Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (the ebook reader .txt) 📕

Civic’s front end was dented inward, and the hood had buckled, although it hadn’t broken free from its latch and flown upward during the crash. She sat there several moments, stunned, trying to gather her thoughts. Her chest and wrists hurt from smacking into the airbag, but considering what might’ve happened to her if she hadn’t had airbags, she figured the pain was a small enough price to pay for her continued existence. She started shaking, and she knew her tremors had nothing to do with the vehicle’s internal temperature.

She thumbed the seat belt release. It didn’t do anything at first, and she thought it was broken, but she tried it again, and this time it worked. Not thinking clearly, operating on automatic, she opened the driver’s-side door, and – grabbing hold of the blanket – got out of the car. A sharp pain shot through her right knee as she put weight on it, her old soccer injury making itself known. She thought of Aashrita again, but the instant she did, the thought drifted away, and it was like she’d never had it at all. The air held a bone-chilling dampness, and she wrapped the blanket about her naked body, not that it did much to keep out the cold. The smooth surface of the Nightway felt strange beneath her bare feet, like ice but not as slippery, and there was a constant low-level vibration, almost a hum, as if some kind of energy flowed through the road’s glossy ebon surface. She walked around to the front of the car to see what she’d hit, limping because of her bad knee, and immediately regretted doing so.

The remaining headlight of her Civic wasn’t pointed directly at the thing, but the light from the beam still illuminated the creature’s form, if only dimly. It was ten feet long and roughly shaped like a scorpion. But instead of being covered in a chitinous exoskeleton, it had pale, almost bone-white skin. The first half of its body was humanoid, the head hairless, eyes receded into hollow sockets, jutting cheekbones, lips pulled away from sharp white teeth. Instead of pinchers, it had a pair of long lean arms that ended in large clawed hands. Smaller limbs protruded from the creature’s midsection, six of them, only these were bent at odd angles, giving them a more insectile appearance. The upward curving tail was a head and torso that looked exactly like the front of the thing – as if the creature was a pair of conjoined twins – except the torso had no arms and the head hung upside down. The thing was injured, the arms on its left side broken, and blood dribbled from the mouth of the tail-head. Half of the front head’s face was crushed, and blood ran freely from one of the eye sockets.

Lori found the thing revolting on a primal level, and she instinctively took several steps back to move closer to the driver’s-side door, but her attention was transfixed by the alien abomination, and she made no move to get back inside the car. Aside from a slight spasmodic twitching in the tail, the creature was motionless. Had the impact killed it? She hoped so.

She didn’t know whether the thing had been traveling on the Nightway under its own power or if it had come from the dark land beyond the road, and she really didn’t care. All that mattered was that it posed no threat to her. She had a thought then. What if there were more of these creatures out there in the darkness, watching her at this very moment, trying to determine whether she was dangerous, if it was safe to attack and take revenge for their dead companion?

She didn’t know if the Civic was still operable, but she couldn’t stay out here, exposed and unarmed. There might not be any more scorpion things out there, but there could well be other predators about, and she’d rather not meet them if she didn’t have to. She turned to reach for the car door, but in doing so she twisted the upper half of her body, changing the distribution of her weight on her legs, and her soccer injury screamed in protest. The pain made her gasp, and her leg gave out from under her. The blanket slipped off her shoulders as she started to go down, and she flung herself against the Civic, hoping to grab hold of the roof and steady herself. But her hands found no purchase on the smooth metal and she fell. She landed on her knees – hard – and she felt something crunch inside her injured knee. This time the pain was so intense that she cried out in a near-scream, and tears filled her eyes. She flopped over onto her side to take the pressure off her knee, and while this lessened the pain somewhat, the relief was minor. Her knee was on fire from the inside, and she whimpered like a child.

She became aware of two things in that moment. One was a pair of headlights off in the distance, some sort of vehicle heading toward her. The other was the sound of a large form pulling itself across the Nightway’s slick surface, a heavy, ominous sliding that could only mean one thing. Not only was the scorpion creature not dead, it could still move – and it was coming for her.

The creature made a high-pitched sound as it came, a powerful keening like it was in great pain. She hadn’t purposely harmed the thing, but she nevertheless felt a pang of guilt, as if its condition was entirely her fault.

Jesus, here she was, naked, alone, bruised and cut, being stalked by some monster on a highway in an alien dimension, and she was feeling sorry for it. Better toughen up, bitch, if you want to continue breathing.

She carefully sat up, and using the side of the car to brace herself – doing her best to keep weight