Extra Life by Derek Nikitas

Author:Derek Nikitas [Nikitas, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller
Publisher: Polis Books
Published: 2015-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

PAIGE DIDN’T hesitate. In one sleek motion, she rolled off her mattress and swiped an aluminum bat from where it stood in the corner of her room. She wasn’t going to die a passive death.

But the intruder wasn’t a person. It had no real shape at all. More of an unfolding web of radiance, it seemed to be on the stairs and in the hall and bulging through the bedroom door, all at once. It was a digitized angelic glow—light dancing midair like slow-mo paint from a sprayer, full of crackling static electricity—except there was nothing heavenly about it.

The whole room was charged with its power. The currents cramped the muscles in my throat. I couldn’t speak. Wisps of Paige’s hair lifted upward as she crouched to take a swipe at anything that might happen to turn solid inside all that ambient light.

But the glow pooled in the doorway and darkened bluish. Another kind of doorway was opening.

And whatever came though would be hell-bent on killing Paige.

I knew, because it had succeeded once already in another world. Took her life and made it look like suicide. I couldn’t understand why, but it had to be my fault, clear enough. For starters, I tore the rifts in time-space that would help Paige’s killer step through, but it was even more than that. She was bait. Her “suicide” was a setup to lure me back here. Save her. Step right into the trap.

With the doorway blocked, our one escape hatch was Paige’s bedroom window. I pointed to it, and she nodded. We were one floor up from the ground, but the risk of a sprained ankle and bruises seemed more pleasant than staying to see what would happen in her room once the radiance engulfed us.

Paige sidestepped and took a line-drive swing, shattering the window glass. Efficient, but she might as well have popped an airplane hatch thirty thousand feet above ground. An instant suction wrenched almost everything toward the opening that wasn’t hammered to the floor.

A spinning baseball clocked my shoulder. Notebooks and commemorative cards and pendants and stray socks all smacked the window frame and coughed through the broken glass. Paige’s bat snapped from her grip and was gone. Even the air in my lungs was expelled with one painful hiccup.

Despite the airborne chaos, we weren’t affected. Our clothes rippled and our hair was tossed around, but our feet stuck as firmly on the ground as ever. It didn’t make any physical sense. Not the pressurized vacuum, and not our resistance to its suction.

The pulsing electric light bled along the walls and surged toward us with an ambient roar. Paige’s room was disappearing in a solid wall of static, like jumbo-tron screens set to dead channels on full volume. We were being enveloped. Even the window was swallowed up in its reach, painted over by an electric film.

Our only exit route was gone. And no more air to breathe. So much pressure, my head would implode if this lasted much longer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.