Page 30 of Dead Vengeance

Liam

The lights cut, a scream slices through the dark, people are shouting, and I have no idea what’s happening.

It’s pitch black. I don’t know if it’s afternoon or evening now; we’ve been in this windowless room for so long and we’re too deep inside the hospital for any natural light to reach us.

My phone must have gone flat, because I’m getting nothing more than a dark screen. But no one else seems to be turning theirs on either.

The voice of what’s presumably a nurse reaches me from across the room, telling everyone to stay calm. Someone falls, smacks against my legs, and goes down with a whole lot of swearing. I drop to try to help, feeling blindly for them. “Are you all right?”

“It touched me! I felt it! It’s after me!”

“What is?”

But they scramble away, out of reach, back into darkness. People are crying, shouting about something I just can’t see.

Then everything goes quiet.

Pin-drop quiet.

Dead quiet.

It’s as if every person who was here one second ago has been raptured out of existence, and it’s just me, left alone, in this dark and silent hospital.

“Hello?” My voice echoes like I’m in some huge, cavernous space, not the cramped waiting room of the last several hours.

Then, a strange, echoing clicking sound fills the air, and my heart slams to life, pounding against my ribs. It’s like the sound of an insect but too deep. Too loud. Distant, but also not, reverberating all around.

Something touches my arm, and I spin away from it, into the black of the empty space, not a thing to guide me. “Who’s there?”

A sharp, icy, finger-like point sinks into my arm.

“What the fuck?” I flinch away from it, whirling around, blind.

It’s at my hip now—that same sharp-cold feeling, like a skeleton hand taking hold of me from behind. I try to push it away, but it isn’t attached to anything—not an arm, not a person. I can’t grip a thing to get it off, even sliding my hand hard against my skin. It’s got me.

My body shudders, reacts of its own accord, and I jump forward, slipping from the ghostly grasp.

It finds my back, a hand laid flat against my skin, then another, a fingertip, reaching around—a frigid finger running along my jawline.

“Liam…” My name comes out of nowhere, everywhere, clicking like the insect noise. Inside my head, outside my head.

“Who are you?”

No reply meets my words.

The fingertip slides down my jaw, finding my neck, then splits apart, five long fingers spreading over my throat, rooting me to the spot.

The emergency lights flicker on—a glow that starts barely there, then brighter, brighter, until it lights the room enough to see that I’m really alone. All alone. Alone in this dark hospital with these spectral hands on me and…

I turn my head slowly. I don’t want to. I can’t bear to. But I feel the presence there, so close by my cheek. I know it’s there. Even while I know these hands touching me are attached to nothing. Ghostly fingers tracing down my spine, over my hip, and me alone in this abandoned hospital room, and not a sound but that clicking. Loud and echoing clicking, all around, inside my head, outside my head.

Still, I turn, slowly. And the face that meets mine…

It’s barely visible in the light, glistening black like onyx, but across its eyes and its mouth rip two pale bands of bright white. Bone white. A huge grin of exposed teeth is ripped wide across its fleshless face, and in the eye sockets… two red and glowing, evil orbs.

The scream races up my throat, the hand tightens, clenches, suffocates it…

“Liam!” At the sound of Archer’s voice, the face evaporates, the hands melt away. Archer’s arms come around me. There’s only a flash of him, and I’m wrapped, bundled, whirled around and away from where the thing was.