This Means War! by Jeff Conner

Author:Jeff Conner [IDW Publishing]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, horror
ISBN: 978-1-4804-2927-7
Publisher: IDW Publishing

“Hey.” A female voice, and a soft pat on the cheek. “Hey, wake up.”

He’d fallen asleep, he realized before opening his eyes. When he did open them, he thought he was still asleep and dreaming. Cate knelt beside him, long black hair whipping in the breeze as she stared at him. Blinking lights reflected off her smooth, pale skin. Hazard lights, Francis thought. She put on her four-ways and stopped for me. Not a dream, then. Made sense. When they’d met, Cate was a nurse at the hospital outside of Kirtland. She was exactly the sort of person who’d be on the road at this time, and would pull over to aid an injured vagrant. A fortuitous coincidence, but not the creation of his own troubled mind.

“Are you hurt?”

“Hit-and-run,” Francis said, falling back on the lie he’d planned for the ER doctor at the hospital. “My leg’s broken in at least two places.”

“Oh my. I’m going to the hospital anyway. Let’s get you situated, and I’ll take you to the emergency room.”

She helped him to his feet, picked up his backpack from where it had apparently fallen from his shoulder, and ducked her head under one of his arms, before leading him to her car. Francis couldn’t help but stare as she shut his door, walked around to the driver’s side, slid in behind the wheel, and pulled onto the highway.

“You can stop staring,” she said after a moment. She sounded firm, but slightly amused. Yeah, that was Cate, Francis thought to himself. He forced himself to look away. Keeping the smile off his face was a little more difficult. This is a sign. This plan is going to work.

“Thank you for stopping,” he said. “My name is…Fritz,” he said, thinking of Winterbottom’s armored corpse on the floor of the research lab. “What’s your name?”

“Cate,” she said, smiling a little. “I’m a nurse.”

“Thank you again, Cate. I know what I look like, but I’m harmless, really. What’s the chance we could skip the hospital?”

“We can put it off for a week or so if you’d rather get the leg amputated,” she said. “It could get infected. You need it set in a cast.”

“I know that,” Francis said. “But you know how to do all that, and I’d rather not go to the hospital. I have money for a hotel room, food, and all the materials we’ll need. Take me somewhere decent and set my leg, please. I’ll pay your rent for the month.” When they’d first met, Cate had been living in a tiny studio apartment and struggling with student loans on her meager entry-level salary. Francis wasn’t kidding about the money, either. He’d looted several cash registers in preparation for his trip to the past. He didn’t feel bad about it, and no one had stopped him. Everyone had bigger things to worry about than a drawer full of useless money.

“So you’re on the street, you need me to take you to the hospital, but you have a stack of cash and want to pay my rent?”

“I’m serious,” he said.

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.