Among Prey (10 page)

Bobby let go of Derek’s shirt, and Derek stood silently feeling at his upper chest. His collarbones, upper ribs and sternum were broken. But instead of popping out, they had been pressed in. That feeling of panic when someone pushes too hard against the sides of your neck filled him, but he had no one to flail against. He knew from his anatomy classes that a broken clavicle was either pinching off an artery or had cut through it, and something was also pressed against his lower trachea so that he had to gasp just to get a sip of air. He ignored the incredible pain in his shoulders and pried at the strangely sunken flesh above his rib cage.

His legs wobbled, then went out from under him. He fell to his knees, then back against the wall. He noticed Bobby patting at him with actual emotion in his eyes. Fear. The huge idiot stood, twisting back and forth with terror in his eyes.

You’re going back to the fucking institution now and you know it.

Something dropped into Derek’s lap. Then something else. The garbage bag had torn, and dolls spilled out onto him. Careful to move his arms only at the elbows, he grabbed a doll and remembered the wonderful, horrible things he’d done to that little girl. As throbbing darkness closed in from the edges, Derek wondered if the police would be able to put it together, or if the world might never know who’d killed the girls.

The world disappeared entirely. He could not see or hear or feel his body. He was only a quickly dissolving consciousness.

His final coherent thought was of what a stupid way this was to die.

About the Author

Alan Ryker is the product of a good, clean country upbringing, and though he now lives with his wife and their purebred pughuameranian in the suburbs of Kansas City, the sun-bleached prairie still haunts his fiction. He is the author of
The Hoard
,
Nightmare Man
, and the
Vampires of the Plains
series, and is also a member of The Abominable Gentlemen, who publish his short stories in their quarterly magazine of weird fiction,
Penny Dreadnought
. To learn more about his work, go to
www.alanryker.com
.

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