Chapter 1


    A lone police cruiser sat beside the isolated road near Kingston, Texas.  The red and blue lights splashed their light on the thick pine forest where two officers from Nacogdoches had entered a few minutes before.  
    They were among dozens of other officers from the surrounding area, responding to a call unlike any they had ever heard.  A small town had been cut off from the rest of the world, and something evil had happened there.  Six killers- or maybe seven, the reports were unclear- had turned Kingston into a bloody playground.  Fires raged, bodies were strewn across streets and inside many buildings.  And every single one of the killers was dead.
    Except for one.
    One was unaccounted for, and so the manhunt in the surrounding area had been called for.  Officers Cade Faust and Holt Camden were slowly stalking through the dense wood, shotguns drawn, and looking for the final killer.  A young man, reports suggested.  His name was Sean, according to a witness’ report, and the officers trusted that witness.  He was one of their own.  Sheriff Sullivan Knox had played a role in the capture and killing of the murderers, but he was on his way to a Dallas trauma center with life-threatening wounds.  That made Faust and Camden dead serious about finding the man who hurt their proverbial brother in blue.
    Faust was a rookie, his first day on the job, in fact.  He had completed the Academy in Dallas just a month earlier, and been called up by Nacogdoches PD just the week before.  He’d done a virtual interview, what with the world still recovering from a pandemic and the fears that came with it.  Small towns like Kingston ignored the distancing and masking, but the Nac was a bit more cautious.  He’d just met his desk sergeant, a guy named Volker, and Camden about five minutes before the “all hands on deck” call went out.
    Faust was an outsider in every sense of the word.  He was not from East Texas, and had been raised near Austin.  He was orphaned as a child when his single mother died in a car accident.  With no father claiming him, Cade went into foster care, and won the lottery.  He had great adoptive parents who instilled a strong desire for justice and a moral code.  Unfortunately, when he was in college, they were killed in a home invasion.  Cade decided then and there to pursue a career in law enforcement.  He left college and enrolled in the Dallas Police Academy.  
    Camden was a ten year veteran, but one that had never had to pull his weapon.  Until that morning.  Part of the reason he never pulled his gun was his size.  He was six foot four and built like Atlas.  He waded into the woods with a fearlessness that only the truly tough men exuded.
    Or the arrogant.
    “Watch my six,” Camden ordered.  He was impatient with new recruits.  Figured it was good for them to get tough love.  His last two had made sergeant inside of two years, and Camden liked to think he was a big part of why they did.  This Faust kid was greener than he liked, but he was about to get baptized in a big way.
    “What’s he look like?” Faust asked, swinging his shot gun toward a shaking pine branch.
    “Swiss cheese if what Sheriff Knox said is to be believed,” Camden said gruffly.  He snapped his head around toward a crunching noise, then chuckled to himself.  Sullivan Knox was a small-town sheriff that had definitely got in over his head.  And his town paid for it in blood.  Camden thought as little of small town sheriffs as he did of rookies.  But a cop was a cop.  And no one bled a boy in blue and expected to get away with it on Holt Camden’s watch.  “But Sergeant Volker gave me the BOLO when we headed here. It says he’s early twenties with brown hair and brown eyes.  ‘Bout five eight or so.”
    “Sure it ain’t me?” Faust joked, tousling his brown hair and pointing to his own brown eyes.
    Camden turned slowly and looked Faust up and down, then snorted.  “Don’t pay to joke around with a murderer on the loose.  I might get an itchy trigger finger,” Camden said without humor.
    Faust bit his lip and ducked his head, like a puppy who had just been scolded.  
    Camden turned around and pressed deeper into the woods.  He came to an opening in the trees and he looked out across a lake.  On the far side was a tall saw mill.  Kingston’s biggest landmark.  And the escaped killer had come from it.  “Gotta be around here somewhere,” Camden said, kneeling down and seeing wet soil a few feet from the edge of the water. “Came this way.  Getcher gun ready, kid.  We get this boy and we get medals.”
    Camden rose and turned.  Faust was gone.  He snarled with disgust.  “Kid, we gotta keep each other in sight.”
    “I agree,” came a new voice- a muffled tone with a hint of a sneer.
    Camden wheeled around looking for the sound of the voice.  But it didn’t come again.  Faust was nowhere to be found.  “Come out, Sean,” Camden called.  “Surrender yourself.  It’s the only way you make it out alive.”
    “I could say the same about you,” came the muffled voice.  But it was closer. Right behind Camden.  He turned once more, and he was looking into a solid wall of foliage.
    Two large, red eyes looked back at him.
    And a sawblade smile grinned back at him.  
    Camden jumped back, startled, and the face moved at him.  He was so transfixed by the oddity of the mask that he almost didn’t see the broken branch arcing toward his neck. When he did see it, it was too late.  The branch tore into his jugular, just above his vest and sprayed blood across the wooden mask that smiled with those dead red eyes.  Camden gurgled as he choked on his own blood, dropping his shotgun and crumbling to the ground.  
    The man wearing the mask, the man who had once been Sean Densman, ‘the Novice,’ in the events of Killtown- he stood over his latest victim, and pulled the branch from his throat.  Behind the mask, Sean smiled, and his own eyes lit up.  He brought the branch’s jagged tip down again, and again, obliterating Holt Camden’s face.

Or get a signed copy directly from this site!

Signed KILL U

$21.99

Signed copy of KILL U with optional personal message at no extra charge.
Shop