About Starts and Stripes Forever: The Rockhounds Return

by CB Potts
15 pages / 3100 words
Ebook zipped file contains - html, lit, Adobe and Sony optimized pdf, prc, epub

The Rockhounds' Matt and Parker are back! Living in the middle of the jungle is all well and good, but the constant rain, the bugs that bite and want to kill you, not to mention the monkeys, all wear on a man. Especially a man of action like Parker. The man is yearning for home, more than ever on July 4th.

The jungle means safety, though, no one is trying to kill them, they aren't being hunted by the mob or the cops, or anyone else, and Matt is scared of what's waiting for them back in civilization. Can he come to terms with his own fears for Parker's sake?

Sample

"Fucking monkeys." Parker punched an imaginary simian squarely in the nose, knocking him senseless. "Fucking rain."

"I know." It'd been raining for the better part of a week. It was the weather you'd expect at this time of year in Tanzania; steady rain kept the country green. It was never truly dry in the jungle anyway. I don't think my Marine and I managed to escape the all-pervasive damp for even an hour in the year we'd been here.

"Can't even go fishing."

The river had been moving fast two days ago, when we'd gone down to check it. Swollen by forty-eight hours of continual rainfall, it would now be a raging torrent, heavy with debris from shores freshly swept away. "Probably not."

"There is nothing to do." Parker paced the perimeter of the tree house. Eighteen steps along each wall, seventy two to make the whole circuit. I counted each step silently, automatically. The sound was as familiar as my own heartbeat. As familiar, and much the same pace.

"I know something we could do." It was intended as a joke, a little humor, something to provoke a smile. Sean always used to laugh when I said it, but with Parker, it just fell flat.

He didn't even smile when he said, "Sorry, babe. Just not up for it right now."

"I know." It sounded surly and snappish, even to me.

Parker shook his head. "This is not good, Rockhound. Not good at all." He leaned on the windowsill and glared out into the jungle. "We've got to get out of here."

I got up and stood beside him. "Where are we going to go?"

He looked at me, then. Parker, who'd stared down SWAT teams and battled mercenaries, a veteran of gun battles and knife fights. Parker, with shining great big blue eyes and hair longer than I'd ever seen it -- so long it curled around his ears, with a waterfall of russet whorls splashing over the nape of his neck, stood there and said, "I want to go home."