Fiction River: Feel the Fear: Fiction River: an Original Anthology Magazine, #25 by LEE ALLRED

Author:LEE ALLRED
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WMG Publishing

Jerry staggers to his feet. Ugly, nauseating pain seeps through his muscles and collects in his bones. His face contorts with a grimace and he screws his eyes shut. For a moment, he can’t breathe.

At last he manages to stand and open his eyes. It doesn’t do any good. Jerry had thought the moonlight coming from the windows on the factory floor had been nothing, but here, down in this earthen pit below the factory floor, is true darkness. He cannot see—not the faint hint of shape, not a flicker of motion, nothing.

And there’s something else.

A foul odor, both sweet and rank. Jerry’s been running calls for eight years. He knows what that smell is.

Death.

Something’s died down here.

First the woman up top and now this.

“What is this,” Jerry mutters under his breath, “the elephant graveyard of drug users?”

He squats down and begins to feel around for the flashlight.

He doesn’t find it.

But he does find something else.

His gloved hand wraps around—

He jumps.

A leg it’s a leg leg leg the tibia long and hard under too-soft flesh and—

Suddenly realization cuts through the panic. It was small. He got his whole hand around it.

He crouches down and slowly, slowly reaches out with a trembling hand…

Jerry clamps his hand around the dead limb. Yes. Can’t be more than an inch in diameter. A cat—or maybe a small dog. Not a human corpse that will have to be dealt with. For a heartbeat, he feels relief.

Then something skitters across the back of his hand, its legs—

(its mess of legs)

—whisper soft.

He jumps and shouts, flinging his arms around like a madman, trying to shake it off shake it off. He feels it slip under the cuff of his long sleeve and then it’s dancing across the naked skin of his inner arm. He paws at the sleeve, jerking it up—

A pinprick of sharp pain stabs through his arm. It bit him. Then another and another.

Biting biting biting—

He rips the sleeve and slaps at his bare right arm and suddenly the spider is gone.

He bends over, breathing hard, hands on his knees, his right arm tingling.

Where the hell is Grayson?

And then he thinks, Grayson!

This has been a weird call from the beginning, an isolated part of town, no one here to meet them, a cardiac call that forces them to rush only to find it’s really an OD. Who made the call?

Jerry remembers Grayson stepping out of the cab right before they got the call. He could have made the call.

Maybe Grayson knows Kildare. Maybe he knows it’s possible to lose someone here.

But why would he do that?

In his memory, Jerry sees Grayson’s hand on his wife’s shoulder and this time he doesn’t doubt the recollection.

How’s Lise?

For weeks he’s been seeing spiders and he’s come to see them as little skittering omens, living harbingers of all his troubles. And now here he is in a spider pit. Yes, a spider pit. The flesh of that dead animal has to be writhing with maggots and the spiders will

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.