By: E. Michael Mettille
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Publisher: TMR Books
Cover Design: Mayhem Cover Creations
Genre: Fantasy
Bale made a bad deal a couple of thousand years ago at a dark time in his life. Everything had been perfect, and then it was almost all ripped away. Out of desperation, he made a deal with the devil. At least, that’s what he thought. He didn’t sell his soul to the lord of the underworld. He sold his daughter’s soul to Orwell Durr, a cat who is as close to the concept of God Bale has found so far. He’s been a hunter ever since. Taking a measly few years off his daughter’s sentence for every mark he brings in.
Everything changes when Orwell locates a soul he’s been wanting for millennia. That soul represents the biggest case—and the biggest risk—Bale has ever taken. If he succeeds his daughter’s soul is free. Maybe they could find some kind of normalcy in a couple of lives which have been anything but that. If he fails… Well, he’d probably rather not think about that. She’d be lost to him forever. There would be no reason for him to exist.
The mark for this big case resides in Perver City, hell if you’re keeping score, but it ain’t what you think. Orwell sells the City of Gold as total spiritual bliss. Buy it or don’t, that’s the pitch. Perver City isn’t quite the opposite of that. There is no fire, burning, or suffering. That place is total physical bliss. Any pleasure you can imagine with no consequences. It sounds great, but for Bale it represents a whole pack of distractions that might be too enticing to avoid. Hopefully, he’s stronger than whatever that place throws at him. His daughter’s soul depends on it.
Lots of folks who have suffered a near death experience—whether they end up crossing that line into clinical death or just come very close to it—talk about seeing a light. For some, this light fills them with joy and hope for what’s to come. It reaffirms their beliefs in a hereafter, whatever those beliefs might be. Others are filled with dread. Regardless of how they come away feeling about the situation, some of them aren’t ready to go. They are free to continue along on their mundane and useless journeys through this physical existence. Some are ready to go, and they know it. Those poor souls are tormented. Guilt weighs on them like a boulder crushing their spirit into the soft earth. Some think it’s demons or ghosts hunting them down to drag them off to hell or heaven or whatever thing they believe in. That part’s all in their heads. They are hunted, but it ain’t by any spiritual beings.
Bale Lance was a hunter. Millions of realities running alongside one another fell under his jurisdiction, and they all had an equal number of myths and beliefs, gods they worshipped or feared. None of those were real in the sense that the particular entity existed in the way they were described in those stories. All those various supreme beings were nothing more than failed attempts at describing Bale’s boss, Orwell Durr. Those souls belonged to him, and it was Bale’s job to collect them.
One of those wayward souls was the reason Bale found himself standing beneath the weight of an unseasonably warm, late April sky on a crumbling street in the bowels of Hell’s Kitchen. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but the air was so wet it seemed droplets of rain could form right out of the nothing. It covered his skin like a damp towel. The street surrounding him was littered with trash and empty except for the rodents scurrying about the refuse and searching for unfinished morsels to chow on. The entire place smelled like someone forgot to flush after unloading the chili from the night before that just hadn’t agreed with them.
Bale stood in the center of it all, soaking up the despair and letting it beat him down to a dark place inside himself, a hollow pit of desolation where he felt desperate enough to sentence some poor slob to oblivion. He hated his job, but Orwell didn’t give him a choice. As he gazed at his prey through a window cloudy with dust from years of neglect, he thought he should be getting hazard pay. For two weeks he’d been chasing this one through the sweaty streets, wet from the heat and humidity and saturated with the smell. He had finally caught up to his mark. It was time to tag his bounty and move on to the next thing.
Bale dragged his palm across his forehead attempting to clear away the sweat beading up above his brow. It didn’t help. The soaking air just left it glistening again. He kept his dark hair clipped short. That normally helped keep the sweat off his neck, but it was just as wet as the rest of him. On the plus side, Bale kept himself fit. Having his thick arms glistening when he walked up to his mark certainly wouldn’t hurt. Intimidating his prey into believing they couldn’t win if they tried had helped him avoid plenty of unnecessary scuffles in his long career. That was good. His favorite kind of fight was the one he could avoid. The folks he hunted typically weren’t horrible people. They didn’t deserve to be hurt. It was just their time.
Ceasar’s Ghost was a shithole of a bar that was probably something fifty years ago, the kind of place where uppity fellows with too much money and too much time could get together to sip bourbon and argue about things nobody else cared about. The name was apropos. The place was just like a ghost haunting a street so littered with trash and sleeping homeless it looked more like a war zone than the vital avenue in the heart of a thriving metropolis that it desperately wanted to be. The unlit neon sign bolted to the front of the building wasn’t how Bale knew the crumbling establishment had possibly the most perfectly descriptive name for a place that ever was. That thing was missing enough letters that the ones remaining didn’t spell any word in any language. Two weeks of hunting, chasing, and researching a poor slob who knew somebody was after him but couldn’t figure out who had led to the perfect spot to hide out for someone who doesn’t want to be found.
When Bale finally yanked the heavy wooden door of the joint open and strolled inside, it was like walking into a time warp. He could picture the place packed with a pretentious crowd pontificating over elegant snifters—each filled with two fingers of bourbon that cost more than some folks make in year—about why one philosopher’s ideas were preferable to another’s. There was no crowd haunting Caesar’s Ghost on this night. It was just before last call, and the dingy space was empty except for three other souls besides him. The one on the end of the bar looked like he’d been sleeping for hours under a pile of matted and dirty gray hair. He wouldn’t be a problem. The youngster behind the bar had the tools to be a scrapper, but his smooth cheeks and all the product in his hair suggested he’d rather chase tail than trouble. And then there was the fat, sweaty reason Bale had to subject himself to one of the most desperate-looking shit holes he’d seen in his life.
Billy Crass slouched over a big splash of cheap whiskey in a tumbler that looked like it was plucked right out of Aunt May’s kitchen. Everything about the guy was sloppy. His dark, sweat-streaked hair stuck to his forehead in spots and straight up in others. The button-down shirt he wore was probably perfect for an office when cleaned and pressed. Instead, the wrinkly, gray thing, that had most definitely been white at some point in its history, looked like armpit stink. The frumpy, brown trousers didn’t look any better.
Bale took one more glance around the room before taking a seat on the wobbly barstool next to Billy. Cracks in the plaster spider webbing all along the walls and ceiling looked like veins under thin skin. The back bar was probably glorious during the place’s heyday. Now it was cracked and discolored from too many years of neglect. The bar looked the same, a ghost of architectural perfection, faded mahogany scratched with graffiti.
“It’s last call. If you want a drink it’s got to be a quick one,” the pretty boy behind the bar quietly said without much conviction in his tone as he scrolled through his phone, probably deciding whether to swipe right or left.
Bale offered a menacing, back off smile with his response, “Don’t worry, kid. We’ll be leaving soon.” Then he turned toward Billy, grabbed the man’s glass of whiskey, slammed it down, and said, “Billy Crass, you died at 10:34 p.m. on Monday, April 1st, in the year of our Lord, 2024. You were supposed to go into the light, but you know that. Why didn’t you? Was that your idea of an April Fools' Day prank?”
“Hey, buddy, I don’t want any trouble here. Order a drink or step off,” the bartender’s smoky voice cracked a bit as he held up his phone and added, “I’ll call the cops.”
There was a reason Bale wore his t-shirts tight. His swollen shoulders looked like they might rip right out of them. He flexed those bulging shoulders slightly as he leaned onto the bar and brought his face closer to pretty boy’s. The smile he’d been wearing shifted to something closer to a sneer as he quietly said, “Look, I don’t want to hurt you. I have a job to do. Put your fucking phone away, or I’m going to shove it up your tight, little turd squirter.”
Billy split. He nearly tripped over the stool he’d been sitting on as it crashed to the floor, and he stumbled toward the exit. The door groaned loudly before slamming shut behind him.
Bale didn’t pay any attention to Billy as he fled. Instead, he stared at pretty boy’s eyes and let his face tighten into a hard scowl. He sat there in silence like that for an uncomfortable few moments breathing deeply like he was counting backwards from ten in his mind to keep from exploding. He wasn’t, but if he were, he’d have only made it to seven before the bartender slipped his phone back into his pocket.
Bale let the smile slip back onto his face as he said, “Thanks, jackass. Now I’ve got to chase him.”
Chase was probably a bit strong a word for all the pursuit would amount to. Bale knew exactly where Billy was heading. The destination was a dumb one. If Bale were trying to run from someone who found him hiding out in a random dive bar he’d never been to before, the last place he’d go would be home. That’s the first place most folks who want to find other folks would start, their homes. Luckily, Bale had no doubt that the chubby sonofabitch was on a dead sprint along the four-block route that would take him to his shitty apartment. Bale would be there long before he arrived.
He grabbed a thin, rectangular device out of his pocket. It was about the same dimensions as a smart phone, not the shitty, small ones but the big ultra kind. Bale didn’t have one of those. There wasn’t anybody he really wanted to talk to that badly, and he wasn’t a fan of any media, especially the social kind. He spun a couple dials on the thing and was just about to push the button that would transport him to his next destination without any running necessary when he felt the bartender staring at him.
Pretty boy’s quickly morphing expression gave away how hard he was thinking about the next words that would dribble out of his mouth. “Are you going to pay for that guy’s drinks since you chased him off?” he asked so quietly it was just a hair louder than a whisper.
“Why would I pay a dead man’s debt?” Bale chuckled and then hit the button on his device.
A moment later, he materialized on the top of a six story, red brick building across the alley from an identical red brick where Billy lived on the fifth floor in apartment 508. Both were equally dilapidated. Bricks were missing here and there. The windows that weren’t covered in rusty, metal cages were boarded up or missing altogether. Corroded fire escapes looked like the only thing they could help one escape from was life, and graffiti covered the buildings far higher than a human should want to scale a crumbling structure.
The sky was much better to look at than the sweaty hell languishing around the alley below. The moon was big and full that night, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky to hinder its brilliant light in the least. Bale loved the moon, full or a sliver didn’t matter. It was one of the only things that brought him any joy anymore. The city lights hid the brilliance of all but the most ambitious stars and planets, but the ones he could see added just a little more magic to the quiet darkness. It looked so peaceful. He’d love to step right off the edge of the building and float off into the nothing, sail off into space and forget everything. He could never do that. There was someone depending on him.
“Where the fuck did you come from?” a voice asked from the shadows behind him, interrupting his little moment of Zen.
Bale spun quickly to get a bead on the owner of the raspy voice who had ruined his peaceful moment. It took a minute to place the fellow. He was buried in newspapers and other random trash. All the exposed parts of him were covered in so much soot, he blended perfectly into the darkness.
Once Bale had identified that the man wasn’t a threat, he smiled wide and answered, “Ceasar’s Ghost.”
“You ain’t no ghost,” the dirty fellow responded.
“No, I’m not a ghost. I was at the bar named Ceasar’s Ghost, and now I’m here,” he chuckled a bit as he replied.
“Yeah, but how did you get there?” the man grew a bit agitated as he spoke, “One second there was nothing there, and the next second, you’re standing there looking at the sky. How did you get there?”
Bale knew what the guy meant, but he had a few minutes to kill. He had no idea what it looked like to anyone who saw him arrive—or depart for that matter. That’s what he called it when he used his device, arriving and departing. He didn’t really understand how it worked, but it was a great tool for his line of work, which was basically hunting people. He plugged in the potentiality, longitude, and latitude coordinates, and hit the button. Then he vanished from where he was and showed up where he wanted to be. It was like a bionic GPS.
“That’s exactly how it happened,” he finally said. “First I was at the bar, and then, just like that, I was here.”
“Bullshit,” the guy groaned at him.
“May Athena strike me down if I’m lying,” he held his hand up as if it might add some validity to the statement in the skeptical man’s mind. Then he scratched his chin and asked, “What did it look like?”
“Static,” the man replied quickly, “The air got all shaky, and then it looked like tiny blocks were being put together so fast you could hardly see them. Then you were there, gazing at the moon like a jackass.”
Bale thought about the description. The fellow’s explanation of what he saw lined up with how it felt to travel. Departing did feel a bit like being torn apart, deconstructed into the most basic atoms to travel through space and time like waves of light or sound, and then put back together on arrival. The process hurt, but the pain was brief. He could never forget the first time he’d done it. It was an instant of terror the moment he hit the button. It felt like a thousand knives sliced into every part of his body all the way into the bone, but the pain ended before the mind-numbing fear could take hold. Then he was standing somewhere else no worse for the wear.
The man’s raspy voice dragged Bale away from the brief reflection as he asked, “Well, how did you do that, just show up like that out of nowhere? Is it some kind of trick? Are you one of them YouTube guys that goes around tricking people and fucking with them and making them look stupid. I ain’t got no place to go, but I ain’t stupid.”
It would be a solid minute and a half before Billy made the alley. Plenty of time to humor a guy who probably didn’t have much joy in his life. Bale finally smiled and said, “No, you obviously have your wits about you, and I am not some kind of Internet magician or anything like that. I hunt souls. I have a device that can transport me any place in any dimension at any point in their history.”
“Bullshit,” the man scoffed as he struggled to his feet, “Let me see it then.”
Bale tensed as the man approached. There was no reason to hurt the guy. Hopefully, the man wouldn’t give him one. “What are you doing?” Bale asked with a bit of authority stiffening his words.
“Relax,” the guy groaned as he shuffled closer, “What’s a scrawny fucker like me going to do to a tank like you? What are you, like six-two, six-three? You look like a pro wrestler. Steroids?”
“No steroids,” Bale chuckled, “I have a pretty strict training regimen. None of the marks carrying around the souls I need to collect want to give them up, and some of them are pretty tough customers. I need to keep myself fit.”
The man posed no threat. Even wrapped up in a dingy, old blanket, that much was obvious. There was something sad about the curiosity in the man’s bright eyes as they sparkled from the soot caked upon his sunken cheeks. He probably had a good life at some point. Bale thought of asking but didn’t. Billy’s big ass would be slowly running as fast as he could down the alley any minute, and it would be time to split.
Bale slid the device out of his pocket and waved the man closer, “Here, look at this.”
That was a mistake. The man was about a foot away from him when Bale caught a whiff. The guy looked like he spent his days swimming in sewage. He smelled even worse. Bale did his best not to grimace, but the odor was breathtaking.
Bale held the device out from his body to stop the man’s advance and struggled through his explanation, “Your reality is potentiality zero. There are millions, maybe billions, of potentialities very similar to this one but different enough that you wouldn’t recognize them all running in straight lines next to each other, each a mere vibration from the next. These are like different dimensions, slices of reality running from, based on the beliefs of this reality, we’ll say Heaven and Hell. This is the potentiality I come from. Anyone can travel from one to another, but it ain’t easy. It requires focus and manipulation of elements. This device does all that extra nonsense for me. I plug in the potentiality I’m traveling to along with coordinates, latitude, longitude, altitude, etcetera, and hit go.”
Bale clicked the button as soon as he finished his explanation. That instant of pain wasn’t the least bit frightening anymore. He knew it would be over quickly. His awareness spread apart, stretching, thinning, and expanding like a cloud. He could feel that he was moving, but it wasn’t like walking or driving, or anything of the sort. It was almost like floating. An instant later he was standing ten feet from the man, holding up his device and flashing a friendly smile.
“Holy shit,” the man gasped, dumbfounded.
“Holy shit, indeed,” Bale laughed. Then he shrugged, and said, “It’s been a slice, but I need to split.”
As if on cue, the sound of heavy footsteps and labored breaths echoing off the bricks of the buildings stretching up from the alley below filled the air. Billy had finally made the alley. Bale wondered if the poor soul had enough gas to make it the last half a block to the back entry of his building.
“Is that the guy you’re hunting?” the man standing on the roof with him asked, and then followed up with, “You’re some kind of alien or something, aren’t you? That technology, all that talk about dimensions. You’re from a different world.”
“I’m not,” Bale shook his head as he walked toward the edge of the roof, “I’m from a long time ago in this world.”
“Fuck that,” the man snapped. His voice gained volume as he grew more and more agitated, “You’re an alien. You’re trying to steal that guy, so you can experiment on him.”
“Dude, calm the fuck down,” Bale whispered, “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will.”
The man dropped his blanket and charged. Luckily, he kept his mouth shut. The last thing Bale needed was for Billy to get spooked and skip his apartment for parts unknown. The scrubby guy just grunted with his first step, lowering his head like he was going to attempt a takedown. It was a short elbow Bale threw at the guy, fast and stiff. It connected right at the back of his jawbone. He dropped like a rock, out cold.
“Dumb ass,” Bale sighed as he turned his attention to the alley six stories below. He felt bad about hitting the guy. He’d be alright. He’d be out for a few minutes, and his jaw would be sore for a couple days. Beyond that, all he’d take away from the altercation was a great story about how he fought with an alien to share with anyone who’d listen. It wasn’t personal. If the guy hadn’t caught him in the middle of a case, he would have enjoyed chatting with him for a while. As it was, Bale had work to do. His target was huffing and puffing six stories below him.
The alley was dark, a wasteland of trash and unfortunate souls hiding among it. There was only one light along the entire block. Halfway from one end to the other. It hummed loudly as it cast a dim glow on a steel security door with more dents on it than a newborn’s cranium. Billy was about ten feet from that circle of dim, yellow light struggling to finish the last leg of his journey. His feet hammered heavily into the pavement with each labored step he took, splashing water up from random puddles, potholes filled up from recent rains.
Billy was a mess. His shirt had come untucked, unleashing his sloppy belly to flop in all its hairy glory from his knees to nearly his chin with every slow stride. He fell just before the stoop in front of the door bathed in the glow from that one working streetlight in the entire alley. He crawled up the three steps and pulled himself to his feet on a rusty, old railing that barely held his weight.
“Don’t have a fucking heart attack,” Bale whispered. It would wipe out his payday if the jerk died before he could deliver him to Orwell.
Billy fumbled with the lock for nearly a minute before finally getting the thing unlocked and flopping onto the stairway on the other side of it. Hopefully, the poor slob would survive the five flights of steps he’d need to climb to make it to his floor. The door swung shut, and Bale turned a couple dials on his device to set the proper coordinates that would land him in Billy’s living room. Then he clicked the big button in the middle.
The rooftop around him melted away. After a whisper of darkness, four dingy beige walls materialized around him. He was in Billy’s living room with his ass planted in an easy chair which accounted for a full quarter of the furniture in the room. Nothing matched anything else in the room aside from it all being at equal levels of disrepair. The chair he sat in was leather and was probably gorgeous thirty years ago. Now, the material was worn, and both heavily cushioned arms were shredded and losing stuffing. The end table next to him had at one time been stained a light oak. At this point in its life, it was full of scratches and the finish was mostly bare wood. It housed a small lamp that belonged on a child’s desk rather than in a living room. The sofa next to that looked even older than the easy chair Bale sat on. It was an awful brown and tan pattern that was difficult to make out amid all the stains and tears in the fabric. Against the wall across from it all was a giant, flat screen TV. At least Billy had his priorities straight.
A solid five minutes passed before Bale heard keys jingling in the hallway. There were no less than four deadbolts keeping the door secure. It took another two minutes for Billy to unlock them all and bust into the kitchen. He didn’t even glance in Bale’s direction. Instead, he headed straight for the kitchen. The smell of spoiled eggs wafted all the way to the living room when he opened the fridge. Billy’s back was to Bale when he cracked a beer and downed it, twist, fizz, chug. Then he tossed the bottle into the sink and grabbed another.
Bale let Billy get about halfway through his second beer before he said, “You know, if you ran everywhere that fast, you might not be carrying around the ninety extra pounds that gave you that heart attack in the first place.”
Crash! The bottle slipped from Billy’s trembling hands and smashed to bits against the floor.
“Who the fuck are you?” Billy stammered without turning around.
“I’m a collector,” Bale replied quietly, “You died, but you didn’t stay dead. Some folks who almost die, aren’t ready yet. You’re not one of those. It was your time. You were due in the City of Gold two weeks ago. I need to take you there.”
Billy didn’t respond. He just stood there, tense and looking like he might try bolting again at any moment.
“Look, I’m sorry, but I have a job to do,” Bale’s tone was matter of fact as he continued, “You’ve got no place to go, and you can’t have any gas left in your tank. It’s over. Don’t try to run…”
Billy bolted toward the door.
“Damn it. Now I’ve got to chase…” Bale said as he thumbed his device and vanished, reappearing in the hallway right outside Billy’s door. The stickers on the flimsy thing read 50, but that was only because the 8 had fallen off.
When Billy busted through the door into the hallway, Bale finished his statement, “…you,” as he threw a right hook and dropped him where he stood. Then he looked down at Billy’s unconscious body and asked, “Why the fuck do they always run?”
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