Dead Winter: A gripping crime thriller full of suspense
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Authors: Jack Parker
This Novel is
a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Copyright ©
2016
by
Jack Parker
ALL RIGHTS 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.
DEDICATION
FOR MOM AND MY WIFE
Contents
T-Minus: 24 Hours (7:12AM)
It's seven in the morning. I'm dead again, sprawled across the aging couch in my run-down apartment with my face painted red and blue from the TV's glare. What's on TV? I don't know, with insomnia everything is tuned-out and far away. It was probably a show on home-improvement or the news, I couldn't tell.
With my feet propped awkwardly across the cluttered table, I lay there; the table was a haphazard mess of plates, glasses and wrappers that obscured from view the things that should be there.
Wait, let me backtrack a little here.
For two weeks, I couldn't sleep. Having never really been a good sleeper, problems in this area weren't exactly that new to me, but this was more than just having trouble falling asleep; for the last two weeks, the only sleep I'd had was when I'd passed out from exhaustion.
Unfortunately, this kind of sleep was useless and made me feel more like a zombie than before I had lost consciousness
Not even feeling human any more, my body moved as if it were a machine. I didn't have time for this, I should have been brushing up my coding skills, or writing that paper on the importance of lighting in game design or whatever crap the lecturer had set for me this time.
Anyway, two weeks of minimal sleep eventually forced me to pay a visit to the doctor lest I wander into oncoming traffic in a sleep-deprived trance or fall down one set of the absurdly high number of stairs in my apartment complex.
The waiting room was a loathsome place filled with irritating sounds, such as that one baby that always seems to be there whenever I am and never stops crying.
Pharmaceutical nightmares.
I hated going to the doctor above most things. Right now, everything is so far away. The distance of everything distorted; you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you.
I wanted the white-shell, red-text Venlafaxine, just to tune everything down to the minimum. Pharmaceutical amnesia, a blanket for my thoughts.
A copy of a copy of a copy, I saw the meaning in this now more than I ever had or will. Kids with nothing but a small cough and their hypochondriac mothers filed in and out of the lounge. Single file, please take a ticket.
Would number forty four please go to room seven, the doctor will see you now.
It was my turn, at last. Dragging myself up from my chair, I shuffled across the ground towards the corridor leading to the examination rooms.
Clean-shaven, grey-streaked hair. Suit and tie; sword and shield. His breath stunk of mints and cigarette smoke, I could almost taste his words as he droned on.
I just wanted to sleep, I got what I wanted.
The scene was changing, a bloody mess projected onto my face from the television screen, I must have dropped the remote.
Glass of water, paper-white pill. Wash it down and wait for sleep to creep up on me.
Back on the couch, I set my alarm and flicked the channel back over to home developments or whatever it was. Setting the glass next to the remote on the table, I picked up the black lighter from the table and my thoughts wandered back to events that occurred several months previously, events that haunted my dreams still.
The lighter had belonged to my elder brother, Matt.
I say had, because he was no longer with us.
My childhood was spent in a small town near the city of York. For as long as I care to remember, my brother had been somewhat of an idol to me. Someone I aspired to be like.
In my eyes, Matt has been a shining light of hope in an otherwise bleak and corrupted world. Even before he was in the police service, my brother had always strode down the path of light and justice. Although at points it had seemed like an obsession as he went to any means necessary to exact justice, nearly risking his life once to apprehend a gun-wielding mugger.
The day flashed through my mind, it had been a miserable October afternoon, drizzle and mist. The phone call came through at around half past three. Because our mother had died over a decade ago and our father was estranged, I was the next on the contact list for my brother. So it was me they called.
Matt was a Detective Inspector for the police service, he moved away from home when I was ten to live in Exeter, to take the position they had offered him.
According to the press reports, he had been working the case on a particularly psychotic and violent string of murders in his area and had wound up becoming one of the last victims.
The last time I had seen him was two months before the phone call, I'd decided to take a little trip down south to check up on him. Somehow, I still doubt the official story they fed me. The last time I saw Matt, he was in a very bad state. He couldn't sleep, his apartment stank of alcohol and cigarettes and he'd started writing on the walls in paint, constantly muttering to himself.
My mind always wandered to suicide when I thought about what had really happened to him, he'd told me that the doctor had diagnosed him with manic depression and schizophrenia, he even had the medication to back it up. But he refused to take his medication and his condition wasn't improving.
Somehow, the people at work hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary with him, as thought he collected himself before he stepped out of his front door and pretended nothing was wrong.
The drowsiness came in waves, softly at first until it was impossible to fight it any longer. Eventually, I fell asleep where I lay, on my fraying, stained couch.
Even babies don't sleep this well.