Chet had locked himself out of the house yet again. He thought about calling his wife, but she was in another state visiting her mother for one more day, so he figured he could wait it out in the tool shed.

He unrolled the three sleeping bags and laid them one atop the other, cushioning him from the cold and hard cement floor. As Chet laid there he let his mind drift until he fell asleep.

It was sometime later that Chet heard strange noises. He had an old kerosene camp lantern, so he decided to light it and have a brief look around.

No sooner did he light the lantern, than the noises stopped. “Must have been dreaming.”

Chet doused the lamp, laid back down and returned to sleep in short order. Then it happened again – strange noises.

He laid still, listening and wondering what they were and where they were coming from. Chet was certain that the sounds came from somewhere inside the shed.

That’s when Chet remembered that his wife had hung a house key on a chain with a cartoonish metal monkey on it inside the shed to the left of the door. He got up, quickly retrieved it and rushed across the back yard and into the house.

While the sounds spooked him initially, Chet promptly forgot about them the moment he locked the door behind himself. His mind then focused on bed and sleep.

Soon several beings moved from the shadows, each made from nuts, bolts, washers and other odds and ends of building materials. They waited patiently for their leader, who had found a way to get inside the human’s house; their first step in world domination complete.

More than 20 years after their disappearance, the remains of two missing Sparks teens were positively identified in March 2000. The skeletal remains of Brenda Lynne Judd, 14, and Sandra Kaye Colley, 13, were discovered in November 1999, when a Hallelujah Junction property owner in Lassen County, just off of U.S. 395, accidentally dug them up with his tractor while getting some fill dirt.

The pair disappeared in Reno during an evening out at the Nevada State Fair in June 1979, victims of convicted sex-slave killer Gerald Gallego, who faced execution in both Nevada and California for four other killings. Gallego was implicated in the girls’ deaths by his wife, Charlene Williams, who told investigators he sexually assaulted the girls, bludgeoned them to death and buried them in a shallow grave.

In a July 7, 1979,  story from the Reno Evening Gazette, Jewel Stelling, the mother of Sandra, said the girls were last seen about 8:30 pm, June 24. When they were discovered missing, she and Brenda’s parents searched the fairgrounds.

“It is like they vanished,” Stelling said in the 1979 story. “Both have very good home lives. They only have a very little bit of money,” she added.

The girls were described as the best of friends. They “used to giggle and say they were going to grow up to be famous singers and movie stars,” according to Brenda’s mother, Lela Duncan.

“[Brenda] was a very caring young lady,” Duncan said “She never hurt nobody in her whole life.”

When girls disappeared, they were initially listed as runaways by the Reno Police Department because there was no sign of foul play. But the circumstances not only led family members to believe otherwise but also two teachers and a private investigator.

“When they said runaway, I didn’t quite believe it,” said Mary Mingo, a Sparks High School math teacher who remembers having Brenda in a ninth-grade class the school year before her disappearance told the Reno Evening Gazette.

“It didn’t mesh with what I had seen. She didn’t seem irresponsible or belligerent like the conceived notions we have of runaways.” Mingo described the 14-year-old as “very quiet.” She said she was a B student in math, but “a very good worker. It was a self-paced program, and she was always ahead of everyone else. She did several assignments a day. There was no discipline problem.”

Mingo also indicated Brenda was somewhat of a loner. “She didn’t have many close friends in that class, but it was a small class,” Mingo said.

Barbara Olson, a Sparks High English teacher, told the Reno Evening Gazette that she vaguely remembered having Brenda in a fourth-period class. “It seems to me she was very naive, as most ninth graders basically are. She was a very friendly, open girl. Very sweet.”

Brenda also worked part-time in the maintenance department at the airport.

“She had a paycheck waiting for her which she never picked up,” said Rob Wheeler, a private investigator, hired after the girls’ disappearance. “That doesn’t sound like a runaway.”

Wheeler added that the day before their disappearance, Sandra, who attended Sparks Middle School, competed in a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints beauty pageant at Idlewild Park’s, California Building. “[T]heir psychological profile doesn’t point to them being runaways,” he concluded.

After capture, Williams told investigators that at her husbands urging, she’d lured victims to their vehicle with the promise of job. Then they’d abduct the victims and Gallego would sexually assault them as Williams drove to a remote site, where Gallego would kill the victims, often times with a hammer.

Both Sparks girls died from “blunt force trauma,” to their heads.

Around the same time the two girls bodies were found, Gallego was formally sentenced for a second time in Pershing County, Nevada. This time for the 1980 kidnap-murder of 17-year-old Sacramento girls, Karen Chipman Twiggs and Stacey Ann Redican, who were abducted from a shopping mall and later found in a canyon near Lovelock, Nevada.

Williams pleaded guilty to her role in the Nevada killings and testified against Gallego at trial. She served nearly 17 years in the Nevada State Prison for her part in the killings of Stacey and Karen, before being paroled in 1998.

She now lives in the Sacramento area, working for a charity involving wounded soldiers and their families.

Williams claimed she and Gallego prowled mostly shopping centers for victims. However while at the state fair, they founding advertising fliers on parked vehicles, removing a number of them and forming a small stack. They then concocted a plan to invite a girl to their van on the pretext of offering her money to put them under windshields.

They eventually found a girl to Gallego’s ‘liking’ and while she agreed to distribute the fliers, she said she’d first have to check with her father. After she left to do that, the Gallegos decided it would be too risky to take her and when the girl returned, the Gallegos told her they had found someone else.

Next, the two enticed Sandra and Brenda to their van and though it was still daylight, Gallego forced them into the vehicle at gunpoint.

A witness reported seeing the couple in a van and later determined it was registered to Williams. Reno police then located the vehicle parked at Circus-Circus. They also learned that Gallego, using the name of a distant cousin, Stephen R. Feil, and Charlene A. Williams, were married in a Reno wedding chapel on May 31, 1980.

Meanwhile, former coworkers in Reno remembered Gallego, known to them as Steve Feil, as a quiet man with few friends. Gallego worked at the Pepsi Cola Bottling Company from July to September 1979.

“He was a very quiet guy,” recalled Cheryl Langford, office manager of the Reno plant. “He never seemed to say much. “He was quite good-looking, [and] he was friendly when I you spoke to him,” she told the Reno Evening Gazette.

Surprised when several police came to the plant several times to ask about Feil, Lanford said, “I couldn’t believe I actually worked with the guy,” adding that he only was in the office area of the plant about one-half hour each day. A route salesman who delivered Pepsi to local stores, Gallego spent a short time in the office each day before he left on his rounds, she said.

“He just went from store to store and sold pop. We never had any problem with him,” she added.

However after working for the plant a few months, Gallego got into a fist fight with a grocery worker behind a local Warehouse Market, said Dave Ziegler, a supervisor for the bottling company. Ziegler said he did not know what the fight was about and there were no injuries.

“I just told him that he would have to watch his temper,” Ziegler said, adding Feil was then placed on probation. “I interviewed the people at the store and got his side of the story. Seems that both were at fault for getting into it,” he said.

Gallego then worked for a few more months, Ziegler said. “He wasn’t a bad worker. He was always on time and stuff. He sold quite a bit and always made his quota and his commission. He was very conscientious about his job,” he said.

FBI agents arrested the Gallegos in November 1980 in Omaha, Nebraska on charges of murdering Craig Miller and Mary Elizabeth Sowers. The couple was forced into the Gallego’s car at gunpoint, while leaving a fraternity party November 1, 1980.

Craig was ordered from the car and shot; his body was found near Bass Lake, California. They killers then returned to their apartment with Mary, where he sexually abused her before taking her to a field in Placer County where he then executed her.

In 2002, Gallego died of cancer in a Nevada prison medical center while awaiting execution for murder’s of Karen and Stacey.

The pair of killers were also suspected of the murder of Rulan Waite McGill, who was last seen shopping at Meadowood Mall in Reno following dental appointment when she disappeared. The 32-year-old Winnemucca teacher was found submerged in an irrigation ditch behind a warehouse at Greg Street and Industrial Way, in Sparks, having been robbed, sexually assaulted and stabbed to death.

Two days after she left home, her vehicle was found abandoned behind the warehouse. The following morning, Rulan’s stepfather, James Porteous and his brother-in-law, Harold Barnett of Emmett, Idaho discovered her body.

In November 1997, Terry Childs, convicted in 1987 of murdering 17-year-old Lois Sigala in Scotts Valley, California and serving a 41-year sentence told Santa Cruz prosecutors that he was responsible for 11 other murders including Rulan, in the late 1970s. Childs confessed to the crimes to avoid being transferred to Pelican Bay State Prison, near Crescent City, California, known as one of the toughest in the state after stabbing another inmate at Corcoran State Prison in an apparent murder attempt.

He’s currently housed at Salinas Valley State Prison.

The moment he saw her, he had an erection and it stayed with him throughout the night. Ruby was her name and a redheaded firebrand to boot.

Only 12 at the time, Nick had seen her on the neighbor’s television as she gyrated in motion to the beat. He couldn’t get over how much she sounded like Janis Joplin, but was so much sexier.

It had been years since Nick thought of her. But that suddenly changed as he drove by the Stardust along the Vegas strip, where he saw her name on the flashing marquee.

He quickly parked and went in. Nick had to see Ruby perform and his stomach felt topsy-turvy as he sat down in the Starlight Lounge to watch.

Ruby was still that and more as Nick sat there recalling how he had masturbated to her image in his mind. He felt that same swell of flesh as he focused on the movement of her hips and listened as she half-crooned and half-screamed over the band playing behind her.

Soon it was two in the morning as Ruby slipped off stage behind the curtain, only to reappear seconds later at the bar in front of Nick. He paused for a moment to study her figure from behind.

“Now’s my chance to meet her.”

Trying to stay calm and look cool, Nick walked to the bar and stood beside her. Ruby smiled at him, lit a cigarette and asked, “Wanna autograph?”

Nick choked for an instant before answering, “Sure.”

“Sorry, I forgot, I’m fresh out,” Ruby sighed. As she batted her eyes at him, she added, “I guess we could go back to my dressing room and fuck.”

It was so nonchalant and disarming that Nick had to fight back cumming in his pants. She reached down and softly caressed his jean-swelling pecker with the manicured nail of her pointer finger, “I’ll take that as a yes.”

Without a word Nick followed the petite redhead singer to her dressing room. He was barely in the door when she started undressing him.

His dick sprung out of its confinement like a sprint-loaded spike and Ruby was on it like a kitten on a ball of yard. Her mouth and lips pleasing, her finger nails on his balls, inviting pain-driven groans.

Soon the two were a tangled mass of undulating bodies, fucking like this, sucking here, fucking like that and licking there. Ruby shuttered beneath Nick as he battled not to unload in her for a while longer.

But soon Nick’s stiffened cock betrayed him and he painted Ruby’s insides with a load of hot jism. After, they lay together, heavy petting and passionately making out, their bodies struggling to recover.

“What brings you into the casino tonight?” she asked.

“You. I saw you were playing here tonight and I couldn’t pass up the chance to hear you sing in person,” Nick answered.

“In person, huh?”

“Yeah, I saw you on TV once.”

“Crissakes, that’s been few years ago.”

“I jerked off thinking of you mashing your hips into me back then.”

“No fucking shit…”

“Yeah, but this beats the fuck outta that.”

“Then once more for the road, mi amigo, then I gotta get home to my old man. He’s probably already wondering where the hell I am.”

Nick was far ahead of her as he slipped his hardened dick in to her juice-laden pussy as deeply as he could. She smiled as Nick kissed the flower tattoo above her swollen right nipple, before he gently began suckling it all the while cupping the breast in his left hand.

Ruby was three hours late getting home. And Nick was certain that Charles Bukowski, had he known, would be jealous.

Fitch had grown tired of that damned cherub of love, Cupid, using him for target practice. So he decided that the next opportunity he had, he’d put a stop to the weaponized-child’s rein of hurt on his heart.

“Tell you what Cupid,” Fitch offered, “let’s have an archery contest. If you win, I’ll fall in love with the first woman I see. If I win, you leave me alone.”

“Sure,” Cupid said with a smile, knowing he’d win.

On the day of the big contest, the two lined up side-by-side, bows in hand. Cupid shot first and Fitch shot Cupid.

Moon boots.
Well worn.
Semper Fi.

A great war chief had a beautiful daughter, who weaved beautiful blankets. Her skills were in high demand and she enjoyed the company of many women from other villages who came to watch her work.

One day Bear decided to visit. He sat and listened as she bragged about how she could turn anything Mother Earth created into a blanket more spectacular than Mother Earth had done herself.

Angered, Bear, Mother Earth’s great protector, challenged her to a contest. They each had to weave a single blanket by the end of the night.

Knowing he would lose, Bear enlisted the help of tricksters Crow and Fox. He told them to tell the daughter that she had won, that she was more creative than Mother Earth and that she should go to the top of the mountain and shout it to all the world.

Soon, everyone heard the daughter’s shout echo down the mountainside and at hearing this Mother Earth turned the daughter into a spider. Daughter Spider still makes her blankets but can no longer brag about how beautiful her work is.

There’s always been this suspicion in my heart that I am nothing more than a second-class veteran. Turns out, I’m right.

First, I never received the same educational benefit my Grandpa got following World War II. Nor was I offered the same educational package that my dad earned after Vietnam.

Along with these, once honorably discharged and in the care of the Veterans Administration’s hospital care program, (or whatever it calls itself these days) I’ve never qualified for eye or dental care as my dad and grandpa did. For me, if it isn’t “service related,” it doesn’t exist.

In fact, until I told the VA that I had ideation of suicide, they refused to treat my PTSD and severe depression or bipolar disorder. And the only reason I received physical therapy for my back injury is that the doctor forced the system to admit me as an outpatient.

And now I’ve learned, as I’m filling out a job application, that if I am unable to list myself as a “Protected Veteran;” someone who was in “a war, or campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge was authorized,” then I no longer qualify to be listed as a veteran at all. Neither the Cold War or the War on Drugs counts because no ribbon, badge or official medal have ever been issued.

A one time in the U.S., any man or woman who served this country, receiving an honorable discharge, were military veterans and were given the same care and benefits alike, but no more. Leave it to the federal government to decide that one kind of service is greater than another and to find a way to divide people without using ‘color, race, creed, religion, age, disability or age.’

He’s certain there’s more rehab to come even after the VA hospital cut him loose. Now a double amputee, both legs gone, one above the knee, the other below, Kraylin continues to navigate a world made for able-bodies.

He doesn’t complain about his inability to walk without losing balance or that escalators still scare the hell out of him. What Kraylin has difficulty with is a nightmare that comes with sleep.

In it, he explains, he bolts wooden shoe stretchers to his stumps, then struggles to walk, “They remind me of what my feet looked like after being blown off.”

Two days after Rosa was laid to rest in her family’s plot, nearly 200 men rode into the Alcala’s hacienda. Each carried not only the tools of the vaquero trade, but also enough guns and ammo to supply a small war.

“We ride in the morning,” Juan Alcala commanded.

Brady found it hard to sleep that night as he kept thinking about how to kill Keene. It had been the only thing on his mind since he brought the news to the family.

Not only had he imprisoned Brady and tortured him, he had allowed Rosa to die by doing so. “Cruel men like George Keene need not walk the earth.”

As Senor Alcala wanted, every available man rode out before sunrise, towards the mountain across the desert. There they would hole-up through the night before striking the town at daybreak.

Hours before the sun shown itself, all 200 riders were in their saddles moving in a large swathe across the desert through the cholla and chaparral. They rode with intent, to be at the edge of the town as the sun came up.

Brady could hear the small talk as it passed between men. Also within his hearing came the chambering and re-chambering of brass cartridges, the cocking of a hammer and the clicking of a squeezed trigger.

Soon all those sounds evaporated into silence as the mass drew nearer the town. One last check of the plan and twenty groups of ten men trotted out of the desert from different directions and onto the town’s single street.

A general alarm sounded throughout Keene that brought all able-bodied men from their bed’s to their windows. And without a word, gun fire erupted from the buildings and returned by the riders.

It was chaos and pandemonium for the town’s people. The horse-backed men went through the town, looting and burning each building, killing each man who interfered and driving the remaining towns-folk out into the desert.

Their work was without mercy as they hunted down associates of Keene and ended their violent lives with final violence. Finally, Keene was found, cornered in the same gold-laden dungeon in which he held Brady for those many weeks.

There was no way Brady was going to get a chance to exact his revenge as he watched a number of men hoist a still-belligerent Keene, spitting and kicking, into a nearby lifeless tree, by his neck. Knowing this, Brady went over to Senor Alcala, thanked him for his hospitality, shook the old man’s hand, turned and rode north.

Brady felt a general state of sadness, knowing that all of this came after the death of Rosa. He come to realize that it may take a life time to get her out of his head and out of his heart.

He also knew that if he should ever ride back this way, he’d find the town of Keene abandoned and as dead as the man it’d been named after. “Maybe the town of Bixby will have something better than chicken and dumplings to offer.”

John had been good to his word. After checking for the arrival of darkness through out the rest of the day, Brady finally found himself outside his prison and next to the livery stable.

As quietly as possible he slipped inside and began searching for a horse that not only could run but could gallop long distances without a breaking. He also looked for the lightest saddle he could, to subtract weight from the horses back.

Once Brady found what he wanted, he saddled the animal and slowly walked it out he back of the corral. He had hoped to find a pistol or a rifle, but neither were available, so after coaxing the horse out into the desert a ways, he hopped in the saddle and trotted away.

Brady had found a willing horse, it needed no spurring as it tore across the moon-lit sandscape. Before he knew it and hours before the sun arose, Brady found himself skirting his way up the mountainside towards the cave and Rosa.

As before the sound of echoing horse hooves filled his ears as he breathed in the fresh air of the canyon lands. Finally, Brady reached the sloping flat surface and the boulder that hid the cave’s entrance.

Quietly and fearfully, he approached the darkened opening already certain he knew what he’d find. There she was, peacefully at rest, her eyes forever open to the endless mystery.

Brady sat by her side, weeping and apologizing for not having returned until then. Soon he gathered his unused rifle he’d left her, returned to his horse, mounted and rode away, leaving Rosa alone for a second time.

Now he had to find her family. “They’ll want to know where she is, what happened to her and to get her back.”

Brady dropped onto the valley floor long before the sun touched the eastern range. By the time it was noon, he had ridden to a hacienda of a friend of Rosa’s family. They sent a rider out to the family, demanding Brady rest and eat.

Within an hour, several vaqueros had found their way to the ranch, each wanting to hear the story for themselves. Brady obliged, not leaving out even one detail at each telling.

Finally, Rosa’s father, Juan Alcala rode in through the gates. His stern features racked by grief at the knowledge of his daughter’s death and how.

“I know the place,” a ranch hand named Pepe offered, “We used to ride and play up there when we were ninos.”

With that, a party of mounted cowboys raced back in the direction to where the cave was hidden and it would be sometime before they would return. So Juan Alcala decided that the time would be best used to plan a raid on the town of Keene to avenger the death of his only daughter.

Brady withdrew from his pant pocket, five gold coins and laid them on the table in front of the old man. “And there’s more where that comes from.”