Free! Free! Free! Night in Desert Blue Acrobat Reader Version (pdf) | Word Version
Sharina Alleycat - Art Copyright by Dorian Cleavenger
Sharina Creswell stood near the door of Mitchy’s Bar and surveyed the rowdy crowd. The second moon of the month was in full swing, and the people around her acted crazier than a woman listening to a deathwatch beetle count down the seconds until her lover’s untimely demise. They were afraid of the Moglith—dark spirits of the night who came to claim unoccupied bodies during the months of two moons. In those weeks, a person’s body became like the old-world American Express card—don’t leave home without it. The bar’s patrons were harmless, for the most part, just drunk, talking loudly and stumbling around like idiots, trying to forget the government no longer cared what happened to them. What’s the matter with these people? If I were them, I’d want to be sober enough to face a Moglith with all my senses about me. Sharina spanned the room with a watchful gaze. So far, the place remained free of the Moglith creatures. Sometimes they weren’t spirits, but flesh and blood monsters that killed without mercy, ripping a victim’s heart from his chest with razor sharp claws. The rest of their bodies resembled prehistoric man as if evolution had reversed itself in a matter of days instead of billions of years. Sharina shuddered, remembering the first time she’d encountered one. It wasn’t something she had wanted to face again in her lifetime, but she protected the city, even without the government’s approval. She wasn’t old enough to remember what happened in the fall of 2003. The only thing she knew for certain, after the second Gulf war, America’s president fell victim to the twenty-year cycle curse brought on by a Native American, which started with William Henry Harrison back in 1840. After a disastrous war with the white men, who had broken treaty after treaty, Tecumseh or his kinsman, the prophet Tenskwatawa, claimed Harrison would become the Great White Chief, but wouldn’t live to enjoy his office. Every twenty years another American president would meet the same fate. Curse or prediction? Most likely both. After the president’s fall, terrorists came back to bite the United States in the ass with a nasty surprise by turning most of the west coast, east coast and southern coastline into a desert wasteland. They called it the desecration bombs. In the deepest part of the ocean where no man had ever traveled, icebergs broke free and exploded to the surface turning it into a frozen tundra. Out of that rotten core the Moglith had been formed, half-human, half-monster with supernatural strength and zero mercy—or so legend said. Not many people had been to what some called the Moglith Desert, or Desert Blue. Fewer returned to tell about it. Sharina was one of the few.
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