"Alabama Zack" is a 40-chapter science fiction serial, published in the Scholar and Scribe community once a week on Wednesdays.
You can start the serial from the beginning by visiting the Curated Collection.
Our hero, a war veteran, finds himself standing on a train station platform in another time and dimension. At his feet lies a man in a brown suit. The man is dead.
At first the crowd on the platform does not notice the dead man. When they do, everyone assumes our hero has something to do with his death....
Mothers scurried dragging their children to safety inside the station house or the rail cars. In moments the platform was empty except for several men and the group of boys. One man, in a brown fedora with a shiny black band, moved toward our hero, and the others followed his lead.
The man in the fedora – and a brown suit that looked a lot like the dead man's – was not angry. He was a doctor, with a smooth young face that belied his knowledge. He carried his suit coat draped over one arm with that hand hooked on his waistband; altogether he had a rather jaunty stroll for someone on his way over to a corpse and a suspected murderer.
The doctor paused looking down at the dead man. Then he identified himself, spread his jacket on the platform and knelt on it. He checked for a pulse. The others arranged themselves in a semicircle behind him; they crossed their arms and spread their legs wide, watching.
“This man is dead,” the doctor said, looking at our hero.
“I know it,” he said. “But how?”
“Are you saying you know nothing of this?”
“That's right,” he said, but then he went cold, because he realized he could not even remember how he had come to stand on that platform, let alone whether or not he'd had anything to do with the man's death.
And he had no time to think. Behind him the train engine let off a hiss of steam and he whipped his head around. Two officials of some kind, in blue uniforms, were walking up along the tracks. They wore octagonal blue hats with black visors; both of them had handlebar mustaches, and they walked with their right hands on large black batons hung in metal rings at their hips. When they reached the platform they jogged up the steps to the sound of jingling metal; one immediately sidled off to get behind him, while the other approached directly. He squared himself to them. When he turned both men stopped: one faced him three paces away on his left and the other half crouched five paces in front of him. He flipped his cape back to free his arms and realized that he bore no sidearm.
“I don't think you want to do that,” the man in front of him said, and the baton slid a little in its metal ring.
He spread his arms slightly with his palms facing up. “Ain't no need for sticks,” he said.
“Gentlemen,” the doctor said.
“What's going on here, doc?” the man on his left said. He pointed at the dead man. “What's wrong with him?”
“He's dead.”
The man's baton rang clearing the metal. “Dead?”
“Turn your palms down and put your arms straight in front of you,” the official in front of our hero said. He obeyed. The official on his left grabbed his wrist and pulled his arm down behind his back. He put his right hand back as told, and he was shackled.
As they took him away, he looked back. The doctor was grinning.
Next week in our story
The cell was bare except for the latrine – a gaping hole in the floor at the base of the outside wall, nine feet from where he squatted on his boot heels. A thin shaft of grey light angled in from a window high on the wall, hiding the latrine from sight, but of course he could smell it.
Cover for “Alabama Zack” designed in Canva using a Pixabay photo as background (image source).
Text written by 
Creative Coin banner designed by @ pacolimited.
Contributions to my $1,600 to $50,000 GoFundMe campaign can be made here: https://gofund.me/f6ea112e6.
