"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.
Alabama Zack, our hero and a war veteran, found himself standing on a train station platform in another time and dimension. At his feet lay a man in a brown suit. The man was dead, and Zack was arrested and jailed.
Zack can not remember how he had arrived on that platform, let alone whether or not he had anything to do with the man's death.
In last week's chapter, Zack was taken to a type of court hearing, in an enormous cave, where he met with an inquisitor instead of judge. The inquisitor asked him what he was curious about. When Zack answered that he was curious about the smiling doctor on the train station platform, he was projected flying from the cave into daylight.
Flying was like nothing our hero had known.
His body was useless. He couldn't move at all; his arms and legs just trailed behind him as that incredible force pulled him along. The wind tore at his eyes and hair and snapped his cape; he tried instinctively to crook his arms to keep his overcoat from being ripped off, though that would have been prevented by the shackles.
There was green countryside beneath him and sunshine behind his head. He seemed to be following a set of train tracks. A plume of black smoke showed a train approaching; past the smoke trail he could see some kind of structure. As the train clattered under him he realized it was the train station platform where he had been arrested. Soon he was arching down to it. He clumped down on the boards just three steps from the double row of benches, and his momentum carried him forward. He spun and sat down hard.
And just like that there he was, sitting on a bench next to the doctor, looking at a dead man he was supposed to have murdered. It was too much. He moved to bury his face in his hands, but the shackles prevented him. He couldn't block it out. He really was back on the platform. He shook his head. At the top of his field of vision there was a hint of green light that wouldn't go away.
“It's a tracking device, and it identifies you to the rest of us as a prisoner of the realm,” the doctor said. “You'll get used to it.”
He turned to the doctor and the green light lagged behind, almost disappearing before moving back into place when he stopped. The doctor sat there with his elbows propped on the back of the bench, his fedora cocked back over an unfurrowed brow, and his jacket folded neatly beside him. His legs were crossed, right over left, in a slanting straight line.
He looked like a man who knew something.
Zack turned back, barely noticing the green light, as the doctor had suggested. In front of him, the train had left the station, revealing a broad dirt avenue that led to a little town. The men in blue uniforms with handlebar mustaches had multiplied in number. They had replaced the dead man with a mannequin of exact proportion and dress, and now they surrounded it in a lopsided circle, striking various poses of contemplation: some squatted with their fingers laced between their knees; others stood with their arms crossed, gazing intently; and a few stood twirling the ends of their mustaches to perfection. One man circled outside the rest, peering through the others at the mannequin.
The doctor was talking. “They're going to have to bring Cork in on this case,” he said. “Although we have apparently caught the murderer, that being yourself, red-handed standing over his victim, no one has yet been able to determine how you committed it. My examination of the body revealed that there was blunt force trauma to the back of our victim's head, possibly from a pistol butt. But I've been told that you were not armed; if fact, you did not have anything on your person. So what did you hit him with? And how did you dispose of it? Our search around the platform found nothing.”
Our hero said, “I did not kill him,” and he was surprised, because he still had not remembered anything.
The doctor laughed shortly. “None of the murderers I've talked to ever killed anyone.”
“I killed plenty,” Zack had to say. “But not this man.”
The doctor looked him over. “All right,” he said, and he sat up and leveled his hat. “Let's go see Cork. I think I believe you.”
Next week in our story
“Where are folks?” Zack asked.
“They keep low whenever a prisoner comes to town,” the doctor said, and our hero looked around for the fearsome convict – before remembering it was him. They stopped in front of a narrow, two-story building with a hand-lettered sign that read “Cork McGraw: Resident P.I.”
Chapter VII
Start at the beginning
Cover for “Alabama Zack” designed in Canva using a Pixabay photo as background (image source).
Text written by 
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