It was all happening so fast.
All my plans and dreams were over.
This was it. This was the end.
I wasn’t ready. Not by a long shot.
I lost my shit laughing at them.
Isabelle levitated straight up, but Olive grabbed her hand at the last minute, before she could float away to the ceiling, and held her suspended above us like a helium balloon. Isabelle bobbed and drifted on the string of their joined arms, while Olive reached for me with her other hand. She grabbed hold of my ear, and I felt instant sparks and a deep electric burn race across my scalp.
Somebody was screaming, but it wasn’t me. I swear to God. It wasn’t.
Delilah covered her shocked mouth like she was embarrassed for me.
The fear ripped out of me.
Sunlight glared through the window, only it wasn’t sunlight—it was a piss-yellow light coming from those two wormy girls. A swirling luminescence beamed straight from their inner beings. It burned so brilliantly inside this tiny attic room that I had to close my eyes. But I could see through my eyelids. There was a growing numbness in my arms and legs, a numbness inside my brain. I tried to speak, but no words came out. Just a hiss. A nothing.
I drew one shuddery breath after another. My heart pounded so insistently it hurt my chest. I was burning up. I was burning alive. I could hear animal screams coming from somewhere—certainly not me. No. Not that.
Now the flesh was melting off my bones. My eyelids dripped down my face—I could not look away. The air was on fire. A hot outrage bloomed in my chest. I couldn’t feel the ground beneath my feet. I was quaking all over. Every muscle, every ligament, every blood vessel, every quivering cell in the gray jelly of my brain began to bubble and boil. I lost all sense of time. “Help!” I screamed.
Delilah’s eyes were hard. Her heart was ice. “It’s done.”
Suddenly, I was floating above the floor looking down at my body. I studied it with clinical detachment. I was rising, rising. Gathering myself into the light.
Pop.
It was sudden, like a sneeze.
I tumbled head over heels into a different world.
*
I woke up in the snow. Everything was white except for the distant mountains. I was back in Alaska, way out in the middle of the tundra. I wasn’t tied up anymore. I struggled to my feet and shook out my hands. “Hello?” I shouted. My voice echoed across the chilly landscape. I was in a daze. I was relieved. I hadn’t disappeared. I was still alive. Hey. That was something.
I picked a direction and started walking, but as my feet sank into the ever-deepening drifts I began to falter. “Hello?” I yelled again. I looked around at the vast whiteness and knew that I was doomed.
The distant mountains formed a ring of snow-capped peaks. It was snowing. The snow was incandescent. It was beautiful and distracting. I was standing on the precipice of my life. I took a deep breath of air, as if I’d just surfaced from a deep dive.
There was nowhere to go. I plopped down in the snow. My fingers were stiff as carved marble. I heard the beat of a fly’s wing close to my ear.
I turned and swatted at nothing. I stood up and listened and heard it again.
Tick tick tick.
A flickering, awful sound.
Tick tick tick.
I swung my fists at the air.
I twisted and turned.
I finally gave up.
I sat in the snow and began to cry. I kicked up little powdered clumps with my angry legs and wondered how long would it take for my tears to freeze. Snow fell off the distant trees with the dull thud of a small avalanche.
I wondered what people would say about me?
Probably just this.
His name was Clay Purvis. He was a killer. He froze to death in the snow.
YOU ARE LEAVING
NEXT STOP
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SHUDDERVILLE
TWO
Mia Zabrisky
Copyright © 2012
All Rights Reserved.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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