Mammoth: A Novel - Softcover

Perry, Douglas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0997237716 ISBN 13: 9780997237719

Verlag: AMBERJACK PUB, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

The small, isolated town of Mammoth View is hit with terrifying news on a summer morning: a mysterious, large-scale attack is unfolding in the surrounding forest. It’s not clear what happened, but it’s bad. And it’s not over. As residents flee in panic, Police Chief Hicks and his deputy set off into the woods to investigate. 

 

The attack seems like the perfect coincidence for Billy Lane. Looking for the biggest score of his career, he targets the local bank. The robbery does not go well―and the aftermath is even worse, leading the robbers to a nearby running camp for teen girls. 

 

Over the next twenty-four hours, chaos descends on Mammoth View as Billy, the police officers, and a courageous teen athlete at the camp face down murderous strangers and ghosts from their pasts―all leading back to what really happened outside of town.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Douglas Perry is an award-winning writer and editor whose work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago magazine, The Oregonian, Tennis, and many other publications. He is the author of two nonfiction books and co-author of another. The Wall Street Journal called Perry’s The Girls of Murder City “a sexy, swaggering, historical tale.” His biography of Eliot Ness, wrote the Christian Science Monitor, is “smart, authoritative, and bristling with challenges to the status quo.”

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The small, isolated town of Mammoth View is hit with terrifying news on a summer morning: a mysterious, large-scale attack is unfolding in the surrounding forest. It s not clear what happened, but it s bad. And it s not over. As residents flee in panic, Police Chief Hicks and his deputy set off into the woods to investigate.

The attack seems like the perfect coincidence for Billy Lane. Looking for the biggest score of his career, he targets the local bank. The robbery does not go well and the aftermath is even worse, leading the robbers to a nearby running camp for teen girls.

Over the next twenty-four hours, chaos descends on Mammoth View as Billy, the police officers, and a courageous teen athlete at the camp face down murderous strangers and ghosts from their pasts all leading back to what really happened outside of town.

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Mammoth

By Douglas Perry

Amberjack Publishing

Copyright © 2016 Douglas Perry
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-9972377-1-9

CHAPTER 1

Tori woke with a ringing in her ears. She wondered if she was getting a cold.

She rolled to her feet anyway and pulled on a pair of shorts. She shook out her limbs in the dark, squeezed her fingers into fists. Like always in the morning, she felt boneless and fuzzy, lost somewhere inside her body. A floorboard burped under her step. Liesel, in the bed next to hers, shifted like an old fishing boat. Tori tiptoed past her, slipped into her shoes. She eased open the cabin door and was off, running down the gravel embankment with quick, scissoring strides, disappearing into the woods.

The rush of air into her lungs shocked her. At first she thought she was going to gag, but then something inside her adjusted, something mysterious, and her breathing eased. She looked up. The night still grabbed at her arms and chest, but beyond the treetops, way out in space, the horizon shimmered like tinsel.

Tori wanted to love this early morning ritual. She wanted it to give her spiritual insights, open her up to nature, her body, and endless possibility. Instead, she felt lonesome. She felt small.

The morning dug deeper into Tori's lungs, a familiar, annoying burn. She picked up her pace. She shot between two trees and into an opening in the forest. All the other kids in camp stuck strictly to the program. They didn't work any harder than the coaches made them, which was plenty hard enough. But Tori knew she was behind the curve. She'd become serious about running only in the past year, and she was sixteen already. Her father had secured a spot for her in this girls' training camp outside Mammoth View, up in the Sierra Nevadas, about two hundred miles from their home in Bakersfield. It was the only running camp in the country for girls, and she'd been stunned when her father proposed it. She'd wanted to go to camp, just normal summer camp, since she was twelve, and her dad had never even considered it. He expected her to work during the summers. Slinging pizza. Hawking newspapers. Anything. Got to do your part for the family fund, he said. Now, out of nowhere, he wanted her to do this special, two-week sleep-away program, and insisted on driving her up there himself.

When she asked why he'd changed his mind about camp, he said he recognized her potential, that was all. Thought she could be good enough for a college scholarship. Good enough for the Olympics one day. With her dad's sudden enthusiasm, she had started to believe it really was possible. She couldn't be ready in time for the Moscow Games — she'd be just nineteen, and that was going to be Mary Decker's Olympics — but by 1984 she would be for sure. Decker, the little pigtailed teen who'd become famous a couple of years ago after winning the 800-meters race at a U.S.-Soviet meet in Minsk, fascinated Tori. If Decker could outrun those big Russian women, maybe Tori could too. She would work hard at Spritle's Racers, she'd promised her father, harder than she'd ever worked in her life. But hard work was only part of it; she knew that much. Did she have enough of that special sauce, enough extra red blood cells, to be really good? Good like the Kalenjin, whose bone marrow could send a rocket to the moon? She didn't know. No one knew yet even if Mary Decker could run with the Kalenjin.

Tori slowed as she moved into the center of the clearing, gazing skyward at an array of stars being blanked out by the morning. She thought about how everyone loved her father. People lit up when they saw Billy Lane coming. Slapped him on the back, ready for a quip, ready to laugh. But he was rarely Happy Billy for her. He gave her this hard, disapproving look all the time, like he was a hungry hawk ready to swoop down, and she was just this small, scrawny mouse, an unworthy snack. Tori thought she heard something — a hawk or a mouse, some kind of animal — and she picked up her pace again. Still in the clearing, still looking up at the sky, she thought how the world seemed too big out here, bigger than it should be. Her ears pulsed, the pressure jostling about inside her, thumping against the sides of her head. She stumbled, turning her foot awkwardly. She caught herself, but it didn't matter. She kept stumbling and turning, finally dropping to the ground with a bang. She held on tight.

By the time Tori made it back to the camp, she had calmed down. They'd all been told on the first day that the Mammoth Mountain area was geologically active and that an earthquake was always a possibility. This one hadn't lasted very long. Thirty seconds, maybe a little more. No big deal.

There was no damage at the camp. No trees or buildings had fallen down. Tori stepped into her cabin and looked around. Her book — Jane Austen's Persuasion — had slid to the end of her bed. That was about it. Her lump of dirty clothes on the floor had been undisturbed by the tectonic ruckus.

Everyone was in the dining hall having breakfast. Tori sat at a large table with her training group. No one moved over for her, so she teetered on the end of the bench, one buttock floating free in space. "You're all still alive," she joked.

"Not for much longer," Liesel said, dramatically holding her nose. "Go take a shower, Tor!"

Everyone laughed, the sound exploding over the table and bouncing off the windows. Tori had grown accustomed to the teasing. She was the new girl. Almost all of the others had been in the camp last summer. Tori didn't mind the teasing that much, but her face and neck still flared into a crimson rash every time. She hated that she was so transparent. She reached across the table, grabbed Liesel's cup of orange juice, and hawked a loogie up from her toes.

* * *

The quake had knocked out the phone line to the camp, though no one had noticed yet. The coaches discouraged parents from calling. Isolation was a powerful motivator. That's how it was in Kenya and Ethiopia, after all. Coach Prinzano, like Tori's high school coach, said that if you were going to be a real competitive runner, you had to think and act and live like an East African, like a member of the Kalenjin tribe. You had to force your body to rewire itself, if it could. That's why Spritle's Racers was at high altitude, more than seven thousand feet up the mountain.

After breakfast and a round of stretching, the seventeen teenaged runners broke up into their training cliques. Tori, Sofia, and Summer would spend the afternoon together doing 800-meter repeats on the track, synchronizing their strides and pushing themselves to the brink. But first they would head off on an eight-mile run along the outer bank with Mary Bowen and her group. Tori enjoyed the slow group runs more than anything else in the program. They provided a sense of community, rather than competition, among the girls. When their various warm-ups were done, seven of them headed out along the nature path, keeping their elbows in tight but letting their legs casually swing like hammocks. It was a challenge — alternately frustrating and satisfying — to hold themselves back, to keep their form while lazing along like old ladies.

The girls chatted during these runs — Liesel, for one, babbled constantly, about the University of Oregon's interest in her, about the hair on her boyfriend's back, about her favorite pair of short-shorts and what she wanted to eat for dinner — but Tori preferred to keep to herself, her head slightly down, watching the dirt path unrolling before her. She liked the way her insides felt when she...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: AMBERJACK PUB
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0997237716
• ISBN 13: 9780997237719
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 266
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: eucomply OÜ; hello@eucompliancepartner.com; ; Pärnu mnt 139b-14; Tallinn; 11317; Estland