The Gateway Legacy

Note: This story was published in Black Cat Weekly #192 (A bargain at $2.99)

Disgraced detective Akayla Daniels has been the main protagonist for the majority of my Kinston Collective stories. In many ways, she is my window into the very world I’ve created. But there are other stories lurking on the fringes, other heroes and villains and otherworldly threats. Natasha Hailey, the tough and extremely competent leader of the Collective’s New Orleans operation, invited me to come along for a ride with her people. The idea was to see how a team of occult investigators might stack up against a late 21st century cult. Sounds straightforward, or at least it did to me, but when Anna Hopkins wandered in Natasha's bar and began spilling her missing sister's story, it got interesting. Turns out, one man’s cult is another man’s corporate culture.

Many years ago when I lived in Dallas, TX, I had a car that only ran on three out of four cylinders and a $20 a week budget for food. Needless to say, I didn’t get out much. But a friend took me on a date to Las Colinas one night, and the experience has been stuck in my head for thirty years. After dark, the planned community shut down, and it was entirely possible to walk for twenty minutes in a well-developed city and not see another living soul. You’ll find it described in the story much as I remember it; empty, eerie, a monument to failed social engineering.

So when it came time to pick a backdrop for a story about shadowy government conspiracies and an evil corporate cult, I had the perfect location already in my head.

The elements all came together on this one, and what ended up on the page turned out to be a rollicking adventure/mystery/thriller not entirely unlike a good X-Files episode. I hope you enjoy it.