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Authors: Joe Hill

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Hicks caught himself and listened and in the next moment felt someone rushing across the room at him. It was not a sound or anything he could see. It was something he felt on his skin and a sense in his eardrums, like a change in pressure. His stomach went watery and sick. He had reached out with his right hand for the light switch. Now he dropped the hand, feeling for the .38. He had it partway out when he heard something whistling at him in the darkness, and he was struck in the stomach with what felt like an aluminum baseball bat. He doubled over with a woofing sound. The gun sank back into the holster.

The club went away and came back. It caught Hicks in the left side of the head, above his ear, spun him on his heel, and dropped him. He fell straight back, out a plane and down through frozen night sky, falling and falling, and try as hard as he could to scream, he made not a sound, all the air in his lungs pounded right out of him.

W
HEN
E
RNEST
H
ICKS
opened his eyes, there was a man bent over him, smiling shyly. Hicks opened his mouth to ask what happened, and then the pain flooded into his head, and he turned his face and puked all over the guy's black loafers. His stomach pumped up his dinner—General Gau's chicken—in a pungent gush.

“I am
so
sorry, man,” Hicks said when he was done heaving.

“It's okay, son,” the doc said. “Don't try to stand. We're going to take you up to the ER. You've suffered a concussion. I want to make sure you don't have a skull fracture.”

But it was coming back to Hicks, what had happened, the man in the dark hitting him with a metal bludgeon.

“What the fuck?” he cried. “What the
fuck
? Is my gun . . . ? Anyone see my gun?”

The doc—his tag said
SOPHER
—put a hand on Hicks's chest to prevent him from sitting up.

“I think that one's gone, son,” said Sopher.

“Don't try and get up, Ernie,” said Sasha, standing three feet away and staring at him with an expression approximating horror on her face. There were a couple of other nurses standing with her, all of them looking pale and strained.

“Oh, God. Oh, my God. They stole my .38. Did they grab anything else?”

“Just your pants,” said Sopher.

“Just my— What? Fucking
what
?”

Hicks twisted his head to look at himself and saw he was bare naked from the waist down, his cock out for the doc and Sasha and the other nurses to look at. Hicks thought he might vomit again. It was like the bad dream he got sometimes, the one about showing up at work with no pants on, everyone staring at him. He had the sudden, wrenching idea that the sick fuck who had ripped his pants off had maybe poked a finger up his asshole, like Sasha was always threatening to do.

“Did he touch me? Did he fucking touch me?” Hicks cried.

“We don't know,” the doctor said. “Probably not. He probably just didn't want you to get up and chase him and figured you wouldn't run after him if you were naked. It's very possible he only took your gun because it was in your holster, on your belt.”

Although the guy hadn't taken his shirt. He had grabbed Hicks's Windbreaker but not his shirt.

Hicks began to cry. He farted: a wet, whistling
blat.
He had never felt so miserable.

“Oh, my God.
Oh, my God!
What the fuck is
wrong
with people?” Hicks cried.

Dr. Sopher shook his head. “Who knows what the guy was thinking? Maybe he was hopped up on something. Maybe he's just some sick creep who wanted a one-of-a-kind trophy. Let the cops worry about that. I just want to focus on you.”

“Trophy?” Hicks cried, imagining his pants hung up on a wall in a picture frame.

“Yeah, I guess,” Doc Sopher said, glancing over his shoulder, across the room. “Only reason I can think why someone would come in here and steal the body of a famous serial killer.”

Hicks turned his head—a gong went off in his brain and filled his skull with dark reverberations—and saw that the gurney had been rolled halfway across the room and someone had yanked the dead body right off it. He moaned again and shut his eyes.

He heard the rapid
clip-clop
of boot heels coming down the hallway and thought he recognized the goose-stepping gait of his uncle Jim on the march, out from behind his desk and not happy about it. There was no logical reason to fear the man. Hicks was the victim here; he had been
assaulted,
for chrissake. But alone and miserable in his only refuge—the dark behind his eyelids—he felt that logic didn't enter into it. His uncle Jim was coming, and a third citation was coming with him, was about to fall like a silver hammer. He had literally been caught with his pants down, and he saw already that at least in one sense he was never going to be stepping into those security pants again.

It was all lost, had been taken away in a moment, in the shadows of the autopsy room: the good job, the good days of Sasha and stirrups and treats from the pharmacy locker and funny photos with dead bodies. Even his Trans Am with the zebra upholstery was gone, although no one would know it for hours; the sick fuck who clubbed him senseless had helped himself to the keys and driven away in it.

Gone. Everything. All of it.

Gone off with dead old Charlie Manx and never coming back.

 

About the Author

Joe Hill is the
New York Times
bestselling author of the novels
Horns
and
Heart-Shaped Box,
and the prizewinning story collection
20th Century Ghosts.
He is also the Eisner Award–winning writer of an ongoing comic book series,
Locke & Key.
His new novel,
NOS4A2
, will be published in May 2013. You can learn more at www.joehillfiction.com, or follow Joe on Twitter, where he goes by the inspired handle of @joe_hill.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

 

Also by Joe Hill

Horns

Heart-Shaped Box

20th Century Ghosts
(story collection)

Locke & Key,
vols. 1–5 (IDW Publishing)

 

Credits

Cover design and illustration by Adam Johnson

 

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

“Thumbprint” copyright © 2007 by Joe Hill originally appeared in the print anthology
Postscripts
#10, Spring 2007, published by PS Publishing.

“THUMBPRINT.”
Copyright © 2007, 2012 by Joe Hill. Excerpt from
NOS4A2
copyright © 2012 by Joe Hill. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062252531

12 13 14 15 16
OV
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

 

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BOOK: Thumbprint
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