Android and the Werewolf

Android and the Werewolf

by Christopher D. Carter, © 2018

Text and Illustration Copyright © 2018 Christopher D. Carter

All Rights Reserved

Also by Christopher Carter available at ebook retailers:

Uncanny Tales of Crush and Pound 1 – 5 (Book 1)

Uncanny Tales of Crush and Pound 6 – 12 (Book 2)

Uncanny Tales of Crush and Pound Annual 3 & 13 – 21 (Book 3)

Uncanny Tales of Crush and Pound Annual 1 & 2

Caught in the Neuse

Children’s Books

When Kitty Came to Visit

Discover other titles by Christopher D. Carter at

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/SawdustEntertainment

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Epilogue

Lofindran Language

About the Author

Chapter 1

*

I woke up this morning, and I finally realized the hard truth, that there is no sunrise outside the window of my room. Nope, I can’t decide if it’s morning without an alarm to tell me that it’s 6:00 a.m. on Earth. I look out the porthole next to the couch I’ve been sleeping on, and all I see is darkness. Yep, that’s how it looks in the morning, at noon, and at night. I can’t complain too much though, because it’s my own stupid fault I’m here. The captain says we will find our way back home, that there is hope of seeing the Sun again, but right now, all I see out my window is the black of nothingness.

Let me tell you our story . . .

**********

Earth, December 24, 2094

I can’t even believe it! A chunk of gold eight times the size of the planet earth! she thought to herself.

It was Christmas Eve, and Kerry Gainsmore sat on the corner of the built-in bench beneath her window, looking out at the stars in the night sky. That’s enough treasure to change my life for good! she said to herself as she watched one of the stars suddenly twinkle brightly in the cold night sky. The window was in the dormer of her bedroom on the second floor of the old farm house that she lived in with her older sister, and she had spent the better part of the last hour mesmerized by the stars that flickered in the night above the Badlands of South Dakota.

Daylight savings time had roped in the darkness an hour earlier, and night had fallen on the rolling plains at 7:00 pm. By 9:00 pm, the stars filled the skies. She had turned off all the lights in her bedroom, and she had blocked the gap at the bottom of the doorway with a thick blanket to keep out any light from downstairs where her sister was watching a holographic movie in the living room. There were no houses anywhere near them for three miles in any direction, and there were no lights shining on the horizon that would detract from the lesser lights of the galaxies spanning the half-circle view from the Earth. She could hear some of the music from the movie, but it didn’t distract her stargazing.

‘Kiss of the Malevolent Stranger’ was the name of the film her sister, Abby Gainsmore, was watching downstairs with her friend from work. Her friend’s name was Harold Bonmot, and Abby had invited him over for dinner and a movie. Abby filled her days as a paleontologist, and she was involved with a high profile dig concerning the skeletal remains of a wooly mammoth on the site of the Badlands National Park. Harold was a fellow scientist who had just completed a year-long dig of the skeletal remains of an extinct short-faced bear that had also been unearthed in the same park. He was finished with the government grant that had been his whole existence for the last twelve months, and he was clearing out of town, if you wanted to call a blinking caution light and a feed store a town, the following week. Actually, the only real town that she knew of on the southwest side of the Badlands was a prairie dog town, and she doubted the prairie dogs would miss the company of Harold.

That wasn’t true for Abby. Or for Kerry. Still, no matter what the local wildlife thought, Abby wanted to spend some quality time with Harold before he left the park for the warmer climate of New Mexico. Needless to say that night, Kerry was the unwanted third wheel. As soon as she had finished inhaling her meal of sirloin steak and Idaho potatoes, the dinner of choice in southern South Dakota, she washed off her empty plate in the sink, put it in the drainer, and ran upstairs so she would not have to watch her sister suck face with Harold. He was a splendidly average looking guy with a good bit of bulging muscles in his arms to accent his ordinariness, and she was infatuated with him almost as much as her older sister. The last thing she wanted was to see her older sister smooching with him. It diminished him somehow, and she wanted to remember Harold like he was the day Abby had introduced the two of them on the excavation site: single. Kerry liked him, too, but she was too young to compete for him, being a thirteen-year-old with acne and ever-changing mood swings, which she didn’t quite understand herself.

Sitting at the icy glass of the window, Kerry looked out at the vastness of the Milky Way. The universe was so huge and filled with so many people, and yet, she felt so alone. Her thoughts wandered to memories of her mother, and that made her feel even worse, if that was possible. She missed her so much. Four years earlier, her mother, Helen Gainsmore, had passed away as a result of a freak weather accident. On the plains of South Dakota, the weather could change drastically in a matter of minutes, and late one spring day at the end of March, a cold front whipped through and dropped softball sized hail across the thawing grasslands. Her mother had been walking out in the field, returning from replenishing the feed in the barn, when the sudden storm had struck. A chunk of hail had fallen from the heavens and clobbered her mother in the temple on the left side of her head. Just like that, Kerry and Abby were without a mother.

As much as she missed having her mother around, she could not say that she missed her father. He hadn’t done anything wrong to her; it was just that she had never known him except by name and a few old photographs in an album. Dale Gainsmore; the name was familiar to her, but there was no real attachment to the person. His name was something that belonged to her sister more than to herself. Like an old softball glove of Abby’s she had found in a drawer one time: Kerry had put it on, and it fit on her hand, but she hadn’t been the one to catch the fly ball with it to win the all-star game. The glove was important to Abby, and that made it special, but it was not a part of her own history. The same was true of her father, Dale. She recalled a picture of Dale and her mother with one teenage girl seated between them, but that girl had been her older sister. Not her. Her mom had gotten pregnant by accident, and then her father had gotten killed before she was born. By accident.

What had happened to him? Dale had died in a tractor accident on the backside of their small one hundred acre farm. He had purchased a cheap tractor that he used to fill in prairie dog holes, and the tractor was an open seater and had no roll bar installed. He had taken it out to the far side of the property one day to fill in holes so that the cattle would not step into the rodent pits and break their legs. Instead, he had pushed on the brake too soon while going backward on an incline and had rolled the tractor over onto himself. Kerry was told that he had returned from the chore in one of those cheap black plastic bags like the detectives used on the police shows. When the funeral was all over with, their mother had parted ways with the tractor for nearly nothing just to get it out of her sight.

‘Cheap comes as cheap goes’ was what her mother had told her. Kerry didn’t know what that meant, but it was something she had learned to say when nothing else would do. Kind of like swearing, but without the four letter words that always got her into trouble in Sunday School.

Because of all of these accidents, Kerry made one mess of a mixed up child. Sometimes circumstances in life couldn’t be helped, but they still gnawed at the back of her mind, like a rodent stuck behind the sheetrock.

She laid there quietly as time passed under the window, and her thoughts drifted to her uncle Rue. Like Abby, Rue was digging around in search of himself. Except, Rue had chosen to go to the stars to do his digging, leaving his two nieces behind in the Badlands to do their own soul searching.

Kerry sang to herself while she watched the stars shimmer in the big sky. Space seemed to stretch a million miles as easily as it stretched a thousand. She zeroed in on the point in space where her uncle had told her he was going to visit, to search for a golden planet, if such a thing even existed. Treasure hunting seemed to be the conviction that drove both her sister and her uncle, the two most important people in her life, whether digging in the rocks of South Dakota or flying to far off galaxies.

She was hot in her upstairs room, and she opened the window of the dormer. There was no screen to the outside, and she leaned out through the window and reached her index finger as far as it would go to touch the point in space where she thought Rue was. A star twinkled at her fingertip, and she felt connected to her uncle somehow, though she knew she could not reach him. Silly as it sounded, her arms were not long enough, but her love for him stretched across the universe to wherever he was. She closed her eyes, and she made a wish on that star. A wish for an adventure of her own.

While her eyes were closed, a bright flash of light streaked across the night sky. A meteor, or something like it, crashed into the South Dakota plains.

Chapter 2

*

Andromeda System

On the giant view screen in the bar of the Green Dragon, the crew watched the two stars spin out of control until the blinding collision that had been years in the making finally occurred.

Damn! the captain said from his bar stool. His elbows were on the aluminum counter, and he leaned in close to take in the historic event on the holographic display.

Holy crap on a bronze toilet! the chief engineer shouted. It was an unusual swear for a bar fly, and the captain looked over at his subordinate with a raised eyebrow. He had never heard that expression before Rue Rumfelt shouted it out.

Bronze toilet? What does that mean? Captain Cribbs asked, and Rue looked at him vacantly.

I don’t know. I just thought of it. Anyways, that was amazing! the engineer shouted drunkenly and chased his words with a shot of Snailian vodka, a rather strong drink from a nearby asteroid belt made with slimy potatoes and aged in sea snail slime. Rue swallowed the whole shot with one swig, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. Then his eyes crossed from the burn as the liquor slunk down his throat. Man, this stuff goes down hard and slow! Whoo! And Captain, we’re gonna be freakin’ rich! he declared and pointed at the screen.

Up until that last sentence, Captain Marcus Cribbs had been preoccupied with the cataclysmic event that had just transpired on the view screen, and he hadn’t given much thought to the contemplations of his crew. But when he heard the honest, unmistakable greed in his chief engineer’s voice, he sat his Pale Titan Ale, or PTA, down on the cold, metal counter with a sharp clink of the brown glass.

Rue. Did you just say ‘we’? Cribbs asked calmly, and he pushed his elbows off the bar and swiveled his chair around so that he was facing Chief Engineer Rumfelt.

Ah, Captain, it was just an expression. You know I got no dibs on anything that comes out of that explosion. Planet-sized chunks of gold, more than enough salvage for a million lifetimes, but it’s all yours, Rue reassured the man in charge, and he placed his hand on the metal bar with a coin between his fingers. He tumbled the coin across the backside of every finger, down one side of his hand to the other like a magician. Then he flipped the coin in the air, caught it, slapped it down on the bar, and removed his hand. The coin was gone. The routine in which Rue called for a drink was unique, unlike anything Cribbs had ever seen before. Hit me again, he told the head cook and bartender, Patsy Shield, behind the counter.

Already? Patsy said. She was a pretty lady, average height with a kind smile most of the time. She never cut her long hair while on a cruise, and she kept it braided up in a ponytail and stuffed down the back of her shirt. She snatched the bottle of thick, viscous vodka and tilted the top over the shot glass to pour another round. She stopped when Cribbs held up a hand in objection. Patsy caught herself before a single drop hit the glass, and with the captain’s objection to the engineer’s request, she replaced the lid on the vodka and stuck the bottle of green liquor back on the shelf, at home with the others. The shelf behind the bar was like a subdivision of liquors from all over the Milky Way, and the array of spirits looked way too tempting to the budding alcoholic that had taken up residence in Rue’s body.

"I think you’ve had enough of my liquor to last the rest of the voyage, young Rue, Cribbs explained as he reached over and flipped Rue’s glass upside down on the counter. That’s the last bottle of Snailian I have left, and I want it to last until we get back to port on Specter."

Specter was the eleventh planet in the Solar System, a planet that had only been discovered by accident when one of the satellite probes launched from earth in the mid-2000’s had become entangled in its atmosphere and crashed on the surface. Cribbs had his home base set up on the dark side of the planet, and it was rumored that his base was full of hard-to-find collectible items from all over the known universe, and perhaps some from the unknown. Rue had just recently signed on board, and this was his first voyage on the Green Dragon as a replacement for the last chief engineer. He had never been to the base on Specter, and he did not know whether the other crew members aboard the Green Dragon had visited the captain’s base either, but he had asked a couple of them and gotten silence as an answer. Apparently, discussion of the captain’s headquarters was a topic that was off limits during casual conversation, and he was going to have to stay aboard long enough to find out by going there himself. If he kept pissing off the captain when he had had too much to drink though, he guessed that he would never get the invitation.

Rue pushed away from the bar and saluted Cribbs with a peace sign, and the captain nodded his dismissal. Then Rue staggered out of the bar room and into the hallway. The Green Dragon was large enough dimensionally to have a rotating outer ring of compartments for living space, shops, and entertainment. In fact, the ship got its name from the circular tube that orbited the center. It was green and had a dragon’s head painted on the outside, something the captain had thought up during his quiet time on Specter, Rue suspected. Personally, he found the ship to be boring, thus, his frequent trips to the bar. Tonight was no different, but Rue was feeling nauseous while he walked through the rounded hallway. The world around him was spinning, and so was his stomach. When he stopped and looked out of the port holes that lined the interior circumference of the giant hamster wheel, he could see the inner bearing of cargo holds and the engine room which made up the center hub of the massive ship. The circular motion of the spinning wheel was hypnotic. After the round of drinks he had just consumed, the last thing he needed to do was to look out of the windows, but it was such a difficult thing to resist, and he propped himself up against a railing and found himself looking out at the center of the ship. He watched the body of the ship moving, and instantly, he felt as if he were standing sideways on an enormous Ferris wheel.

Great, he mumbled to himself as the contents of his stomach decided to bubble up his esophagus at that very moment. He closed his eyes and clamped his mouth shut. Sweat formed on his forehead, and he swallowed deeply. He bent over and held onto the railing for stability because his knees were doing him no good at that moment. His assigned room, which he shared with the senior technician Jessie, was halfway around the circle, and he was not so sure he could make it that far without losing his nutritious dinner of beef jerky, blue cheese, and vodka. He would have to make his food choices a little wiser the next time that he decided to take five shots of hard liquor.

Maybe sardines and Swiss the next time, he said to himself. The thought of swallowing a whole fish, eyeballs and all, made his dinner float up that much higher at the back of his mouth. His eyes bulged, and he saw the window spinning in his peripheral vision. Once everything around him was turning, that was it; dinner flew out onto the perforated metal of the hallway floor. Chunks went through every crevice they could find, a perpetual stream of alcohol and salted food. The puke seemed to go on endlessly until his lungs were collapsed. He fell to his knees and saw spots before his eyes, and then he spit out the last of the vile and managed to pull a breath of air into his lungs. Once he was breathing again, he felt better, though the ship was the worse for it. He tried to stand, but his legs were like jelly, and he stayed there on the floor with his knees propped on the slimy grating, leaning his sweaty forehead on the railing along with his pasty hands. After a long while, when his stomach said he could change positions, he got up on his feet from where he had been crouched in vomit, and he tottered around the half-circle of the dragon to his room. The label on the door said ‘11’.

Hey, open up, Jessie, he said and banged on the locked door with his fist. Room 1-1. Binary 3. Hexadecimal 17. Open up, he said and chanted every syllable with a pound of his fist. There was a peep hole built into the door, but it never darkened to alert him before the door swung open suddenly. Jessie knew who it was, and she knew that the only way to quiet down the obnoxious drunk on the other side of the door was to let him in.

Vodka again, huh? she frowned. She was a small but husky lady, built like a can of corn with arms and legs sprouting out the side. She had a jeweler’s screwdriver in one hand and the door knob in the other. She sniffed the air, and she caught a whiff of his evening adventure. Ugh, and you threw up on yourself this time!

He held up a hand and leaned against the door frame. Hey, you don’t have to yell.