Bloody Foundations: A Grace and Poppy Adventure

In a world where magic is real and monsters lurk in the shadows, the only hope people have for saviors are a pair of janitors. They're not too pleased about it either, but they have experience in cleaning up messes. Grace West: A general all around disappointment to her family, now making ends meet with a combination of crime scene cleaning and house flipping. She is as surprised as anyone to be making money from this unhealthy combination. Winterdawn "Poppy" Strongwill: A former child hero in the Fantastical world and now a full-time burnout, trying to live off the magical grid. Making do with a police station janitor job by day and reality TV shows with take-out food at night. Unfortunately for our reluctant heroes the Fantastical World is a mess. Mythical monsters are running amuck, amoral wizards are experimenting on innocents, and one of the worst kinds of trouble is about to crash into their quiet little worlds. Emma is a golem, an unstoppable monster made of clay. For an extra kick the fiend that made her used clay created with the ashes taken from the ovens of Dachau. Emma's set on a "holy" mission, to reclaim artifacts stolen from the victims of the Holocaust camps. Unfortunately she does this by killing everyone and anyone in her way, regardless of innocence, and in the most brutal ways possible. Grace and Poppy are drawn into Emma's orbit by grisly murders of close friends. Knowing that they are the only ones who have a chance of stopping the monster, Grace and Poppy need to face their own demons and become the heroes that this world desperately needs. And they better do it fast, because Emma does not stop, she does not forgive, and every second she's getting closer . . .

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Bloody FoundationsA Grace and Poppy AdventureBy Grady J. GrattAuthorHouseCopyright © 2009 Grady J. GrattAll right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4490-3388-0Chapter One- USA, Today - "So," Grace West frowned as she looked at the mess. "The guy was standing here?" Her paper wrapped shoes toeing the edge of the outline on the floor. They still called it a chalk outline even though these days they used a sort of yellowish-plastic tape. She wished they went back to chalk, adhesive was a bitch to get off of floors. "Yup." David, the police officer said as he flipped through the sheet of papers on his clipboard. "Wife picked up one of those ornamental porcelain cows on the table and rammed it right into his throat." "Allegedly." They both said at the same time, sharing a smile. "Okay, so how did the blood get all the way onto the kitchen wall there? I know arterial spray goes pretty far, but I never heard of it going over 80 feet AND turning a corner." "Dunno." David said. "I suppose finding that out will be the detective's job. Sign here, here, and here." He handed the clipboard over to Grace and she completed it with her usual flourish. "Okay, place is all yours, Gracie." She hated being called that, but she also knew one of the cardinal rules was to never give a reason for secretaries, librarians, and people who filed permission forms, to dislike you. They could make your job infinitely easier or almost impossible in this world of paperwork. "Thanks, David." She pulled on her dust mask and goggles. She couldn't help but smirk a little as she saw David's eyes look for something to latch onto, the letch, and find nothing. In her coveralls, gloves, and hairnet she looked totally sexless. A look she promoted. She knew she wasn't anywhere near a model but she never thought of herself as unattractive. She just didn't spend much effort on her looks, not that there was anything to work with sadly. Her appearance was like most things in Grace's life, she had stopped trying to please the wants of others. Sadly, she didn't know what she wanted either. So she ended up doing nothing. The result was black hair, a thin rectangular figure, a straight set of legs and breasts, hazel eyes, and decent looking skin that was just a little pale. The most natural expression on her face was, as one of her former co-workers said: 'As if she's always hearing someone tell a bad joke and is trying to be polite about it.' All of it ended up making her look like the caricature of a strict school marm from some Dickensian story. "You can take off now." Grace said to David. "See ya, Grace. Happy cleaning. Give me a call if something happens." He waved and left her alone with the gore. She stared at the mess, trying not to breathe in too deeply. It was a fairly standard mess, save for the errant blood. A little fecal matter here and there, annoying but she had never seen a pair of pants that could contain the contents of an entire voided bowel. It was one of those very disgusting things she had learned in her career. A tad more bile and vomit than she had expected though. Usually victims with gaping neck wounds don't vomit, but it can happen. The cops had attempted to haze her on her first few jobs by describing, in extensive detail, all the various things they had seen. She actually found it more helpful to her than nauseating. Know thy enemy ... even if it's some unknowable ichor staining the wood floor. She hadn't even known what the word ichor meant, or that it was even a word. Grace adapted though, soon she knew all the different words for describing the thin, acrid, watery discharges from wounds. Grace decided to start with the fecal matter first, then the blood later. Bloodstains weren't too hard to take care of, at least not for her, but somehow a person could always notice the smell of excrement once it had set, no matter how hard she had cleaned. Grace found it was a little depressing that she could now identify four different types of bodily fluids by smell alone. No one ever sets out to clean up blood, bile, and other organic matter for a living. It's one of those jobs people don't expect anyone to actually do. When they do meet a cleaner, they make an attempt at sincerity and say there's nothing wrong with knowing which type of solvents get intestinal juices out of linoleum without permanently staining the floor. Then when they think no one is watching, they roll their eyes at the person who wound up cleaning crap for a living. For Grace, however, she was quite content dealing with this kind of fecal matter as opposed to all the other kinds of crap she had to put up with in her earlier jobs. Her attempt in the world of architecture was a spectacular failure; even though she had a degree and two years of apprentice work she just wasn't willing to dive into the world of union kickbacks and zoning law 'negotiations.' Interior design was a living nightmare, infested with unreasonable and hideous demands of customers who blamed her for their own poor choices. Finally, she found didn't have enough of a killer instinct to survive in the living cesspool that was the real estate business. There was another reason that explained why she was unable to hold a career in general. Psychological issues coupled with massive parental resentment along with a deep fear of confinement to a set 'Plan.' The usual neuroses really, Grace told herself, just another part of the tapestry that explained her life's pattern of failure. She was just about to end her position in the nightmare job of selling houses, when she discovered the 'disclosure killers.' The series of perfectly nice houses that no agent was able to sell due to one kind of horrible crime or another taking place within. The agents were always stuck between a rock and a hard place. They couldn't just lie about the place, and there is just no way to spin a murder-suicide as something that could help a set-up sheet. That was when Grace, with the help of her combined experiences, had a revelation. People didn't want to live in houses where people were murdered. Real estate agents knew that to be one of the universal truths, full disclosure was the bane of their existence. Grace had come up with the ingenious concept that people did not want to live in houses that LOOKED like people were murdered there. All she had to do was replace the wallpaper, change the carpet and flooring, and add a new light fixture or two. Almost magically, those horribly lurid photos in the paper could no longer be directly connected with this house. Sure there would be stories but once you disassociated them with the house directly they created even more appeal. Provided that you marketed it to the right kind of person. There were an amazing number of macabre people in this world who thought their lives would be that much richer knowing that someone got their throat slashed in the upstairs bathroom. Grace explained her idea to Kerri, her co-worker. Kerri was a nice girl who had a very active period of teenage rebellion. As a result her hair was now and forever, despite the best efforts of the city's stylists, streaked with bright bubblegum blue. She was the only one of the city's real estate agents who would talk to Grace. She was low in the numbers, not as low as Grace was but not far from it. Most importantly, she had a cousin who worked for the city in the licensing department. The set up was elegant. Kerri's cousin got Grace all the licenses and permits she needed to clean up biological material with limited hassle from OSHA, Federal Health and Safety, and the Medical Waste Management Act. Grace would go in, clean up the mess, and figure out the cheapest way to make the house presentable. A few quick cheap changes, and then Kerri and her blue streaked hair would do the rest. The entire operation pulled in good money. No one really argues about how much it costs to get the little pieces of skull out of a suicide's bedroom, as long as it's done quickly and completely. Grace would charge people through the nose, and even though they complained, they always paid. She had successfully found a way to profit off of people's misfortune, and could still look at herself in the mirror the next day. She told herself that she wasn't making money off of people's misery, but rather assisting in the healing process by swiftly returning a little bit of normality to people's lives in trying times. She still wasn't happy though, happy enough to clean up blood spatter when someone was paying for it, but not truly happy. Grace always imagined she would end up in a corner office with a view, browsing eBay while other people did her work for her. Instead, she was currently on her knees scrubbing lemon-colored puss out of lemon-colored tiles with lemon-smelling cleaner. She had just decided that she was going to burn the next citrus themed item she saw, when she realized that something was wrong. The room was ... off. She got up off of her knees and walked around the perimeter. Everything looked fine, save for the mess, but something about this room bothered her. She went to a corner and going heel to toe, started to count the number of steps in the room lengthwise. A little mental math came up with the number of twenty feet. She repeated the act with the width of the room. She ended up with twenty-three feet. Everything seemed normal, but something still bothered her. Shrugging it off as imagination she went back to cleaning the floor. Two minutes later her head snapped back up in realization. The room was too small. She had checked the blueprints on the Internet before she had entered the house. She always did that to start making her list of alterations. The room was supposed to be twenty feet by twenty-seven feet. She got back to her feet and, this time with a tape measure, checked the room again. There was still that four-foot discrepancy. She checked the walls and then she found it. It was the wallpaper that tipped her off to what was going on. It was a hideous peach and white creation with a pattern that looked like the unholy offspring of plaid and paisley. It was sagging just a bit at the corner and only slightly peeling. It was also freshly applied along one wall, a false wall. Grace calmly walked out of the room, shut the doors, and called the police to come back to the scene. She didn't know why someone had mysteriously made three feet disappear from a room, but that most likely made it dangerous. She had found out the hard way that peeking into a mysteriously placed curtain or opening an oddly stuck door was a quick way to come face to face with a 'person of interest' in regards to the crime. The first time she had been fortunate enough that the police were in the next room. The next time she had a spray bottle of ammonia in her hand, which she used to blind the man. Then she grabbed the nearest blunt object, hit him hard, and then tied him up with massive amounts of duct tape. From then on she carried a police grade tazer, pepper spray, and the good sense to hold back her curiosity. The police returned to the house promptly and Grace waited for them to finish their work. She expected either the sounds of a scuffle, if someone was hiding back there, or the sound of photographs if there was something being hidden behind the wall. The whole 'fake wall' issue was new, but the rest seemed horribly routine to Grace. Nothing really shocked or surprised her in this business anymore. To be fair, Grace was never one to be shocked or surprised, even as a child she always seemed to be able to keep from startling or flinching. Her little brother attempted a great many ways to try to get her to scream. Tactics ranging from jumping out from around a corner and screaming, "boo," to dumping cold water on her when she slept. All efforts ended in failure, and some of that unique brand of torture only a big sister can deliver. It was sort of a reverse Pavlovian training. She stopped responding to shocking stimuli after a while. That talent of never being shocked or surprised stayed with her. It was how she was able to fend off two 'persons of police interest', how she could take opening a door to have a mangled maggot eaten corpse fall out at her, how she could be able to negotiate price with a hysterical landlord, who just lost a tenant in a fourth floor apartment and was very upset that what was left of the former tenant was starting to drip into the third floor apartment below him. That's not to say she didn't get scared or excited, she just didn't react to impulse as strongly as others. That allowed her to be able to assess situations and think on her feet faster than other people usually could. Usually just a second or two, but that made a big difference sometimes. That was why when two police officers ran out of the room, past her, through the door, to vomit outside, Grace didn't stand blinking in confusion. She was a little amused to see a movie clich in action and now her curiosity was peaked. With the police here to ensure that her interest wouldn't invoke any danger, she walked up to the room in question and knocked on the door. "It's Grace. Two guys tore past me and gave me more work to do on the patio outside. Something wrong in there?" "Uhhh ..." A pause. "Hey, Hall. It's the Necrosweeper, should I let her in?" Grace rolled her eyes. Wonderful, she thought sarcastically. That was Officer Beston. He came up with that nickname for her. His thinking was that it was 'cute' and that she might think he was 'charming' or at the very least that her title would 'catch on.' So far the only thing that had happened, was Grace had began thinking of him as 'That idiot.' "Yeah. Come in, Grace." That was the calm measured voice of Detective Hall. A decent guy in Grace's book, by the fact he treated her like an actual person with a respectable career, instead of a glorified, over-paid janitor. She'd be the first to admit that she was, but every profession deserved a little bit of dignity. Grace entered the room and saw what was behind the face wall. She blinked, tilted her head one way, then the other, and blinked again. "Wow." The officers were always impressed with Grace's ability to remain calm. Now they were in awe of it. The scene was horrifically graphic, belonging more in a direct-to-TV horror movie than in reality. Grace felt her stomach churn in protest and understood the other officers needing to leave the room. They had found the wife of the husband that was dead on the floor earlier. She was a piece of work. According to the medical examiner, first the killer had cut off all of her limbs, leaving just a torso. They had done this slowly, with what looked to be an electric carving knife. That explained the unusual blood spatter Grace had commented on earlier. The killer had then immediately cauterized the wounds by using a heated frying pan. The wounds were then sutured with thread and needle, and then finally the wounds were covered with dishtowels that were, quite literally, stapled in place. Then, the psychopath sealed her nostrils with super glue and a clothespin. Finally, a rubber garden hose was shoved into her mouth, down her throat, and duct-taped in place. Each tool used was neatly stacked next to the victim, and beside that were the arms and legs, also neatly placed. Grace's mind was filled with horrified questions. How could anyone do this? Had this been done while she was still alive, or was this just some sick way to desecrate her corpse? Who could think of doing anything like this to another human being, living or not? The questions heaped up open themselves until Grace had to turn away from the sight. "This bastard took his time too." Hall shook his head. "Probably to keep her from passing out from the pain. He wanted her to feel every agonizing bit of it." "Are you telling me that she was alive during the entire thing?!" Grace stared at the pile of limbs. "What were they ... how does that ... that's just SICK!" She took a deep breath to settle her queasy stomach. "Yeah," Hall said shaking his head. "Then the sick freak took a sheet of plywood and walled her in. Leaving her alone in the dark." "Oh God ... if I found her sooner?" "Wouldn't have mattered." Hall muttered. "She was long dead before you started working. Coroner says she asphyxiated. The hose was too long for fresh oxygen to travel through, with her hyperventilating because of the pain, she would be breathing in nothing but C[O.sub.2]." He shuddered. "Dying alone in the dark, in utter agony, choking on your own breath ... this is just too sick." (Continues...) Excerpted from Bloody Foundationsby Grady J. Gratt Copyright © 2009 by Grady J. Gratt. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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