The Unwanted Winter - Volume One of the Saga of the Twelves

The Unwanted
Winter

Richard M.
Heredia

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This book is licensed for
your personal enjoyment. This book may not be re-sold. This book is
a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are
products of the author’s imagination or are used factiously. Any
resemblances to actual events or locales or persons, living or
dead, are entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 Richard M.
Heredia

ISBN-13:

ISBN-10:

All rights reserved,
including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in
any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted,
downloaded, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any
information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any
means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written
permission of the author.

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Visit the author
at:

https://www.facebook.com/rich
ard.heredia.37

https://twitter.com/RichardMHeredia

http://www.linkedin.com/home?trk=nav_responsive_tab_home

http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/15082395-richard-heredia

http://www.shelfari.com/talarian

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Pen a quick review
at:

Smashwords

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Cover Art by Amygdala
Design.

http://www.amygdaladesign.net

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Books by Richard M.
Heredia

The Saga of the
Twelves:

(
https://www.facebook.com/TheSnowmanSeries?ref=hl
)

The Unwanted
Winter

Winter’s Fury (Reboot
January 2014)

The Shroud of the Lesser
(Coming Sept. 2014)

The Shadow Seed
Series:

(
https://www.facebook.com/TheShadowSeedSeries?ref=hl
)

The Misbegotten

Estefan’s Death (Coming
Summer 2015)

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For Antonio, Elissa and
Michelle

For Raquel

And, for
Christine

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I would like to give my
deepest thanks to my Creative Team, for always being available to
me when I needed to brainstorm or bounce an idea back and forth.
The three of you – Antonio, Elissa and Michelle - were a major
factor in the completion of this work. I will always consider
myself indebted to you for all the insight, all the readings, and
all the corrections in the quest to make certain all the pages were
perfect.

A special thanks to Raquel
A. Rodriguez, who has always been the spirit behind this story, the
one person that always wanted more, even back when it was only a
thought and without form. You were always the catalyst, the
cornerstone of my inspiration to re-tell this story after the
eighteen years it sat idle in my brain.

Thanks to my wife, Maira
Ayala, for giving me the freedom to follow my dream and for never
getting in the way. Mostly, my love, thank you for motivating and
keeping me determined to finish this project down the stretch when
it mattered most. Without that
nudge
, I don’t think I could’ve done
it.

Thanks to my mother, Petra
Heredia, for always listening to me and helping me grow. You always
let me write without in impediment, even when I was a little boy
with a giant dream.

Lastly, warm thanks to all
of my Facebook friends and pals (you know who you are!), who
consistently gave me encouragement and support, always eager to
comment on my progress and prod me to keep at it. Your support
helped me get this done.

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The Unwanted
Winter

Volume One

Of

The Saga of the
Twelves

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Interstate Highway
40

Friday, August
20
^th
,
6:04 pm…

Marianna White Horse sat
in the middle seat of the middle row of her parents’ Suburban,
staring through the windshield at the clouds on the horizon. Her
beat up, ancient-looking MP3 player was in her lap, a pair of
newer-looking earbuds stuffed in each ear. She was listening to the
latest
Lady Gaga
album, mulling over the gigantic cumuli-nimbus formations
before her, lost in thought.

She’d downloaded the music
from the family computer moments prior to its’ dismantling and
packaging for the move to Los Angeles. Though,
‘Gaga
wasn’t her favorite artist.
She had decided to listen to her now – right
now
- because her father absolutely
hated her. She had inputted the album into the ‘player on purpose,
hoping her father would discover her listening to the outlandish
tunes and beats, screaming of sex and homosexuality. It was her
plan, her hope, he would try and tell her to change the playlist.
It would create the perfect opportunity, the right moment, for her
to let him know just how much she disapproved of the family’s move
from the only home she had ever known. She would howl at him, make
him understand just how much she hated having to leave the only
street she’d ever played. She would explain with her last breath
how much she regretted leaving the only school she had ever
attended. She would scream at him, “I’ve been forced to leave
everything behind, dammit!”

It was all she had ever
known after all. She would yell and fume until she had no more
breath, by god!
Why do we have to leave
now?
Shit!
she
fumed.
If he so much as looks at me funny,
I’m gonna pick a fight!

They were traveling west
along I-40, making good time at a steady eighty-five miles an hour,
having passed through Winona about a minute earlier.

Now, they were about 14
miles out of Flagstaff, the city with the highest elevation in the
state of Arizona. It was a quaint, drowsy community nestled over
seven thousand feet upon the vestiges of the San Francisco Peaks –
themselves, the remains of eroded stratovolcanoes, dead ages
ago.

She had done the
calculations in her mind. Since they’d been on the road for about
an hour and fifteen minutes, she guestimated they were now over
seventy-five miles from all she was used to, all she had ever
liked, and all, she was certain, she could
ever
manage to love.

Love! Not like I’d ever
find
that
again.
Her eyes played along the
huge, billowing forms, towering above the raised land surrounding
the small city ahead. There was always some sort of overcast about
those peaks. Every time she’d come this way in the past, she’d seen
them obscured by a myriad of overarching cloud cover.
Ah, there’s one that looks like a giraffe with
its’ neck bent backwards
.

It was true; Holbrooke,
Arizona wasn’t the most glamorous placed to live. And, by
comparison, the city they were moving to was arguably in the top
five most glamorous cities on earth. This was undeniably accurate,
but still, to her, the small town of ten thousand souls had been
enough. She’d been happy there. She had good friends - loyal and
lifelong. Friends she’d gone hiking and camping with nearly every
weekend, especially during the summer months, when it was so hot.
They could sleep atop their sleeping bags in just their tank tops
and shorts - comfortable, free. They never had to worry about any
weirdo’s or whack-jobs bothering them, even when they were way out
in the boondocks. Her life had been simple and carefree. She had
embraced it fully.

In town, they could walk
the streets at night and still feel safe. Everyone knew everyone
else, which made abhorrent behavior difficult to mask. Her parents
had often left the front door unlocked just as often as they locked
it.

That was the honest
truth.

Now, speaking fairly,
there were drugs here and there about town. Though, it was mostly
marijuana or “X” (which was so rare her and her friends hardly ever
got the chance to even look at one of those pale blue pills), and
what the hell, right? Getting high now and again never hurt anyone.
It wasn’t too terrible a thing, right?
Besides, it wasn’t habit forming
,
she told herself silently, sitting there in the suburban, trying
her damnedest not to forget where she’d come from. She wouldn’t
forget.
You assholes can’t make me
forget!
She promised.

Far ahead, the clouds were
obliterating their current shapes, recreating new ones.

Sitting there, in the car,
watching the landscape fly pass, her mind kept wondering. She
couldn’t recall who had told her weed was benign or when they’d
said it. In the end, it didn’t matter.

She and her friends
weren’t potheads or stoners, like the kids she’d seen on her
Fathers’ worn out VHS copy of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. A movie
she was certain her father kept around because half way through it,
Phoebe Cates comes out of a pool with her perfect rack bared to
Judd Reinhold. Her tits were glistening and sparkling in the
sunlight. How could anyone forget that?