Chapter Twenty-Five
Li’l Ron stood—his bare feet in the ice-cold water of the creek—eyes closed, breathing in the crisp November air, listening to the shower-like trickle of the rushing waters.
Her
waters.
Her
freedom. Her
runaway train
.
Sweet Kate was free.
About the Author
Glenn Rolfe is an author, singer, songwriter and all around fun loving guy from the haunted woods of New England. He has studied Creative Writing at Southern New Hampshire University, and continues his education in the world of horror by devouring the novels of Stephen King and Richard Laymon. He and his wife, Meghan, have three children, Ruby, Ramona, and Axl. He is grateful to be loved despite his weirdness.
Look for these titles by Glenn Rolfe
Coming Soon:
Boom Town
Playing with fire has never been more dangerous.
The Nightmare Girl
© 2015 Jonathan Janz
When family man Joe Crawford confronts a young mother abusing her toddler, he has no idea of the chain reaction he’s setting in motion. How could he suspect the young mother is part of an ancient fire cult, a sinister group of killers that will destroy anyone who threatens one of its members? When the little boy is placed in a foster home, the fanatics begin their mission of terror.
Soon the cult leaders will summon their deadliest hunters—and a ferocious supernatural evil—to make Joe pay for what he’s done. They want Joe’s blood and the blood of his family. And they want their child back.
Enjoy the following excerpt for
The Nightmare Girl:
Joe rolled down the windows and climbed out. He didn’t like the gasoline fumes wafting in toward Lily, but he liked the prospect of her and her mother baking in the unseasonably hot early April afternoon even less. He left the door ajar, swiped his card, and chose the cheapest grade of gas. As he waited for the all-clear to start fueling, his gaze wandered over to a maroon van parked on the other side of the pump. There was a blond woman pumping gas and another blond sitting behind the wheel. He saw what looked like a kid’s car seat behind the passenger’s seat.
Joe’s pump said “Please proceed” in a pleasant female voice, so he did, inhaling the gas fumes as he pulled the trigger and braced it to remain on until the tank was full. He felt a pang of guilt at enjoying the fumes so much—his mom had always warned that sniffing them would kill brain cells—but he couldn’t help it. He’d always loved the smell.
A plaintive cry tore at his ears, a child’s cry, and for a moment, Joe thought Lily had awakened. But when he glanced to his right, he saw his daughter still snoozing peacefully and realized it was the kid in the maroon van doing the bawling. He took a sideways step and saw that, yes, there was a little boy in the car seat, and he was indeed wailing. Little fella couldn’t have been more than a year old and had hair the color of bleached straw. He noticed, too, the pretty girl in the driver’s seat was glaring up in the mirror at her boy with a grim look on her face. She didn’t look so pretty anymore. Or very old, for that matter. She couldn’t have been much over twenty.
Joe’s eyes shifted to the lady at the gas pump and saw how it was more clearly. The little boy belonged to the younger girl. The woman at the pump was the grandma—the very young grandma. Probably forty-three or forty-four, just a couple years older than Joe. Of course, from the way the grandma was dressed, she didn’t much like the thought of growing older. The denim shorty shorts and the tight white top showed so much leg and midriff that the lady could’ve posed for a nudie magazine with minimal fuss. The shorts were so tight Joe worried her female parts might suffer from oxygen deprivation. But she wore them well, there was no doubt about that. Grandma looked thirty or so, until you got to the face. And though it wasn’t a bad face and might even been called attractive, there was a hardness there, a fierceness that suggested she’d seen much of life and wouldn’t put up with anybody else messing her over.
The little boy in the van continued to wail.
Joe saw the look on the young mother’s face and felt a ripple of misgiving sweep through him. The young mom, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, was staring daggers at the kid in the overhead mirror now. Joe glanced at the young grandma at the pump and thought,
Hurry, lady. Your daughter’s at the end of her fuse. I’ve got a feeling the toddler in the backseat isn’t a stranger to fussing like this, which means his momma’s nerves are as frayed as old wires
.
“You gonna stand out there all day?” Michelle’s voice called.
Joe blinked, returning to himself, and glanced at the gas pump. Stepping over and leaning into the open doorway of the pickup, he said, “It’s three-quarters full. Can we get Lily home and into her crib without waking her up?”
“It’s probably better if she does get up,” Michelle said, checking her watch. “It’s five now. If she doesn’t wake soon, she’ll be up all night.”
Joe nodded. “You’re right. She’ll be cranky th—“
A flat, solid sound popped in the spring air. Joe felt his guts squirm. Michelle’s face paled. She was staring at something beyond him. He knew what it was even before he turned, knew it yet hoped against hope it wasn’t true. But when he did crane his neck around and peered through the windshield and saw what was happening, it was as though Joe’s internal organs turned to mush and settled in the pit of his stomach.
“Joe,” Michelle said in a small, breathless voice.
Jesus Christ
, he thought.
Jesus Christ
.
The young mother stood in the van’s open side doorway. She raised her hand again, her face twisted in a snarl. She was spitting sibilant words at the little boy through bared teeth. Her eyes were enraged and full of white.
His whole body numb and shaking, Joe pushed himself away from the pickup, and his view was momentarily washed out by the late afternoon sun glare boiling off the van’s windshield. But he still saw a flash of brown skin as the young woman’s arm whipped down, still heard the sickening, meaty smack of bony fingers on tender pink flesh. His heart thumping, his gorge a bursting mass of heat, Joe stumbled over the concrete island on legs he couldn’t feel. He was distantly aware of the young grandma’s eyes on him as he drifted around the corner of the van. The scene that awaited him was worse than he ever would’ve imagined:
The young mother, athletic and curvy and all brown skin. Her right palm rearing back like a sledgehammer, her eyes ringed with hideous white coronas, her gleaming teeth those of a Rottweiler with all the gentleness conditioned out of it, who only knows how to lash out, who only knows how to rip and maim.
Beyond her were the faces of several bystanders. Though Joe wasn’t looking at them, he could make out their faces in the background. Like horrified constellations they stared at the hideous scene, but not one of them moved. Women. Men. A couple children of maybe four and seven. The faces gaped, but they were frozen in that tableau. Some modernized version of a Bosch painting come to life.
But the worst of it, by an inestimably vast margin, was the sight of the little boy, too young to know exactly what was happening or to understand the injustice of his situation, but old enough to know he didn’t want to be hit again. Old enough to cry and writhe in his seat while the snot and saliva formed bloody whorls on his lips and his chin. The collar of his baby blue T-shirt, Joe saw, was purpled with sweat and other fluids Joe didn’t want to think about.
The woman was beginning her striking motion again when Joe reached her. Until this moment he’d known people like this existed, but perhaps he’d deluded himself into believing their crimes really couldn’t be as detestable as the papers described. A mother really couldn’t willingly harm her child.
What he did do was catch her by the wrist. So powerful was her downward swing that her arm descended another few inches anyway, but Joe was a good deal stronger, and he had enough adrenaline sluicing through his body to stay her slap before it landed on the toddler’s already swelling face. For a split second, it seemed she would relent. Her white, deranged horse’s eyes flicked to his and registered what might have been astonishment.
Then her left hand curled up in a claw and tore ribbons from the side of his neck to the shelf of his jaw. The pain was incredible, but the instinct for self-preservation won out. Before she could get at him again—and she was already retracting her scythe-like talons for another vicious swipe—Joe jerked her sideways, away from the squalling toddler and his heartbreaking tears. She staggered, nearly fell, and Joe almost came down on top of her. There was someone batting at his shoulders, a voice shrilling at him to
Let Angie go! Let Angie go!
But Joe’s only thoughts were of preventing more abuse to the child in the van and of saving what was left of his own looks by immobilizing those lethal fingernails.
They were halfway between the pumps and the gas station. A car had stopped about ten feet shy of running them over and sat there idling impatiently. The girl was thrashing in his grip and spouting obscenities at him, words like
cocksucker
and
motherfucker
and other things so foul he didn’t even know what they meant. Beyond the shrieking harpy he could make out the pink, full moon faces of onlookers who’d stepped out of the gas station to spectate. On their right flank, the crowd from the small parking lot had closed in, perhaps to get a better look at Joe’s bloody neck.
The girl—Angie, the grandma had called her—reared back and let loose with a gob of spit that slapped him in the cheek. Meanwhile, the grandma was tearing at his arms, his shirt, now interposing herself between him and Angie to pry loose his fingers.
“Let my girl go, damn you!” Grandma whacked him across the chest, the shoulder. “Let…her…
go
!”
Joe threw her a look. “Tell her to stop carving me up with those nails of hers and I will.”
The grandma seemed not to hear him. She hauled off and swatted him across the bridge of the nose, and god
dammit
, did that hurt. Angie was still flailing about, her arms like electrified nunchucks, and now she was kicking at his legs, rearing back like an NFL placekicker and booting him with all her strength in the left shin.
Joe stifled a cry of pain and gave her a shake. “Stop it, damn you, and I’ll let you go!”
Angie aimed a knee at his crotch and only barely missed neutering him.
For the love of God
, Joe thought.
I’m in the middle of a sordid daytime talk show, the kind where guys hump their sisters and the bodyguards have to work overtime.
He spun Angie away from Grandma so he could avoid the older woman’s bruising slaps, but she kept at it, revolving with him in an unceasing attempt to disengage him from her daughter. A gas station attendant, a young guy with longish brown hair, had finally exited the building and was now just a few feet away from the scrum. The young guy’s face was etched in a disbelieving mask, but he looked like he could be an ally if he’d snap out of his stupor.
“Help me,” Joe managed in a strangled growl. The young guy gave him a reluctant nod and ventured to put his hands on the grandma, but no sooner had he made contact than the woman whirled and slugged him in the mouth. The dull thud of her knuckles on the young guy’s teeth would’ve made Joe wince under ordinary circumstances. But these were not ordinary circumstances.
The Twilight Zone has landed in Northern Indiana,
he thought.
Forget about ordinary
.
Angie was grinning crazily at him now and actually snapping at his forearms with spit-flecked teeth. He dodged her first lunge, but on the second, those gleaming white teeth sank into the meat of his forearm like it was a filet mignon. This time Joe did bellow in pain, and without thinking, he shoved the girl away. The force of it surprised them both and her teeth came loose with a disgusting
schlurp
ing sound. She landed in an awkward tangle, her wrist pinned under her side. Joe heard a gruesome wet crack and made a futile wish it wasn’t a broken bone. But her pinched features and her inhuman wail of pain suggested otherwise.
The grandma shouldered past him and fell at her daughter’s side. Grandma cradled her daughter’s thrashing head and shot Joe a look of such stygian venom that his stomach performed another somersault.
“You’ll burn for this,” Grandma hissed.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B
Cincinnati OH 45249
Abram’s Bridge
Copyright © 2015 by Glenn Rolfe
ISBN: 978-1-61922-509-1
Edited by Don D’Auria
Cover by Scott Carpenter
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
electronic publication: January 2015