MINE Chapter 1 (standard:action, 11518 words)
Author: Tom Soukup	Added: Feb 21 2003	Views/Reads: 3908/2567	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Chapter 1 of my new novel that I am currently marketing. It is an international action thriller involving terrorism and West African diamond mining.

Chapter 1 

Cambridge, Massachusetts Saturday, May 28, 2005 10:14 AM 

The teapot whistled softly at first, growing louder with mounting
impatience as puffs of scented steam angled away from the tiny hotplate 
on the corner of the dresser.  The wailing went unnoticed, fading into 
the background, as indistinct as the distant whine of a police siren 
somewhere in the city far away.  Erin paid no attention.  Her mind was 
farther away still than all these sounds.  She was lost in the thoughts 
of today, of the moment.  Of what would be.  She stood at the window, 
drapes parted only enough to allow her eyes to pierce into the 
brilliant morning beyond.  Bicyclists zigzagged by on the narrow street 
below, pedals pounding frantically as each hurried off to apparently 
important destinations, wobbling and weaving recklessly though the few 
straggling cars that plodded along Plympton Street.  None saw Erin at 
her window now, and Erin saw none of them.  She wondered to herself who 
she really was today, now that she had realigned her life.  Her gaze 
remained unfocussed, cast to the sky above as if the soft folds of the 
billowy cumulus clouds hanging high above might somehow hold the 
answer.  A barely perceptible wry smile spread across her thin lips.  
It had actually become quite natural these days, there most times even 
without conscious control.  Something inside was its source.  That 
something had been only recently born but beat within her with purpose. 


The tolling of heavy bells far above her in the Tower at last broke the
spell.  She blinked her eyes in reflex, and that flash of emerald green 
reflecting in the windowpane before her snapped her back to reality.  
The teapot whistle was losing strength now, its futility expressed in 
the waning hiss.  Erin glanced back over her shoulder into the room, 
blinking in confusion as if the sound itself was foreign.  She shook 
her head and dismissed it.  There were plenty of errant noises echoing 
through the hollow hallways of Lowell House.  Certainly this one didn't 
matter.  Sharing a building with four hundred fifty others left little 
in the way of extraneous clamor that ever did.  She turned back to the 
window and saw the face of the new Erin Logan turn with her. 

How wonderful it was to be who she had become.  It was so very far from
where she had been.  She saw shadows of the past in the taut lines of 
her face.  Even now as the summer was fast approaching, her skin held 
steady to the stark pallor of winter's greatest depths.  She had 
learned long ago, and in very uncomfortable measure, that her pedigreed 
Irish heritage made the sun her lifelong enemy.  A sprinkling of 
scattered freckles, barely a shade or two darker than the skin upon 
which they lay, scattered across her cheeks and gave the only hint of 
dimension to the otherwise albescent canvas.  She grasped the loose 
ends of her poker straight hair and pulled it tight against her face.  
Its color contrasted her skin only in its ability to catch the golden 
rays of the sun from the morning sky. 

At times she looked skeletal even to herself.  Wasn't it that, as well
as her pale complexion, that was fodder for the names she endured as a 
child?  "Ghost" they called her.  "Spooky" at other times.  "Casper" 
may have been the kindest although in high school she was even forced 
to endure the cruelty of being labeled "Albino".  Before she let 
herself be dragged into the depression that such memories had often 
brought over the years, she was reminded of how far she had come, where 
she was now, and where her destiny would take her by day's end.  The 
smile grew wider and she parted the drapes further to take the 
morning's glow fully on her body. 

"You'll remember me differently," she whispered across the rooftops. 
"You'll all remember." 

She drew her eyes to slits, emerald crescents that were as much a
signature of her heritage as the rest.  If beauty could be found on the 
face of Erin Logan, it was in her eyes.  They spoke with outward 
expression, smiling when she smiled, sorrowful when that moment struck, 
and vengeful when need be.  Her eyes would always reveal her innermost 
feelings.  Rather than turning heads of handsome men and envious women, 
they more often betrayed her and accentuated her distance from her 
peers. 

"You'll see," she hissed and she placed her palms against the window


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