"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, the doctor took Zack into town to meet the private investigator Cork McGraw. Zack, confused and lost by his amnesia and his strange experiences in that dimension, broke down crying. Cork asked his maid Matilda to make tea and takes them out to the front stoop to talk things over.
Matilda put the kettle on the cast iron stove, then put her hands on her hips. She was a heavy woman, and wise to the ways of the world, which to her meant being wise to the ways of men. And she'd had plenty of experience with that lot. Her experience with one abusive man after another had finally led her to Cork McGraw's door one drenching wet night, in search of a P.I., or anyone who could make her latest man stop bothering her. In a couple of days, the man had disappeared, and Matilda had stayed on in gratitude, as Cork's cook and maid.
The kettle began to hiss. Since she had been at Cork's, she had seen one man after another come through his door, many with the same hangdog expression of doom and gloom as this new man, and most with problems whose solution required someone who stood just a little outside the law. She'd been around for quite a few disappearances, all of them warranted as far as she could tell. But word had it this new man didn't need a disappearance. He needed a scapegoat or a guilty party, and if Cork took him on, he would provide whichever the situation needed.
She placed a tea pack of yolanta leaves, Cork's favorite, in the bottom of three mugs, and when the water boiled she poured steamy water on top. The pack would dissolve, and the leaves would condense into a green sludge, which she would likely have to scrape out when she washed the mug. “Men,” she said with a grimace. “If they don' beat you, they leave you, and if they don' leave you, they leave a mess.”
She loaded the mugs onto a tray and left the kitchen, her skirt whispering against the door frame. Outside, Cork and the doctor – “Oh, that doctor,” she thought, and she saw herself shaking a dark fist at the heavens – sat with the man they called Zack. Zack's face was wet with crying, and Matilda almost dropped the tray before she placed it on the bench beside Cork. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a man with tears on his face. It had the same effect that crying young ones had on her: an urge to sweep them up and smother them with love.
She left the men discreetly. She didn't think they had noticed her staring at Zack and wanting to wipe the tears out of that big yellow mustache of his. She returned to the kitchen and sat in her rocker in front of the stove and rocked for awhile. Before long her bosom shook a little and a smile that matched the twinkle in her brown eyes pierced her round cheeks. She stopped rocking and threw her head back in a loud spat of laughter. And then she rocked and laughed some more, until her own face was wet with tears. “Oh, Lord have mercy,” she said, using her apron to wipe her tears away. “I sure did think I was done with all of that. Sure did. And who woulda thought a man's tears could remind me that I'm not. Yes, indeed. Who woulda thought.”
Matilda stood up and fluffed the curl in her hair.
Next week in our story
He stared unseeing at the dirt. He searched again the gaping hole in his mind, that black maw where his memory should be. It seemed like more and more of his memory was falling into that hole. He could remember his cell, the cave and the strange robed being, but how had he arrived back at the platform? Flying? He struggled with a fleeting image of the countryside and a train rolling underneath him. Had that really happened?
Chapter IX
Start at the beginning
Cover for “Alabama Zack” designed in Canva Business using a Pixabay photo as background (image source).
Text written by 
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