Tales of Chills and Thrills: The Mystery Thriller Horror Box Set (7 Mystery Thriller Horror Novels) (47 page)

Samuel shook his head. He looked down
at his clothes, held a hand up to his face. “This ain’t me. I’m dreaming or
something.”

Mara bit her bottom lip. She let go of
the doorknob and walked toward him. “I want to show you something.”

Her voice dropped as though she were
breathing the words. A hand came up and stroked the side of Samuel’s face. His
eyes met hers and his breath hitched as he tried to encourage his lungs to work
while keeping his heartbeat in check. Mara took his hand and turned toward the
door of the cabin. She looked over one shoulder and smiled at him. She winked.

Samuel allowed her to lead this
foreign body to the threshold of the door. He no longer cared about the
pursuers. He no longer heard the manhunt emerging a few hundred yards from the
tree line.

“Damn. Yeah, sure I’d like for you—”

Before he could finish, Mara’s knee drove
upward into Samuel’s groin. Colors exploded in his vision, and before he could
cry out, he felt the sickening crunch of her fist smashing the cartilage in his
nose.

Mara opened the door and dragged his
bleeding and disoriented body through with her.

***

“Reckless.”

“Aren’t we all?”

Kole stood with both hands wrapped
around a mug. He sipped and smirked while tattoos stretched across his bulging
muscles.

“The other guy still trapped in the
ether?”

Major didn’t reply and Kole shook his
head.

“So now we know Samuel can slip, but we
don’t know if he can do it alone. Pointless.”

Major shook his head. “He can,” he said.

“You don’t know that,” Mara said.

Mara wanted to believe Samuel could slip,
that he could transport them out of this universe and into one that wasn’t
eating itself, but the only sure way of knowing would be to try.

Samuel stirred. His mouth opened and
closed as he grimaced in unspoken pain.

“Worse than a hangover,” Kole said,
before returning to his tea.

Major shrugged and walked over to Mara.
The cabin felt cramped and suffocating. “You volunteered to go get him. Kole
would have done it.”

Mara ran a hand through her stringy,
greasy hair. She took a deep breath and exhaled over her bottom lip. Even the
short amount of time she spent in the test slip was enough to muddy her
thoughts and upset her stomach.

“Yeah. I did.”

Major reached out and tapped her shoulder
with his fingers. “Deep breaths. You’re here.”

“Right,” she said, shrugging off his hand
like a renegade snowflake. “I’m back here, safe and sound, in this shithole
that’s getting eaten by the cloud, with you three assholes.”

Kole laughed into his mug, sending drops
of tea to the floor.

“Where am I?” Samuel asked.

Major turned away from Mara and sat on
the chair next to him. Samuel’s legs moved beneath the rough, wool blanket like
two monsters prowling the depths of the ocean.

“Back. In this place. Against the odds,”
Major said.

Cramps gripped Samuel’s stomach, and the
meager light from the fire hurt his eyes. “Right. That explains it,” he said.

Kole grinned and walked around the other
side of the cabin to face him. “I don’t know what the old man or the little
girl have been telling you, champ, but you ain’t ever going home. Once you
slip, you’re done.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Mara said. “He’s a
cynical dickhead.”

“I’m honest. Tell him, Major. Tell him
what you know. He deserves to understand the situation, just like we did.”

Samuel sat up as fireworks exploded
behind his forehead. His tongue felt like a ball of yarn inside his mouth. Mara
returned from the edges of his vision carrying a cup, presumably one with more
of the licorice tea. Samuel accepted it from her, his hunch confirmed.

“I wasn’t in my body, but I was back in
the real world.”

Major sighed and looked at Kole, and then
Mara. They waited, neither speaking nor moving.

“We thought we could rescue that man, but
we couldn’t. We’re on our own. You were in him, and he was determined to find a
gruesome end. He probably did, once Mara pulled you back.”

Samuel nodded at Mara. “It looked like
the world I remember.”

“Yes, it probably did,” Major said. “But
if you had been a kind of tourist, you probably would have discovered minor
anomalies with that place. French fries may not exist there, or Jimmy Page may
have been a founding member of Black Sabbath.”

“Does this have something to do with the
parable you told me when we first met? Something about the lion and its
different parts?” Samuel asked.

He struggled to recall the earlier
conversation through the pain in his head. Major looked at Mara and Kole. Mara
nodded, and Kole threw an arm into the air.

“Tell him, old man.”

Major squared up to Samuel and spoke
inches from his nose. “What’s the first thing you remember from this place?”

Samuel looked at the ceiling. Bits of
memory had come back, especially when he was able to hold reflections, like the
picture on the wall and his pocketknife. Without the physical prompt, he
struggled again.

“I remember dropping from the tree.
Someone tried hanging me, I guess.”

Kole whistled and shook his head, amused.

“Someone hanged you?” Major asked, his
voice prodding into Samuel’s memory.

“Or maybe you were trying to get off by
yourself. What do they call it? Autoerotic asphyxiation?”

Kole laughed, but Mara stayed quiet.

Samuel’s face glazed over. He looked to Kole
and then back to Major. “Suicide? You think I was committing suicide?”

“Kole tried, as did I. Mara hasn’t been
able to unlock her memory. If you can, that would mean three of the four of us
ended up here as a result of a suicide attempt.”

Samuel’s hand came up to his throat and
he remembered the bruises. He looked at Major’s neck.

“I remember the circumstances, and I
think you will too, eventually,” Major said.

“Yeah, just in time for the cloud to eat
us all,” Kole said.

“Can you shut up for more than three
minutes at a time?” Mara asked.

Kole shrugged and went back to the stove
to pour himself another mug of tea.

“So we slipped in the process and ended
up here in this place,” Samuel said. “And the reversion is eating it, and it’s
coming toward us.”

“Don’t forget that we don’t know if we
can all slip, and if we can, we don’t know what we’re slipping into or if we
can get back. Could be a world of blind supermodels where you’re the only guy,
or it could be a dark, empty world getting eaten by a black cloud.”

Major glared at Kole. “We seem to be in a
holding tank of some kind.”

“What about the wolves? What happened to
them?” Samuel asked.

“I don’t know,” Major said. He trailed
off, but with a thin veneer of truth covering his words.

Samuel opened his mouth to ask about the
other spirit he encountered on his way to the Barren, but then he reconsidered.
Mara read the look on his face.

“What? Is there something else?” she
asked.

Samuel shook his head and turned back to
Major. “So how do we get out?”

“I hoped the man you slipped into had the
answer. But he doesn’t,” Major said. “The solution must come from within these
walls.”

***

Samuel watched Mara move about the
Barren. She walked with a determined grace, as if every step had its own
purpose. He followed her to the tree line, where she gathered sticks for
kindling, snapping the twigs to place them in a bag.

“Need some help?” he asked.

Mara shrugged without lifting her head
from the forest floor. Samuel approached, bending down to pick up pieces of
broken branches.

“So you don’t remember how you got here?”

Mara spun on him, her eyes glaring with
untold emotion. Her nostrils flared and she closed her eyes. Samuel watched the
surge pass. Mara opened her eyes.

“No. No, I can’t remember,” she said.

“Did you go to your senior prom?”

Mara stopped and made eye contact with
Samuel. A slight smile forced the corners of her mouth up.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“Prom. Did you go?”

“Yes.”

Samuel let the one-word reply hang in the
silence.

“Did you?” she asked.

“Not my own. I was too cool. Spent the
night sitting in the woods with my other loser buddies, a case of beer and a
bag of weed. Had a girlfriend a few years younger when I was in college. Ended
up going to her prom at my old high school when I was twenty-one. My younger brother
was in her class, so I was at their senior prom three years after not going to
my own.”

Mara waited until she was sure Samuel
finished recounting his experience.

“That’s pathetic,” she said, her face
relenting with a reluctant smile.

Her comment brought another wave of
recollection from Samuel. He brushed past the light banter and dug deeper into
his patchwork of memory. “I know I had a wife, but that’s about it. I mean, I
saw the picture on the wall, the ‘reflection,’ as Major calls them. I knew that
was my wife, but I don’t remember anything. I couldn’t remember the name of the
thing that sparked fire when I first woke up here.”

“A lighter,” Mara said.

“Yeah, a lighter. So I get these bursts
of memory, but it’s more like being asleep on a train. The ones I can remember
now are only snippets of my life.”

Samuel waited. Mara looked at him and
shook her head.

“The fire is probably low. Let’s get this
back to the cabin,” she said.

Samuel followed her, watching her hips
sway with every step. Mara’s feet appeared to glide across the organic debris
on the forest floor. Before she opened the door, he spoke.

“There’s something he isn’t telling me.”

Mara turned to face him. She dropped the
sack of kindling next to the door and put her hands on her hips.

“And there’s something you’re hiding,
too,” she said.

She stepped toward him and turned her
worried eyes up to his face. “I don’t know where we are. I don’t know what this
place is, and I’m not sure I even want to return to my locality. It’s not
likely that would happen anyway. But this reversion will wipe us from
existence, and I don’t want to be here when it does.”

Mara stepped around Samuel and pointed to
the west, where the pulsing, dark cloud loomed higher in the sky. “You see
that? It’s coming for us, and when it does, we’re finished.”

“Major knows how to get out of here? Is
that why you’re at the Barren?”

“I’m at the Barren because the Barren is
the only place to be. I know you’ve met our friends the wolves, and I’m not
convinced they’ve been sucked up by the cloud. So if you have doubts about this
place or us, there’s the path.” Mara pointed at the narrow trail leading to the
tree line and to the west.

“I don’t trust any of you, and whatever
it is you need me to do to get out of here ain’t gonna happen until Major or
you, or the dickhead, levels with me.”

Mara huffed and looked over her shoulder.
Samuel nodded and picked up the bag of firewood before opening the cabin door.

Chapter 10

The rain came like a cruel, silent
invader. It fell from the sky in glistening waves that obscured the tops of the
trees, swallowing the light. Major, Kole, Mara and Samuel sat on
the floor of the cabin watching the dwindling supply of kindling burn down into
anemic, yellow flames. Samuel could not remember when the rain began or how
long it continued. The lack of natural light combined with the quickening
reversion hampered his ability to judge time. He recalled two fits of sleep on
the hard, wooden floor, where he thrashed and awoke achy, a prisoner of fitful
dreams just beyond his grasp. He remembered the image of a train moving on a
track in the most desolate place his head could conjure. But the vision
disappeared before he could recall it. Major rationed the remaining crackers
from his rucksack. Samuel was thankful the odd locality made sustenance less of
a survival necessity.

“Look.”

Mara’s silhouette cut a shape in the
greasy window next to the door. Kole huffed and waved a hand while Major and
Samuel craned their necks forward, seeing nothing but the back of her head.

“What’s that?” she asked.

Samuel stood and bent down to look
through the pane of glass Mara had cleared with her sleeve. She managed to push
the grime across the surface with enough force so they could see out of
it. They both stood, staring into the black abyss.

“I can’t see anything,” Samuel said.

“You have to wait for the lightning,” she
said.

“Lightning?” Major asked. “When did that
begin?”

“It caught my eye a few hours ago. Of
course, no thunder coming with it, but the lightning came, and each flash
drenched that black place with a burst of light.”