Chapter 7: Shadows in Killeen
Miles away from the quiet military housing, in a dimly lit, abandoned auto repair shop on the outskirts of Killeen, Hector Reyes tapped his fingers [more…]
Category: Fast Food
Chapter 6: Broken Glass and Cloud Backups
The next morning, I left for school with a lightness in my step I hadn’t felt in years. The weight of Victor’s lies and my [more…]
Chapter 5: One Hundred and Eighty-Four Messages
My fingers flew across the keyboard of my backup rig, the old Nokia connected via a custom-made adapter. The screen glowed with lines of code, [more…]
Chapter 4: The Old Phone in the Cedar Chest
The house fell silent hours later, the only sound the hum of the air conditioning. I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling, the [more…]
Chapter 3: Smoke and Mirrors
I pushed open the front door to our base housing duplex. The familiar scent of my mother’s Vietnamese cooking usually calmed me, but tonight it [more…]
Chapter 2: The Price of a Fallen Soldier
The air in Major General Bradley’s office was cool, almost sterile, a sharp contrast to the humid Texas heat outside. I sat on a plush [more…]
Chapter 1: The Uniform She Didn’t Need
Part 1 My stepfather, Staff Sergeant Victor Delgado, laughed in my face, grabbing my wrist tightly right in the middle of the crowded Fort Cavazos [more…]
Chapter 11: Six Months Later
Six months crawled by, each day a quiet testament to what had been lost. The leaves had turned from green to gold, then fallen, leaving [more…]
Chapter 10: The Ultimate Deed
The day after Marcus fled Pine Ridge, a heavy quiet settled over Driscoll Motors. The immediate crisis of his presence was gone, but the long [more…]
Chapter 9: Unfinished Justice
The confrontation that followed was swift and brutal. I carried the physical hard drive, still warm from Leo’s extraction, into Marcus’s glass-walled office. Eli Croft [more…]
