ol National with a pocket knife for a slide.
Crammed into the corner with a jumpin’ band was the man hisself, Howlin’ Wolf, all three hundred pounds of him, black as pig iron and sweatin’ like a steam engine, crawling on all fours, rollin’ his eyes, and flickin’ his tongue like a snake. He was wailin’ ‘Evil’ into a microphone and he sure looked like a man possessed by a devil. He was too big for the place, so goddamned big when he stood up and put his harp between his hands and blew he looked about to swallow it whole.
Yeller had picked out one of them fine biscuits in the crowd and was singin’ straight at her. She was that devil-eyed type woman lay her business on you, make you forget your own name, how much money you got in your pocket. She seen what Yeller was about right off, and she give him a smile over her man’s shoulder. That gap in her two front teeth let you know she liked to get her jelly rolled. He played ‘Come On In My Kitchen’ at her, and then ‘One Way Out,’ and by the time he finished up, her man had took notice.
Now for The Merkabah Rider series, there are a few tracks I listen to to put me in the mood, though of course, none of them actually appear in the books.
As you might suspect, most of them are Ennio Morricone pieces. In particular these.
And legendary bluegrass mandolin master Bill Monroe’s My Last Days On Earth. If any song encompasses the entirety of the series and the feel I’m trying to portray, it’d be this one.
My friend Ryan Gerossie also put together this book trailer using music we both composed and played (I did the Jaw harp and the monotonous guitar tune) for the indie film we did together in 2009, Meaner Than Hell (you can watch the trailer on the sidebar). This tune is sort of my default Rider theme (though if I had my way I’d find a way to mix some kind of klezmer or Hebrew chanting in there).
Anyway, listen. Broaden your horizons. Enjoy.
Some Words And An Excerpt From Gully Gods
FOUR IN THE MORNING is available now….
It’s an eclectic collection of four entirely different dark novellas, the brainchild of contributor Lincoln Crisler (editor of CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY?) and also featuring stories by myself, Malon Edwards, and Tim Marquitz.
When Lincoln approached me with the idea for this collection, he suggested we loosely use the theme of ‘age’ as a jumping off point, as in one of us do youth, another middle age, and another the golden years. When Malon came on, he and I decided to split youth into adolescence and young adulthood.
The novella I wrote for this project is called GULLY GODS.
Pilsen
GULLY GODS started way back in 1997 with an entirely different cast of characters but a similar setting, the Lower West Side of Chicago, around the historic Pilsen neighborhood, traditionally a kind of port of entry neighborhood for foreign immigrants to the city, beginning with Czechs in the early nineteenth century and gradually becoming predominately Mexican in the twentieth.I wanted to explore late 90’s street gang culture, sort of in the way Harlan Ellison did back in the 50’s (but without actually joining a gang, obviously), and it occured to me (as almost everything I study does) to infuse it with weird fiction. Actually, the first time I heard the term ‘Urban Horror’ or ‘Urban Fantasy,’ I ran it through my outdated 90’s PC filter, when every thing ‘urban’ meant ‘hip-hop’ related. So I set out to write this thinking I was writing Urban Horror because the whole time I had an old school hip hop soundtrack going in my mind (and I never ever write to music. But more on that in another post). Then while walking past a booth at San Diego Comic Con last year I came across an Urban Horror publisher and saw the covers were almost entirely populated by white women in black leather pants, emulating the chick from Underworld (who to me, was already a second generation Trinity from The Matrix). Open up another window and do a google search for Urban Fantasy and you’ll see what I mean. A slew of skinny chicks in black t-shirts.
But I digress.
As things sometimes do, the most vivid scene I had written wound up showing up almost to the T in a major motion picture release (the curb job in American History X), so I sort of became disenchanted with the material and the story never really took off in my mind. It sat dormant way back there for a lot of years, but Lincoln brought it back out itching.
I decided to revisit the concept (a group of hardcore gangbangers who pay homage to a dark and very real deity which grants them supernatural powers) from the point of view of Africans/African Americans instead of Puerto Ricans, as was my initial idea.
I think what made it click was my recent research into the child soldiers of Liberia, an absolutely deplorable phenomenon that’s been practiced there and in several other countries for as long as men have aimed guns at one another. My interest in Liberian child soldiers started after I’d streamed the Vice Guide To Travel’s harrowing episode on Liberia, and become acquainted with Joshua Blahyi, AKA General Butt Naked.
Blahyi is a reformed warlord turned Christian minister in Liberia. During the country’s bloody civil war, he devoted himself to a personal deity which required the blood of murdered children as sacrifice and in turn supposedly granted him immunity from bullets if he strode into combat stark naked (which he did). The majority of his Butt Naked Brigade consisted of armed children, sometimes as young a nine years old, kidnapped from their home villages, beaten, often sexually abused, and strung out on drugs, usually ‘brown brown,’ a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder, which left them in a perpetual state of heightened paranoia and agitation. 
Their former identities as sons and brothers were completely wiped away. They traded their real names for ‘battle names’ like Walking-Fucking, Rambo, Khadaffi, and Captain War Boss. They were trained to show no mercy to their enemies, and encouraged to brutalize and rape civilians at their pleasure (we’re talking rape from the time they’re first able to even attempt sex). Following Blahyi’s vision, the boys strutted into combat either nude, or wearing evening gowns, outrageously colored wigs, and handbags, which they believed confused enemy bullets.
I read Uzodinma Iweala’s child soldier novel BEASTS OF NO NATION and several positively chilling first hand accounts from ex-(child) combatants and their victims, a few of which wound up as recollections of the characters in GULLY GODS.
Joshua Milton Blahyi AKA General Butt Naked
GULLY GODS’ ‘hero’ if it has one, is an African American Houston teenager named J-Hoss, who, having been caught up in the South Houston gang culture, witnesses and promptly avenges the death of his best friend at the hands of Mexican rivals, and goes to Chicago to lay low with his aunt and young cousin.
Like Father Flanagan, I’m not of the opinion that there are natural born ‘bad boys.’ There are kids who have gone bad, sure, and J-Hoss is one of them. At an early age his father was incarcerated, and he was fortunate enough to have been partly raised by his grandfather, a hardworking ex-cowboy who instilled him a sense of personal history and a moral code.J’s family comes from the Mascogo.
The Mascogo are African-Mexicans, descended from the Black Seminoles of Florida. The Black Seminoles came about when Africans fled to Spanish territory and mingled with the Seminole Indian tribes there, becoming part of their community. After fighting the United States nearly to a standstill in the everglades during the Seminole Wars, the Black Seminoles were faced with the prospect of slavery and removal to Oklahoma (Indian Territory). A group of them chose instead to head for Mexico, where they established the town of Nacimento with the full blessing of the Mexican government, who prized them as scouts and trusted them to defend the northern borders against American bandits and hostile Apaches (how the world turns, right?).
The leader of this group was called John Horse, and it’s from John Horse that J-Hoss takes his name.
Juan Caballo, or John Horse
After his grandfather’s death in a nursing home, J-Hoss finds himself not always living up to the code he was taught, acting selfishly as teenaged boys do, but in the volatile and hostile world of the gangster, which soon makes him a dangerous individual.Expecting a peaceful sojourn in Chicago, J-Hoss strikes up a relationship with a Mexican girl from the new neighborhood, which soon draws the ire of the local Mexican gang. Pretty soon it’s more of the same, except here, J-Hoss doesn’t have his own gang to back him up, and in addition he’s made a promise to his aunt and her Muslim boyfriend not to endanger their home or the life of his young cousin with any of his criminal dabblings.But when a small but ambitious and up and coming Liberian immigrant gang called the Trip Sixes sides with him against the Mexicans and extends a friendly hand to him, it’s understandably difficult for J-Hoss to say no.
Soon events transpire to send him headlong back into the life he’s forsworn. But the Trip Sixes (led by an intense ex-child soldier who calls himself Hitler) are nothing like any gang J-Hoss has ever known.
They court a terrible, dangerous power, an old power that hungers for bloodshed.
Here’s the first two pages….
All the bad started when the Southside Cholo’s rolled up on me and Bruce Wayne in the Subway parking lot on Aldine Bender Road in Houston.
I’d been bangin’ with the five deuce Hoovers since fifth grade, mostly slangin’ weed and rock to the hypes at Haverstock Hills where I’d stayed in an apartment with my moms since my granddaddy died when I was ten.
It was all over a damn dog.
Bruce Wayne had this white pit bull named Cripto. He’d had a special collar made to order, with little pockets on the inside to keep the rock in. He said he got the idea from a Punisher comic. That was a mean ass dog and it wouldn’t let nobody touch it but him. I used to tell him I thought one of the pockets had ripped and Cripto had got a nose full of shit, because that damn dog acted like a crackhead.
Bruce Wayne loved that dog though, and he would tell me to shut the fuck up about it.
Now you know Bruce Wayne wasn’t that nigga’s real name. It was really Bruce Wayne Charles. Nigga was crazy about comic books. He went by Bruce Wayne, or B-Wayne, or Mista Wayne. Nigga changed his name more times than Diddy. I just called him B like I always had when we was kids.
After me and him got jumped into the Hoovers and he started makin’ his papes, B got hisself a big gold chain thick as a baby’s wrist with this fat ass bat signal hung on it. The bat was all in diamonds and the yellow part was gold. It was sick. Like I said, nigga was crazy about comic books.
He used to say me and him was gonna O.G. a clique one day, and all the gangstas was gonna have superhero names. Five Deuce SupaFiends, he wanted to call it. Nigga wanted me to call myself Black Bolt or some gay shit. My nickname J-Hoss though, after John Horse, this Black Seminole my granddaddy used to tell me stories about.
And anyways, I like the X-Men.
It was a real hot night. We was chillin’ in the Subway parking lot smokin’ beedies and eatin’ footlongs over the trunk of his ride (a tricked out two toned black and grey’92 Buick Roadmaster nigga called The Batmobile – had chrome bats on the dub spinners) and listenin’ to ‘Face when a pickup full of Southside Cholos pulled up and got out.
They didn’t pay no attention to us and I told B to keep chill, ‘cause I knew even though he was strapped I’d left my deuce deuce at home and I didn’t want no ‘plex.
I hadn’t never been no killa then. Sure, I busted caps in a couple fools, beat some slobs down, but I ain’t never heard nothin’ ‘bout none of ‘em dyin.’
Anyways they was five of ‘em, all bald-headed in they khaki shorts with they socks pulled up and they little mustaches and wife beaters, lookin’ all the same like soldiers. They had this trick with ‘em, hair all wet lookin’ and lotsa lipstick like they like ‘em. She had a dog in her arms, if you could call it a dog. It was one of them yappy little Mexican mutts like in the Taco Bell ads. Ain’t no fuckin’ dog. This one was black. Never seen a black one before. Looked more like a big ant than a little dog.
Cripto got a whiff of that motherfucker and stood up, and I guess that little dog smelt him too, ‘cause next thing we knew it had jumped out that bitch’s arms and was bouncin’ around in a circle barkin’ its goddamn head off.
Now I thought B had Cripto hooked to something, but that fool had just put his foot on the chain while he ate, and that motherfucker got loose and run across the parking lot, the chain just dancin’ and janglin’ behind.
It run right up to that little yappin’ mutt, right in the middle of them SSC’s. It picked that little bitch up in its teeth and bit down, gave it a shake. Thing stopped yappin’ right there. I think I heard the neck snap clean across the parking lot.
Then Cripto, big dumbass that he was, come trottin’ back to me and B with the thing hangin’ out his mouth, like he was bringin’ us a rabbit or something.
“Oh shit, ” B says, ‘cause all them Cholos come marchin’ in behind the dog, and the dog come right at us, and the bitch was cryin’ and screamin’ about her perrito.
“’Ay! ‘Ay!” one of the Cholos yelled, and they all started yellin’ at once, callin’ us motherfuckers. This big one run up and put his foot down on Cripto’s chain, pullin’ him up short. He dropped the dead dog on the ground and the bitch started yellin’ in Spanish for them to kill ‘these two niggers and their fuckin’ dog.’
The big one picked up Cripto’s chain and pulled him up to his shoulder, so Cripto was on his back legs, chokin’ and snappin’ and fightin’ to get away.
“This your dog, homie?”
“Yeah ma’fucka and you better let him go,” said B.
I didn’t like that dumb fuckin’ dog, but I hated to see him gaggin’ that way, twistin’ on the chain.
“The fuck you say, puto?”
“You heard him ma’fucka,” I say.
“What set you with, puto? You a ma’fuckin’ crab?”
Me and B looked at each other, and B pulled up his shirt, showin’ his orange belt.
It drove ‘em crazy. They was like dogs theyselves, and they started into thowin’ up they set, twistin’ they fingers up and frontin’ hard, talkin’ ‘bout they Hoover Killa Criminals and they goin’ fuck us up.
B backed up a bit, and that drove ‘em crazier, ‘cause they figured they had us faded. They stepped to us, and the big motherfucker pulled Cripto off his feet, but B bumped against me like he meant to, and I took his Glock out the small of his back and pulled it, unlocked and cocked.
I only wanted to scare them slobs off…
Gully Gods is coming soon in Four In The Morning.
There are several international charitable organizations which work toward preventing and raising the awareness of the forced ‘enlistment’ of children in combat and rehabilitating former child soldiers. Among them are:
http://childsoldiersinitiative.org
The United States has its own child soldier dilemma, and it doesn’t gain much sympathy from the public. There are a few organizations out there that work with lower income communities and troubled youth in danger of becoming victims of the pervading gang culture. An internet search will turn up any number in your own area. All of them are in dire need of support.
(LA-based organization that exclusively trains and employs ex-gang members and at-risk youth. ‘Nothing stops a bullet like a job.’ Homeboy is currently on the rocks and could definitely use some help.)
http://www.catholiccharitiesusa.org
http://www.resurrectionproject.org
(works to improve the historic Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago with affordable housing, childcare, and community outreach programs)
EDIT: Gully Gods now appears in my collection With Sword And Pistol from Ragnarok Publications!
Delirium Tremens 