The Twilight Zone: Burned One Night at Mercy by Christa Faust

Author:Christa Faust [Faust, Christa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, General
ISBN: 9781844161799
Google: ab-DOQAACAAJ
Amazon: 184416179X
Publisher: Black Flame
Published: 2005-07-11T12:00:00+00:00

TWO

Rhonda Seed first noticed the dead man at 2:27am on Friday night. The Roaches had been giving Rhonda a particularly hard time that day and it took her over three hours to find a safe path back to the abandoned warehouse that she had been using as a temporary sanctuary. Rhonda was thirty-two and looked easily twice that. She had been homeless for more than fifteen years, bounced from various underfunded mental health facilities to living on the street and back again. She was very dark-skinned and tiny with only seven teeth left in her head, all molars. The ones in the front had been smashed out with a pipe when she was attacked and nearly beaten to death at age sixteen. After that, the mind control devices implanted in everyone's front teeth at birth were gone and Rhonda was able to see what was really going on with the Roaches and that radio disk jockey, and all the franchise restaurants.

If she were shaved and stripped naked, she would have weighed only ninety-five pounds, as thin and fragile as a baby bird. But the seven layers of purple clothing (purple being the only color the Roaches couldn't see), each layer meticulously lined with scavenged bits of foil, combined with her nearly floor length, wrist thick and foil wrapped dreadlocks, added another twenty-five or thirty pounds and gave her a bulky, Eskimo silhouette.

Rhonda crouched below the broken window that served as in entrance to her safe house. She checked the seven bottles of urine she had left to protect the window and looked at the seven watches on her left arm. They were all set to different times in order to confuse the Roaches, but she knew the system and saw that it was actually 2:18am. That upset her, because she could only enter the safe house on times that ended in a seven and that meant she would have to wait out in the open for a full nine minutes.

It had been a bad luck day from the start. There was a new guy working at the soup kitchen and he had turned the radio to the station with that disk jockey while Rhonda was sitting there gumming her day-old muffin. Laura, the nice familiar soup kitchen lady who wore a purple scarf and was safe to talk to, was in the bathroom and was too late to stop him. The thick, roachy sound of the disk jockey's voice had caused Rhonda to projectile vomit almost instantly and she had run screaming out into the street, leaving a whole bag of foil behind. With the poison of the disk jockey's voice eating its way through the foil beneath her clothing and into her vulnerable body, the Roaches immediately started hounding her, chasing her through the streets and brushing their quivering antennae against her eyelids everywhere she turned. She hid in the park, laying very still beneath a bench with protective foil gum wrappers over her eyes. The horrible voices hissed and screamed and raged around her like a hurricane.

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