Deathless by Jeff Strand

Author:Jeff Strand [Strand, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2021-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

Tucker woke me up with a barking fit. It took a moment for my dream (I couldn’t remember what it was, but it had been pleasant) to make way for the reality that my dog was going berserk as somebody pounded on my front door. I’d trained him out of this behavior when I lived in an apartment, but out here in my cabin it had been several years since my last unexpected visitor.

I glanced over at the clock. 2:02 AM.

I quickly got out of bed and hurried out of my bedroom. I’d become the kind of person who kept a shotgun by his front door, so I picked it up and peeked out the window.

It was April. I opened the door.

Her face was stained with tears and she looked terrified.

“Is everything—?” I started to ask.

“There’s a gun pointed at my head,” she said.

I glanced around. The porch light didn’t illuminate much of the surrounding area, and somebody with a gun could’ve been hiding pretty much anywhere.

Tucker started to bolt from the house, but I shouted at him and he came back inside.

“I need your phone,” she told me. “You have twenty seconds to hand it over or they’re going to shoot me. They’ll do it.”

They’ll do it. This wasn’t good.

I ran back into my bedroom, grabbed my cell phone off my nightstand, then ran back to the front door and gave it to her. April held up the phone, showing it off to whomever was watching, then tossed it into the darkness.

“Thank you,” she said, seeming to suddenly relax.

I didn’t have a landline. Presumably they had already circled the cabin searching for cords to sever.

“Is it Ian and the others?” I asked.

April nodded.

I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Do you want me to pull you inside? I’ll do it fast.”

“No. They have three guns pointed at me.”

At the edge of my yard, I saw a lighter flick on, and then a torch burst into flame, illuminating one of the guys I recognized from Detroit. Then another torch lit up. And another. And another. Soon I counted thirteen or fourteen of them. I recognized some of the people who held them, while others were strangers.

Flashlights would have worked just as well. These people were trying to be scary.

“Hello, Alex,” said Ian, walking toward the cabin. “It’s good to see you again.”

I didn’t step outside, but I pointed the shotgun at him. “Don’t come any closer,” I warned.

“Don’t be like that. We’re all friends here.”

“Take one more step and I’ll blow your head off.”

Ian nodded and took a step backwards. “All right. I guess you’re going to make this more difficult. That’s fine. I completely understand. But you know why we’re here, right?”

“Field trip?”

“Funny. Nobody’s here to harm you, Alex.”

“Of course not. Torch-wielding mobs never show up to cause problems.”

“It’ll be okay, I promise.”

“Prove it,” I said. “Let April come inside.”

“No.”

“You want to earn my trust? Let April go.”

“I don’t need to earn your trust,” said Ian. “If we decide to get aggressive, you will lose.

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