Tales of Chills and Thrills: The Mystery Thriller Horror Box Set (7 Mystery Thriller Horror Novels) (54 page)

Samuel turned to see the first of the
horde coming into view, shuffling down the path in slow pursuit. More howls
reverberated through the silent stillness until they raised the hairs on his
neck. Mara looked at Samuel, and they made a decision without speaking. Samuel
stepped into the inky blackness of the cabin, pulling Mara behind him. He
slammed the door shut, her sweaty hand in his and his heart hammering in his
chest.

***

Major opened the door to a desolate and
empty scene. He had become so accustomed to the horde occupying the space that
the Barren felt like an underwater realm, filled with a formless void of
darkness and silence. The locality held no trace of its occupying army of the
undead—it had pulled up stakes and set off on the path, following Samuel and
his talisman. He could not muster a lick of concern over the girl. She was
cute, like a pixie, punk-rock chick, but Major felt he was far beyond the
ability to ever experience a crush again. While he felt no direct animosity
toward Mara, he would gladly remove her if she was in his way.

The howls grew in intensity, but Major
did not need verbal confirmation to figure it out. He could feel the alpha male
coming. And the wolf was angry. He had been denied the hunt and the spoils.

“We going after them?”

The question broke Major from his
thoughts. He turned to see Kole standing several feet back. He had dirty scraps
of cotton in his hands to dab the blood from his face. Kole blinked constantly,
and his puffy, red eyes looked possessed.

“Can you see?” Major asked.

“Yeah, enough,” Kole said.

“The horde followed the path, which I’m
sure they used. Samuel said he saw it extend to the east on the other side of
the Barren. No doubt he headed that way with Mara.”

Kole growled at the sound of her name.

“And now the pack is coming hard out of the
west. Seems like we got ourselves a party.”

“What are we going to do with them?” Kole
asked.

“It may not be up to us,” Major said. “If
the horde or the pack get to them before we do . . .” Major let his sentence
trail off with a shrug. “Hike up your boots, Sally.”

Kole bristled at Major’s insult and wiped
another drop of blood from his face.

***

Samuel had lost the ability to register
sensations. He groped like a drowning man bobbing in the infinite ocean. He
felt his eyes bulge and dry as he forced his lids open only to see nothing but
blackness. He flailed his arms in hopes of striking Mara and verifying her
existence, as well as his own. He opened his mouth and screamed, but the space
stole the words from his ears. He sensed his body floating and stopped fighting
the momentum. Samuel drifted until the images in soft focus came to life inside
his head.

“Another round?”

The bartender looked at him with his
mouth slightly agape, the beginnings of a smile that would never quite blossom.

“I don’t think so, pal.”

Samuel shrugged his shoulders and
looked at the young woman sitting next to him. She wagged her index finger back
and forth while stifling a drunken giggle.

“C’mon, man. One more for me and the
lady. We’re walking through campus after last call. Not like we’re getting
behind the wheel.”

The bartender rubbed the iron-cross
tattoo on his outer bicep and snapped the dish rag down on the edge of the bar.
He grabbed a clear, tall bottle covered in Cyrillic and poured two fingers of
vodka into each shot glass.

“Six bucks.”

Samuel reached into the pocket of his
jeans and pulled out a ruffled ball of paper money. He slapped a ten-dollar
bill on the polished maple bar and lifted one shot glass with each hand.

“Thanks, man. Keep the change.”

Samuel spun to face the woman on the
stool next to him. Her face glowed, a mixture of alcohol-infused color and
youth.

“Don’t know if I’m going to be able to
make it back to my dorm,” she said, accepting the shot glass from Samuel.

He felt a bolt of electricity as her
hand touched his. The charge traveled through his torso like a whiskey burn and
settled in his groin with a slow smoldering. She moved her leg inside of his
and ran her toes up his calf. Samuel looked down at her bare foot, untethered
from her sandal, and fantasized about seeing her perfectly painted toenails
next to his ears.

“You can always crash at my place. My
roommates already left for the semester. Got the whole place to myself.”

She smiled and let her eyes peek at
Samuel’s lap. She let the look linger.

“Certainly don’t want you to be all
alone now, do we?”

Samuel looked around the bar at the
survivors. The underclassman and underage kids had binged through the early
evening and had already been escorted home or put into a cab. The shot and beer
regulars had not returned yet, although once spring bled into summer, they
would come to reclaim their neighborhood bar, at least until dorm move-in day
in August. For now, Samuel felt like the bar was his, and the people finishing
their drinks in it belonged to him as well. He had taken the remainder of his
finals yesterday and printed out the last history paper in the university
computer lab that morning. Samuel’s parents wouldn’t be expecting him home for
another week, and it would be a week after that before he’d be back on the
assembly line at the factory, making enough money in the summer to pay for his
books in the fall.

Pride motivated Samuel more than the
promise of a good job or the adulation of his family, who marveled at him as he
became the first to steer toward a college degree. In fact, Samuel believed most
material possessions owned him. He had a car, a beauty of Detroit engineering.
Samuel loved his 1988 Dodge Daytona, but he still had a year of payments left.
He belonged to that car, or more accurately, to the bank that owned it. He
spent long hours at the circulation desk. The countless stupid questions and
disparaging glances from blue-haired librarians felt like a chain tethering him
to a world he knew he was inevitably entering. The position as a circulation
desk assistant came with a stipend which, to Samuel, was another way of getting
owned. He savored the few moments in his life when he felt truly liberated, and
this night was going to be the first in a string of six or seven that would
belong to him and him only.

“I’m afraid of the dark, so maybe you
could come into my room, tuck me in.”

The girl smiled, which precipitated a
burp, which turned into a full revolution ignited by the acidic burn in her
stomach. She turned in time to project the vomit over the bar and onto the
webbed plastic mat that kept the bartenders from slipping on the wet floor. She
coughed and spattered like an old truck, and Samuel could do nothing but stare
at the skin horizon that appeared under her shirt and above her shorts when she
leaned forward on the stool. He studied the smooth, white skin, turning his
head sideways. Samuel was glad she did not ruin that space with a tramp stamp,
like most of the girls in college. He knew the ’90s were just the beginning for
tattoos, and he really liked the hot biker-chick look. But on this lady, he was
hoping to slide in behind her and enjoy the unobstructed view of the beads of
sweat that would collect in the small of her back. He imagined her long, blonde
hair splayed out and falling down over the sides of her breasts. He would grab
her hips and hold on for as long as the ride lasted.

“Get her out,” the bartender said, unfurling
countless paper towels off a roll and dropping them to cover the puke.

The remark and ensuing odor of
sickness snapped Samuel out of his fantasy. He noticed he had been rubbing her
back while she vomited, and his fingers had moved further south until they
caressed the waistband of her hip-hugger jeans.

Samuel blinked, returning him back to the
present and his mental prison. He took shallow breaths, knowing the memory was
not finished. He thought of Mara, wondering if she was being forced to relive a
time from her past, the reopening of wounds that had never quite closed.

He felt the warm, penetrating feel of
her tongue in his mouth. Samuel pulled her closer with two hands on her hips.
The alcohol killed the taste of vomit on her lips, but did not protect his nose
from the odor of summer trash coming from the dumpsters in the alley.

“Right here. I want you right here.”

Samuel put his hands on her breasts
and pushed them up, feeling the stiffness of her nipples through the thin
T-shirt. He looked into her eyes and saw the hazy glaze of 3 a.m. in them. The
woman’s head moved in stuttering motions as Samuel fought a losing war against
the vodka shots.

“I have a queen-size bed in my room.
We can do all kinds of stuff on that.”

She grinned and slid her hand inside
his jeans. Samuel moaned, tilting his head back against the wall until more
loose mortar rained down on them.

“Get a fucking room.”

Samuel and the woman looked down the
alley at the opened steel door at the back of Joey’s Grill. A short-order cook
with a soiled apron and a cigarette dangling from his lips emptied a garbage
pail into the dumpster with a wet smack.

“Get out ‘fore I call the cops, or
worse yet, ‘fore Slimy Larry comes back to his cardboard house and stabs you
both in the gut.”

Samuel giggled, and the woman slid
both hands around his waist.

“I can’t walk no more,” the woman
said.

“I think I’m parked around the corner,
at a meter.”

She stepped back, lifting her head off
his chest. She drew an index finger down over her bottom lip, smirking at
Samuel before waving it at him. “Naughty boy. Gonna have to punish ya.”

“The house is only a few blocks. I’ll
be fine. No faster than twenty-five, I promise.”

The cook shook his head. He flicked
his cigarette into the dumpster while stepping through the steel door, pulling
it shut with a sound of metal on metal echoing through the alley.

“‘Kay,” the woman said. “But hurry.”

Samuel led her to the sidewalk. A few
lonely souls skulked by, caught in drunken limbo. The bars had last call, and
the breakfast restaurants hadn’t opened yet. He glanced to his right and
watched the neon sign of the bar flicker into cold darkness. He turned in the
other direction and stared until he saw the taillights of his Dodge, the
twenty-inch tires snuggling up to the curb.

He had done this before. Many times.
Samuel knew the drill, knew his limitations like every good drunk. He would
ease into the street, stay slow and keep to the residential streets. Avoid
traffic. That would allow him to reach home safely. Intellectually, Samuel
understood the risks he was taking, but the young college girl pawing at him
skewed all of the statistics. He would return to his room and they would
explore each other like first-time lovers. It was the aroma that drove him mad.
Samuel could smell her.

“Lezzgo, silly,” she murmured, placing
a hand in his lap.

Samuel shook his thoughts loose and
put the key in the ignition. Fear slid across his face until he realized it was
the wrong key. After four more tries, Samuel discovered the ignition key and
started the car. The Dodge came alive with a throaty rumble after he pushed the
clutch to the floor and pumped the accelerator three times. Pearl Jam’s
“Oceans” came through the speaker system, and the woman fumbled for the volume
knob, turning it until Samuel felt like Eddie Vedder was singing to them from
the backseat.

“Album of the year,” she said.

“This is killer. Not sure how Pearl
Jam is going to top this record.”

Samuel fastened his seatbelt and
looked over both shoulders before easing into the empty street. His body took
over as if the effects of the alcohol, the slurred speech and the slowed
reflexes had subsided. He looked at the girl and pointed to her seatbelt.
Samuel wanted to see the way the nylon restraint would run between her breasts,
accentuating her curves.

“I trust you,” she said. The woman
closed her eyes and leaned back against the headrest.

Samuel put the Dodge in first gear and
eased from the curb. The parking meter stared at them as they drove past, its
cyclopean eye red and menacing. He coasted underneath the first traffic light,
which blinked yellow in the pre-dawn darkness of Fifth Avenue, the main strip
dissecting the quaint college town. The next set of lights swung red in
the gentle summer breeze.

“Wazzup with these?” he asked.

The girl just mumbled.

Samuel waited and looked back and
forth, wondering why the second intersection’s lights had not gone to blinking
yellow, and more importantly, why they were red in his direction. Before he
could contemplate the answer, a dagger of light pierced his rearview mirror. By
the time Samuel reached to flip his mirror to the nightshade angle, the vehicle
was beside his.

The chrome side mirror captured the
reflection from the copper street lights in a way that made it look alien. But
it was the 1977 Chevy Corvette attached to the mirror that made Samuel forget
about the sexual tryst he had in the works. The tinted windows and T-tops made
him think the vehicle had to be from California. They did not have the need or
the legislation to make that happen out here. Chrome side pips ran from the
back of the front tires underneath the door until they flared out at the rear.
The black paint job glistened as if the car were wet. The ‘Vette slowed at the
intersection until four inches separated the passenger-side window from
Samuel’s. He waited as the Vette’s window came down with the slow lurch of a
handle turn.