The Mountain Man’s Curvy Trick-or-Treat (Forbidden In Fall Mountain Man #20)

Chapter 1

Chapter

One

EVERETT

The line at Ponderosa Salvage crawls like glacier melt. Slow, relentless, ancient as regret. I lean on the bed of my old truck, waiting my turn to dump a load of scrap—twisted metal limbs and scorched circuitry stacked beneath a thick blue tarp.

Kids in plastic fangs weave between idling cars, their laughter fizzing like static, candy-filled pumpkins swinging like tiny suns. On their approach, I reach into my truck, grab the bag of goodies and put a handful in each basket.

“Thank you, Mister,” one screams.

Another giggles. “Trick-or-treat.”

I used to think these earth-born tadpoles pathetic … soft, breakable things. But somewhere between centuries, they grew on me. Cute in their own way, flushed round cheeks, and toothy grins. Still, they’ve got nothing on kittens or baby alpacas.

A worker wears zombie makeup, white and green, to cast his complexion in a rotten pallor. Torn clothes and black circles around his eyes to evoke the undead. No dread there.

The best costume here is the one nobody sees. Big brown beard, denim, flannel. If only they knew how hard I have to concentrate not to glow.

The light wants out; the same way truth does. It gathers behind my ribs like a storm no textile can hold back forever.

Ten more trick-or-treaters and a nearly empty candy bag later, I finally make the front of the line.

The zombie gestures me forward. I hop back in my truck, make the engine rumble, and pull up next to him. The man eyes me, nods, then strides to the back, lifts the tarp.

He squints, face scrunching. “Electronics?”

The pile in my truck bed once marched, saluted, obeyed. Now it’s just twisted obedience, ready for the crusher. Sentinel constructs. Or robots, some might say.

Made to patrol the frontier, break the Resonant where they’re found. A final act of rebellion I’ve been inching toward for centuries.

I step out, cross my arms, and grimace. “Junk.”

He doesn’t look convinced, but the line’s long, and there’s no use fighting. Besides, I add, “No radiation or poison.”

If he only knew the half of it.

“Nice costume, man! Those glowing eyes are killer!” A voice calls my way. A man wearing a clown mask.

I deadpan, “Yeah. Killer.” I let my bioluminescence flare for one solitary moment, savoring the way he steps back and does a double-take.

I smile to myself. Don’t know if it’s the joke or the joy of finally knowing I’m doing the right thing after so many centuries of inner conflict.

Humor blunts the guilt, though the scraps still hum under the tarp like restless ghosts. A residual current, nothing spiritual.

How do I know this? Because even buried under concrete and metal, I can still feel the Mother Tree’s slow heartbeat miles away—roots whispering through rock, calling her wayward sons home.

The zombie and I throw the rubble into the huge pit below, where bulldozers smash and crush the otherworldly pieces.

Memories of last night wash back over me. Robot watchers limping back to my cabin, circuitry humming with demands. A recharge. Small repairs. Something to combat a dampener. That’s when I went from listening to smashing, not stopping until the constructs lay around me in violent heaps.

I may be a builder of artificial intelligence by day. Still, I’ll be damned if I let them use my tech on any more of the halfbloods, despite their transgressions.

Sentinel purity has become our quiet path to extinction, not a noble choice. The halfbloods, Wildbloods, whatever they want to call themselves, were right all along. Only I hope this realization hasn’t come too late.

My face is grim, but the corners of my mouth tilt up at the fracturing metal, crushed circuitry well beyond repair or reverse engineering.

An act of sedition—small, silent, maybe suicidal.

Maybe I don’t care.

Diesel and ozone float across the yard, rain whispered through the dampening breeze.

“Better trick-or-treat while they can,” I say, nodding toward the kids gobbling candy. “Gonna rain tonight.”

The zombie lifts his head, surveys the dark, swirling atmosphere. “Sure looks like it.”

“Even the sky’s getting in on the holiday,” I say. He shrugs, eyes me like he doesn’t know what to say.

Typical.

Don’t know how the inhabitants of this place can’t read its moods, hear the whispers sizzling deep through the mineral veins of this planet. The hum. Drove me crazy when we first arrived. Like the worst case of tinnitus a body could get. Never got better. I got used to it.

“What the?” the guy says, fingers brushing over metal so thin it resembles fabric.

I snatch it, throw it into the pit below. “Memento from Roswell,” I say with a wink.

He chuckles. “Good one. Name’s Steve, by the way.”

“Everett,” I say, gripping his hand firmly. Learned a long time ago the key to blending in with the Terrestrials is knowing how to shake. Firm enough to garner respect, not so hard their hands turn to rubber.

“Seen you here before.”

I nod, wipe my hand over my forehead as I throw in the last pile of robot pieces. “Yep, live up near the Starborn Range.”

“Oh,” his eyebrows lift. “Is it as spooky as they say?”

I shrug. “Worse.” And if he knew how true that was, he’d stop smiling.

“Say, did you hear about those strange lights last night? Some folks got photos, videos, even. Weird pulses, humming, movement across the north pasture above Thunderhawk Ranch.”

I square my hips toward him, pretend I’m interested in what he’s saying. Should’ve decommissioned those bots a long time ago. Even though it goes against our commander’s orders. More trouble than they’re worth.

And all to keep a few hybrid aliens from fucking human gals. Got far better things to do with my time.

“Dunno,” I lie. “Slept like a baby last night.”

Steve looks disappointed, zombie makeup creasing. “What do you think, Ev? Do aliens exist?“

I whistle low and long. “Everett. Don’t do nicknames.”

He blinks for a moment, face suspended.

I rub the back of my neck. “And as for extraterrestrials? Wouldn’t believe it even if you saw one. How all … humans are.” I catch myself in the last sentence, remove the “you,” so I don’t come across as too disparaging.

To prove my point, I let the frequency slip. Light ripples under my skin, refracting through rain-damp air, a confession I can’t unsay fast enough. His breath stalls. Then, I shutter the shimmer closed again.

“That’s some costume,” he parrots the clown.

I nod, hand him a wad of green, and climb back into my truck. I park along the outskirts of the yard, pouring steaming black from a thermos. Coffee. Best invention in this solar system.

I take a swig of the hot liquid, almost too hot to drink. My mind festers with what I’ve done. How I’ve buried the tracks by erasing the last witnesses to my disobedience.

But it’s about more than that. Breaking chains that have bound us for centuries. The same way of thinking that caused the Great Rift between Sentinels and Wildbloods. Never thought I’d feel this, but honestly, I wish I’d chosen a different side all those years ago.

Free but hollow. That’s the crux.

The Starborn Range has been eerily quiet all morning. Like the disturbance from last night didn’t bother them at all.

A calm so deep it feels rehearsed.

This morning, beneath the Mother Tree in the deepest part of the woods, I pressed into her ancient energy for wisdom.

“Live. Breathe. Love,” she’d told me. More felt than heard.

Her trunk rises like a cathedral of light, sap veins pulsing in blues and greens that answer the glow in my own skin. When I press my palm to her bark, the hum aligns—mine and hers, one continuous frequency older than the stars. For a moment, I almost believe redemption is photosynthetic.

My commander says breeding with humans is entropy. But Mother Tree showed me how purity is poison—something our half-alien, half-human cousins figured out long ago.

The one piece of the puzzle I still can’t wrap my head around, though, is resonance. Been here for literal ages, not even caught a glimpse of it with a human, man or woman.

I take another sip of coffee, waving goodbye as I pull out of the junkyard, windows still down, small-town noises filling the cab. Children’s laughter, a barking dog, locals chatting amiably. In the distance, a train calls, lonely as I feel.

The mountain road coils upward, rain whispering against the windshield. The hum in my bones keeps time with the wipers—two metronomes of regret. It gnaws at me, like the occasional glitches from my failing regulator.

I should report the issues to Command. But then, Command should already know … if they cared anymore. Can’t even blame them. Nothing has made sense in too long to remember.

Every mile of this road feels longer than the last century.

No beacon. No orders. Just the echo of the constructs’ death-cry in my head and the promise of a tribunal that’ll never come.

Maybe that’s punishment enough—being left to rot in peace.

The cabin greets me like an accusation: a single lamp burning, tools scattered across the workbench, the faint smell of ozone and pine sap. I used to think solitude meant safety. Now it just sounds hollow. Like the faint copper taste of lightning waiting to strike.

I pour what’s left of the coffee, let it go cold in my hands. The storm outside thickens, white noise swallowing the world. I can almost hear High Command whispering across the static, reminding me what happens to traitors.

I should feel regret. I don’t. Only emptiness.

Maybe the Mother Tree was right. Without living, life is dead. Guess I’m half-dead already.

Lightning cleaves the dark; for one heartbeat, the empty chair isn’t empty. Then the world exhales, and I’m alone again. Except for a distant buzz. Like Rook’s signature flicker in the static—impossible, but there.

The wind hits the walls hard enough to shake the glass. I close my eyes and tell myself it’s just the storm. Nothing coming up the mountain. No one foolish enough to find me.

I throw off my flannel, bare-chested in the fading light. Let the cabin fill with my radiating glow. No one to fool or impress.

The hum rises beneath the rain, a pulse older than storms. My skin answers with a faint aurora, soft blues chasing through gold.

Change, it whispers—or maybe that’s just the part of me still bright enough to believe.

Far down the mountain, I can still hear the children—costume-clad shadows scattering across the pavement. Life hums on, steady and unbothered, with or without me.