Black Box Inc. Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise for Jake Bible

  Other Jake Bible titles from Bell Bridge Books

  Black Box Inc.

  Copyright

  1

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  3

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  8

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  10

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  Please visit these websites for more information about Jake Bible

  About the Author

  Praise for Jake Bible

  “It’s fast. It’s fun. It’s colorful, and it’s one hell of a good time. This was my first experience with Jake Bible, but it won’t be my last.”

  —The Royal Library, spychocyco.blogspot.com on Stone Cold Bastards

  “. . . fantastically amazing . . . I don’t even know what to say. I was completely blown away . . . one of the best zombie books I have ever read.”

  —ContagiousReads.com on Little Dead Man

  “Morty and company burst to life in your mind’s eye. As tension builds and the violence becomes almost non-stop, it’s impossible to put down.”

  —SciFi and Scary.com on Stone Cold Bastards

  Other Jake Bible titles

  from Bell Bridge Books

  Stone Cold Bastards

  The Black Box Inc. Series

  Black Box Inc.

  Blood Ghast Blues

  (Coming Spring 2018)

  Black Box Inc.

  by

  Jake Bible

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-824-0

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-839-4

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2017 by Jake Bible

  Published in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

  Visit our websites

  BelleBooks.com

  BellBridgeBooks.com

  ImaJinnBooks.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo/Art credits:

  Man (manipulated) © Captblack76 | Dreamstime.com

  Background (manipulated) © Ig0rzh | Dreamstime.com

  :Ebib:01:

  1

  I DIG TAPAS.

  However—and I don’t feel like I’m alone here—I do not dig tapas when a goddamn severed head is plopped down in the middle of those small plates. The carne asada with ramp pesto (sounds fancy, but ramps are a local thing in Asheville) stopped being appetizing as soon as a small bit of severed-head-neck-gristle flew up to join the meat on the fork that was halfway to my mouth.

  “You gotta hide this for me!”

  I sighed and slowly put my fork down.

  “Hey! Lawter! Are you listening? I need you to hide this!”

  Chappy Reginue was a two-bit hustler who got himself into trouble pretty much every other day. Not our usual clientele, but then usual isn’t our gig.

  I leaned back against the bench seat of my favorite table in my favorite restaurant—Taps & Tapas. The menu had everything I needed, including a thick, dark stout and bread that’s even darker. Everything was farm-to-table, handcrafted, inspired by centuries of culinary masterpieces that span the globe, and priced accordingly. All of which is great (except maybe the pricing), but I liked the place because I needed a stiff drink and something tasty to go with it.

  Severed head is not tasty.

  “Chappy, you look upset, pal.”

  “Fucking A right I’m upset!” He practically shouted.

  Several of the patrons turned toward the disturbance. Asheville was known for its characters and personalities, but they were tolerated out on the streets. Once you got inside a nice joint like Taps & Tapas, folks tended not to be quite as accepting. They expected their money to insulate them from the weird that they’d experienced outside. Chaos was for the street corners, not their dimly lit tables holding appetizers that cost as much as any entrée in town.

  Chappy, not one to care much for the nuances of tourism’s socioeconomic strata, stared the gawkers down and flipped them off. “What the hell are you looking at?”

  Lassa was also eyeing Chappy. He could break Chappy in half if I let him. Lassa’s a seven-foot-tall, three-hundred-and-sixty-pound yeti. But shaved bald so he can blend in. We don’t ever tell him he doesn’t blend in. He hates that. The guy has pride. And he doesn’t like his dinner interrupted any more than I do.

  “Chase?” Lassa asked, seated to my right. My favorite table was a booth in the back corner, situated perfectly so our backs were against the wall and protected while we kept an eye on the entrance.

  “Not yet,” I replied.

  “He should lose an eye for being so rude,” Harper Kyles said from Lassa’s left as she twirled a steak knife between the fingers of her right hand.

  Then the knife was in her left hand. I never saw the switch. No one ever does. She used the steak knife to tuck a stray dreadlock of her raven black hair behind her ear and glared at Chappy with violet eyes. Her deep brown skin allowed her to fade into the shadows of the restaurant’s low lighting, but she’d leaned forward so Chappy could get a good look at the scars that filled her face like age lines. Except she was only in her twenties and far from old.

  She’s human. We think.

  “Maybe both eyes.” Harper made a stabbing motion with the knife. “Pop, pop.”

  “Sharon?” I turned to my right. “Chappy is upset. He’s in a hurry. He ruined our dinner. And he needs us to hide a severed head.” I studied the head for a second. “Dwarf? Goblin? Kobold? What the goddamn hell is that, Chappy?”

  “Kobold,” Chappy said. “Royal blood. Worth more dough than I can even count, man.”

  “So that would be more than two, then,” Sharon said.

  Lassa and Harper snorted, then continued eating what was in front of them; blood, gristle, and whatever else had fallen onto it be damned.

  “Chappy has only ruined your dinner, Chase.” Sharon Spaglioni frowned at the man standing at our table. “I do not eat this cuisine, of course.”

  Being a zombie, Sharon doesn’t eat what the rest of us eat. Not that the place couldn’t accommodate her. All the restaurants in the area have learned to adapt since the extradimensional happening. It was either that or close up shop. Tourism was no longer limited to the usual brainless human idiots looking for the hip good time they were promised in some pretentious
top-ten list.

  Nah, Sharon would have been eating with us, but the executive chef had wrung his hands and informed her that the latest shipment of artisanal pig brains had been delayed due to chupacabra attacks or some crap. Personally, I think the chef, despite his incredible talents, is a fall-over, piss-his-whites drunk. He probably forgot to order the brains. I’ll have to talk to the owner.

  “What’s the fee?” I asked Sharon. “Considering.”

  “Considering?” Sharon mused. She rubbed at her rotten chin and hummed along to the Cuban jazz playing softly over the restaurant’s fine stereo system. “Minimum of five thousand. But that is only to hide. The charge triples if there is any type of transportation. That’s the base fee. Mileage and expenses would apply as well.”

  “You want a hide job?” I asked Chappy.

  “I ain’t got five thousand!”

  “What do you got?”

  “Two and some change.”

  “So you have the five,” I replied, locking eyes with the loser. “Come on, Chappy. I can smell a lowball when one’s standing in front of me.”

  “You mean slimeball,” Lassa said.

  “Pusball,” Harper added.

  “Hairball.”

  “Shitball.”

  “Lintball.”

  “Lintball?” Harper frowned. “Lame.”

  “I couldn’t think of another one, dude.”

  “You two done?” I asked.

  They shrugged as a loud noise came from up front. Some commotion at the hostess station. Since we were all the way in the back corner, we had some time for me to squeeze Chappy some more before whatever was on his tail reached us. If Sharon said five grand, then the fee was five grand. We all had our roles in the company; hers was keeping us operating and solvent.

  “Listen, Chappy, I think you’re scum and have zero respect for you, but if you need me to do a job, then I will treat you like every other client.”

  “For five thousand dollars,” Sharon added.

  “What the lovely lady said, pal,” I said and hooked my thumb toward Sharon.

  Despite the necrotic state of her body, she was actually quite lovely. I could only imagine what she looked like back in her dimension when she was alive. She would have been a looker. Before she was chased down by the undead that ruled her world and turned into one of them. But that was the great thing about the extradimensional happening. It not only allowed specific pockets of humanity on Earth to get a glimpse into other places, but afforded those from other places the opportunity to come here and start a new life.

  In her dimension, Sharon had been another rotting, shuffling brain junkie. But here she was a brilliant, beautiful undead businesswoman with a knack for keeping me, Lassa, and Harper from getting into too much trouble. She credits her intelligence to all those brains she ate in her dimension, which didn’t do shit for her intellectual capacity there, but seemed to kick in and up her mental game exponentially in our dimension.

  You are what you eat.

  “Five thousand dollars and that dinner interrupting head goes good-bye. Never to be seen again until you give me the order to bring it back,” I said.

  “Sweet Jesus, Lawter.” Chappy looked over his shoulder toward the four very large men scanning the restaurant while an alarmed hostess tried to tell them to get lost.

  The great thing about Asheville, North Carolina, was you could go into the fanciest restaurant dressed in cutoffs and flip-flops and no one would bat an eye, but if you were a dick, you’d be tossed out on your ass first thing.

  The fact that portals were now opening into other dimensions didn’t change the unbreakable rule of service in our wonderfully weird corner of the world. We were weird—and liked it that way, even before the portal. We had the ubiquitous tourist-town street performers and buskers. But being Asheville, we also had plenty of hippies with their nightly drum circles, men dressed as nuns and riding ten-foot-high bicycles, free hugs and free love. A slice of the 1960s, reimagined in the 1990s, then updated for the twenty-first century.

  All of that brought money. Tourism dollars that began to change the face of Asheville. Greed started to overtake weird, and everything was going south fast.

  Then the portals to other dimensions opened, and the weird came back with a vengeance.

  Now, if you’d ever read about a creature in some fairy tale, it existed and could probably be seen walking Pack Square or by the Flatiron Building. The monsters were real, and they wanted to buy overpriced grilled cheese sandwiches and even more overpriced pints of craft brew, just like every other damned human tourist.

  And if the creatures were dicks, they’d be tossed out on their asses, the same way anyone else would.

  “Tickety tockety, Chapster,” Harper said as she chewed a green olive, then spat the pit out into a small dish set halfway across the table. The pit landed dead center with the other pits. Harper didn’t miss. She also never lost a fight. Like never. Winning fights was her thing.

  The deceptive part of our group was that Lassa may have looked like the muscle, but Harper was the real danger. Lassa handled transportation and logistics. Harper handled security and protection. Having a seven-foot-tall yeti next to her made Harper’s job easier. Everyone expected the attack to come from Lassa, and they never saw Harper coming until the blade had already pierced flesh.

  She stared at Chappy like a house cat stared down a baby bird outside the living room window. Except there was no window between her and Chappy.

  “Fine, fine, five thousand,” Chappy snarled at us. I knew he was well aware of Harper’s role, and I had to applaud his sense of self-preservation, which was about the only amount of sense the scumbag possessed.

  “Do you have the money on you?” Sharon asked. She opened her purse and pulled out her phone, then a handheld printer. Always prepared. “We need payment upfront.”

  “Yeah, I have the cash on me,” Chappy said and shoved his hand into the front pocket of his jeans.

  He yanked out a wad of cash and threw it at Sharon. I held up my hand as both Lassa and Harper started to get up from their seats.

  “We’re good,” I said. “Chappy is upset. I’m sure he didn’t mean any disrespect. Right, pal?”

  The four men up front caught sight of our table and shoved the hostess out of the way, then marched toward us, ignoring the chaos and disruption swirling in their wake.

  “Chase?” Harper asked. “What’s the call?”

  We held equal shares in our little company—Black Box Inc. But they’d gotten into the habit of looking to me to make the call when necessary. Reminding them that we were a team of equals had absolutely no effect on their behavior. I was the de facto boss whether I wanted to be or not.

  “No fighting,” I said. “We talk this out. I’m not getting blacklisted here. Not happening.”

  “Hurry up!” Chappy barked.

  “Not until payment is counted,” Sharon said, her gray fingers busily facing and sorting the wad of cash that had fallen into her lap. “Give me a moment.”

  I leaned in close to her and whispered, “We don’t have a moment. Guess.”

  “I never guess when it comes to payment,” Sharon whispered back.

  “Give Chappy the benefit of the doubt. If he’s short, we’ll get the rest from him later. With interest.”

  “Twenty-five percent,” Sharon said to Chappy.

  “Twenty-five percent what?” Chappy asked. There was a crash of plates hitting the floor, and Chappy turned to watch the men charging toward our table.

  “Twenty-five percent interest on any amount you are short of the five thousand,” Sharon stated.

  “Better listen to her,” I said.

  “Fine!” Chappy said.

  “Then we are good,” Sharon said and began typing into h
er phone. “I’ll prepare the invoice while you make the box, Chase.”

  “Order another round of food and six pints of stout,” I said to Lassa. “Rush jobs always make me hungry.”

  Lassa raised his hand to get the waitress’s attention. Wasn’t too hard since all eyes were turned our way. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to see where the toughs were headed as they slowly wound around the maze of tables crammed into the space to maximize profit. Another reason I liked the place, no easy way to get from one end to the other quickly.

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. It wasn’t hard to pull from the Dim when in a hurry, I only wanted to put on a show for Chappy. I mean, I only needed a small box. A head-size box. Piece of cake. Simply reach into that space between dimensions and grab me some of the Dim to play with.

  Boxes weren’t all I could do with the Dim. I had a few more tricks. But, for the moment, it was box-crafting time.