Book 14 of 52: "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" by Chris Anderson

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Most of the time, the management books I read tend to re-hash the same facts over and over, so although the facts are good, I feel like I’m experiencing deja vu, like I’m reading the same book over and over.

Chris Anderson’s book Free, however, definitely has some new concepts – and that’s a great thing!

Anderson has noticed that, especially with the rise of the electronic market on the Internet, more and more things are being offered for free.  Is this the death of business?  Are free products going to eliminate many paid products?  Are we seeing the death of multiple industries, killed by a thousand free competitors?

In a nutshell, no.

Instead, Anderson argues that there are many ways to make money with free!  He outlines several main approaches:

  • The “Discounted” model, which includes options such as “buy one, get one free”.  You’re not really getting a second copy for free.  You’re getting two copies in exchange for some money.  This is the model most commonly still seen in the physical world, outside the internet.
  • The “Freemium” model, where users can pay for added features or enhancements.  Super popular in apps or other programs, where users are willing to pay to unlock custom content or to remove advertising.
  • The “Unlimited” model, where users pay a single price to access as much content as they want.  Netflix is the prime example.
  • The “Limited Time” model, where users can try a free trial version, intended to get them hooked on the product, before continuing to buy the full version when the trial expires.
  • The “Third Party” model, where users are the product, not the customer.  A program might gather data on its users in exchange for giving them a free tool – and then sells this data to interested companies.
  • The “Reputation” model, where the end goal is not profits, but reputation, recognizability, popularity.  Think of comedians who tweet.
I personally read “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” with a considering mind, because, as an author, I’m very interested in getting people to look at my books, hopefully with the end goal of purchasing them.  Will giving away books help me to sell more books?
Looking at the above models, it’s clear that some of these won’t work.  I can’t really sell upgraded versions of the books, so no Freemium.  The Unlimited model is already in effect through Kindle Unlimited on the Amazon site, and that does tend to generate a significant portion of my profits.  Limited Time and Third Party models don’t really apply to book sales.  
However, the Discounted model would be interesting to consider.  If I advertise that, with the purchase of one book, users can receive a code to download a second book for free, would that drive sales?  
In any case, “Free” definitely gave me a lot to think about, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone involved in sales, possibly of some small entrepreneurial venture that utilizes the internet.
Time to read: about 8 hours.  Because I stopped to think about what I’d read a lot, this took a while to get through.

The Man Who Built in the Sahara

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“And to think,” the man sitting in the leather-padded chair across from me commented, his lips twisting up into a little smirk of self-satisfied humor, “they all thought that I was absolutely crazy.”

I nodded, not quite sure how I should respond to this comment.  Throughout the whole interview, I’d always had the slight, sneaking suspicion that my subject was, in fact, just the slightest bit crazy.  But I knew better than to say this out loud.

Fortunately, the man just chuckled a little to himself, and then leaned forward to pour himself another glass of champagne.  Beneath our seats, I felt the private jet shift slightly as the pilot adjusted the course.

“Shouldn’t be much further, now,” my interview subject commented, sparing a quick glance out the jet’s nearest window.  “It’s a bit out of the way, I know – but that’s part of how I became so successful in the first place, isn’t it?”

I nodded again, mentally telling myself that I had to pull this interview back on track.  “So, Mr. Gibbs, did you see something in the tech world that tipped you off, something you spotted before anyone else?” I asked him.

Across from me, the man’s smile faded somewhat as he leaned back in his chair, interlacing his fingers behind his neck.  “A hole,” he commented at length, his brows furrowed a little.

Jefferson Gibbs was not a small man.  From the moment that I had arrived at the airport for this interview, I had felt slightly dwarfed by his presence.  Even as he leaned in to shake my hand, I felt like I had stepped into a circus, like I was up on stage with a trained bear.

Initially, I had worried a little about conducting this interview on a jet – would Gibbs even fit inside the private plane?  But once we had climbed the steps, I saw that the man had completely redone the interior, replacing the rows of smaller seats with just a couple larger swiveling leather monstrosities, in which we now reclined.

“Saved so much on fuel that I could afford the whole interior being redone,” he explained to me, as we settled into the seats and prepared for takeoff.  “But with energy so cheap now, well, gotta put that money to use somewhere else!”

The man maintained a ferociously genial attitude, and he seemed to keep grinning at me no matter what question I asked.  Once again, as I saw him flash his wide, white teeth at me, I had the feeling that Jefferson Gibbs had a screw loose.

“A hole?” I repeated, hoping the man would elaborate.

And for just a second, that smile went away.  “Yeah, that’s what I said, isn’t it?” Gibbs growled, leaning forward aggressively.  I kept my face neutral – a well-practiced skill as a reporter familiar with the rich and powerful – and the man relaxed after another minute.

I don’t know if he decided that I wasn’t a threat, or he just wanted to brag some more, but Gibbs’ anger vanished as quickly as it had appeared.  “See, everything was in place except for one missing piece of tech,” the multibillionaire elaborated, glancing again out the window.  “And I knew that, if I could push the demand for that tech high enough, someone would figure it out and make the rest of my investment profitable.”

At face value, the strategy sounded absolutely insane.  But there was no denying that it had worked for Gibbs.

When he started, the whole world deemed him crazy.  A minor player in the computer science world, whose singular claim to fame was a patent on improving microchip density, Gibbs stunned the world when he announced his plan to build several geothermal heat engines out in the middle of the Sahara desert.

Admittedly, the idea had several merits.  Geothermal heat engines, which relied on using the temperature differential between the hot desert surface and the much cooler interior of the Earth to generate power, were some of the cleanest and most efficient energy plants in history.  Land in the Sahara was incredibly cheap, and once the high initial cost of the engine had been paid, the device would run for many decades without needing more than routine maintenance.

“But there’s no need for power out in the middle of a desert!” critics pointed out in the papers around the globe.  “Forget the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ – the guy’s building a power plant for nowhere!”

And indeed, without a market, Gibbs’ investment seemed doomed to failure – until, just weeks before the plant was set to come online, the Tesla Motor Company announced that they’d made a huge leap forward in battery technology.

Suddenly, batteries were smaller, lighter, and capable of holding hundreds of times their previous charge.  Everyone wanted to switch to battery power – and they needed someplace to charge those tanks.

Gibbs had the cheapest fuel line for that demand – and as power poured out of the Sahara, the man shot to the top of the Forbes 400 Richest Individuals.

“Ah, here we are,” Gibbs interrupted my thoughts, nodding towards the window.  I turned and looked as the jet banked in a descending circle.

Down below us, in regular lines across the undulating tan sand of the Sahara, steel towers rose up from the ground.  Each tower was topped with an array of black panels, gathering in the heat of the brightly burning sun above us.  That heat, I knew, would be conveyed down into the earth, where it would mix with the cooler air rising up from the bowels of the earth and would drive a series of electricity-generating turbines.

Across from me, Gibbs stared out the window at the source of his great fortune.  The expression on his face was unusual.  He looked almost hungry, desiring, as he stared out at his power plant.

The man had taken a great risk building this plant, I knew, no matter how vociferously he insisted that the strategy made sense.  I wondered what his next leap would be – and whether he’d be able to get lucky twice in a row.

Danni California: Part 7

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Continued from Part 6, here.
Start the story here.

* * *

“And that,” the man in black said, leaning back a little from his typewriter to gaze at his audience, “is where I first heard of Danni.”

Jenny glanced over at the other member of the audience, feeling confused. Old Hillpaw was nodding, as if this made sense to him, but she was lost.  With the strange sensation that she was back in the single room farmhouse where she struggled through all six grades of school, she put her hand up in the air.

“I’m lost,” she blurted out as the man in black turned his gaze towards her.  “Who are you, anyway?  What do you do?”

Old Hillpaw’s eyebrows drew together into a thunderstorm of a frown, as if this knowledge should be obvious.  But the man in black just sighed, shaking his head back and forth.

“Ah, how quickly we fade into obscurity,” he said, speaking more to the empty air than to his bar companions.  “Let me try something else, miss.

“Have you heard of the Priests in Black?”
Even Jenny knew that name.  She physically jerked back in her chair, her mouth dropping open as she stared at the man in black.  As the new and terrifying realization made its way through her mind, she pushed her chair back, as if trying to put physical distance between her and the story’s narrator.

“You- you’re one of them?” she gasped out, shaking her head back and forth in a tangle of hair as if trying to deny reality.  “But they’re killers!  They assassinate people, shoot people!  They’re murderers, and worse!”

Unbelievably, the man in black tossed back his head and laughed, a surprisingly hearty laugh that shook his whole frame.  “Relax, young lady,” he said, as he reached up to wipe a tear from his eye.  “I haven’t killed someone in longer than you’ve been alive.”

At his urging, Jenny settled down a little, although the whites of her eyes were still wide around the edges of her harried and insecure expression.

“But yes, I was one of them,” the man in black said, once he was sure one of his audience members wasn’t about to bolt from the table.  “Of course, we called it the Organization.  Loyal, we were, as well we should be after the time and training they invested in us.  But even still, I didn’t mind the other nickname we picked up.”

The man nodded to Old Hillpaw.  “I wager you know it.”

Hillpaw licked his lips.  Even though he hadn’t physically reacted, the old-timer looked almost as nervous as the waitress next to him.  “Machine gun priests,” the old man said, his voice hoarser than usual.

“That’s the one,” the man in black nodded.

Jenny glanced over, confused again.  “Wait, they were priests?  I thought they were assassins?”

Even this new revelation about their storyteller couldn’t prevent Old Hillpaw from giving a lecture when he knew more than another.  “Oh, they weren’t true priests,” he explained.  “But they dressed all in black, long coats like robes, with their guns hidden underneath.  And when they wanted someone dead, they’d deliver last rites with a machine gun.  Hence the name, see?”

The waitress still didn’t quite understand, but she nodded.  Hillpaw opened his mouth, about to add more, but he then remembered the other person at the table, and decided to not completely dominate the conversation.

“That’s how the public saw us,” the man in black said, quietly.  “But to us, it was a calling.  We were the arm of the Organization, keeping the world on track, eliminating the criminals, the insane, those that caused a threat to the order.”

“To your Organization’s order,” Old Hillpaw challenged.

The man in black didn’t respond, but his eyes settled on the old man.  After a second, Hillpaw flushed, dropping his gaze down.  “Sorry,” he muttered into his nearly empty drink, and then tossed back the rest.

“We eliminated threats,” the man in black repeated.  “And so, one morning, a sketch and a description arrived at my desk.

“The sketch showed a girl, once with her face bare, and once with a black bandana covering up her nose and mouth.  The description called her slender, lithe, with blazing red hair.  She was armed and considered extremely dangerous.”

The man in black glanced over at his stack of papers beside his typewriter, and shook his head.  “I didn’t know her name, didn’t know her story.  Not yet.

“All I knew was that she was my next target.”

To be continued . . . 

Book 13 of 52: "Hickory Dickory Death", by Agatha Christie

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I’ve read a lot of Agatha Christie this year!  This is what, the fifth book by her to appear on this list?  But contributing to my reason for going back to her over and over are several strong points:
  1. Her books are widely available, and always easy to pick up (no hunting for rare copies!);
  2. They’re fast to read;
  3. They always have that perfect “strong upper lip” sense of British sensibility, even when the topic is murder;
  4. And finally, I still am absolutely terrible at guessing the murderer in the end.
Take this book, for instance.  Once again, M. Hercule Poirot is dragged into a case that, although it starts off as a simple and puzzling series of thefts, soon escalates into murder.  The suspects are a group of students and young professionals living together in a boarding house, and Poirot must dig through the web of tangled connections to figure out everyone’s real story.
One complaint, however minor, that I can make against some of Agatha Christie’s stories is that they would fare much better with a cast of characters at the beginning.  Although it’s important for the reader to have a good list of suspects, the names and faces and quirks often seem to meld together – especially at the beginning of the tale.
In addition, in this story (which takes its name from the fact that this residence where the crimes occur is at 26 Hickory St) barely seems to feature Poirot at all, despite his involvement as the head detective!  Instead, most of the questioning seems to come from Inspector Sharpe.  And while the Inspector is perfectly adequate at his job, we see very little of his actual investigative work.
Overall, I’m not sure I’d dub this the strongest of Christie’s works, but it’s still an entertaining afternoon read.

Time to read: 3-4 hours, as is typical with Christie’s books.

"With enough thrust, pigs fly just fine."

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I took a moment to collect myself as I stepped around to the wooden gate that lead into my neighbor Jeff’s backyard.  I didn’t know what I was going to find – but my sixth sense was tingling already, telling me that it was going to be trouble.

I should have known that an engineer takes everything far too literally.

And sure enough, as I came around the corner of his house, I could already smell the acrid scent of melted plastic, the tang of gunpowder.  My concerns weren’t lessened when I saw the wooden structure pointed up at a forty-five degree angle, a set of rails that angled up over his back fence.

“Jeff?” I called out, a hint of concern in my voice.  What was he building?

The man himself popped up a second later from below a metal contraption of some sort, grinning broadly.  His face had even more smudges of dirt and grease on it than usual, and he wore a pair of safety goggles, conveniently protecting his forehead.

“Bill!” he shouted back, sounding as if he hadn’t seen me just yesterday.  “Check it out!  Totally gonna prove you wrong this time, buddy!”

I stepped forward, doing my best to get some idea of what the man had constructed, while at the same time trying not to set him off with any sudden movements.  “And what are you proving me wrong on, exactly?” I ventured, trying to figure out what he had cobbled together.

It looked like a long ramp, two parallel rails aimed up and over the back fence.  At the base of the ramp, several wooden struts supported and cradled a sled, made out of a sheet of hammered metal with a couple small wheels bolted to the bottom.  Attached to that homemade sled were two very suspicious tubes that smelled strongly of dangerous explosives.

As I stepped in closer, I heard a faint squeal from the other side of the ramp, and I felt my stomach drop.  “Oh, no,” I said out loud.

“Oh, yes!” Jeff retorted, popping back up from whatever he had been adjusting on his sled.  “And you said that they couldn’t fly!”

I stepped gingerly around the launch platform (and that had to be what it was, I figured out), staring down at the creature in the cage on the other side.  A pair of beady little eyes stared back at me, not recognizing me but already blaming me for being trapped in this little metal box.

Things weren’t going to get much better for the fellow, I knew.

“Surely, you can’t be serious!” I tried, staring back and forth between the man, the pig, and the machine that the man had constructed for the pig.

“I am serious!” he fired back.  “And don’t call me Shirley!  Look, it’s totally going to work – and Sir Porksalot is going to be fine!”

“Jeff, it’s just an expression!” I insisted.  “It just means that something isn’t going to happen!  You don’t have to prove the idiom wrong!”

“But it isn’t that they can’t fly!” he said, reaching down and, with a grunt, lifting the cage, and the angrily protesting Sir Porksalot with it, up onto the sled.  Even despite my horror, I couldn’t help noticing that there were small pegs on the sled that perfectly held the cage in place.

He might be insane, I had to concede, but at least my neighbor was a hell of an engineer.  And for all I knew, this crazy contraption might actually work.

“See, I worked out the calculations,” Jeff continued, overrunning my protests with sheer determination.  “It’s just a problem of propulsion!  With enough thrust, pigs fly just fine!”

And before I could say anything more, Jeff had tugged me back a dozen feet from the gantry, sled, and angrily protesting passenger.  He lifted up something that looked suspiciously like a garage door remote and pressed the button.

My next comment was totally lost in the roar of explosive combustion.

As my ringing ears slowly cleared, I stared at the long, arcing trail of smoke that led up and out of Jeff’s back yard.  “Hey, Jeff,” I shouted, trying to make myself heard above the persistent sounds of encroaching tinnitus.

“Yeah?”

“How’s it going to land?  And where?”

“There’s the field back there behind our houses!  He should come down just fine in that!  I put a parachute-“

A very loud boom cut off the rest of his sentence.

We hurried out of the fenced-in back yard and around the house – where we both stopped short, staring in shared horror at the large column of smoke rising up from the field behind the house.  Even at this distance, we could already catch the whiff of burned Porksalot on the breeze.

I reached out and patted Jeff on the shoulder.  “Sure, they fly with enough thrust, but you still need to work on that landing,” I told him.

For once, the engineer didn’t have a retort.

Danni California: Part 6

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Continued from Part 5, here.
Start the story here.

* * *

The next Monday, Danni wasn’t at the construction site.
Most of the workers didn’t even notice the absence of the young, slim girl who had counted herself among their number.  The foreman noticed, but only in the vaguely annoyed sense that he would have to go round up another worker to replace her.  It wouldn’t be hard to find someone else desperate for money, but it still took effort, and it still annoyed the foreman.
James noticed, however…
He bobbed up and down through the breakfast line, trying to see if he had somehow missed her, had passed her.  After a few passes, however, he concluded that she was nowhere to be found.  There was no way that he could miss her big shock of flame-red hair.
Should he hope that she would turn up, or should he go looking for her?  James decided that the paycheck was more important than why his friend had decided to play hookey, but he kept his eyes peeled all day.  
Yet still, there was no sign of Danni.
As soon as the day was over, he dashed back down to the makeshift barracks that the workers called home.  Where in the world could she be?
When he entered, however, he spotted movement over by her bunk.  Someone was digging through her things, someone wearing a cloak and cowl to conceal their identity!  
“Hey!” James shouted, running over towards the hooded figure even as he was uncomfortably aware of the fact that he didn’t have a weapon of any sort.  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?  Get away from that stuff!”
“James?” came the voice from under the hood – and as the figure stood up and turned to face him, he saw Danni’s face staring back at him in surprise!
He skidded to a stop, barely keeping from colliding with the girl.  “Danni!  Where’ve you been?  You missed work!  You’re gonna get fired!”
“Let them!” the girl shot back, reaching down for a small canvas bag at her feet.  She pulled it up, undid the latch holding it closed, and flipped it around so that James could see the contents.
He stared.
The bag was stuffed with cash, more cash than he had ever seen in his life!  There were stacks upon stacks of bills, wrinkled but bound together with paper bands.  The denominations printed on the faces of the bills varied, but there were ones, fives, tens, and James was fairly certain that he saw at least one stack of hundreds!
Hundred dollar bills!  The young man couldn’t even imagine a hundred dollars.
“Wh-wha?” he managed, trying to find the words to express his incredulity.
Danni grinned at him, the cheeky, irrepressible grin that he recognized.  She reached down into the bag, carelessly shoving some of the bills aside as her fingers quested for something heavier, something towards the bottom.
She pulled out the piece of heavy metal, the muscles in her slim arms tensing as they held it up.  “Remember how you said that all the money’s tied up in banks?” she asked, as James stared at the object in her hands with a mixture of awe and horror.  “Well, I robbed one!”
James couldn’t even speak.  He just shook his head back and forth, staring at the huge, glinting metal weapon in Danni’s hands.
“Like it?  I stole it off the foreman,” she commented, taking his silence as admiration.  “A forty five, I think.  It’s huge!  I just waved it at the bankers, and they all shut up and did what I told them!”
After another moment, the young man licked his dry lips.  “Danni, you’re gonna get killed,” he whispered.
But the girl shook her head fiercely, errant strands of her red hair escaping from beneath the hood.  “No!  Come on, you and me – we can finally get out of here, can go actually do real things, live real lives!” she insisted.  She shoved the gun back into the bag amid the stacks of cash, and reached out to put her hand on James’s shoulder.  
“And I want you to come with me,” she finished.  “But we gotta go now!  Come on!”
Even if he had wanted to resist, the young man never stood a chance against Danni’s reckless, youthful determination.  But he did manage to ask a question as he was tugged out the door.
“Where are we goin’?” he managed to ask, before all his breath had to be devoted to running to keep up with the girl.
“North,” came the answer.  “That’s where all them folks with money are, right?  Well, we’re gonna go change that!”
An hour later, the local constabulary came bursting into the barracks, guns drawn.  But by that point, Danni and her friend were long gone.

Book 12 of 52: "David and Goliath", by Malcolm Gladwell

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Ever since I picked up Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, I’ve always been a fan of his books.  I’ve read Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw, so when I saw that he had a new book, it was an easy decision for me to add it to my list.

Once again, Gladwell tackles some of our assumptions about how the world should logically work.  In the typical “David and Goliath” story, the titular tale of this book, a tiny underdog goes against overwhelming odds – and somehow perseveres and manages to conquer.  What an unexpected result!

However, is David’s win over Goliath really such a surprise?  Gladwell argues that it is not!  Indeed, in the ancient world, stone-slingers (David) were typically used as the natural military counter to slow, heavy infantry (Goliath).  Why would anyone be surprised by David’s win?

Indeed, as Gladwell goes on to show through a plethora of other examples, many times the individual that we regard as the underdog turns out to have at least one, sometimes several crucial advantages.  Gladwell emphasizes the idea of “near misses” versus “remote misses”.  For example, when talking about a bombing, a near miss might leave an individual wounded.  But when an individual experiences a remote miss, they are not only unharmed by the bomb – but also, since the bomb missed the first time, that individual starts feeling invincible, and is more likely to take on additional risk in the future!

It is this idea of near misses, Gladwell argues, that leads to underdogs often rising up far higher than anyone might predict.  And although the concept sometimes seems extreme, he fills the book with plenty of examples to back it up.

While there aren’t a ton of lessons to take away for improving your personal life or approach towards problems, the book is, as are all of Gladwell’s books, a thoroughly interesting and engaging read.

Time to read: about 3 hours.

The Man Who Bought Socks

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I glanced up from the paperback sci-fi novel held just below the counter as the bell over the front door jangled.  As soon as my eyes focused in on the man’s face, I sighed.  I put the paperback away, bracing myself and taking a deep breath, trying to prep for the confrontation I was sure to begin momentarily.

In my head, I whispered a silent but fervent curse to UPS for delaying the recent clothing shipment to our store.  Didn’t they know that we had regular customers?

Extremely regular, a few of them.

“Hey, Albert,” I called out, leaning over the counter a little and giving a wave of my hand to get the man’s attention as he shuffled in.  “Listen, buddy, little problem…”

The man glanced over at me, pausing in his usual pattern that he followed.  I could see confusion pass briefly across his face, accompanied by some other emotion that I couldn’t quite place.  Was it fear?  “Yeah?” he grunted, looking at me from beneath lowered brows.

“Listen, I know you’re in here every day to pick up a pack of socks,” I said, trying to sound as apologetic as possible.  “But our restocking shipment hasn’t arrived yet, even though it was supposed to be here by Tuesday – and we’re all out, buddy.”

The man blinked, and I braced myself for some sort of assault or tirade.  I really had no clue what was going to come out of this strange little man, but I really just hoped that he wouldn’t start knocking down displays when he freaked out.

I mean, the man has to be some sort of crazy, doesn’t he?  He’s been in every day for the last six months – every single day I’ve worked here – and he’s always buying the same thing.  He strolls in, picks out a single six-pack of white athletic socks, and pays for it in cash.

When I first started working here, I used to imagine that maybe he was some sort of alien, and he was trying to study humanity through socks – or maybe I just read too many dollar store science fiction paperbacks.  All of us employees had our own guesses.  Mary thought that he used them instead of toilet paper.  Carl insisted that the man jerked off into them and then threw them away.  My boss, Tom, swore that he’d once seen the guy eat one.

I really didn’t know what Albert did with these socks, or why he needed a new pair every day – but this day was going to definitely throw a wrench in the works.

I was expecting him to get angry, maybe yell a bit.

But I wasn’t expecting him to stare at me with wide eyes, his whole face going pale with shock.

“No, no,” he gasped out in strangled tones, staggering forward towards my counter.  I leaned back a little, concerned that this might be a ploy to get close so he could take a swing, but the man’s hands just landed on the counter, as if he had to struggle to stay upright.  “No, you can’t be out!”

“I’m really sorry, man,” I offered, not sure how to handle this outburst of sheer panic.

The man stared up at me, his eyes so wide that the irises were fully visible.  “But you don’t understand,” he insisted.  “Now I can’t feed it – and it’s going to spread!“

What the hell?  I just stared back at him in confusion.  “What?” I managed.

“The plant!  Oh god, the plant!  If I don’t feed it, it’s going to grow out, searching for food – and once it learns that there’s more, well, it will explode!” the man hissed, waving his arms at me as if this would somehow make things clearer.

I just shook my head at him.  “Plant?  Albert, slow down.  Are you telling me that you feed these socks to a plant?”

For a moment, the man affixed me with one wide eye, glaring at me as if wondering how I could be so dense.  “Yes,” he snarled at me.  “When it crashed into my back yard, I did as ordered.  I was a good little servant.  And I convinced it that only I could bring it the food it wanted.”

I nodded, certain that this guy had to be off his meds for something.

But Albert saw my expression, somehow read my thoughts, and shook his head furiously at me.  “You don’t believe me – not yet,” he accused me.  His hand reached down for his left sleeve, unbuttoning the cuff and hauling it up.  “But just wait!  It will grow, and you’ll see!”

This time, as the man shook his left forearm at me, I felt my mouth drop open as I stared.

All up the man’s arm ran a line of round, puckered scars.  It looked almost like the tentacle of some giant octopus creature had wrapped around him, burning marks into his skin.  I couldn’t think of anything else that could cause such a pattern.

“And now, it will grow!” he continued, shaking his scarred arm at me.  “It only stopped before because I convinced it!  Now, now it will know that I cannot be trusted, and we won’t be able to hold it!”

Inside my head, I felt myself lurching, reality sliding off at an angle.  Albert couldn’t be talking truth, right?  This had to all be some sort of crazy self-delusion.  But I couldn’t tear my eyes away from those scars wrapping around his arm.

“Albert, wait,” I said, my voice sounding to me like it was coming from somewhere far away.  “What if we fight it?”

The man just stared at me, but I was already moving, ducking out from behind the counter.  Fortunately, the store was empty aside from the pair of us and Tom was in back.  My replacement was due in at any minute, and I’d be off duty.

I hurried down the aisles of the store, Albert tagging along behind me.  Finally, I found what I was looking for, and skidded to a stop.  Behind me, I heard the other man suck in a breath.

“It might work,” he said doubtfully.  “There’s a chance.”

I nodded.  “You know, I’ve always wanted to fight an alien,” I remarked, staring up at our store’s selection of weed killer, shears, and other trimming implements.

I reached up and lifted down one of the big pairs of hedge trimmers, feeling its comforting weight in my hands.  “What do you say?” I asked, giving the pair of oversized scissors a test snick together.

For a minute, Albert just stood there, looking at the wall of weaponry.  And then, suddenly, he reached forward and picked up a bottle of poison.

“Let’s do it,” he said fervently.

The two of us loaded up, getting ready for battle…

Danni California: Part 5

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Continued from Part 4, here.
Start the story here.

* * *

Ten hours later, the foreman gave each of the workers a nod as they passed by.  In his hands he held a thick stack of thin envelopes, and he handed one of these to each man as they passed.
Danni knew better than to rip the envelope open right away.  The foreman might be a cheap skinflint, but he knew better than to rip off his workers.  He told them all how little they were going to make, and then paid them precisely that.  If he tried anything else, he’d soon be without a crew.
“Hey, Flame-head,” called out a voice next to her.
Danni glanced over at James, the skinny, scrawny youth jogging to catch up with her.  The young man looked half-starved, like always, but he still put on a grin as he loped up beside her – and Danni’s smile in return was genuine.  
“Hey, Skinny-bones,” she replied, the nicknames affectionate rather than insulting.  “How was your long day of grueling labor?”
“Oh, same as always,” the kid replied with a shrug.  His back was still a bit hunched; that tended to happen after spending the whole day picking up the nails that the other workmen dropped.  He, unlike Danni, had already ripped open his pay envelope.  Danni could see the end of it sticking out of a pocket on his oversized, baggy canvas trousers.
“So,” James continued after sucking in another breath, “what are you going to do tonight?  Are we hitting the town?  Living it up like kings?”  He bounced a little as he trotted along, making the pockets of his pants jingle with the change inside.
Danni couldn’t help but smile at the kid’s exuberance, but even though she was only a year older than him, she couldn’t help feeling wiser by many years.  “Yeah, maybe later,” she dismissed his suggestion.  “But first, I gotta go visit my mom.”
James’s eyebrows rose.  “You know, I’ve never gotten to meet your mom?” he said, his tone turning the words into a question. 
Danni stopped and just looked at him for a minute.  Even for those few seconds, she could see the man growing uncomfortable, his shoulders pulling back a little, but he didn’t back away.
“Okay,” she finally said.  “Follow me.”
*
A half hour later, they both stood in silence, looking down at the smooth stone in front of them.
When James finally spoke up again, his voice was hushed, muted of its usual enthusiasm.  “Sorry, Danni,” he said quietly.  “I didn’t know.”
“That’s okay,” the girl replied, reaching out and patting her friend on the shoulder.  Her eyes, however, never left the stone in front of them.
When they arrived, she had bent down and carefully cleared away some of the weeds and taller blades of glass, making sure that the stone was visible.  It wasn’t properly carved, but she’d paid off the tab of one of the masons in town, and he’d chiseled some words into the stone in exchange.
“Might not be carved proper, but at least it’s good granite,” he had remarked as he finished hammering in the words that Danni requested.  “Should last a while if you keep the roots off it.”
And the girl had done so.  Every two weeks, while the rest of her work crew headed down to the bars to fritter away their meager pay so that they could live like rich folks for a night, she would make the hike up to this hill and carefully clear away any errant plants encroaching on the stone.
After another few minutes, Danni opened her mouth again.  “She wanted me to make something,” she said, not looking over at James.
“What, like a house or something?”
She shook her head, the long strands of red hair falling out around her face.  “No, of myself.”  She gestured around, out at the skeletal frames of buildings in the distance, at her dusty and stained clothing.  “She wanted me to be more than just another little poor girl.”
James opened his mouth, but the boy found himself at a rare loss of words.  “Yeah, but no one gets outta here,” he finally said, truth winning out over tact.  “I mean, nobody leaves – there’s nothing else out there.  At least here there’s work, enough to get by.”
He saw Danni nod, but the woman didn’t reply.  “All the money’s owned by the rich folks up north,” he went on.  “And they keep it all in banks, so you can’t even rob ’em!  So we’re all kinda stuck here.”
The girl had straightened up a little, and glanced back at him.  She was taller than James, and as she looked down at him, James thought for a moment that he saw a queer glint in her eyes in the dusk.  
“What?” he asked, confused.
After a second, though, Danni shook her head.  “No, it’s nothing,” she said.  “Forget it.”  
But as they headed down the quiet hill, back towards the hustle and activity of the town, an idea was growing and flowering in her head…

Book 11 of 52: "The ABC Murders" by Agatha Christie

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Going back to fiction again!  I’m continuing in my quest to read all of Agatha Christie’s consistently amazing mystery books.

Normally, a mystery book doesn’t reveal the killer right away.  If so, he’s well hidden, and often the last person to be suspected.  We almost certainly don’t get a chapter from his narrative, telling us his full name and what he’s up to.

But there’s a reason why Agatha Christie’s books are anything but normal…
In only the second or third chapter of “The ABC Murders,” we get a short little blurb from a man by the name of Alexander Bonaparte Cust, detailing how he’s considering a new method for selecting a victim.  By gods, we’ve got our murderer!  No need for a detective after all!

But of course, for Christie, nothing’s as simple as it seems at first, and as she leads our mustachioed hero Poirot deeper into this mystery.  As Poirot himself mentions, this is one of his first cases where there’s a murdering spree, and not just a single murder in a cozy group of clear suspects.  How does he hunt down a killer, when it could be anyone in the country?

But of course, it turns out that there are suspects, and we also get a nice glimpse into the operating methods of the police as they investigate, both with and without Poirot’s help.

And once again, at the end, I couldn’t guess the killer.  Damn.  One of these days, I’ll manage it, Christie!

Time to read: 3 hours.  Typical for fiction.