Victoria by Jason Parent

Author:Jason Parent [Parent, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloodshot Books
Published: 2018-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

A steady beeping infects her nightmare, a world of giant spiders feasting and draining the blood from human cattle. She is among those cattle, lumbering across a field of meat, waiting for her turn to be consumed. All fight has left her. All hope is gone.

Except for that beeping. Somehow, even in her dream, she knows it’s tied in some way to her life. Steady. Constant. Monotone.

The spiders are coming. A particular fat one the size of a bus has locked eight blood-red eyes on her. Despite its girth, its steps are silent as it walks right up to her. She doesn’t run, doesn’t even turn away though fear has clogged her throat, cut off her voice. She can smell the thing’s breath now, sizzling hot and rank like gases emanating from a rotting animal. Its drool patters at her feet.

“I’m going to eat you,” the spider’s twinkling eyes say. “I’m going to eat you and suck out all your yummy organs and wallow drunkenly in your blood. Then, even after you’re dead, I will kiss your flesh and render meat from bone, taste all of you until there is nothing left.”

The spider opens its mouth wider. Large fangs extend. The beeping tethered to her life intensifies, the tone repeating so quickly that she feels as though her years are racing away from her, a fact she knows to be true as the spider leans in for its first kiss. It takes her hand into its mouth and begins to chew.

***

Victoria awoke to what sounded like an alarm-clock blare on rapid fire. White walls, white linens, ugly sallow curtains, and a heart monitor going apeshit—she processed it all quickly and came up with one word: hospital. Her heart slowed, and the pain in her stomach kicked in. It felt as though someone were trying to pull off her abs the same way Vishal used his hands to pull fat off raw chicken.

And her hand… Someone held it. She tore it free.

“Bad dream?” a young man said beside her.

She gasped. How she had overlooked him in her haste to determine her location was uncharacteristic and almost embarrassing, if not potentially deadly. But if he’d been there to kill her, she’d have been dead already, she supposed. No, he wasn’t there to kill her. He’d been holding her hand.

She drew it in closer and glowered at him.

“Excuse me,” he said, his cheeks the color of roses. “When I saw you were having a nightmare, I thought maybe I could comfort you.”

“Who are you?” She knew the answer to that question. He was the boy from the market. The boy who knew too much. “What are you doing in my room?”

The boy smiled, a warm but mischievous kind, friendly but dangerous if the two could coexist. “For my name, I already told you. It’s Armani. Armani Giancarlo Scarpetti, to be exact, at least that’s one of my names, the one my bosses call me, though I go by a number these days. Like you, I assume.

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