Dark Moon Digest Issue 10 by Stan Swanson & Lori Michelle

Author:Stan Swanson & Lori Michelle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook, QuarkXPress
ISBN: 111-1-11-111111-1
Publisher: Dark Moon Books
Published: 2013-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

BIG BAD

Jack Maddox

Afterwards, Jacob Wills couldn’t have told you what came first: Red, or the dreams.

He called her Red because he never learned her name, not until he started the hunt. The things he actually knew about her could’ve been counted on one hand.

She lived four doors down from him. She was old enough to smoke, which she did frequently, maybe not old enough to drink.. Her hair was ice-blonde, her eyes were blue.

He watched her through the peephole when she passed by, carrying a small backpack loaded with food, her battered red hoodie pulled up. She wore baggy clothes so you wouldn’t see the comfortable curves of her body, but he saw things others didn’t. The way the edge of her black lace panties peeked out of her jeans when she bent to tie a shoe. Her dark purple lipstick.

His mother had told him to stay away from girls like her.

***

Jacob didn’t have anything to hide. Just another little man scurrying through the halls, a little man who sat in an office and had trouble remembering what his job was, who ate from a little Greek restaurant down the street and hated the man who ran the place for being so tall and confidently fat and always grinning. He wished he could be like that, but he knew that if he ever worked up the nerve to walk up to Red and start talking, she’d stare at him blankly until he disappeared.

Now you see me, now you don’t.

Only she never really saw him.

***

When the dreams came, they were always the same.

He was running through a forest on all fours, feeling stronger and more sure of himself than he ever did when he was awake. Leaping and bounding through the trees, the scent of prey burning in his brain. A heartbeat throbbed in his ears. It didn’t belong to him.

Jacob passed by an abandoned house made of bricks. The windows were broken, and the jagged glass made them look like open mouths. There were yellow eyes peering out at him from the windows. This didn’t raise his hackles. He feared nothing that walked on two legs, or four legs, or didn’t walk at all.

The deer would come into sight about then. A pale young doe in the center of a clearing, frozen with fear when she saw his yellow eyes in the darkness. He galloped to the edge of the clearing and then jumped high and hard, and it felt like flying.

Sometimes the deer was still a deer when he came back down with his claws and fangs slashing. Sometimes she turned into Red.

***

The fall came.

You couldn’t even tell in the city, except for the sudden chill. Somebody had torn up the last of the trees long ago, probably to make room for a strip mall that would sit empty for a hundred years like the world’s tackiest haunted house.

He started staying up later, especially when the moon was full, and spent more time watching the stars than watching the little television set in his bedroom.

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