"Club 27" Teaser

Since my short story "Club 27" has now published in Schlock! magazine, I'm free to put it on my blog. But, since I'd rather you read the full story at their website here, I'm just going to be posting a little teaser. Enjoy!

 As the fog grew ever thicker around his Mercedes, Jack McCracken had to admit he was utterly lost somewhere in the San Bernardino Mountains.

“What the fuck?” he muttered to himself as he took a long, nervous drag on his cigarette. “Where the fuck am I?”

 Jack slowed his car to a crawl and leaned forward towards the windshield as if that would help him peer through the gray mists completely obscuring his view of the road. Jack had gotten off Route 15 while driving back to Los Angeles at Cajon Junction to use the bathroom, but rather than getting back on the same route he’d somehow missed it and instead continued along Route 138 higher into the mountains. He wondered how he could have been so distracted to miss the onramp as he took another swig of bourbon from his ubiquitous flask.

As he drove, Jack could feel himself climbing higher and higher into the mountains. Shrouded by this implacable fog, however, he couldn’t get his bearings at all. He might be going in circles for all he knew. Jack stopped in the middle of the road, getting out to look around, and was struck by how bizarrely quiet the dark night was. He could see the vague shape of trees looming around either side of the road, but he could hear nothing – no night animals, no wind through the trees, not even the sound of faraway traffic. It was almost as if the fog was absorbing sound as much as it was blocking light.

Lost and utterly confused, Jack took another long drag off his cigarette before flicking it away, looked around one final time, then got back in his car to begin slowly crawling forward again.

The fog had settled in not long after he’d started moving up the mountains on 138, quickly thickening into a wall of mist. At almost the same time, Jack’s Bluetooth gave out, cutting off the music to which he’d been listening and plunging him into that weird silence. He’d checked the radio, but every station offered him nothing but quiet, leaving him without even the hiss of static. Jack had tried to bring up his GPS, but he had no service up in the mountains, and so there was no way he could even call his wife, Kai, to track his phone and give him directions.

As Jack wandered aimlessly through the impenetrable fog, he’d come to several intersections he couldn’t identify, each option just leading him further into a dark sea of fog. Jack had turned in these intersections almost randomly, making his confusion about his location even worse. He thought he’d passed Silverwood Lake a little while back, but if that was the case some mountain top developments should have been on his right, yet all he saw was inky blackness shrouded in thick mist. Jack had taken the road trip from LA to Las Vegas dozens of times before and never once had any issues with the drive, until tonight.

Tonight, the night he’d been forced to say goodbye to Emily.

He thought about her now with just a touch of sadness as he crept his way through the murky fog. He’d been instantly attracted to her the first time he saw her with her perky little tits and her ginger hair and her sweet Mid-Western girl smile. Emily had told him she’d moved to LA from Nebraska to make it big, and she was a recent enough arrival to still have stars in her eyes. He’d found that boundless, naively innocent enthusiasm somehow quaintly attractive to him, knowing it’d only be a matter of time before the filth of the movie industry crushed her soul, too.

Most of Jack’s career in Hollywood had been as a stunt man, so he was well accustomed to managing and conquering his fears. Over the years he’d developed quite a reputation as a stunt man who’d do things few others would, earning the nickname of “Crackhead McCracken” due to his willingness to risk injury doing stupidly dangerous stunts – yet despite that, Jack was starting to feel a deeply unsettling, unreasonable dread creep into his heart as he seemed trapped in this never-ending fog.

Jack continued to think of Emily as the fog got thicker, something he’d thought to be scarcely possible. The fog wrapping around and closing in on his car like greedy fingers made that fearful sense of impending doom grow. He chuckled nervously, flinching at the sudden sound of his own laugh.

“Well, Emily,” Jack muttered to himself. “You seem to be having your revenge on me, aren’t you?”

That would be a well-earned revenge. As the son-in-law of Hugh Pettibone, one of Hollywood’s most powerful and successful movie producers, Jack had assured Emily he had major influence and suggested he would pull strings for her. Jack had told her he helped oversee various projects and had a hand in choosing actors, so he could guarantee her a role in some upcoming movie. All she had to do in return was favor him with her company.

Jack, however, had been shamelessly lying to Emily just to get her to sleep with him, because, while Pettibone certainly was his father-in-law, he despised Jack with a passion and treated him with unrestrained contempt. Yet nonetheless, Jack’s ruse worked, just as experience taught him it would.

Emily had been a great lover – one of the best he’d ever had, he fondly recalled with a devilish smile – but she should’ve known better. She should have known not to get too attached to him, Jack reasoned to himself, to develop feelings for him. She should’ve known that their relationship was entirely about sex, purely primal, solely focused on carnal satisfaction. She should have known she was nothing but a pleasant distraction for Jack in what was an otherwise pointless existence for him.

He’d told her clearly enough a year earlier, at the very beginning of their affair. He could distinctly recall the questionable odor of the downtown motel they met at their first night together, one far away from the prying eyes of the Hollywood hills and the Pettibone family’s considerable reach. He’d lain there after filling her for the first time that night, gently stroking her red hair, admiring her green eyes contrasted against her milky white skin.

“You know I’m crazy about you,” Jack had said, “but you also have to know this is all we can ever be. Two horny lovers, meeting secretly as often as we can – I mean, at least until you make it big and forget all about me.” Emily had giggled at that. Jack very much liked that giggle, a sexy mixture of youthful innocence mixed with native lasciviousness.

He’d continued his thought, saying, “No dates, no hanging out, certainly no proposals of marriage. Just sex. You OK with that?”

Emily had leaned in to kiss him, and then, with a playful wink, said, “Of course…not like I want to get married.”

“That’s what they all say,” Jack said to himself as he floated in a sea of fog, just to break the unearthly silence in his car. “That’s what they always say…at first.” 

Speaking out loud had forced Jack to become even more aware of the crypt-like quiet. That was an image he instantly wished he hadn’t conjured. He had a sudden vision of himself trapped in a crypt, driving in never-ending circles in some foggy tomb for all eternity. Jack almost felt like he was literally floating through a black void. As he did, Jack felt that gnawing dread creep ever more deeply into his heart, and he had to work hard to push down his growing panic.

“PANIC!” Jack screamed suddenly just to shatter the silence but also because his thoughts turned to how he’d felt not long ago thanks to his perky little ginger lover.

Emily should have known better, Jack again had told himself. She should have known better than to fall in love with him, and she certainly should have known better than to tell him she was in love with him. She absolutely should have known better than to have told him she was pregnant with his child.

Emily had dropped that on him like a ton of bricks. She’d called him, which immediately sent up red flags because they normally only ever texted. Emily told him then that she was pregnant, and as chilling as those words were to Jack, much more so was the joyous, ebullient tone to her voice. He’d heard those words a few times before with other lovers, usually followed by a brief pause and then the words, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it,” coming swiftly afterward. Having lovers take care of such inconveniences was certainly a benefit for Jack, especially as it marked the perfect point at which to end their relationship.

“But not with you, Emily!” Jack yelled out loud as he became more disturbed by creeping through a blackened void in grating silence. “Oh, no! Not you, Miss Emmie! You had to go make things difficult, didn’t you?!”  

She’d had the audacity to be thrilled about carrying Jack’s child and had made it clear she had no intention of aborting their baby. When they met later that night Emily had told him again she loved him, that she wanted to be with him, and that their baby would bring them together. Emily wanted Jack to leave his wife and be with her. Screw the Pettibone’s, she’d said. Screw them and their power and clout and multiple Oscar wins. They could start their own production company, she’d enthusiastically told him.

“You don’t need them, Jack,” Emily had said. “They need you. That whole place would fall apart without you. You’ve said so yourself.” That’s when Jack started to feel panicked, trapped in his own web of lies.

When Jack had lied to Emily about being able to pull strings for her with Hugh Pettibone, it wasn’t just because his father-in-law hated him and treated him contemptuously, it was because he had nothing to do with the business. Jack’s father-in-law saw to it that he was kept far away from developing scripts, hiring directors, overseeing stages of production, or any of the many other things a producer does. Kai ran her father’s production company for him with great success, and Hugh made damn sure “that fucking former stunt man” remained as far away from his business as possible.

Not only did the Pettibone’s most assuredly not need Jack as he had led Emily to believe they did, but he also had no money to his own name. Jack didn’t work anymore, neither as a stunt man nor as the bit actor he’d occasionally been, so the money he had access to was what Kai earned herself, mingled with the massive profit from the production company. To ensure this was a benefit of marriage Jack could only enjoy while married, Hugh had insisted they sign a prenuptial agreement. If Jack should ever be divorced from Kai for any reason, he’d lose everything he had and go back to the life he’d lived before Jack had met Kai onset and then swept her off her feet.

At that time, he’d been living in a crappy little apartment in a seedy part of LA, driving a beat-up Sonata, and typically eating ramen noodles. He now lived in an opulent mansion in the hills, drove a Mercedes-AMG GT convertible, and enjoyed every luxury modern American life could offer the super-wealthy. Jack might not technically be a member of the elite, but he enjoyed the castoff benefits of being so close to that stratospheric level, which was good enough for him. There was no way in hell he was losing all of this for some freckle-faced redhead from Marsland, Nebraska with silly dreams in her head.

Then, to make matters worse, Emily had said it. She’d said the words that led inexorably to this night, to Jack ending their relationship. “You need to tell Kai,” she’d implored Jack. “It’s the right thing to do. And if you don’t, Jack, I will.”

At that moment, Jack knew what he had to do...