The Sound of Midnight - An Oxrun Station Novel by Grant Charles L

Author:Grant, Charles L. [Grant, Charles L.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Horror
Publisher: Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Published: 2012-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII

"I can't understand why you're so bothered."

"We've lost another one, fool, that's why! We've lost another one."

"We had five. Now there are three. We can do as well with two, you know. One, if we have to."

The voices frightened her. The backlighted figures were clearly those of children, but the voices she heard were adult in tone; and in closing her eyes it was easy to imagine a man and a woman standing not five feet from where she crouched.

"We have five days."

"I know that. I haven't forgotten how to count."

"Well said. Can you do as well so the others won't run?"

"Run? Where are they going to run to? Back across the water? This is the best chance, the only chance we'll have for—"

"All right, all right! There's no sense in our arguing. We'll only make it worse. What's done is done. And if what you say is right, we have to do it again. Two, you say? I wouldn't like to be here if you're wrong."

A cramp knotted the back of a thigh, and she reached to massage it through her coat, gnawing on her lips to keep from crying out.

"And what of the other troubles? I don't like it. We risk too much."

"There's little we can do now to stop it."

"Then the least you can do is be a little more efficient, don't you think?"

Dale brought her arm forward again, brushing it carelessly against her coat. There was a sudden alarming clatter as the flashlight fell. The voices stopped, and she looked up to see the figures turned in her direction. Panic flooded out reason, then, and she snatched up the light and jumped to her feet. Immediately the figures took a step toward her she switched on the flash to blind them, heard their angrily startled shouts as she ran between them, striking out with her arms to knock them aside. There was no time to search for the path to the main gates now; she stumbled onward through the brush, slamming once into a bole as a warning yell rose hysterically behind her. She gasped, pushed herself faster, and broke onto the open slope. Frost had already whitened the ground and crackled like twigs beneath her feet as she ran without looking back. The wind shoved her, carried to her the distant sounds of more shouting, but though there didn't seem to be any pursuit she didn't slow until she tripped and fell onto her stomach, rolled, thrashed about until she regained her feet. Standing, then, and watching the glow at the top of the hill flare once before dying into black. Her breasts and knees ached from striking the hard earth, and her mouth gaped to find the air her lungs demanded. She turned, began a trot, angling away from the main entrance toward the park's southern boundary. Listening, always, for the footfalls that never came, the sudden cries of discovery that remained silent in the wind.

She was like an automaton—her legs moving her,

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