Dead Dog's Tale

In the quiet, inky blackness of early morning, I awoke with a start. The room was shrouded in darkness, the kind that seemed to swallow up even the faintest hope of light. My young mind, perhaps no older than five or six, instinctively knew the hour. Just past 3 a.m., that liminal time when the world teeters on the edge of something otherworldly. Anxiety bubbled up within me, a nameless fear that I couldn't yet articulate, but it was there, as real as the walls of the ranch-style house in Chino, California, where I lived. I can still trace the layout of that house in my mind, every corner, every shadowed hallway. Even then, I had an intimate knowledge of its contours, perhaps because there were times, just before dawn, when I would find myself in different parts of the house, far from the safety of my bed. The clock ticked toward 5 a.m., the hour when my father would rise, a man of little patience. His wrath was a thing to be avoided at all costs. The thought of flipping on a hall ...

I won my black belt in Judo at 14 during a Batsugun.  A Judo Batsugun is when a tournament's competitors line up, from the lowest-ranked white belt to the top-ranked black belt. The lowest-ranked white belt steps out on the mat and challenges the second-lowest-ranked white belt. The contest winner challenges the next Judoka, and so on until the highest-ranking black belt is called out. I was third in line from the beginning. That night, I took my black belt off the highest-ranking black belt under 18 in Southern California.  Later, I discovered it's partly what got me noticed by some interesting people, and my name was "highlighted." I was 17 in the mid-1990s when an organization recruited me to hinder the advance of MS-13, looking to gain footholds in rural areas of Idaho, Oregon, Washington, & Montana. They would train males 15 to 16 years old and "seed" them in small Podunk towns in the Pacific Northwest. These seedlings recruited members, primarily o...

Surprised, I opened my eyes to find myself standing. My gaze was fixed on a vast crystal blue sky. A soft, icy breeze coiling around the hilltop conveyed the morning cold. I began shivering and asking myself how I got here when a glint of silver caught my attention. I looked over my shoulder to see a bright metal disc with a mirror polish, gigantic in proportion, hanging silently above me. Upon my realization, I was suddenly seized with a terrific force. Some invisible vice locked itself around my whole body; the air crushed from my lungs as it gripped me ever tighter against my consent. A loud metallic click resounded as I strained against what bound me and reverberated inside my brain. The disk and I began to interface. A deluge of images flooded my mental processes. I was a human particulate futtering between states of consciousness and dissolving in equal parts terror and astonishment.  Amidst the churning ocean of digital chatter I was drowning in, a single directive emerged, ...

Keeping a low profile at the Dream Catcher RV in Deming, NM, I hunkered down inside a battered 90s C-class RV, letting my travel companion handle the driving and logistics. Like a nocturnal predator, I only emerged under the cover of darkness, moving through the night like a wraith cloaked in shadow. The I-10 E was a blood-soaked artery, a highway of horror for the abducted, trafficked souls funneled between Mexico and the dark underbellies of Phoenix, AZ, and Las Vegas, NV. In 2018, it was a red-market conveyor belt of human misery. I had been summoned to sever a particular link in that grim supply chain. It had become alarmingly routine for human traffickers on the I-10 E to pad their cargo with natives from the surrounding reservations, primarily infants and toddlers. In response, a clandestine group of private financiers, unsanctioned by official Tribal Governments, began hiring sympathetic and morally aligned outsiders to act as ghostly avengers against their people's enemies....