Shattered
By Scott Crowder
Published by r[E]volution Press at Smashwords
Contents copyright © 2011 Scott Crowder / r[E]volution Press
All rights reserved. Any reproduction, sale, or commercial use of this book without express written permission of the author is strictly forbidden.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are inventions of the author. Any resemblance to actual events or people, alive or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover image was found on the internet and I make no claim of ownership to it. If it’s yours and you’d like it removed, please contact me at zombieapocalypse [at] earthlink [dot] net.
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Luther Guthrie glares down at the shattered remains of another mailbox lying in the grass of his front yard. Third one this month. The cold hard nugget of his anger is like a stone buried in the dark earth of his gut. His ratty old house-coat flaps in the gray wind and he pulls it tight once more; still chilly here in these dead weeks between winter and spring.
The third mailbox them damn kids have driven by and busted up with their baseball bats, and he knows for a fact that they've hit Earl Holliman down the road twice now.
Damn stupid kids. Damn these stupid-ass kids and their baseball bats and their boring-ass lives that they ain't got nothin' better to do on a Wednesday night but drive around bustin' up mailboxes.
Damn these stupid-ass kids.
He spends the next half-hour hunting down his mail. Some of it is hung up on the barbed wire fence at the edge of his cornfield beside the house, one envelope is in the boxwood shrub at the mailbox post itself, but most is scattered across the expanse of his front yard, soaking in last night's rainwater.
By the time he is finished and ready to go back inside, the cold hard stone of his anger has already worked its way a little closer to the surface.
Convection, it is called. The working of stones to the surface of the earth. Every year before planting he clears stones from the same fields he cleared last year. He'll have to do it again here soon.
It's called convection.
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