Ax Noon

Dust Cover

Christos Skanderbeg was aware from his father’s journal, that he swam downstream from a race of Kings. With scant call for real men to join the decision-making echelons of Late Modern society, he made his way in the fight game and made his home On The Mountain. Panther Mountain, overlooking the Potomac River, had called to him from I-70, while delivering ATVs one money-hunting day. As soon as that delivery was made, he turned in his keys, cashed out his Teamster’s pension and made his way up out of Slaveland, Maryland into Highland, West Virginia. It was as if the very Mountain had called his name.

Then came Grudge Girl, fixing his position, Norman the Tennessee Viking seeking instruction, and that insane Doctor Stormgren, chain-smoking historian of everything Appalachian, nosing about the Spring Tree and the Arch Tree, hunting Panther Road like a ghost haunting a battlefield.

Extended Dust Cover

Christos heard an ax fall in the night. Waking at noon, having missed the dawn, having slept through his self-imposed run up and across The Mountain, he held astart. Something had passed him in the night—he knew—and left him sleeping long past the morning light. Anger welled in his soul. A helmet strap—invisible, but real—tightened under his chin, “Okay, that’s weird. Run. Get the hell up and run!”

With those words of command issued to his army of one, the 38-year-old MMA fighter, rose, found two mismatched socks, slipped on his running shoes and knew in his arrogant bones that his next fight was already won. He did not know, that he was not long for this limp-wristed world, and that beyond the morning’s run lurked an opponent that, since the world was young, had always won.

…

Dedication

To Lewis Wetzel and Messach Browning, who hunted Panther Mountain when America was a mere brat among nations.

Inspired by Norman’s Red-winged crypto rant, July 4, 2026.

…

Dramatic Persons

…

Protagonist: Christos Skanderbeg, son of a Greek Expat from Islamic Occupied Albania, born in Brazil, to an American airline stewardess and raised in a BJJ school.

…

Love Interest: Grudge Girl, improbably proportioned Roller Derby Pro, generally referred to by the hero as “Woman!”

…

Conductor: Norman, a neo-pagan fanatic, MMA fighter and “mad genius,” with a rampant curiosity, discharged from Special Forces selection for animal sacrifices hung over the door to the Officer’s Club.

…

The Panther Mountain Scientific Community: Big Jay, moonlight distiller, and Doctor Stormgren professor of folklore, botany, zoology and some other useless crap at some big city university, somewhere in this bat shit crazy country.

To The Reader

When one is haunted by a story, especially one inspired by a week On The Mountain with said characters, there is no need to invent heroic actors. Christos is a real life action hero. His woman is so fair to look upon that it is difficult not to stare. She could be on the cover of any Conan or John Carter comic book. Norman is a story in, and of, himself. This leaves the author free to work the norn threads upon the hideous loom of our dire straights. The characters will react as I’ve seen them under milder stresses that would leave most modernites in shambles.

Doctor Stormgren appears courtesy of his caretaker, T—B Wright, Doctor of Data Analytics.

The appendices are nonfiction journals, mostly written On the Mountain. They explain the protagonist so well, I thought it a shame to merely use as a profile in a boxing hand book as intended. The 7 part bio of Christos begged for a weird action tale, especially after meeting Norman and being advised by Doctor Wright of the importance of the symbolically manipulated sign trees on Panther Mountain.

I have placed Stormgren in my position as visiting hermit.

Contents

-Prologue, Tells

#1. Fight Camp

#2. The Tree of Wells

#3. Of An Iron Stamp

#4. Wyrd of Knells

#5. Moon’s Wicked Tramp

#6. Spawn of Three Hells

#7. Up Rentwood’s Ramp

-Epilogue, Fells

…

Appendices: Back Into Masculine Ways #1-7

#1. Christos

#2. School

#3. ‘Old Man’

#4. Today

#5. Yesterday

#6. ‘Our Gringo’

#7. ‘The Hero,’ Offhand Tales of Masculine Competence

#8. On The Mountain, Writer’s Notes

…

Tells, A Prologue

Christos had rarely felt so tired. That ax had fallen last night, as if the crazy Doctor Stormgren, researching weird-ass Cherokee plants on The Mountain, had been chopping wood last night. ‘Couldn’t be anyone else—he’s the only man that doesn’t drive.’

Grudge Girl wasn’t in bed.

‘Good, my legs are already dead,’ he consoled his ego as he put on two mismatched dirty socks, and picked a clean NYC BJJ Nationals shirt to match his black trunks.

‘It’s going to be hot as hell,’ he mused.

“You shouldn’t have overslept by six hours—asshole!” he scolded, chaffing under positive reinforcement.

He heard Stormgren cough downstairs in the kitchen—down he went.

The weird Doctor was folding their clothes, his, hers, and the Doctor’s, wrinkling his brow comically at one of his Woman’s outfits, “Good Morning, Christos—they don’t charge for the material, do they,” as the old goof tried to figure out how to fold the scanty garment.

“Morning, Sir… speaking of which, have you seen the Woman?”

“Ah, hem, ah, I have endeavored to look the other way, Sir, Helios seems to have called her.”

“Oh, yeah, I told her to tan those titties up for my fight. Two minutes and forty seconds into the third round, she going to flash the referee so I can foul the shit out of that big bastard… catch weight fights, can’t be too friendly—“

“What the fuck, you lazy Greek!” came her voice.

Grudge Girl walked in the front door covering her breasts with a towel, a pout on her pretty face, “They’re burned. I was catching the morning sun, you know, so that faɡɡot god with the harp would take it easy—you were supposed to wake me up on your run. You never sleep in this late!”

Stormgren was lighting a cigarette with his stump of a cigarette, pretending he wasn’t there.

Christos turned to him, “Help me out here, Doc?”

“Helios forbid. I shall side with the Lady—if a beating I must take, from your hand would sprout the clarion of honor.”

Grudge Girl grinned, noting Christos’ own sunburned neck from yesterday’s kayaking, “What the fuck—like you’re even half Greek?”

“Thanks, Doc—you’re making friends all over the place, even convinced Jay he’s a scientist for cooking shine?”

“An alchemist of the first order,” winked the Doctor, as he tried to match three of Christos’ orphan socks with a pile of their bereft fellows.

“I’m tired.”

“Look,” whined Grudge Girl, as they both looked away and Christos grilled the old scholar, “You smoke four packs a day, drink moonshine, are on a near starvation diet—how old are you?”

The Doctor stopped trying to match socks, visibly counted in his mind, and opined, “83 or 84, depending on whether you recognize the Gregorian Calendar.”

“That’s old as fuck! And you still have hair,” noting the still blond 1950s boy curls on the elongated nerd head. “Well, if you can still walk the mountain in this heat, I can run it.”

“You sure, Baby,” grinned his girl as she held out a bottle of lotion to him, to which he scoffed, “Woman, don’t you have some cooking to do? It’s Sunday.”

It then occurred that he did not hear the griping gimp cat he had rescued from down on the main road, “Where is the Gimp cat—I’d hate to shoot that damn thing…”

Grudge Girl, nodded to Stormgren, “He was the last to pet it, just laid down in the grass.”

Christos looked at the old chain-smoker in his flannel shirt and heavy cargo pants, who should have been sweating his ass off. The Doc shrugged sadly, “As you suggested, the poor creature earned a Viking burial—arranged, ahem, a twig boat with paper sail, facing west, soaked in Doctor Jay’s distillation of moonlight. His smoke rose with the first rays of morn.”

Christos nodded, “I’ve got to run—has anyone heard from Norman? Fucker disappeared, was supposed to be here a week ago for camp?”

The young beauty and the old man, shrugged sadly, each knowing how much energy Norman lent to Christos in the latter stages of is fight career.

With a frown at indiscipline, and for Bad Luck too, Christos Skanderbeg headed out on the porch. He there noted the charred pile of twigs in the shape of a toy boat in the driveway, the smell of which should have awakened him, and wondered, ‘Am I slipping, headed downhill without brakes into old age?’

The burning in his soul said, “Hell no!”

He looked up the mountain into the yawning hollow of soaring oak, achieved the zone with a single breath, and jogged up that hard damned lane that someone had named Panther Road.