The Nyte Patrol by Alex P Berg

Author:Alex P Berg [Berg, Alex P]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Batdog Press
Published: 2019-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

20

The following morning got off to an inauspicious start. I woke up late. The dorm shower ran out of hot water halfway through my lather, which helped me get out faster than I otherwise would’ve but not fast enough to avoid a late arrival to my eight o’clock class. That in turn meant I got a delayed start on the pop quiz our instructor assigned. It was open book—a blessing because I’d never emptied my bag from earlier in the week—but I don’t think it helped enough. By the end of it, I had matrices swimming in my vision and all I could hope for was that the test would be graded on a generous curve.

My second class went better than the first, if only because I didn’t have any exams sprung on me, but gosh darn it if I hadn’t come down with a case of sudden onset daydream syndrome. One moment, I’d sat there while Dr. Borovyk droned on about stresses from bending moments, then a wail filled the air, the door at the front of the lecture hall burst open, and a swarm of smoky, razor-clawed demons poured inside. I’d leapt to my feet, demon tooth bat in hand, and started swinging it with wild abandon. The beasts went flying, crashing through the walls and ceiling, howling with fear as they tried to escape the blur of my bat. I smacked one across the jaw. It soared into the projection screen at the front of the hall only to fade into nothingness. Suddenly there was Dr. Borovyk again, and the presentation was about eccentric axial loading instead of moments and I had to click back several slides on my laptop to figure out what I’d missed.

Similar problems afflicted me throughout lunch and my afternoon lab. As I exited my last class of the day and headed to the study hall, I silently admonished myself for my lack of focus, something I’d always thought I’d had in spades. With self-imposed threats hovering over me, I jammed my ear buds into place, cranked up some AC/DC, and got to work on another pile of homework that I hadn’t touched the night before. It was going pretty well until my screen went fuzzy and my eyelids gained ten pounds. Then I was off in Neverland again—or at least back at McCombs Field. I was in the middle of a game, but Larry and Dawn and Tank were there. Bill, too. Then my teammates magically disappeared, replaced instead with a herd of chimeras in softball uniforms. Larry’s magic crackled, Dawn’s blades flashed, Tank’s guns rat-a-tat-tatted, and I was in the middle of it all, fighting, leaping, yelling, and having the time of my life.

I awoke with a start. I blinked a few times and worked some saliva onto the roof of my mouth. My collar felt damp as I plucked it off my skin, and I sat up, pretending like I hadn’t been drooling all over myself while sawing logs in public.

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