Thirteen Forgotten Worlds (Seam Wardens Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  I Run Into Trouble (Again and Again)

  Smack Down at the Restaurant

  Spencer Vs. Uncle Mike

  My First Underground Secret Base

  Awkward Reunions

  I Become a Player

  I Learn All the Things

  Scared Out of My Second Skin

  Enhancing Our Education

  Into the Seams

  Black Worms and Hooded People

  The City of Love and Sharp Tongues

  I Go To Rehab

  Angry Women

  Doing My Time

  Web of Lies

  I Am Spartacus

  Flexible Beliefs

  To Catch a Spider

  First Assignments

  How You Can Help Me Write More Books

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Brant Williams

  Thirteen Forgotten Worlds

  Seam Wardens Book 1

  Brant Williams

  The Thirteen Forgotten Worlds (Seam Wardens Book 1)

  By Brant Williams

  © Brant Williams 2017 All Rights Reserved.

  Cover Art by Karri Klawiter (www.artbykarri.com)

  For my lovely wife, Caroline. My first reader and constant support.

  Contents

  1. I Run Into Trouble (Again and Again)

  2. Smack Down at the Restaurant

  3. Spencer Vs. Uncle Mike

  4. My First Underground Secret Base

  5. Awkward Reunions

  6. I Become a Player

  7. I Learn All the Things

  8. Scared Out of My Second Skin

  9. Enhancing Our Education

  10. Into the Seams

  11. Black Worms and Hooded People

  12. The City of Love and Sharp Tongues

  13. I Go To Rehab

  14. Angry Women

  15. Doing My Time

  16. Web of Lies

  17. I Am Spartacus

  18. Flexible Beliefs

  19. To Catch a Spider

  20. First Assignments

  How You Can Help Me Write More Books

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Brant Williams

  1

  I Run Into Trouble (Again and Again)

  Some people run because they love it. They love the adrenaline rush and feeling of euphoria that comes with it. Others run because of a sense of duty or a desire to lose weight or stay in shape.

  I, unfortunately, had no idea why I ran.

  It was kind of crazy, really. I ran almost daily and could go for miles without any difficulty. I ran on my high school cross country team and placed second in the California state meet. A few months ago, I tried a marathon and ran fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon.

  The dirty little secret I never shared with my running friends and teammates was that I didn’t like to run.

  I felt like I should stand up and confess before all my friends so they could have an intervention for me. “Hi, my name is Pierce Davis, and I hate running.”

  And, why should I like it? I never felt the runner’s high that all my runner friends talked about. No matter how far or how fast I ran, it never felt good to me. It just sometimes sucked slightly less than other times. Let’s be honest here – running is long and tedious. Some days, I can cruise through it, but when I push myself, it’s painful and uncomfortable.

  But for some crazy, unknown reason, from the time I was ten, I somehow knew I was supposed to run and run often.

  So, I ran.

  I saw a hill up ahead of me and groaned inside. I had run this route through the park many times before and had intimate knowledge of just how brutal this particular hill was. I was only on mile five of my eight-mile run and the worst part was yet to come.

  It was time to push through it.

  I changed my music to something with a fast beat and pushed myself to get to the top of the hill as quickly as I could. I had the stamina to get through it, and I wanted to put the nightmare hill behind me as quickly as possible.

  As I crested the top of the hill, I saw a man and a woman standing in the middle of the path at the bottom of the hill. They were both dressed in some sort of pseudo-military or hunter clothing with dark cargo pants and vests with a bunch of pockets over black, long-sleeve shirts.

  Which couldn’t be comfortable since it was sunny and at least eighty-five degrees.

  The man had buzzed, brown hair and a crooked nose that looked like it had been broken at more than once. The woman was a few inches shorter with blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. She had intense, dark eyes, high cheekbones, and a nice figure. If she wasn't way older than me, I might have thought she was hot.

  As I got closer, the man held up a hand to get me to stop.

  Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen.

  Rule number one when running by yourself was to never stop to talk with strangers. At well over six feet, I was pretty big compared to your average eighteen-year-old, but I had also been taught to be careful and not take chances. Besides, the guy didn’t look like someone I wanted to mess with.

  I angled around the two of them and took a couple of steps off the path to get past and then jumped back on once I had passed them. After a minute of running, I took a quick look behind me and saw they hadn't followed me.

  Good. Crisis averted.

  I continued running and got back into my rhythm, arms and legs pumping, and my breath exhaling in controlled bursts.

  I only had a few more weeks before I would be leaving and moving out of my Uncle Mike and Aunt Ella’s house. I had been accepted to Harvard on an academic scholarship and was starting in the fall.

  All my life, I felt like I needed to accomplish something. And so, I did. I pushed myself constantly to try new things and discovered that I excelled at most things I put my mind to accomplish — running, sports, music, or academics.

  Except at Scrabble. For some reason, I just couldn't beat my Aunt at that game, no matter how hard I tried.

  But aside from that, the more pressure there was to perform, the better I did. I always wanted the last shot of the basketball game, the final catch in football, and the hardest classes at school. Some people collapsed under pressure. Not me. Pressure brought out the best in me and helped me do things I didn’t think I could.

  I thought getting a scholarship to Harvard was the accomplishment I had been looking for. And it was – sort of. For a while, it had taken away that feeling of uneasiness and the need to accomplish something, but after a few months, the old feeling returned. The bottom line was this: Getting the scholarship was great, but it still wasn't enough.

  Something was missing, and I had no idea what it was.

  But at this point, it really didn’t matter. I now had no choice but to go. My Uncle Mike was very rich, but he also believed in raising independent children. He had made his own son, who was a few years older than me, move out when he said he didn’t want to go to college.

  “My job is to prepare you to be productive members of society,” my uncle said on many occasions. “You can’t learn that if you hang out here your whole life.”

  I hadn’t always lived with my uncle. When I was ten, my family was in a car wreck that killed both of my parents, my older brother, and my younger sister. I was the only one who survived. I had spent almost half a year in the hospital recovering from the accident and only had a few foggy memories of that time. But I did have a jagged scar on my right shoulder which served as a constant reminder of that horrific day.

  Up ahead, I saw two more people standi
ng in the middle of the path. I prepared to run around them but did a double take when I realized they were wearing the exact same cargo pants and vests as the people I had just passed a few minutes before.

  Not only that, but they even looked the same. This man also had a broken nose, and I could swear the woman was the same as the one I had just passed.

  The man held up his hand just like the first one had. Or was this the same man? I had run in a straight line, so there was no way they could have cut through the woods to get in front of me. They had to be different people who were just dressed alike.

  Didn’t they?

  Like the first time, I maneuvered around them and kept running. Neither of them made any move to stop me or get in my way – other than standing in the middle of the trail, that is.

  Now that they were behind me, I put them out of my mind and continued to run. The trail made a wide turn around a large pond. When the path straightened out again, I saw two figures standing in the middle of the path ahead of me. This time, there was no mistaking it – they were the same man and woman I had passed before.

  I was one hundred percent sure of that.

  Something strange was happening here. It was time to change things up a bit. I turned around and ran back the way I came. I sprinted around the curve and once again saw the same two people waiting for me.

  How could this possibly be? There was no way they could have gotten there so quickly – especially without me seeing them. I made a quick pivot and ran in the opposite direction again.

  There were the man and woman still waiting for me.

  This had gone from curiously strange to extraordinarily disturbing. I slowed down and came to a halt, breaking my own safety rule. Clearly, there was no way to run away from these people. I pulled my headphones off and waited to see what the people would do. I really wished I had some sort of weapon with me. Being a strong guy, I had never really considered the possibility of getting attacked while running before. Now, I wished I had been a bit more paranoid and had something more than my bare hands for defense.

  “Relax,” said the man. He had a deep, soothing voice. He and the woman both held up their hands as if they were surrendering and started to approach. “We’re not here to hurt you.”

  “Then why are you stopping me in the middle of a park with no one else around?” I asked. “I don’t have any money.”

  The man laughed. “We don’t want your money. We just want to talk.”

  “Talk?”

  “Yes,” the man said. “Just talk.”

  "Ok," I said. "Let's start with you explaining how you can be in two places at once?"

  “We can’t, Pierce,” said the woman. “We just have ways of moving very fast.”

  She called me Pierce. That meant this was no random meeting of strangers. They knew who I was and had deliberately sought me out. But who were they and what did they want? I had a pretty good memory and was sure that up until today I had never seen either of them before.

  “How do you know my name?” I asked.

  The woman shook her head. “We first met you when you were ten-years-old,” she said. “You were the most prying, inquisitive, and annoying, little boy I had ever laid eyes on.”

  The man laughed. “And you loved every minute of it, Tamara.”

  The woman, Tamara, shrugged and smiled, but didn’t deny what the man had said.

  “I don’t remember meeting either of you,” I said.

  “Of course you don’t,” the man said. “Nobody remembers the creatures from the Seams after eight years with no exposure.”

  Creatures from the Seams? Was there a black lagoon, too? It was time to talk my way out of this.

  “Look, I don’t know who you are, but I need to get home soon or else my parents will be looking for me.”

  “No they won’t,” said the man. “They died almost eight years ago. We were there.”

  Did I hear that right? Did this man say he was there when my parents had died? How could that possibly be? There were no witnesses to the accident and everyone involved except me had died.

  “Spencer!” the woman said, anger in her voice. “Don’t talk to Pierce like that. And show some respect when talking about the dead.”

  Spencer took in a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Pierce. I meant no disrespect. I just want you to hear what we have to say. I made a promise to you the day you left us, and I mean to keep it.”

  “And what promise was that?” I asked. This was getting creepier by the minute.

  Spencer looked me in the eye. “I promised you that when you came of age, I would find you and give you the opportunity to join us. It’s what you wanted more than anything else.”

  “I don’t know what your little cult is,” I said. “But I can make this easy for you. I’m not joining. I have no interest in growing crops in your compound or whatever it is that you do.”

  “We don’t grow crops,” Tamara said. “We’re Seam Wardens. We’re the guardians of the passages between the worlds. We monitor those passages and keep this world safe from anything that gets through.” She gave Spencer a meaningful look. “At least, we try.”

  So, not a cult. Lunatics.

  “You protect us from alien invaders?” I said. I made an exaggerated gasp. “Oh! You seem to have forgotten your foil hats to stop them from reading your mind! Let me get past, so I can run to the store and get you some.”

  “Nice try,” Spencer said. “Do you think we don’t understand how it sounds to someone who has forgotten? We know it sounds crazy. You did, too. That’s why you made a video and asked me to show it to you when it was time.”

  I paused. A video? Well, since I knew it couldn’t possibly be real it shouldn’t be too hard to point out the flaws and prove it a fake.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s see it.”

  Spencer pulled out a pair of metal cylinders about four inches tall and each about the diameter of a pen. He pulled the cylinders apart and between them stretched a six-inch long sheet of clear plastic that remained connected to each cylinder.

  When Spencer let go of one of the cylinders, instead of rolling back up, the sheet of plastic stayed flat, forming a four-by-six-inch rectangle. Spencer tapped it with his finger and images flashed along its surface.

  I looked at the screen with awe. It was like a smartphone that was so thin it could be rolled up into metal tubes. Spencer swiped and tapped the screen with his finger until he found what he was looking for. He made a final tap with his finger and handed the screen to me. I held it carefully, not wanting to break it. The entire thing felt surprisingly light – hardly any weight at all.

  “Here, watch this,” he said.

  I looked down at the screen. There in front of me was a miniature version of myself, just as I had seen in pictures and video a hundred times in the past. Only, I had never seen this one before.

  “Is it ready?” I heard my younger self ask someone off-screen.

  “Yes, it’s ready,” said a male voice that sounded like Spencer’s.

  "Great! Hey, Pierce! It's me, Pierce!" The young Pierce on the screen grinned widely and laughed at his own joke. "This is so weird, huh? Anyway, I'm making this video because I have to go live with my uncle now and they tell me I’m going to forget everything about this place once I leave. But I don’t want to. I want to be a Seam Warden like Spencer and Tamara. They told me when I turn eighteen I’ll be old enough to join if I want to. And I really do. Being a Warden is awesome! They get to fight monsters, have powers, use cool weapons, and save people.”

  I gaped at the image on the screen. It certainly looked and sounded like me. I was even wearing the same Voltron shirt I had loved as a kid.

  From off-camera, I heard Tamara’s voice. “Tell yourself something that only you would know about yourself.”

  My younger self laughed. “That just sounds so funny! Uh, your favorite Pokémon is Venusaur, you hate broccoli, and your thumbs are double-jointed." Then, he looked around conspiratorially as if
making sure he was alone and whispered, "And you think Alexa is kind of cute. For a girl, you know." He burst out laughing and covered his face with his hands, clearly embarrassed about what he just said.

  “What else do you want to tell your future self?” asked Tamara’s voice.

  “Uh,” he paused for a minute, thinking. “There are bunches of worlds connected to ours that hardly anyone knows about. Well, they know for a few minutes when something happens, but then they forget right away and their brains make up stories to explain what they saw. Only a few people can actually remember for more than a few hours. Like us! That’s why Spencer and Tamara brought me here after we were attacked. I still remembered long enough that I could be one of them. It’s kind of scary and really weird, but if I can help, I don’t want to let any other kids have to go through what I did.” He stopped for a moment and looked directly at the camera. For a moment, I almost felt as if this younger version of myself could actually see me. “Say yes, Pierce. This is what I want more than anything.”

  The picture went blank and Spencer took the video player back. “What do you think?” he asked.

  That was a very good question. What did I think about the video? It certainly looked real enough. Could it possibly be the truth? They could do a lot with special effects these days. If someone really wanted to, they could have made the movie and faked it.

  It didn’t explain why they would waste the time, effort, and money required to fake something like this.

  It also didn’t explain the pull-out screen. That was technology that didn’t exist yet. It didn’t explain how they kept showing up in front of me no matter how fast I ran. It didn’t explain how the little boy in the video knew so many things about me.