Dead on My Feet by Wm. Mark Simmons

Author:Wm. Mark Simmons
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Occult, Fantasy - General, Epic, Vampires, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fantasy fiction, Horror, Contemporary, Fiction - Fantasy, Fantasy - Dark, Fantasy, General, Science fiction, Horror fiction, Fiction, Science Fiction And Fantasy, Fantasy - Contemporary
ISBN: 9781416509103
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2005-10-14T13:00:00+00:00

HOWARD

IGER

black Chevy van

2109 Boudreaux

Sikes, La

basement

The toe stopped.

Kandi Fenoli stepped back.

I looked up at her shadowed face. “Is this the one?” I asked, my heart a cold lump of lead in my frozen chest. My own soldier’s heart. “He did this to you, didn’t he?”

She nodded. Once.

If there is a God, I thought, He must be an absentee landlord.

The front door opened. Terry-call-me-T peeked out. “Sam?”

I stood up and turned to my wide-eyed houseguest. As I did I saw a familiar red firefly dance across the doorframe and disappear into my shadow.

A giant fist slammed into my back, knocking me across the threshold and slamming me into Terry with the force of a battering ram. We both smacked into the vestibule wall and she went down beneath me.

I didn’t think her eyes could get any bigger but I was wrong. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. I tried to lift myself off of her, but my arms had lost their strength and my legs their feeling. I had to roll to the side, flopping onto my back, and push myself up on shaky elbows.

The world lost its momentum.

Time slowed.

Moments became a succession of freeze-frames.

Even as deep shock probed my brain with muzzy fingers, my body was ramping up into preternatural battle-mode. Unfortunately, my legs had gone on weekend furlough.

I heard the door open on Montrose’s truck and his head appeared above the cab. “What happened?” he called, his voice distorted into a bassy drawl.

Beyond his shoulder, something flashed in the branches of one of the trees. Wide-eyed, I stared in disbelief as a small rocket whooshed toward the pickup in slo-mo.

My heightened reflexes gave me just enough time to yell: “LAW!”

Master Sergeant William Robert Montrose, who had last seen action in 1865, couldn’t know what a Light Antitank Weapon was. And even if he had, he could not have cleared the truck in time. The front yard turned the color of his red-orange dashboard lights and a gust of hot wind threw me down the hall.

It took me a moment to shake off the disorientation from my double battering. As I oriented myself I discovered that I had a small hole in my back and a larger one in my front. Judging from the alignment, I probably didn’t have a liver any more. Curiously, there was no pain, just numbed discomfort and hazy exhaustion. I turned back toward Terry and saw that she had been flung onto her side, where it seemed as if a large carnivore had taken a bite. Her shirt was in rags, oozing raw, bloody hamburger and nubs of white bone where her pelvis and ribcage had been shattered. She blinked once. Twice. Stretched her arm toward me. Opened her mouth. No words came, only a freshet of blood. Her eyes stayed open but her body suddenly relaxed and her gaze went past me, focused on eternity.

Shadows appeared on the roiling, flickering play of yellow, red, and orange lights on the curtains and hallway walls.

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