Charnel House (37 page)
Authors: Fred Anderson
No book is created by a single person; it takes a team to make something worth reading (and hopefully, if you made it this far, you thought
this
book was worth reading). There are a few people who helped me in getting this to the place where you purchased it, and I would therefore like to give the following shout outs:
First, to my wife Robyn, for putting up with my incessant rambling about Joe Garraty and Bobby Frank, and who didn’t get
too
annoyed with me for spoiling the ending when she’d only read the first half of the book.
To Michelle Stulberger, who acted as a sounding board for my weird ideas and told me parts of my baby were ugly when I needed telling.
To Susan Burlingame, who has the most gifted eye for textual bugs I’ve ever seen. She also made me come to the realization that I say “in the floor” when “on the floor” is actually correct. I also said it about thirty times in this text. I blame my southern heritage for this.
To the designers at Damon Za (
http://www.damonza.com
), who created such an incredible cover.
Dave Stewart isn’t sure what to make of the door he just discovered embedded in the concrete floor of his workshop. All he knows is that it wasn't there a few minutes ago when his wife called him in for dinner.
It looks perfectly normal, like any door in any house except for its unusual location, but it’s not the door that has Dave so concerned. It’s the voice speaking to him from the other side, asking him to open it.
The voice that sounds so much like his own.
When the laws of reality are torn, you do or die.
An accident two days before his sixteenth birthday put Dan Mackenzie in a wheelchair, but he hasn
’
t let that slow him down. He’s made a good life for himself in the Florida panhandle since then, working as a computer geek and playing basketball with his buddies on the weekends. A normal life.
During a pickup game one September morning he meets a pretty woman with eyes as green as the Gulf of Mexico and finds himself irresistibly drawn to her. What he doesn’t know is that someone wants her dead. Very dead.
When a lunatic tries to kill her, Dan’s effort to save her profoundly changes his life, and he discovers that his notion of "normal" is nothing like he thought. Now the two have become separated, and he is fast learning that people are not at all what they seem. There are powers at work he never dreamed existed.
And they want
him
dead, too.
Poker player Matt Freeman knows life is a gamble, so when an oncologist offers an experimental gene therapy as a possible cure for the terminal cancer killing his eleven-year-old son Andrew, he takes a chance. The treatment works, and Matt feels like he’s beaten the house. His elation is short-lived, however, because Andrew is soon killed in a freak accident.
Nearly a year later, he is still struggling with his loss when a midnight phone call begins with a single electrifying word: “Daddy?”
He races into the Nevada desert to find Andrew not only alive, but in possession of an incredible new ability and on the run from those he calls “bad people.” Now Matt must protect his son from enemies with seemingly endless resources—and the willingness to turn Las Vegas into a battle zone.
Six months ago, John Burleson woke from a nightmare, about a quiet little cove off the Tennessee River and the terrible event he witnessed there as a boy. Now the dream is coming almost every night, always the same, robbing him of his sleep and sanity. John’s only hope lies in revisiting the past—and coming to grips with what happened all those years ago.
Kyle Maddox woke up this morning with an amazing new ability. There’s just one problem: his stepfather wants to use Kyle’s gift for his own benefit.
Now Kyle has to make a decision that will change both their lives forever.
