Born on the 4th of July by Heather Graham Pozzessere

Author:Heather Graham Pozzessere [Pozzessere, Heather Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-07-01T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Jennie had been moving ahead of Angela, showing her the way. She stopped suddenly, listening.

“We’ll never get there!” she said.

“What?”

“I mean, in time! Someone is coming. From the office—it’s a bit of a walk, but someone is coming from that direction. I know because there are turns in the tunnels . . . the Rosser family wanted to help; they built a tunnel. But there’s another tunnel that comes from the office.”

“The back of the office,” Angela murmured. “That’s it—they dragged me through the office; I know that. I remember . . .”

She remembered . . . something. Something she’d done when she’d been held by the man who had blocked her from exiting the office.

“Angela!”

Her new ghost friend was looking at her with anguish. “We’re not going to make it! You—you are cumbersome and moving too slow and still, some of the path is narrow and to rush—”

She broke off.

She didn’t want Angela risking her baby—anymore than moving laboriously through a dark tunnel might be doing already.

“All right—”

“She’s coming from the office and she’ll take a turn into this main tunnel, but not before we’re past the turn. She’s coming fast!”

Angela’s eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness. The little pinpricks of light allowed for her to make out shapes.

The tunnels had been built for the living; now, they housed the dead. The slabs—like the one she had lain on—had not been enclosed with any kind of sealant.

Corpses had lain on them for maybe a hundred-and-fifty years.

Bones, for the most part, were covered with decaying shrouds.

She closed he eyes for a split second. Everything inside her cried out.

But something stronger cried out as well. Not just her instinct for survival, but the instinct to protect her unborn child at all costs.

“Help me the best you can!” she said.

She quickly slid onto one of the closest slabs, choosing one with the shroud that remained in the best shape.

“Forgive me!” she whispered, pushing bones with bits of mummified skin to the side and crawling beneath the shroud.

“That’s Papa Jim; he wouldn’t mind in the least,” Jennie assured her.

She was barely in the slab—worried her extended belly would be a give-away—when she heard footsteps.

A light step, she thought. A woman, not a man.

Hatfield! Merissa Hatfield was the witch who had doused her!

She really hoped Papa Jim didn’t mind. She felt one of the disarticulated bones at her side; a femur. She curled her fingers around it.

Forgive me! She said, in silence this time.

And she waited. The footsteps were coming closer.

And closer.

*

“It’s locked,” Corby said, frowning and staring at the door to the office. “His car is out there—but the door is locked.”

Adam stood next to him. He pounded on the door.

Charlie Dearborn’s car was, indeed, parked right in front close to the door. The man had to have reached the office.

There was no answer to Adam’s banging.

“He’s got to be in there!” Josh Harrison’s ghost murmured. “Maybe I could will myself through the wall, but . . . I can’t open doors.

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