Avenging Autumn: Seasons Change Book 1 of 4 by Derek A Schneider

never
would.
    Hind sight is always twenty/twenty.
Right?
    “ Right,” he said aloud.
    Jack’s head popped up from its resting place
on the passenger door window. “You say something?”
    “ No,” Frank replied, after a slight
hesitation, “go back to sleep, son.”
    Jack dropped his head back to the window. A
few seconds later, Frank put his hand in Jacks and held it. Jack
squeezed his father’s hand, and sleep came a little
easier.

    There was still about a half an hour of
daylight left when the Writeman hearse pulled into the Auburn
Fields cem-etery, just outside of Omaha city limits.
    “ See, I told you we’d make it.”
Frank stated, proudly.
    “ Yeah,” Jack glumly returned,
“that’s great, Dad.”
    Looking back through the window at Autumn,
Frank asked; “Where exactly do we need to go, pumpkin.”
    Autumn felt momentarily stunned by her
father-in-laws use of a nickname he gave her long ago. Though he
had called her pumpkin countless times in the past, this was the
first time he had done so since she had returned from the dead. It
made her feel accepted and at the same time it made her realize how
much she really loved the old man as if he were her own
father.
    “ Autumn?” Jack said.

“ Sorry,” she pointed a finger out
the windshield, “up there on that hill, inside the
mausoleum.”
    “ Inside a mausoleum,” Jack half
shouted, “Why am I not surprised.”
    “ Settle down, Jack,” Benny said
from the back of the hearse, “let’s get up there, we don’t have
much time.”
    Frank drove the car up a narrow, paved road
and parked next to the decrepit looking structure. The three men
exited the car and began equipping their gear. Autumn got out of
the car and walked slowly away from the mausoleum. She came to a
stop near an eroded headstone and stood staring blankly toward an
adjacent corn field.
    Benny and Jack went to the front of the
mausoleum and began the arduous task of removing the large stone
slab that covered the entrance. After a few moments of struggle,
Benny turned to his father, red faced and out of breath, “Can
you…give us…a hand with this.”
    “ Oh, yeah!” the Old Man exclaimed,
“Alright, on the count of three. One, two, three,
heave.”
    The three of them pulled on the slab together,
but still had no luck moving it.
    After catching his breath Frank said;
“Something isn’t right here, it shouldn’t be this hard to
move.”
    “ Maybe we should just go,” Jack put
in nervously, “we don’t have much time left.”
    Benny thought about it a moment, then looked
at his brother “Jack, do you have a tire iron in that
hearse?”
    “ Yeah, I think so. Give me a second
to dig it out.”
    As Jack went back to the car, Benny noticed
his wife hadn’t moved or said a word since they had exited the
hearse. She only stood there by a grave, staring at a withering
corn-field down the hill a ways.
    “ Autumn?” Benny said from behind
her, “Are you alright?”
    She turned and stared at him with frightened
confu-sion. “He’s there, in the cornfield.”
    Jack had just returned with the tire iron and
all three of them were now giving her an identical dumfounded
look.
    “ But, didn’t just you say he was in
the mausoleum?” Benny asked.
    “ He is, but I also feel his
presence in the cornfield.”
    “ Are you sure it isn’t other
vampires you feel?”
    “ He is the only one I can sense,
and he’s in the mau-soleum, yet at the same time I can feel him in
many different places throughout the field.”
    “ Alright,” Frank said, as he took
the tire iron from Jack and shoved it into Benny’s hands, “Jack and
I will check out the cornfield, you keep working on getting that
door open.”
    “ Guys, this is not a good idea,”
Jack added, “the sun is almost down, we should beat feet and get
the fuck out of here.”
    “ We’ll be alright, Jack,” Frank
assured, “we have the equipment to defend ourselves. Besides, if we
run now they’ll catch up to us within a