Someone enters my bathroom through the wall and introduces herself. “I am Amie, your personal assistant,” she says. Her appearance and monotone speech are unusual, not to mention her fluorescent, green hair. As I finally come to grips with what I’m seeing and hearing, she disappears back into the wall. This is only one of the many startling occurrences I’ve experienced lately.

Nephilim Awakened is a sci-fi novel with New Age and biblical references in which an unlikely heroine finds herself chosen to destroy the anti-Christ, a perfect hybrid creature developed by aliens living beneath our world in tunnels. It is a fast-paced, witty, and sometimes humorous account of a seemingly ordinary woman awakened to dormant supernatural powers and thrown into a crash course in survival on a distant planet.

Joanne Johnson is the author of three published children’s books, My Best Friend is Blue, Trees Can’t Talk, and Pen Pals.

Joanne holds a multi-disciplinary M.A. in Special Education, Gerontology and Adult Education and a B. A. in Art and English from the University of Incarnate Word, San Antonio, TX. She has won a writing contest for her short story, The Yellow Shoes, published in the Oasis Journal, 2011.

She continues to write short stories inspired by her time spent in a second home in New Mexico where she discovered a new way of living and thinking.

Nephilim Awakened is available in print or ebook format, at Lulu.com

I met him one day on my daily walk. It was the same route I always took past the pecan grove and the large horse ranch ending at the base of a majestic, snow-capped mountain. It wasn’t that I actually enjoyed this diligent, hour of self-torture. It brought a kind of satisfaction being disciplined in this one thing in my life.

It was a pleasant, sunny day in late October when our worlds collided. There he stood next to his bicycle with a flat. He was an elderly, thin man of six feet or more,  with dirty overalls and a badly frayed straw hat shading an unshaven face. He looked homeless.

“Need some air in that tire?” I asked.

“No, think I’ll just walk it on home from here, but thank you, Miss.”

“But my house is right there,” I said, pointing to the left.

We walked to my little adobe retreat hidden from the world behind towering agave cacti. He used my air pump, we exchanged first names and sat in brightly painted rocking chairs enjoying a glass of cold iced tea with fresh mint from my garden. He didn’t seem in a hurry to get home and frankly I was enjoying the company. He was educated and cautious. I quickly raised him to the level of eccentric from homeless and pictured him living in a vintage travel trailer hidden away on a ranch where he had menial chores allowing him to live the rest of his life peacefully, alone.

Our conversation took several friendly, but shallow routes until finally I asked him about his past occupation, wondering if he had any. He said he had farmed his nine hundred acres along the outskirts of the White Sands Missile Range for thirty years. He paused a moment carefully planning what he said next.

“I had crops and cattle, but my Herefords kept roaming into the restricted area. I sold out and moved here.”

I quickly imagined possible ways he could have squandered his money leaving him in this state and ended up with an addiction.

He darted his eyes at me. “It’s a lie”, I thought.

I had nothing to lose now, so I asked him if he ever saw anything strange out there, hoping he would entertain me with exciting, mysterious tales.

“Sometimes,” he responded quietly.

I had hit a chord because he then jumped up and politely thanked me for the air. I watched as he cycled off down the same road we had met on.

“Well, you sure blew that,” I thought to myself. A nagging feeling of unfinished business or something I needed to remember tortured me into the night.