War God for Hire- Gladiator by David Burke (books under 200 pages .TXT) 📕

Wait a minute, had it been just a moment ago? Or not? Somehow that didn’t seem right. It seemed ages ago and a world away. Then he remembered another detail.

That wasn’t the last. He hadn’t ended his life on the pavement alone, shot in the street like a common thug. Rather, he had been floating a few inches above the pavement. Or maybe… was that just a dream?

Yeah, likely a dream, Kyle thought, because now he was falling. He kept accelerating faster and faster. He definitely felt the sensation of falling, but there were no clouds, no sense of the wind in his hair. All that remained was a certain, unavoidable sensation that he was falling. Or flying, because what was falling but uncontrolled flying anyway?

That was an odd thought, he realized. Not really typical of the way he would have phrased things at all. Uh oh, maybe he was still dreaming. But, didn’t bad things happen when you were falling in a dream?

Or wait, Kyle realized, it wasn’t the falling that was bad, it was the landing. If you hit the ground in a dream, that meant you died. At least he was pretty sure that was what Tessa had told him she read in a book.

Then that thought no longer mattered as he experienced what usually happened when falling. He came to a sudden and unwelcome stop. He felt himself crash into the ground with an astounding amount of force. Kyle didn’t know what was going on, but he could feel the ground around him break, and smelled the dust scattered into the air from his impact.

This wasn’t the sort of thing you walked away from, and certainly not without being broken into so many pieces that all the King’s men couldn’t put you back together again.

He decided he needed to move slowly, if he could move at all. He needed to see just how bad the damage was. Kyle figured it was a good thing that he wasn’t dead on impact. At least that meant there was a chance. Of course, he had just survived being shot, so maybe today was his lucky day. Unless that was all part of this same dream, too.

He reached out and didn’t experience any pain as he moved. The crew normally kept this private parking deck really clean, so hopefully he wouldn’t have any glass embedded into him. Yet as his hand moved around him, he knew instantly that this was not the smooth pavement of the players-only section behind Wrigley. No, it was just hard-packed dirt.

Or it had been hard packed until his impact.

His landing created a crater that was more than a foot deep, as well as quite a big cloud of dust. The building next to him rattled; oddly, no one came outside. That seemed bizarre in and of itself. He was in what appeared to be a narrow alleyway, and still not so much as a head had peeked out a window to see what the ruckus was.

The sky overhead was dark but filled with stars. Far more twinkled overhead than he remembered seeing of late. Of course, most nights he had been stuck under the glare of stadium lights, where it was hard to make out more than a few stars in the sky.

Even being night though, either these buildings were empty, or his neighbors were incredibly deep sleepers. He didn’t care to try to imagine what reasoning would explain the lack of investigation.

Despite the obvious force of the impact, Jay only felt like he had rolled out of bed after celebrating too hard. He shook his head and got up slowly. First onto his hands and knees, and then he did a scan of himself again to make sure that nothing felt broken. Since that went well, he decided to sit onto his backside rather than pushing his luck by trying to stand up.

This gave him an opportunity to evaluate his surroundings. This was clearly not Chicago. There might have been alleyways that smelled this foul in the Windy City, but if there were, they would have been littered with broken beer bottles, and most likely bums. This space appeared to be mostly litter-free but clearly was used as a urinal and worse by the local residents. That smell, more than anything, convinced him the area couldn’t be empty.

Maybe it just smelled so nasty that even the beggars didn’t want to bed down here. Just his luck to land in a back-alley latrine. Of course, thinking about his luck caused him to realize something. He didn’t feel any pain in his gut or back. Hadn’t he been shot?

His hands immediately went to his stomach and then felt around behind to the small of his back. Whatever shirt he was wearing was made of fine material, but it definitely wasn’t his Nirvana shirt, and it was not soaked in blood. Beneath his shirt was smooth, nothing but rippling abs.

As he felt, he sucked in his breath. He was even more cut than he remembered. Something was definitely not right. He didn’t want to complain, but no bullet wound and a ripped body? Then, he looked at his hands. They were massive and had the calluses of someone accustomed to days filled with hard labor.

It wasn’t that he was opposed to hard work, in fact, quite the contrary. It was more that his hands were worth millions, and he took care to make sure they stayed in pristine condition. He needed them to be responsive and able to feel the slightest difference in the grain of a bat or the leather of a ball. These hands had clearly never seen a manicurist in their entire life.

Apparently, he was still dreaming.

The hair on his arms was a light blond and his forearms were as thick as six by six timbers. It was then that Kyle heard a voice say, “You’re perfectly fine. At least for now. But we need to