Invitation: The Call, The Haunted, The Sentinels, The Girl Read online

  The Call © 2017 Bill Myers

  The Haunted © 2017 Frank Peretti

  The Sentinels © 2017 Angela Hunt

  The Girl © 2017 Alton Gansky

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-3145-1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the authors’ imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Gearbox

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  From the Authors

  The Call by Bill Myers

  Contents

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Epilogue

  The Haunted by Frank Peretti

  Contents

  1. Clyde Morris

  2. The Phenomenon

  3. Encounters

  4. Earthsong

  5. Gustav Svensson

  6. The House

  7. Explorations

  8. During the Night

  9. Four Messages

  10. A Heated Debriefing

  11. Daniel

  12. One Final Message

  13. The Prison

  14. The Third Death

  15. A House Afire

  16. The Monster

  17. A Hero

  18. Reflection

  The Sentinels by Angela Hunt

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Epilogue

  The Girl by Alton Gansky

  Contents

  1. Snow

  2. “This Ain’t Right”

  3. Found and Lost

  4. I Almost Failed French

  5. A Burger and a Shake

  6. Back to the Tracks

  7. The IT

  8. Reunion

  9. It’s All Greek to Me

  10. A Knife to the Soul

  11. Hospital Rounds

  12. A Spark of an Idea

  13. Thirteen O’clock

  Epilogue

  Sneak Peek From Episode 5, The Revealing

  Selected Books by Bill Myers

  Selected Books by Frank Peretti

  Selected Books by Angela Hunt

  Selected Books by Alton Gansky

  Back Cover

  In this fast-paced world with all its demands, the four of us wanted to try something new. Instead of the longer novel format, we wanted to write something equally as engaging but that could be read in one or two sittings—on the plane, waiting to pick up the kids from soccer, or as an evening’s read.

  We also wanted to play. As friends and seasoned novelists, we thought it would be fun to create a game we could participate in together. The rules were simple:

  RULE #1

  Each of us would write as if we were one of the characters in the series:

  Bill Myers would write as Brenda, the street-hustling tattoo artist who sees images of the future.

  Frank Peretti would write as the professor, the atheist ex-priest ruled by logic.

  Angela Hunt would write as Andi, the professor’s brilliant but geeky assistant who sees inexplicable patterns.

  Alton Gansky would write as Tank, the naïve, big-hearted jock with a surprising connection to a healing power.

  RULE #2

  Instead of the four of us writing one novella together (we’re friends but not crazy), we would write it like a TV series. There would be an overarching storyline into which we’d plug our individual novellas, with each story written from our character’s point of view.

  Bill’s first novella, The Call, sets the stage. It will be followed by Frank’s The Haunted, Angela’s The Sentinels, and Alton’s The Girl. And if we keep having fun, we’ll begin a second round and so on until other demands pull us away or, as in TV, we get cancelled.

  There you have it. We hope you’ll find these as entertaining in the reading as we did in the writing.

  Bill, Frank, Angie, and Al

  Contents

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Epilogue

  For Angie Hunt:

  The Wendy to our Peter Pan

  CHAPTER

  1

  There’s four of us. Well, five if you count the kid. We don’t know each other, we don’t like each other, and we sure didn’t ask for any of this. But here we are. “The probability of fate,” Andi calls it.

  I call it a pain in the butt.

  Anyway, we each got our own version of what’s been happening, so here’s mine. . . .

  It was Friday night. I was tired and business was slow. Time to shut down. I was already cleaning tips and grips when three white boys—football jocks from the community college—roll in. They’d played some big game earlier and it must have been a sweet victory by the way they waved around their Buds and staggered in, giggling. Well, two staggered in giggling—the one they carried between them was barely coherent.

  “Hey there, Brenda.” The buzz cut on the right had been a recent customer.

  I glanced up from where I was cleaning my stuff. “Sorry, boys, all closed up.”

  He acted like he didn’t hear. “We got ourselves an honest to goodness virgin.”

  The one in the middle, six-three, 275, raised his head and opened his watery eyes just long enough to greet me with a Texas drawl, “Ma’am,” before nodding back off. But it wasn’t the good-ol’-boy charm that got me. It was the face. The same one I’d been sketching for over a week.

  Buzz Cut laughed. “Twenty years old and not a mark on him.”

  “Pure as driven snow,” his buddy agreed.

  I looked at the clock. Like I said, business was slow and I was getting tired of ducking the landlord. “You got money?”

  All grins, Buzz Cut dug into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash.

  I swore under my breath and motioned them to the beat-up barber chair in the middle of the room. “Set him there.”

  They plopped him down.

  I popped a sterilized pack and began prepping a tip. “What do you have in mind?”

  “You know,” Buzz Cut said. “Do your hocus-pocus thing.”

  “My what?”

  “Where you tat out his
future. Like you did me.” He pulled up his sleeve to show a broken heart spurting blood from a bullet shooting through it. “I’m gonna be a heartbreaker, man.” He grinned at his buddy. “A real lady killer. Ain’t that right, Brenda?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Chicks go for a man in uniform. Wherever they send me I’m gonna leave a long line of broken hearts.”

  I rolled up Cowboy’s sleeve and started prepping the arm.

  “So do the same for him,” Buzz Cut said. “Tat out his future.”

  “You really do that?” his pal said.

  I reached for a blade and began shaving the arm. “I just ink what I see.”

  “Well, shoot, do my future, too.”

  “You ain’t got one.”

  “Huh?”

  They both laugh, thinking it’s sarcasm. I wish it was.

  I sterilize and goop the arm, all the time staring at it.

  “So how much?” Buzz Cut says.

  “Free form?” It was a lie. Like I said, I’d been sketching stencils for a week. But they didn’t have to know.

  “Sure.”

  “Two fifty,” I said. “Half now, half on completion.”

  “So that’s . . .”

  Thinking wasn’t his specialty, so I gave him a hand. “One hundred fifty now, one hundred fifty when the job’s done.”

  “Sweet.”

  He peeled off the bills, counting as he set them in my palm. “Fifty, one hundred, one hundred fifty.”

  He figured he was done, but like I said, it was a slow week and he was a slow thinker. I gave him a look and glanced at my hand, making it clear he was short.

  “Oh, right.” He peeled off another fifty.

  “I gotta piss,” his buddy said.

  Buzz Cut nods. He motions to the empty bottle in his hand. “And it’s time for a recharge.”

  His buddy leans over Cowboy and says, “Don’t go nowhere, pal, we’ll be right back.”

  Buzz Cut adds, “Get some sleep. It’ll be over ’fore you know it.”

  Cowboy doesn’t answer, so he shakes him. “Hey . . . hey!”

  He opens his eyes.

  “Get some sleep.”

  He nods and drops back off.

  The boys turned and headed for the door. I stared at the arm, pretending to wait for an image to form. But as soon as they’re gone, I crossed to the desk and pulled out the stencil I’d been working on—four grown-ups and a ten-year-old kid walking toward us. I didn’t recognize the kid or two of the adults. But, like I said, I recognized Cowboy. And I recognized the woman beside him. Black. A few years older. Dreadlocks. A dead ringer for me.

  The job took less than an hour. Another hour passed and still no one showed. It was late and I’d had it. I tossed down the magazine. I butted out my cigarette and crossed over to him. He was snoring like a chainsaw.

  I shook him. “Hey.”

  He kept snoring. I shook harder. “Hey!”

  He opened one eye, gave a polite “Howdy,” and went back to sleep.

  I shook him again. “Your friends? Where’re your friends?”

  Nothing.

  Enough was enough. I lifted his arm and slipped under it. Getting him to his feet wasn’t as easy.

  “Come on, come on,” I said. “A little help wouldn’t hurt.”

  Somehow I got him to the door. I hit the lights with my elbow, staggered outside, and leaned him against the wall to lock up. I barely got out my keys before he started sliding.

  “No, no, no—”

  He hit the sidewalk with a thud. I finished locking up and knelt down to him. “Hey. Hey, Cowboy.”

  Nothing.

  “Okay, fine.” Prattville was safe enough. A small town in the middle of the desert. And the night was warm. He could just sit there ’til his buddies remembered where they left him.

  I turned and headed toward my beater Toyota. Once I got there, I reached through the window to open the door. I glanced back at him. Big mistake. He sat there all alone and helpless-looking.

  I swore and started back.

  Two minutes later I’m loading him into the passenger seat. He does his best to help, which was next to nothing. Once all the arms and legs were inside, I got behind the wheel. “Okay, Cowboy,” I said, “where to?”

  He mumbled something.

  I shook my head and sighed.

  Suddenly the car shook as something roared overhead. I stuck my head out the window just in time to see a private jet shoot by. It was three hundred feet above us, with smoke and flames coming from its engine.

  I looked around, then dropped the car into gear and hit the gas.

  CHAPTER

  2

  The jet took its sweet time to come down. We’d been on the road fifteen minutes and still hadn’t found it. But we would. I saw the direction it was going and doubted it would be making any turns. I’d have called someone, but as usual my crap phone battery was dead.

  “Where . . . are we?”

  I turned to see Cowboy coming to. “Well, look who joined us. Hope you got cash. Door to door delivery is extra.”

  He frowned. “Sorry?”

  “I’m driving you home.”

  He managed to turn his head and look out the window. “But . . . I don’t live out here.”

  “We’re taking the scenic route.”

  He sat up. “That’s real kind of you, but—” He spotted the cellophane over the tat and pulled at it. “Ow!”

  “Yeah, that’s going to be a little tender,” I said.

  He looked at it. “Wow. Did you all do that? That’s real nice. Who are them people?”

  “No idea.” I glanced at it. “That big guy’s you, obviously. But those others . . .” I shrugged.

  “What about—Ow!” He’d touched it again. “Her?”

  “What about her?”

  “She kinda looks like you.”

  “What do you mean, ‘kinda’? That’s a great likeness.”

  “Watch out!”

  I turned back to the road just in time to see some old dude and a girl. I yanked the wheel to the right, swerving, barely missing them. Well, mostly missing them. I must’ve clipped the old guy, cause the next thing I know, he’s out of sight.

  I slammed on the brakes. The car barely stopped before I leapt out of it. He was on the ground twenty feet behind.

  “Are you all right?” I shouted, racing to him, “You okay?”

  “Professor?” The girl, a twenty-something redhead, was already at his side. I could only see her back. “Professor!”

  He was sitting up when I got there. Even in the moonlight, I recognized the face. It set me back, but not much. When you sketch like me, you’re never too surprised when the stuff shows up.

  He was the third person in Cowboy’s tattoo. His neatly trimmed beard and silver hair made him look like a senator, all polite and genteel . . . until he opened his mouth.

  “Moron!” he shouted. “There’s nothing but desert out here and you couldn’t see us?”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “What type of idiot are you?”

  “I didn’t see—”

  “Stupid women drivers.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Normally I’d be sympathetic, ’specially with not paying my insurance the last couple years. But he was a real piece of work. “Maybe if you didn’t walk down the middle of the highway, you’d be easier to miss.”

  “A highway, is that what you call it?” He tried moving his leg and winced.

  “Professor—”

  “You people should try using some asphalt, or put a white line somewhere so we’d have a clue.”

  “Professor, you’re hurt.”

  “I’m fine.” He winced again.

  The girl bent closer. Little Orphan Annie curls blocked her face.

  “Were you with the plane?” I asked.

  He didn’t bother to answer. “How far are we from town?”

  “Were you with the pla—?�
�

  “Are you okay?” Cowboy interrupted as he joined us. “It looks like you’re hurt.”

  The old man shot him a glare then turned back to the girl. “Are mental midgets the only indigenous life-form here?”

  Cowboy smiled that dumb smile of his and kneeled down to join us.

  The girl kept checking his leg. “We were flying to UCLA. That’s where the professor will be delivering his next set of lectures. They’re very informative and the reviews have been extremely positive.” She looked up at me, shaking back those curls as she kept chattering. But I barely heard. I was looking directly into face number four.

  “So our engine experienced some mechanical difficulties, at about”—she looked at her watch—“actually, exactly one hour and eight minutes ago. And the pilots, nice men both of them—an older gentlemen with a moustache and a younger one who forgot to button his fourth shirt button from the top—decided to set the plane down back there”—she motioned over her shoulder—“approximately one point two miles.”

  “Incompetent boneheads.” The old man tested his leg again and winced.

  “They okay?” I asked. “The pilots?”

  “Until I sue them for attempted manslaughter.”

  “Professor, they saved our lives.”

  “Which they’ll live to regret.”

  “No one injured?”

  “Everyone’s fine,” the girl said. “They’re flying in a mechanic first thing in the morning, and they called a taxi for us.”

  “But you didn’t wait.”

  The professor answered. “I’ve developed serious trust issues with them in the matter of transpor—Ahh!” He turned to Cowboy, who’d put a hand on his leg. “What are you doing?”

  “Sorry,” the big guy said.

  The professor turned to me. “So do you have hospitals out here? Or do you just leave people on the side of the road until they expire?” He spun back to Cowboy, who was touching him again. “What are you . . . where’s that heat coming from?”

  “Sorry.”

  He looked to the girl. “Andi, get on the phone and call 9-1-1. Tell them I expect a vehicle to be sent immediately and—” He stopped and shouted at Cowboy again. “What’s that heat? What are you doing?”

  Cowboy gave no answer, and the old man pulled his leg away.

  “That’s strange,” he said.

  “Professor?”

  He moved it. “What on earth?” He reached down, touched the leg, then moved it some more. “How very odd.”