Wreckers: A Denver Boyd Novel by George Ellis (ebook reader ink .TXT) 📕

“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s going on,” I said.

She screwed her face into a confused grimace. “Oh, you thought I was here to ask for your help? I’m deciding if I should tell you something that might help you. But now I think if you had the information, it might influence your decisions in a way that could actually get you killed.”

“I see,” I said. I had no clue what she was trying to say.

“Forget it. You’ll find out at the right time and hopefully, it’ll save your life.”

“Hopefully?”

“Probably. Definitely probably,” she said.

“Can’t argue with that logic,” Gary said, sarcastically. “Romy, why don’t you tell me and I can determine if Denver needs to know?”

“I don’t trust the judgment of a sitcom writer, sorry.”

Damn. That was what they used to call a burn.

“I was also a sitcom star!” Gary yelled. “And you didn’t even know what a sitcom was until like three days ago!”

Romy shrugged and walked out the door, leaving me annoyed.

“She’s a weird one,” Gary said.

“Thank you, captain obvious,” I replied.

“Wanna talk about it?” he asked.

“Talk about what.”

“You’ve been pretty stressed lately, and it’s obvious why,” Gary said.

“Uh, because we’re about to try and steal the most coveted device in the verse from the dangerous ship in history? And if we fail, we die. And if we succeed, we might die anyway?”

“Right, that,” he said. “But also, your brother. It has to be a total mind-fry to find out that he’s still alive, and you’ve barely talked about it.”

I paused. It wasn’t like Gary to care about emotions and feelings.

“Maybe I’ve been busy with trying not to be killed, myself,” I told him. “And what’s gotten into you? Let’s talk about you for a minute.”

“I’m good.”

“I don’t know. I think you’re hiding something. And I’m starting to think I’ve honored my uncle’s wishes long enough.”

“What could a regular guy like me possibly be hiding?” Gary asked. “I don’t even have pockets!”

“Well it’s not a sense of humor, we know that.”

“It’s not my fault you don’t understand 21st century humor. Your Uncle E, on the other hand, knew the dealio. Dealio is a slang term we used back in the day.”

“I’ve seen Napoleon Dynamite.”

“That doesn’t make you an expert, Denver.”

“Go to bed.”

“But I don’t want to!” he whined. I looked at the camera above the door and waited. The red light finally blipped off. I sighed and laid back on my bed, staring at the ceiling of the room. On top of everything else, the last thing I needed was a problem with Gary. The Stang meant so much to my uncle, and Gary was part of it. Shutting him off would feel like cutting a piece of my uncle’s heart out of the ship. With both of my parents gone, I’d always thought of the Stang as the last member of my family because it was infused with so many memories of my uncle.

Of course, that was before I knew my brother was still around.

I flipped through the Stang’s entertainment catalog to take my mind off things for a while. It usually worked when I was facing a tough job or needed a break from the grind of lonely, long range space travel. These were different problems and worries altogether, so it was time to pull out the big guns.

Cate Blanchett’s haunting yet beautiful opening narration of the Fellowship of the Ring began, and I tried to immerse myself in the 20th century’s most epic fantasy. At last count, I had watched the full Lord of the Rings trilogy 18 times. On half of those occasions, they were back-to-back-to-back viewings of the three movies. My uncle once told me that it was called a “movie marathon.”

The tale was set in another time and place, of course, but there was something comforting about the clear delineation between good and evil. I much preferred it to the world of gray.

You were either on the side of Frodo, Sam, Gandalf and the bunch, or you were a slave to Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor, a barren wasteland filled with wretched creatures. On occasion, I’d considered space to be like Mordor; it had no soul. It was endless. Cold. Dead. One false step and it could kill you without a second thought.

One does not simply walk into space, I thought to myself.

The story revolved around the quest to destroy a sacred ring of power. If the good guys succeeded, evil would be defeated forever. If they failed, the world would fall into darkness. Again, I liked those simple outcomes.

In real life, especially in the current verse, there was no such clarity. Sometimes you did a good thing. Sometimes a bad thing. And other times, you thought you were on the side of justice, only to find out later you were working for the wrong kind of people. That’s why I liked watching movies. They were the ultimate means of escape. For a few hours, my actual troubles were miles away. All I cared about was the fate of someone else who, most of the time, was on a noble quest.

Unfortunately, all I could think about was the job at hand. Even the greatest wizard the world had ever seen couldn’t save me from that. I fell asleep thinking not of hobbits and Middle Earth, but space pirates and federation bounty hunters.

Chapter 19

“Dad won’t even know we’re gone,” Avery said. “Besides, he doesn’t really care what we do on our own time. I mean, he’d probably be proud of you for having the balls to break a rule for once in your life.”

My brother tucked his curly brown hair under a black cap. He was 18 and looked a few years older than that, thanks to the thin mustache he sported. I was only 15 and had exactly zero whiskers on my face. Next to him I probably looked all of 12.

I rose from my cot