A dead woman’s hair streamed across his face as her corpse brushed against him.
In a panic he tore at the hair, clumps coming off in his fingers, and then lost his grip on the mausoleum.
“No!”
He was swept along with the dead body that, to his horror, seemed to be enveloping him. Tendrils of hair were everywhere, long and black and in his eyes. He thought of Wick, of her long red hair, her porcelain skin, her blue eyes, her young, lithe body. He was going to die here in this flood, in this graveyard, somewhere outside of a backwater like Plunyport. This was supposed to have been a simple thing. An easy job. Kill some ridiculous jailer and get gone.
He spat out the noxious deluge and grabbed onto an obelisk, wrapping his arms and legs around it as if it were a parent he never wanted to lose. The dead woman was still draped around him. She was newly dead, no longer bloated but covered with slime.
For a moment it seemed that he would be able to hold on. He braced himself against the unending tide as it wore him down. He cursed the name Gilbert Marklegrove.
The dead thing still attached to him was becoming cumbersome. He needed to pry it off, lighten his load. He squeezed his eyes shut, willed himself to let go with one hand, wiped the hair off of his neck, and forced the head down into the water. Then he let go of the marker with his legs and was nearly pulled away by the current.
“Gods!” He grasped for the top of the obelisk again.
The corpse slipped off of him and sped away on the current.
Jules fought to pull his legs in, to wrap them back around the marker, but he just didn’t have the strength.
Several panicked farm animals swept past him, tumbling against the headstones and coffins and disappearing into the darkness.
As lightning flashed again, he saw the demolished remnants of a barn coming toward him. The side smashed against the mausoleum, a portion of fence knocking into his hands, but he held tight. Then the barn’s frame loomed overhead. It creaked as it crumpled against the menagerie of rocks, snapping and shifting and coming down on top of him.
The stone that he’d been holding for support broke off under the weight of the crumbling wood, and he was lost under the ghastly water once more. His body was spent. He was unable to save himself as his back smashed into a gravestone, and then his right arm broke when it collided with another. He spun, limp, sucking water into his lungs as he writhed in pain… slipping under… consumed by the darkness… his hair twisting in the void, tickling his face. He felt the life leaving him replaced by a strange sort of lightness, drawing him away from the pain.
He then shot out of the water and slid up onto the side of the barn with such violence that it revived him from near death. The barn wall rocked from side to side, and more and more debris piled up beside him. Jules lay in the confused mass atop the makeshift craft, face down, one broken arm useless and lying at an odd angle to one side, a pool of blood gathering under his head.
He wished for death. In that one moment he had tasted it, however briefly, the sweetness, the peace. More than anything he’d ever felt before, he wanted that again. But instead he was in agony, too weak to move, with garbage and dead things surrounding him.
As he lay there, half clothed and broken, he spied a corpse lying beside him, stark white in the lightning, with a mangled face and a rope tied around one wrist.
Dawn McCullough White grew up in Rochester, NY, and is a keen observer of people. She spent her childhood listening to her father tell stories about history and ghosts. This left an indelible mark on her psyche. It is not such as surprise that, at the age of fourteen she penned her first novel and has never looked back since. Dawn currently has a Dark Fantasy series out—The Trilogy of Shadows—available in Kindle and Nook and in print through Amazon. In her spare time she enjoys watching documentaries and keeping EA in business by buying up every single Sims expansion she can get her hands on.
Facebook Fanpage: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dawn-McCullough-White/125763474137312
Website: http://dawnmccullough-white.com
WORLDWIDE EVENT
by David Dalglish
Jake Finley was sitting at his computer at 2:37 a.m. when the Worldwide Event struck. He started in his chair, not by any physical sensation but by the sudden lack of it. He stared at his monitor dumbfounded, his forum post momentarily halted. He scratched the stubble on his cheeks.
“The hell?” he said.
He pushed back his chair and stood, most of his weight on his left leg. Taking a deep breath, he kicked out with his right leg. No pain. No stiffness.
“What the hell?”
On went the lights with a flick of his finger. It was as if he needed to see, to know for sure he wasn’t asleep or hallucinating or dead. He looked at his knee, saw the scar across the bottom of his kneecap. After the surgery, he’d had no cartilage left in the joint. At least he thought he didn’t, but now, well…
He snap-kicked again, feeling like a short-haired, overweight version of a Rockette. No pain at all.
“What the hell!”
After a few minutes of walking, jumping, kicking and stomping like an infant discovering his feet could make noises, he picked up the phone. He had a terrible urge to call a friend, but he didn’t have any. The closest person to a friend he knew was a paralytic man named Reuben who lived several hours away in Kansas City. And of course there was the whole middle of the night thing. He backed up his browser and hit refresh, scanning the titles of forum posts that had erupted over the past few minutes.
I might be crazy but…
Miracle?
Anyone else feel that?
God is here!
The words gave him the courage. He dialed the number.
“Hello?” Reuben’s gruff voice said before Jake even heard the phone ring. It was as if Reuben had been waiting for him.
“Sorry if I woke you up,” Jake said, staring at his monitor. He felt so stupid, so silly, but at the same time so goddamn happy that he had to keep going. “It’s just…well, you know my knee, right?”
“Jake,” Reuben said, not even giving him the chance. “I’m standing right now. As I’m talking to you. Standing on my own fucking two feet, not a wheelchair in sight. Your knee’s working, isn’t it?”
“Brand-spanking new.”
“I’ll be honest with you,” Reuben said. A bit of a chuckle came through the receiver. “I didn’t know who to call. I almost called you, but I didn’t think you’d believe me. You do believe me, right?”
Snap-kick.
“Damn right I do,” Jake said, and he laughed and laughed.
*click*
“…eaves just two roses left: Greg and…”
*click*
“…with a final score of twenty-three to…”
*click*
“…still receiving calls, but it appears that this is not a localized phenomenon. We have confirmed cases from Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, as well as reports ranging from Brazil to Germany to China. I want to stress that, no matter how outlandish this appears, this is no jo…”