Wait a minute here…someone other than Reid is getting whumped on? The world must be shifting, there's an alteration in time and space!

The chapters here will be freakishly short because I've been writing a bit sporadically lately. I will finish this, though, as well as my other much more involved WIP.

OK, on with it!


Derek Morgan was starting to feel like this property was not worth what he paid for it. He shook his head as he stared up at the high ceiling regarding the exposed beams riddled with water damage and rot.

The house had been an impulse buy, like the expensive candy bar one would pick up at the checkout lane at the grocery store that turned out to taste like chocolate-covered cardboard. He had just cleared double the expected profit from his last flip and the confidence he felt from that sale made him believe he could accomplish anything, even turning a house that should probably have been condemned into a beautiful future home for some growing family.

Morgan sighed and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his glove-clad hand. "I guess I can't get this place in shape by staring at it, can I?" he asked himself out loud and reluctantly began the tedious task of clearing out his workstation.

The first order of business was to rid the floor of debris; insulation, split boards, shattered glass and piles of stripped wire made the space so difficult to maneuver that Morgan found himself constantly stepping over the clutter. It was hot, backbreaking work, and the dust mask he wore made him sweat even more heavily. Eventually, though, he managed to throw most of the smaller junk out the window into the awaiting dumpster; the larger pieces he had to carry out the back door. Within a few hours, the floor was clear enough to walk across without tripping.

When he was confident that he had done enough hard labor to warrant a break, Morgan lifted the dust mask off of his face and let it hang around his neck. He leaned against a splintered wooden column long enough to let his heart rate return to normal. Soon he resolved to go out to his car to retrieve a bottle of water from the cooler in his trunk. He pushed off from the column and instantly heard a deafening crack above him. He instinctively looked up just in time to see the column topple over and the beams above that it had been just barely supporting come crashing down.