Hello
I'm A.L. Utterback, a writer and editor.
Sample 1
Two turns into the maze of stainless-steel, Keiko manhandled me up a set of metal stairs that led to a line of brew kettles. “Sit there a second,” she said. I sank on the middle step, thinking through attempts to get the gun from her. They all ended in a very loud failure.
Lear’s orders bounced around the brewery’s metal vessels, so distant and distorted I could hardly parse them. Keiko pulled a bobby-pin from her hair, leaving that greased-back pompadour a pin less pomped. “Bracelets aren't a good look for me.” With a single twist the lock clicked and the cuff fell from her wrist.
My voice was small with dread. “How did you do that?”
“Psh, this is nothing. The hard part’s when my hands are behind my back. Lucky for me, your goons locked me in the trunk so no need to be sly about it.” Keiko clasped her long-fingered hand about my bicep and jerked me up. “How do we get outta this joint?”
The gunbarrel stabbed the base of my spine. “Two lefts… Do you always carry lockpicks?”
“‘Course. All the good stuff is locked up,” K said, taking the lefts in quick succession. The evening light, wan and foggy, pooled in from the open loading bay doors, leading her the rest of the way.
“How did you know Lear would come close enough for you to take his gun?”
“I gave him a reason to get in punching range.”
The wind was crisp as a kiss as we walked out onto the platform. “What if he hadn’t hit you?” I asked.
“I dunno.” Keiko leapt down from the loading platform with a crunch, then spun the gun back up at me. The ghost of its pressure still hummed up my spine.
I tip-toed to the platform’s high ledge, a brisk ocean breeze pulling goosepimples up on my arm. “So you're just making this up as you go along.”
“Pretty much.” Keiko held out her hand to me.
“What?”
“You got heels on,” she said, beckoning.
“So?”
“So I ain't about to make ya jump a meter onto gravel, you’ll twist an ankle.”
“...You have a gun pointed at me.”
“Sure, but I ain't a barbarian.”
Chivalrous intent aside, it was clear Keiko didn't have a lot of upper-body strength. I leaned my weight on her and she wobbled, we stumbled, and she released my hand to catch me by the hip. “Y’alright?”
She smelled like cigarettes. I shoved her off. “I'm fine. I liked you better when you had a gun on me.”
Sample 2
Niko woke up on a hardwood floor. It was springy, and not quite smooth. He thought, maybe this is what real hardwood feels like. Odd—y’know like, funny-odd—because he’d never felt the real thing in his life. Foster parents pulling in another kid for the government check weren’t exactly the type. Children were like dogs to them. Once you got one it didn’t cost that much to get another and another, y’know?
There was a familiar smell in the air, the way smells can remind you of a taste, but Niko couldn’t place it. Too sore to move, all he could see right now was the ceiling way, way above. Up was about the only space left in the PNW.
Three-story lego townhouses had long taken over the backyards the natives used to have. Every poor neighborhood Niko had been shipped off to had steadily filled to the chin with relocated tech bros until government checks couldn't pay the rent much less the water bill, no matter how many strays the foster parents took in. In the city, at least. Out past Redmond, past Shoreline, past Kent, it was all open road, lonely and evergreen.
Wasn’t that where he’d been going? He struggled to grasp his last memory. He’d snuck out of the group home on a school night, he remembered. He remembered, too, paying for a ferry ticket with soft, crumpled, stolen bills. He remembered crossing the Sound. The water had looked like black glass under the gibbous moon. He remembered skulking off the ship with his hood up, bundled against the crisp, wet November in his greying goodwill jacket. He remembered a wrinkled Indian guy—y’know like, Asian-Indian—asking, in a familiar way, if he was going camping. He’d seemed nice, but Niko had scowled at him anyway, shouldered his pack then darted off into the woods. He remembered unzipping it, taking inventory by crank-powered flashlight: Canteen, pup-tent, wire, Zippo, emergency blanket, and the crowned jewel, the black-bladed hunting knife he’d nicked from a pawn shop four blocks from his group home. This time it’s going to work, he remembered thinking as he stuffed everything back in his pack. This time, I’m not ever going back.
Niko didn’t have his pack now, or his Goodwill coat or his fraying hoodie. Chill air was pulling goosebumps on his bare arms. The back of his t-shirt felt… wet—y’know like, sticky-wet. Sirens wailed in the distance. Niko grimaced, managed to turn his head. Bay windows, thrown open. Outside was a residential street, one of those oh-so-Seattle sardine neighborhoods of postage-stamp houses and tall, ugly-modern apartment buildings, shrouded in morning-grey mist. The gossamer curtains on the bay windows were a translucent white, except at the bottom, where they were spattered with a fresh, scarlet red. Niko put his chin to his shoulder, and with a turn of his stomach, he finally recognized the scent, just before he lifted his pale arm to find it slick with blood.