Nightlife - Brian Hodge [Epub]

He snorted the first two lines, and they slammed his head back against the recliner. Pain, murky green and gold, and a feeling as if he had lit a string of firecrackers in the back of his skull. He moaned aloud. No turning back now. His nose dripped, but he held fast to purpose and lowered for the rest. The next line, and the next, and the next. And the last.

The cigarette case clattered to the tiles. He was glad the penthouse was soundproof. Because he screamed. Oh, how he screamed. Loud enough to wake the dead and send them running for cover.

Not out of pain.

Not out of fear.

But out of head-to-head confrontation with infinity. He found himself standing on the brink of stars, looking down into pits of primordial slime. And here he was, vainglorious adventurer, poised somewhere between the two. At their whim and mercy, for they would send him where they damn well pleased. Everything he had believed, everything he had been taught, everything that had been genetically encoded within his body his bones his blood his cells his nuclei his intertwining dual strands of DNA—it had all been erased.


A drug-lord steals a mysterious green powder called "skullflush," an entheogenic drug used in shamanic rituals, from a fierce Venezuelan mountain people which then wreaks havoc on its unwitting abusers. Justin Gray, a former small-time drug dealer in St. Louis, has arrived in Tampa, FL, to start a new life. But on his first night in town his buddy Erik takes him to a disco, where he tries a mild dose of skullflush. Another of Erik's friends takes a larger dose and is tranformed into a ravenous beast who practically devours four people on the dance floor and then commits suicide. Local dealer Tony Mendoza begins a search for Justin, the only witness who knows what really happened in the disco that night. Mendoza himself is sought by the Yanomamo warrior Kerebawa, who travels to America to retrieve skullflush and avenge its theft before it is sniffed by too much of Tampa's "nightlife."

(Thanks OutLaw6980)