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Sky stood on the roadside in the small hours. When a car passed by, she watched it approach, trying to see the driver, not moving until it was close, then put out her thumb, trying to smile. Only seven cars had gone past in… how long? It seemed like at least an hour. Perhaps she not only was unable to smile but had a scared expression. Or maybe she looked awful. She had not looked in the mirror before fleeing from Todd’s house. Since then, she’d been praying, an old habit, though she had long since lost all concept of who or what she prayed to. Please let me get out of this awful place, this town, get far away, somewhere where I can sort this out. I have to think some more…

She realized she was speaking aloud, though in a whisper. Men, so pitiful. She’d known so many, could manipulate them when she wished to, but didn’t understand them, didn’t understand herself. She still called it a mission, one of her own. She told no one. But it wasn’t a mission anymore, was it? She didn’t believe in anything. She went on, she knew, because it was thrilling. Don’t ask me to explain… But she really was trying, hoping, to help. It was what she was made for, that part was true.

But I didn’t know it could go so wrong…

Poor Todd on the bathroom floor in a pool of blood, his head attached to his body by a scrap of flesh, wide-eyed, already dead. The Invisible World is ever with us, full of ghosts. She’d seen the ritual done only once, when she was seven, at the ranch in Modesto among a crowd of Kindred, holding her mother’s hand and being brave. Delbert Wingdale was there. It was before Daddy Dickey and love bombing. It was a rite, he’d said, a separation of the mind and body. A gift from the Space Brothers. And it was a secret. Todd had nearly de-brained himself with the shotgun. Frantic and blind with tears, she’d completed the task, driven to do so. Possessed.

Maybe that was the answer to everything. She was possessed.

A black car approached, and she put out her thumb, not smiling but pleading with her eyes. The car slowed and stopped. A man, alone, was driving. Of course.

“Don’t you know you shouldn’t hitchhike? A lovely girl like you?” the driver said, turning on the ceiling light in his car. He was clean-shaven, had blond hair in a widow’s peak, somehow an unpleasant face. He was grinning almost like the mask that represents comedy, taking in the sight of her.

“I probably shouldn’t, but I’ll have to trust you.” She was too shaken to make eye contact. She got in, pulled the door closed. “Too late now,” he said, and she forced a laugh.

The car started moving. He was driving rather fast.

“I don’t think you’re from around here, are you?”

“No.”

“Just passing through, eh?”

“Umm-hmm. If you could let me out somewhere near the highway, that’d be fine.”

He threw back his head and laughed, too loud and too abruptly. “You know what’s odd?”

“What?”

“I smell blood.”

Smell? A chill ran through her. “Oh, yes, I guess I cut myself.”

“You have blood on your dress, too. And your eye is bruised, isn’t it?” He winced a bit, peering at her. The ceiling light was still on. She wished he’d turn it off.

“Is it? I didn’t know.”

“Sounds like you’ve had a bad night already.”

They often said strange things. Besides, she was upset. Her perceptions could be off. Maybe he wasn’t driving as fast as it seemed, wasn’t too often studying her rather than watching the road and with a disturbingly hungry gaze. She felt nothing for him, couldn’t tease, couldn’t even try.

Her prayers began again, silently now. Please let me get through this ride. Let me live. Let me go on with my mission, and please don’t let it be in vain.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Andersen Prunty and C.V. Hunt for emergency editorial assistance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pete Risley is also the author of Rabid Child (New Pulp Press, 2010), The Toehead (N.H.N.T., 2016), and Office Mutant (Grindhouse Press, 2018). He lives in Columbus, Ohio and is a distant cousin of Gelett Burgess, author of the celebrated poem The Purple Cow: Reflections on a Mythic Beast Who’s Quite Remarkable, at Least.

PRAISE FOR PETE RISLEY

“Risley’s cold but soul-searing novel snatched my attention irrevocably from the opening passage. Its dark frights are as scary as the things on offer in good horror fiction. In a way good noir and good horror aren’t that far removed from each other in spirit. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Rabid Child. The humans are the horror but this book is honestly frightening.”

—Kristofer Todd Upjohn, author of Jess Franco: The World’s Most Dangerous Filmmaker

“Murder-minded singer and author Nick Cave has nothing on Pete Risley. Risley’s debut novel, Rabid Child, reads like the unholy offspring of Brian Evenson and Erskine Caldwell, of Thom Metzger and Jim Thompson, of Tim Burton and William Lindsay Gresham. It’s Carnival of Souls re-filmed for the twenty-first century, possessing an air of creepy menace and swampedelic grimness that is simultaneously hip and eternal, off-putting and seductive, melancholy and hilarious. Desmond Cray, our perverted anti-hero, is no match for his demented foster sister, uber-slut Tracy Honnecker. Their conjoined and separate trails of lust and destruction through their town—Peyton Place via The Book of Revelation—will leave you shaking your head in grinning disbelief.”

—Paul Di Filippo, author of A Mouthful of Tongues and Ciphers

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