To celebrate the release of Ghost Writer, and because I like to give away free stuff, I also released Semi as a free download, available exclusively to my mail list subscribers. In case you haven’t picked it up, here’s a sneak peak of the third chapter. Let me know what you think!

Chapter 3 ~ Jack Knife

Twenty-four hours into it, I’m making good progress. Though I’ve had to take more Dramamine, adrenaline has made a fine substitute for caffeine to keep me upright and churning.

“I’m ready,” I tell Cynthia.

“You sure this time?”

“Like I said. The fancy calculator impressed me on the first go-around, but it’ll bust this time.”

She steps out of the room. Through the parted door, I hear her mumbling something to one of her water boys. Something about retrying and going live, to which he replies, “you mean going dead.” Through the last twenty-four hours of riding around, stopping to refuel, followed by more riding, I’ve gathered Cynthia’s burly men don’t have a high opinion of this craziness.

Outside I hear the squawking of a radio and more mumbled words, pre-warning the impending outage, like they did last time. Cynthia comes back into the computer room with her mission-first face on.

“We’re a go.”

“OK.” I let my hand hover over the keyboard for a second. Do I do it for drama or out of hesitation? Beats me. I bring it down, and away it goes. Digital mayhem flies out through one satellite dish. Diagnostic data pipes back through the other.

She lets the data scroll for a few minutes before she says, “Well?”

“Oh, it’s not well at all.”

“Meaning?”

“The calculator is saturating with a few too many branches.” I shoot her a sideways grin. “And the branches are coming up too fast, finding leaky paths faster than it can plug.”

“Lovely analogies. Is it working?”

“Why don’t you have your guys ask?”

She gets up and steps out again. This time she closes the door. I don’t need to hear it. I can see it well enough on my screen. One by one nodes go red as my code captures them. A few flicker back to yellow, or even green. In some instances, the calculator manages to regain control, and it does a nice job of it. But nice and good enough don’t equate. A few recovered nodes here and there, turn into exponentially more red ones elsewhere, and soon the system cascades in my favor until even the holdouts can’t cope.

The door opens. “Major parts of Phoenix are going dark,” Cynthia says.

“Oh, I think it’s pretty much pitch black now.”

She points at my stomach. “Do me a favor. Tighten up your strap.”

“Huh?” I look down to where I’ve loosened my seatbelt so it doesn’t squeeze my upset stomach. When I look up, I see she’s affixed hers and is pulling it some more.

“Lock your chair, too,” she adds as she does the same with hers.

I comply in time to hear the metal walls vibrate with the accelerating truck engine. Right as I lock my chair to keep it from swiveling, I feel myself pressed against its back with the truck’s increasing speed.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“Focus on your screen.”

I do. The text and graphics vibrate. I reach out and hold the main monitor still—or as steady as I can make it.

“All nodes captured,” I say.

“Good. Now hang on.”

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

“The next part of the test.”

“Why don’t I like the sound of that?”

She smiles. “The point now is to see how long we can persist.”

“Persist? I thought we were just showing that we could get through.” I point at the screen. “I can reverse it.”

“But you won’t.”

The thin strips of lights that outline the ceiling switch from fluorescent white to blinking orange.

“Brace, brace, brace,” a digitized voice says.

Cynthia wraps her hands around the back of her neck. With elbows braced against the sides of her face, she does a sit up, except she’s curling down, until the points of her elbows touch her knees.

“Brace, brace, brace,” the voice repeats, and I mimic Cynthia’s posture.

Underneath me, my chair’s single leg post rattles in its latched position. I hope it and the rail is sits on hold.

The truck swerves hard right—or what I think is right, anyway. A second later I hear an explosion, and another a moment later. The screeching of tires follows.

“Partial breach,” the voice says. “Switching off all non-essential power.”

A relay snaps. All the computers go off, leaving only the intermittent orange glow.

“What was that?” I shout.

“Stay put,” Cynthia replies.

I squeeze the back of my neck harder, as if that will keep me safe. The truck swerves to one side, then the other, then back. The hiss of the air brakes comes next, and then more tire screeching.

The G forces yank me forward. If not for the belt digging into my abdomen, I’d go flying off.

“Brace, brace, brace.”

The tires keep screeching. Around us the trailer rattles, moans and bounces. We’re fish-tailing it. No, not fish-tailing. What do they call it? Jack-knifing, that’s what we’re doing. Cab going one way, the trailer swinging the other, out of control.

Underneath us, the floor tilts. For a moment, I prepare to go over. Because that’s what we’re doing, isn’t it? Like all those nasty semi-trailer accidents one sees on the news. We’re flipping over, and my only hope is that we’re not flying off some cliff.

“Brace, brace, brace.”

Somewhat relieved, I note we stay vertical. With a thump-thump-thump, the trailer bounces. We list from side to side, from front to back, and then I realize. We’ve slid to a stop.

Cynthia’s already out of her chair. “Come on,” she says as she unlatches my seatbelt.

Pulling on my arm, she leads me out of the computer room. We go past the Faraday cage room and the side door where I came in and enter a part of the trailer I haven’t seen. I smell gasoline and motor oil. We squeeze along the trailer’s wall, past an SUV. Ahead I see a blinking red light.

“Press it,” she tells me.

She shoves me toward it, and I do as she says. The back door starts rolling up almost at the same time an engine screams to life behind me. I turn.

With straddling steps, Cynthia edges a motorcycle toward me. “Get on,” she says, her voice calming down, but retaining its sharp edge.

Once more I comply. She’s putting on a helmet, and I do likewise with the one she hands me. My mind finally registers the clack-clack ratcheting sound underneath us. A second later I see it. A ramp is edging out, angling to touch the asphalt below.

“Hang on!” She doesn’t wait for it to unfurl all the way.

With one hand around her midsection and another grabbing onto a handle behind me, I hang on as the bike jumps off the trailer, down the ramp, and into midair. It touches down with a controlled skid, and then we’re off.

I see it now. The highway curls along elevated coast terrain. With trees on the right and steep drops on the left, we’re going north. Big Sur. I’ve been here before, once, on a more leisurely drive inside a sporty convertible. I’ve been here in the daytime, not in the middle of the night, like now.

The cool ocean air rushes over me as we speed away. Through the helmet, I still get a whiff of the moist, salt air. For a moment, I almost relax. Like surfing a gnarly wave, man. Like hanging on to a board in the midst of God’s creation.

Something booms behind us. As we go around a turn, in one of the rearview mirrors I catch the orange, morphing ball, rising up into the sky. A second, smaller explosion lights up the night.

Thank you for reading. This will be the last blog sample of Semi. To get the full story as a free download, join my mail list…