Excerpt
The cold air was refreshing as she sprinted to her Ford Mustang in the parking lot. After she sat down in the driver’s seat, she opened Windows Maps on her cell phone to search for the address her evil handler had texted. Since Microsoft stopped supporting Windows Phone, she couldn’t use her voice to enter the address in the navigation app of her cell phone.
It felt weird to go unarmed, on a mission unknown, while the navigation calculated the best route from her current location. Whoever captured Harry held all the cards. At the moment, she had no other choice but to follow up on their instructions. She started the car and drove off. Luckily, there wasn’t much traffic on her way to the mansion.Since the pandemic, life was slow. People had more time on their hands, working from home, distracted by their kids and spouse. Eating more comfort food—watching TV all day, or in Sybil’s case, spending time with her pet rabbit, Max, and trying to avoid the news. She didn’t have a TV. Well, she did, but she used her 70-inch display as a monitor. It was connected to a Windows 10 laptop with an external soundcard attached to a Dolby digital surround set. Felicity installed the equipment and showed Sybil how to use her dinosaur cell phone as a remote control for the laptop.
The laptop offered her a safe window to the world. She had online meetings once a week, on Sunday night at eight, and sometimes she watched the news on CNN. Most of the time, she used the laptop to binge-watch streaming media. Prime video, Netflix, Disney Plus, and reruns of her favorite TV shows: Body of Proof, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and she loved movies starring Denzel Washington. My life during the pandemic.
She wanted to floor the gas pedal, but then she noticed a police car and she slowed down considerably. The police vehicle turned left at the intersection. She glanced over her shoulder. A truck came into sight, and a few more cars appeared on the street ahead of her. Morning rush hour was about to begin, even though she hadn’t expected it.
Sybil reached her destination in twenty-six minutes after she floored the gas pedal when she reached the outskirts of Boston. She had some time to kill, but she didn’t want to waste it by sitting in her car. So, she explored the area. The mansion didn’t stand out by itself. It was a wooden, two-story building, Victorian architecture style, late 1800s, set in a rural landscape outside Boston, normally a thirty-five-minute drive if she hadn’t gone way above all posted speed limits. Its shingles used to be white at some point.
She exhaled and contacted Vanessa Dogscape—an ATU data analyst, and currently married to her friend and coworker Felicity Walker. Perhaps Vanessa could help her—off the record. She didn’t want to involve the ATU. It took a while before Vanessa answered the phone.
“Sybil. You know what time it is?”
“I’m aware of what time it is. Look, I need your help. Harry’s been kidnapped by—I don’t know who. Anyway, they want me to do some errands.”
“My God!” Vanessa replied in a worried voice.
“I need you on this. But please, keep it off the record. I don’t want to endanger Harry’s life.”
“Sure. How can I help?”
“Perhaps you can pinpoint them somehow and get their location so I can kick some ass?”
“I need more intel before I can do anything,” Vanessa said.
“They contacted me via my cell phone and sent me a text message. Oh, and a picture of Harry’s battered face.” She gritted her teeth at the thought.
“Send the text message and the picture to me. And please activate the ATU app Felicity programmed three years ago for your Windows Phone, so I can tap into each conversation and perhaps ping their location while you talk to them. Are you sure you want me to help you off the record? It’s better to make this an official ATU investigation. At least, let me inform Jack.”
Sybil closed her eyes for a moment. If the criminals found out she had informed the ATU, it’d complicate things. Perhaps endanger Harry’s life. But then again, she sure could use all the help she could get. Otherwise, she wouldn’t bother Vanessa with it. Taking that into consideration, and the knowledge that Jack was a professional, Sybil agreed to Vanessa’s suggestion.
Despite the sun in a clear, blue sky, her body responded with a shiver that ran down her spine. She did not know what to expect as she stood near the abandoned mansion with its weather-beaten, cracked walls covered in pointless graffiti. But she knew she had to go inside as she sat down on her haunches, studying the rusty sword lying in the mud. She took a deep breath before she carefully touched its sticky handle. Blood! Clotted blood.
Her stomach gnawed at the sight. She smelled. It wasn’t human. She stared at the mansion as she heard a strange sound she couldn’t identify. Immediately, her old instincts kicked in—weird sounds coming from an abandoned mansion equals danger. She grabbed the sword in both hands, jumped up, kicked the battered door wide open and ran inside. It was time to act; this was no time to be cautious. Lives were at stake.
The wooden planks creaked under her feet as she rushed into the dark hallway. The sound of rasping breathing reached her eardrums when she entered a dark room with just enough light to see the overturned furniture and the bloodstained, fractured walls …
1. Tell me a little bit about your main character of this book.
ReplyDeleteSybil Crewes is a vampire and was born in 1750. She was turned into a vampire in 1775. Caused by an ancient curse from the book of the dead (the infamous Necronomicon).
Until the 1960s, Sybil was an ordinary vampire, living on human blood—until she, with her former lover, took the life of an innocent girl. Her friend—soon-to-be ex-friend—didn’t mind killing the poor girl. But Sybil grew more conscientious about killing her. Her guilt was amplified after the girl’s father doused himself with gasoline to commit suicide.
Since early 2000—while seeing too many Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes—she fights evil whenever and wherever she can.
She became a part-time ATU (Anti-Terrorism Unit) Agent after she helped Jack Hunter, head of the ATU branch in Boston, to capture the Boston Marathon bombers.
Sybil lives in Boston, MA. Besides being an ATU agent, she’s also a hotel manager of Nightbird.
Sybil hates being a vampire and clips her fangs, prefers to drink pigs’ blood, and walks in daylight. Her skin doesn’t sparkle under direct sunlight. All stereotype vampires and ways to kill them don’t apply to Sybil (or any other vampire or unearthly creatures). The only thing that kills evil are guns, fire, and a beheading.
Crosses, holy water, or anything else won’t stop evil from spreading. Sybil and her friends from the ATU keep America safe from terrorists and the supernatural.
2. Do you believe in the paranormal and if so, do you have an experience you can share?
Ever since I was a seven-year-old, my mom used to tell me horror stories. My mother grew up in a haunted house in Indonesia. She saw them. Dead People. Haunting her at night. A bony hand, playing with lace shoes.
My mother could see in her dreams when something dangerous was about to happen. She had this scary dream about my two elder brothers, aged 15 and 17, driving illegally on a motorcycle and having an accident.
My two idiot brothers didn’t have a driver’s license and were uninsured. The accident my mother witnessed in her dream really happened. Luckily my brothers survived, but their motorbike was beyond repair.
She could also foretell when someone was about to die, and she knew I’d marry a guy from the south even though I was already in a relationship. And yes, she was right. My husband Gerard is from the south.
I can’t have children and yet, my mom knew I’d have three children. She saw it in a dream. Two girls and a boy. Guess what? Gerard has three children: Tamara, Nikita, and Dennis.
So yes. I believe in the supernatural. In my own way, I can sense things too in my dreams. Sometimes, when I’m tired, I can see a human-shaped shadow in a flash, and one time I saw a rabbit-shaped shadow, even though my own pet rabbit, Max, was someplace else in the house.
3. What titles are you working on now that you can tell us about?
Before I wrote Pandemic: Chaos is Bleeding, I worked on a 3D computer animation. Using Carrara Pro 8.5, Daz Studio 4.16, and Poser Pro 11.
After an email from my editor, I decided to write my book, Pandemic: Chaos is Bleeding. I love the story, and I hope my readers will too. I’m now thinking about a sequel. Pandemic: It’s a Madhouse.
In the sequel, Sybil is no longer a vampire. You’d think this will make her happy. But the people she killed back in the days when she drank human blood haunts her. They appear as shadow people before she can see their ghostly presence with blood-gushing wounds from their necks. This new curse drives her nuts.
Meanwhile, Boston is plagued by distrust among its own citizens. Fueled by COVID-19 misinformation and crazy QAnon conspiracy theories to divide people into two groups. The anti-vaxxers, and people who got their vaccinations.
Terrorists stir things up, using cyberattacks and organizing riots throughout the country.
It’s up to Sybil and her friends from the ATU to stop the terrorists in time before they succeed to encourage people to grab their guns to take down the government while Sybil has to face her own demons.