69 INCHES AND RISING by Rebecca Steinbeck

CHAPTER ONE
     
    T he man in black loaded the gun, aimed it at the woman across the road, and pulled the trigger. The bullet hit her in the chest and blood flowed from the wound. She staggered across the front porch as the heat from the bullet tore shreds from her soul. She fell to her hands and knees and looked at the man who had shot her. He was smiling. The heat from the bullet was ferocious now, burning her inside like she was on fire. Tears rolled down the sides of her face and the man in black smiled some more. Her dress was soaked in blood and she crawled to the top step. She hoped to get someone’s attention, praying to God they could help her. But she didn’t get it and even if she did they couldn’t help her because the bullet had done the damage the man in black hoped it would, and it made him happy to see that.
    Her body was close to giving up now and the tears flowed hard and fast. She looked around, not for help anymore but for comfort, because she had accepted in her heart that by then it was too late. She looked around because she wanted the last thing she saw before she died to be the thing that had given her the most happiness - her home town that kept chugg-chugg-chugging along during the day and its sordid little secrets to itself at night. And as she looked around, she prayed the thing that gave her just as much happiness as her home town would be happy and safe in the arms of the daughter of the man who killed her.
     
     
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    J onathon looked at the words on the screen. It wasn’t how a romance novel should begin, he thought, but then again he was used to writing horror, and his own love story had begun in a river of blood so why shouldn’t someone else’s? He continued typing, one word following the other, and each word playing its part in the creation of a new world that would soon be filled with the same love as his. But first there would be something else. First there would be fear, for without fear there would be no appreciation of the love that followed. He typed as fast as the story unfolded in his mind, albeit with two fingers for he never took a lesson in how to type with ten. He was a literary superstar after all, and superstars could do whatever they wanted, and what he wanted to do was write, not take dictation. He was an author, not a secretary. And he was a man in love whose heart was driving the story he was writing down a path he had never been down before. The story he was writing was not about scaring the shit out of people as many of his other stories were. It was about making them feel. He wanted his readers to know he had found love and he was sharing it with them the best way he knew how. Through his words.
    Serena watched him from his office door while she hugged a warm cup of tea. He was wearing a set of headphones through which pumped heavy metal music. He had it so loud she could hear it even through his headphones and he was tapping his feet to the thunderous beat while his fingers punched the keys on the board in front of him. Sexy. Successful. And able to do two things at once. She had hit the jackpot.
    Jonathon tap-tap-tapped away. The pictures in his mind were transferring easily to the computer screen as they always did, and its one of the things that made his work so popular with the masses, but not so much with the literary snobs who thought that anything less than a Man Booker Award winning manuscript wasn’t worth wiping their butts with. But Jonathon Steel wrote for the man in the street, and he didn’t care one bit what the man in his ivory tower thought about it.
    He saw from the corner of his eye his cell phone light up with an incoming call. He kept tap-tap-tapping away, wanting only to write what needed to be wrote. The call could wait.
    Serena watched as the call rung out. She knew he wouldn’t answer it and didn’t press the fact it might be important. This was Jonathon Steel, world-famous and best-selling author and he was writing what