A kid in a corduroy baseball cap looked at him. He held his right ear and just stood there with his mouth open. At first he didn’t move to protect anyone, not even himself. Then he turned to get out of there and tell someone about it.

“Don’t leave.” the shooter told him.

He resumed firing. Shell casings dropped to the floor with hollow clinks.

“Don’t,” he said.

More people fell. Some staggered forward from the impact then fell. Others just sank. It was crazy. The shooter walked a few steps. He looked like his legs had gone to sleep and he wanted to wake them up.

“God, I’m sweating,” he said.

It just went off, like, oops. The first shot hit solid and sent a guy cutting pizza for his son back into a wall.

“Wow,” the shooter said. “I’m sorry.”

He apologized in the same tone a mother uses when she tells her child the hamster died.

“What was that?” someone said. “What the hell?”

continued…

My first novel, Bad Day for the Home Team, is slated to be published Aug. 15. Here and on my tumblr site, http://alexomeara.tumblr.com/ I will post the first chapter of the book in installments. I will begin on Thursday, Aug. 12 and it will be fully posted Monday, Aug. 16.

I invite everyone to read, comment, raise your hands, stamp your feet, yell, scream and whatever as this unfolds. I hope you enjoy it.

The paperback of Chasing Medical Miracles is due out on May 25. There is a newly written foreword about swine flu and the clinical trials process for that. I will excerpt that foreword on this site this week and in the days leading up to the release of the paperback.

Also in August my first novel, Bad Day for the Home Team, will be released by Zumaya Books. The book is about how a very average man in Sierra Vista, Arizona walks into a pizza place, shoots and kills 30 people, then kills himself. He comes back as a ghost and tries to figure out why he did what he did while a cop, his brother, and a reporter try to also unravel the mystery of “Why he done it?”