Introduction
"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.
Previously in our story
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 for murder.
Zack has amnesia: he can not remember how he arrived on that platform, let alone whether or not he had anything to do with the man's death.
Zack has met three people who are helping him to recover his memory and prove his innocence: the doctor, whom Zack met on the train station platform, the P.I. Cork McGraw, and Cork's maid Matilda.
When we left Zack, he had been transported by his inquisitor to the Clayton ranch, where he began having memories of working with the Claytons – an outfit that had made two attempts on his life while he was in town with Cork, the doctor, and Matilda. In the barn he discovered the town drunk, tied up and beaten bloody.
Alabama Zack crouched on his heels on the ground floor of the barn on the Clayton ranch. In the corner across from him, a sign over the door to a small room ordered a death sentence.
The sign read: What exits here must be killed.
To stop the barrage of confusing images that assaulted him in that barn, our hero had deliberately sought out the black hole in his memory, and now he could only stare vacantly at the sign. In the hay mow above, the drunk slumped comatose against his ropes, while outside, purple mountains beckoned beyond a plain of golden, wheat-like vegetation.
Zack's first thought past the black hole in his mind was to wonder what was on the other side of those mountains. But then he heard a voice cry out. It sounded far away – or muffled; he thought it came from the hay mow. He forced himself to stand and reach for the ladder. The voice called again, but this time he recognized where it was really coming from: someone, or something, was inside the corner room.
It got quiet – no sound at all, not even wind from outside – and Zack realized he didn't have his gun. He looked at the door below the sign. The door hung flush, like someone had just cut a rectangle into the wall. A deep shade of black seemed to move around the edges.
“Hello?” Zack said, and his voice startled him in the quiet.
From impossibly far away, given the size of the room, the voice answered: “Is someone there? I can't see a thing!”
In his mind Zack saw himself going to the door. It had no handle of any kind, and when he tried to open it – pushing, and then prying at the edges – it wouldn't budge. Then he saw the door standing open – still without knowing how it had opened – and instead of light penetrating the room, darkness poured out into the barn so that he had to stand back to avoid it.
Out of the blackness stepped a man in a brown suit and a fedora.
Zack snapped his mind away from the images, until he was aware mostly of where he stood on the barn floor across from the corner room.
The man in the brown suit had the pocked face of the dead man on the train station platform: it seemed our hero had somehow opened the door to let him out – alive and well.
Next week in our story
Suddenly the doctor almost ran his bike into Cork, who had stopped. He looked up and saw Mr. Clayton astride his horse and coming down the row toward them. Clayton held the reins in his left hand and a rifle in his right; as he neared them he lifted the reins and laid the rifle barrel across his forearm, trained on Cork's chest.
Chapter XXX (link to come)
Start at the beginning
Cover for “Alabama Zack” designed in Canva using a Pixabay photo as background (image source).
Text written by 
Creative Coin banner designed by @ derangedvisions.
Contributions to my $1,600 to $50,000 GoFundMe campaign can be made here: https://gofund.me/f6ea112e6.
Subscribe to receive my posts through email. A new feature offered by Ecency.