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    Fractured: Dereck Dillinger and the Shortcut to Oz
    Fractured: Dereck Dillinger and the Shortcut to Oz
    Fractured: Dereck Dillinger and the Shortcut to Oz
    Ebook120 pages1 hour

    Fractured: Dereck Dillinger and the Shortcut to Oz

    By Eddie McPherson

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    About this ebook

    Dereck, is a normal thirteen-year-old boy who has agreed to take care of his five-year-old sister, Jessie, while their mother is away overnight. As the big brother, he intends to keep his sister safe, taking on the role of their dad who died in a car accident the year before.

    Jessie only wants to be read fairy tales, and she begs Dereck to read her the stories, though he would prefer they do anything else. When a violent storm moves in, Dereck stumbles into the cellar of their home, while Jessie is trapped upstairs, screaming for him. Trying to get to her, he falls through the cellar floor and wakes up in Oz - an Oz filled with all the fairy-tale characters Jessie loves so much.

    Now Dereck must battle dangerous and tricky creatures as he attempts to take a little-known shortcut to a Wizard who Dereck hopes can send him back upstairs where his sister is alone and screaming in the eye of a raging storm.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateMay 1, 2017
    ISBN9781483599373
    Fractured: Dereck Dillinger and the Shortcut to Oz

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      Book preview

      Fractured - Eddie McPherson

      Chapman

      My little sister looked up at me with her blue eyes.

      Read it again.

      No, Jessie. I’ve already read that one.

      I’ll tell Mommy.

      Jessie, come on now. I pulled my softball glove from the top drawer of my dresser and put it on, hitting my fist into it.

      Mommy! Mommy! Dereck won’t read to me! She ran down the hall, book in hand. I sighed, put on my cap, and adjusted it in the mirror. I knew what was coming next.

      Dereck, you promised you would look after your sister!

      "I am looking after her, Mom!" I tried to keep the frustration out of my voice.

      Come down here. I’m about to leave! I could tell she was also trying to keep her voice calm, so I quickly went downstairs.

      When I walked into the kitchen, Mom was placing her purse on her shoulder and picking up the car keys from the kitchen table. Jessie sat in a chair near the door, her arms crossed. Little sisters.

      She just wants you to read to her, said Mom.

      "I did. She wants to hear the same stories over and over: Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel. They’re dumb, Mom."

      They’re just stories, Mom said, with mild exasperation.

      I’m sick of them!

      She wants to spend time with her big brother. She gave me the mom look.

      I told her I would take her out back and play ball and then shoot bottle rockets when it got dark. I bought some of the big ones this time. I looked at Jessie as I said this loud enough that her stubborn ears would hear me. She sat with the Cinderella book in her lap and her bottom lip stuck out. Come on, Jessie, let’s go out to the backyard.

      No! Jessie said. Moooom!

      Mom turned to Jessie. It will be good for you to go outside for a little while. I have to run. There’s plenty of food in the fridge. I’ll be home around noon tomorrow. She turned to me and asked, Did you put my bag in the trunk?

      Yes ma’am, I said.

      All the numbers are on the fridge.

      I know, Mom. We’ll be fine. Don’t worry.

      I can’t help it. That’s what moms do. She kissed Jessie on the cheek, and then she turned to me. Please watch your sister closely. She planted a kiss on my temple. I didn’t like it much, not many thirteen-year-old boys do, but I let her get away with it this time.

      This was the first time I was entrusted to watch my five-year-old sister overnight by myself. I was a little nervous about it, but didn’t want Mom to know. Since we lost Dad in the car accident a year ago, Jessie wanted a lot more of my attention. No matter where I was, in the house or out in the yard, Jessie was right behind me, clutching one of her fairy tale books. It was really starting to get on my nerves.

      We’ll be fine. I won’t take my eyes off her. I smiled. We waved good-bye from the back door.

      As the sound of the SUV backing out of the driveway died away, I turned to Jessie, who was holding up Cinderella to me.

      Read, she demanded.

      "After we go outside, I said in my best authoritarian voice, before grabbing a Pop-Tart out of the cabinet and heading for the door. I grabbed my backpack from the hook near the back door, too, because that’s where I had my bottle rockets and comics. No, leave the book in here."

      ***

      We threw the softball back and forth for a while, and then caught a few frogs at the edge of the yard and put them in jars. When Jerry and Alex came over, we compared bottle rockets and had a contest to see whose would shoot highest in the late June sky. I was the clear winner three times, while Jerry won six times, and Alex won four times. We let Jessie win eight times, making her the grand champ. She was elated, and I threw her up in the air to celebrate.

      See? I said, Isn’t this more exciting than a silly fairy tale? She was laughing too hard to answer.

      We heard the rumble of thunder in the distance, and then Jerry’s mom called him on his cell. She wants me to come home, he said dejectedly. She says there’s a storm moving in.

      But we have more bottle rockets, I said, pulling out the rocket I had spent most of my allowance on. Look at this one. I call it ‘Bottlestar Galactica.’

      Real clever. Jerry rolled his eyes, smiling. But I gotta go. We’ll do it again tomorrow.

      I gotta go, too, Alex added, grabbing his own backpack and throwing it over his shoulder. Bye, Jessie. Congrats on being queen of the bottle rockets! They jumped on their bikes and sped away, heading toward the incoming storm clouds.

      Around six-thirty, Jessie declared herself worn out and disappeared inside the house. A little while later, I put on my backpack and gathered up our softball gloves and the ball, and I went inside to check on Jessie—after all, I did say I’d keep my eye on her. I dropped the softball gear in the bin inside the back door but kept my backpack on so I could read my comics in my room before going to sleep. I found Jessie in her bedroom, asleep on top of her Wizard of Oz comforter. At last, some quiet time for me. I put down the cup of water I had brought upstairs for Jessie, in case she had forgotten to get one before falling asleep. I laid her favorite Rapunzel doll beside her and surveyed her pink room. Posters of her silly fairy tale characters covered every inch of the room’s walls: Snow White, Thumbelina, Jack and the Beanstalk, and, of course, Cinderella. They were all there.

      I heard a noise coming from Jessie’s desk, where all her favorite books were stacked next to the window. It sounded like little voices. Guessing that the voices were coming from the backyard just below the window, I moved over to peer outside, but I didn’t see anybody. I heard the high-pitched voices again, and my eyes followed the sound to the stack of books right in front of me. I opened the top one and the voices fell silent.

      The book had flipped open in the middle of the story. There she was, Little Red Riding Hood, whom I had come to know so well, skipping along with her basket of goodies, frozen in this pose for all eternity. On the facing page, the terrifying wolf was hiding behind a tree, watching her with his sharp teeth bared.

      You’d better hurry, I murmured, so you can get to grandmother’s house before Red does. I turned the page to find the close-up of old Big Bad, dressed in a frilly bonnet and wearing a white old-lady nightgown. You don’t look so tough to me, I chuckled quietly. I would never admire these books out loud in front of Jessie, but I had to admit the artwork was pretty awesome. There were so much lifelike details that many of the characters looked like they could jump right off the page.

      The cover of the next book in the stack sported a farm girl, a scarecrow, a tinman, and a lion, with an evil green witch peeping at them from behind a tree. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I did a little double take as the image of the witch spying from behind the tree sunk in—it was just like the Big Bad Wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, except this tree had eyes, a nose, and a mouth, and didn’t look friendly in the least. I flipped through the book, the characters and pictures all too familiar. Next were Hansel and Gretel

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