Another Teaser from The Tilikum Troll


Author's Note: You may ask what happened with my book. The literary lull was simply recovery from a pseudonym which left me angry and disillusioned. Kept me from writing fiction, after having written the truth about my life for decades.

Now I'm mostly free from my self-imposed, half-assed "secret" self. Having this freedom, I can finally resume writing this story. 

Here's another teaser, a Tale of the Tilikum Troll.

* * * * *

Thomas heard the entire conversation.

Although the entrance was effectively closed, he furiously clawed the sand where his daughter disappeared. Thinking password, he uttered everything he could imagine. Then he fired his service revolver twice into the embankment. Nothing, except displaced sand and loud reports.

After a few moments of realizing he couldn’t rush in to save Char, Thomas stood quietly a moment. Then, he heard voices. Concentrating, he realized he was not hearing, but registering them. In his mind. He sat down, covering his ears while still holding his gun. Anyone who saw him would think he was about to shoot himself. 

Except Zack, who rounded the corner of the bridge after jumping the fence and raced up to find Thomas sitting on the sand with that .45 in his hand.

Zack froze, hoping past his fear that he had arrived too late. He quickly realized Thomas was alive, but not responding to outside stimulus. Wary of the gun, not daring to touch it even to save a life, Zack sat down a few feet back and to his right.

Then he, too, heard the conversation.

Neither male moved during that horrifying 30 minutes. When the troll blasted his cerebral voice threatening them both, it flattened them in the sand just as Char’s body shot out of the embankment and landed 30 yards past them at the river’s shore.

Thomas sprang upright, gun pointing at the still-shimmering hole in the embankment, firing until the cylinder was empty. He briefly thought he saw the troll, and hoped one of the four bullets hit his mark. Then, the wavy hole was once again just a sandy bank.

Thomas turned to see Zack staring blankly, saying something to him, but Thomas couldn’t hear it. He turned leftward and saw Char’s body. He and Zack sprinted to her, the younger reaching Char first. 

* * * * *
Stay tuned... more to come!

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