Serial · ongoing
The Seventh City
Nate Hollis is a junk-shop dealer in Albuquerque, a former combat engineer, and a man with a debt to a dead friend. He pays it by opening what was closed: old graves, old mines, old places that were meant to stay shut. It is not a noble trade, but it is a trade, and he is good at it. Shirley Vance walks into his shop with a photograph and a question. Her father went into the Sonoran Desert looking for the Seventh City, a place Spanish soldiers wrote about and never found. She wants him back, or she wants proof. Nate wants the money. Neither of them says what they are really afraid of. They join a small expedition into the Sierra Hueca. The guide tosses a coin before every decision. The professor explains away every legend. The desert gives them a mine, a sealed door, and a candle that goes out when something is near. The city is not empty, and it is counting them. This is a book about guilt, survival, and the cost of curiosity. It is quiet horror and hard walking, with a first-person voice that sounds like a man telling you the truth after midnight. I wrote it for readers who like their adventures with a dry mouth and their endings with a hook.
Chapter 1: The Trade
The Trade This is not a sermon, and it is not a wedding, and it is not a eulogy. It saves nobody, it joins nobody, and it lays nobody to res…
Chapter 2: The Paper Bride
There is a saying out here that a family goes from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, and I have never once heard a man say…
Chapter 3: Brother Rat
Brother Rat This is the one he told the most. He told it with his hands — the lid going back on the kettle, the knife coming off the table —…
Chapter 4: The Bride at Thirteen Mile
Harlan Deeds lasted about a year. He had two hundred men on a payroll and a county that voted however he told them to, and that counted for…
Chapter 5: The Half Book
The Half Book Rand shut my grandfather in the back room of the house he was living in then, and locked it from the outside, and left him in…
Chapter 6: Nine Springs
Nine Springs In 1979 I had a store on Central Avenue in Albuquerque, in the old part of town, where a man could still make a living off what…
Chapter 7: The Dead Show
We ate where we were standing, and while we ate we laid everything out on the flat rock and counted it. Dolores had her father's rifle, an o…
Chapter 8: Sealed
The piece they played was a duel. The man behind the cloth talked for a while and then quit, with the band going under him the whole time, a…
Chapter 9: The Blue Hole
In the spring of 1969 the papers had more armies in them than a man could keep straight. There were divisions in Europe and divisions on a b…
Chapter 10: Hollow Ground
They never did put that hole in the mountain. We cut brush and drilled test holes above the supply station the rest of that summer, and in t…
Chapter 11: The Hundredth
There is a rule in the trade, and they hand it to you before the tools and before the names for the tools. The rule is that ground keeps acc…
Chapter 12: Loose Ground
The rain was coming off the low edge of the poncho in one sheet, and where I stood the sheet came down across my boots. Every man in the squ…
Chapter 13: The Slide
He got two steps and stopped. Our safeties were off. That comes first, because everything else came out of it. When the thing rose up out of…
Chapter 14: Stone Garden
Stone Garden Tank got to him first. He put two fingers under Delgado's nose and held them there a while, then took them back and wiped them…
Chapter 15: One Left
One Left Two hundred and eleven steps. I made that count once on my belly, with the lamp in my teeth, and I made it again on my feet, becaus…
Chapter 16: Blue Fire
The first thing they teach an engineer about a tunnel is water. Not the enemy. The enemy is loud, and a man who is loud is a man you can pla…
Chapter 17: The Salamander
The Salamander I put the beam out across the water and got water back. That was the whole report. I held it there long enough to burn the pi…
Chapter 18: The Seam
The Seam I had the knife out of my belt when it came up the last ten feet, and ten feet is not a distance. I could hear it on the rock. It h…
Chapter 19: The Broken Book
Churchill had the line for it, and nobody has done anything with it since: no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent intere…