by Josh Sinason
Release Date: 9/1/15
Eternal Press
Summary from Goodreads
A Spy-Fy, YA, Thriller. When Archie, a poor kid from New Jersey stumbles on a ring of spies working on a secret experiment, he ends up with a dead spy in his brain and the image of a girl he's never met haunting his dreams. When he goes halfway around the world to finish the spy's final mission he finds out just how much he can handle and just how far he's willing to go in the fight for love, honor and justice.
Excerpt
“I
thought we would be square by now, Scott.”
He said as he wrapped an arm around Scottie. He started slowly patting down his jacket
looking for scraps of anything he could take.
“Nothing, man, not a thing.
That’s too bad.”
“Here, I was holding this for him,”
I handed him the few dollars I had on me.
“That’s all, honest.” The second
year senior grabbed the crumbled wad and looked me over.
“Alright,
this is start.” He butted Scottie in the
shoulder, nearly knocking him over.
“I’ll see you later.” We heard
the click of a lighter as he disappeared around the corner, not even bothering
to bypass the dogs.
“I’ll get you the money, Archie,”
Scottie said as he straightened himself up and we ducked around the
corner. “We’ll get burgers sometime
soon, my treat.”
“Yeah,” I put my hands in my then
empty pockets. “So what’s with that
man? You owe some goon money?”
“It’s complicated. I have it under
control, Archie. I just need some extra
time. You really saved my ass, man. Thanks.”
We went back inside and snuck in the
free lunch line. I saw that grey lump of
macaroni and did my best not to think about those buttery grilled unions and
that patty covered in real melted cheese.
The smell of grill seasoning was in my brain and I didn’t want to let it
go because what was in front of me was the same thing I’d had all week,
leftover from the year before probably.
I told Scottie everything was fine
but I was still pretty annoyed. What was
he doing worrying about money anyway?
He’s all set. In two years he’ll be living in the city and Panzer and
everything about this place will be nothing but a memory, including me.
* *
* *
I skipped the bus home. I wanted to clear my head. I was tired of the
bus, that parking with the rust piles, and that metallic smell filling the
air. I was practically choking on it so
I did the only thing that made any sense to me at that moment. I ran.
I ran flat out until cold air filled
my lungs and my throat grew dry. It felt
like I swallowed gravel. I could see the other kids at the burger stand
enjoying their burgers and I could smell the butter on the grill, but I just
kept on running.
I
didn’t stop until I hit right around Seventy-fifth Street with those half
abandoned office buildings. One of them
was barely finished; it hung open at the time with the crumbling concrete
showing through the fading paint job. I
took one look at it, a building I walked by a hundred times in my life, and
nearly collapsed to the ground. The pain
in my head was skull-splitting. I could
feel veins straining as the world spun out around me.
“C’mon,” I said as I looked for the nearest
place to sit down. “Don’t be that
guy. Don’t be the kid who passes out in
the middle of the street. No. No,
Archie.” I dug my fingers into a metal
pole. “Don’t be that guy.”
And then it passed, like a tide
clearing out a layer of sand on the beach, my head was suddenly clear. I pried my hand away from the pole and moved
forward on shaking legs, but I just couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that
something was there, something big. It whispered
in the back of my skull and echoed even after I’d made my way down the block
and back to our little tenement. “It’s
not a tumor. I’m fairly sure it’s not a tumor,” I said as I rounded the corner
to my neighborhood. “I’m like
eighty-five percent sure it’s not a tumor. Seventy percent.”
My head was still spinning as I stumbled
back home. I couldn’t even tell which
building was mine at first. I was guided
by the smell of rust and looked for the old trucks with collected debris and
scrap metal hanging out the back that belonged to our super. It wasn’t until I saw those, and smelled the
collecting water in his tire pile on the side of the building, that I knew I
was home.
Just like every other building, ours was a
pile of bricks built on top of a puddle of mud with a fire escape barely
holding on at the side. Sometimes I
thought about climbing that fire escape, just once. I looked up at my window without the bars on
it and I knew I could do it if it wasn’t for that final jump, which was just a
little too high.
I stepped on broken
glass on my way up to the stoop. The
pain cleared by the time I hit the door but my head still felt fuzzy. It was like a radio on static in my
brain. There were flashes of that
Seventy-fifth street building, with its wild thorn bushes surrounding a paved
path with weeds stick through and a roof that remained unpainted. They’re flashes of me and words like “asset”
and “rendezvous”, but they were only coming through the fog every once in a
while as I plodded up each creaking and warped stair to our doorway.
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I do both serious articles and some artsy fartsy stuff, 2010 and 2011 Creativity Media Award winner. Check out my recent work at Goodreads.
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