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

reduced to a scattered pile of bones, the muscle and sinew that had held them together gone, and she closed her eyes and concentrated on keeping her stomach contents where they were.

She heard the man walk with his lurching gait, and a moment later she jumped, startled, as she felt her blanket being draped around her shoulders. She opened her eyes and saw the man smiling at her. Grateful, she drew the blanket tight around her body and put the majority of her weight on her uninjured leg. Her bad knee still hurt like hell, but at least she managed to remain standing.

“Let me guess,” the man said, voice low and sonorous. “The fucking Cabal, right?”

Surprised, Lori nodded.

The man shook his head.

“I hate those assholes.”

* * *

“Want me to turn up the heater some more?”

“No, thank you. I’m fine.”

Lori sat in the van’s passenger seat, blanket wrapped around her, seat belt buckled. The dashboard vents blew a steady stream of warm air, but it couldn’t touch the core of cold at the center of her being. She wondered if she’d ever truly feel warm again.

She glanced over at her benefactor. He’d introduced himself as Edgar Mullins, and as the business name on his T-shirt – PEST DEFENSE – suggested, he was an exterminator. Or at least he had been, back in the real world. Although the longer she spent on the Nightway, the more it was beginning to seem real and the more Earth began to seem like a dream. If she stayed here long enough, would she forget about Earth entirely and come to think of the Nightway as the only reality that mattered, maybe even the only one that existed?

The van was Edgar’s work vehicle, white, with PEST DEFENSE painted on the sides, below that a cartoon image of a black man in coveralls thrusting a sword into the midsection of an equally cartoonish human-sized cockroach. The vehicle’s interior smelled of harsh chemicals, and metal canisters in the back rattled and clanged against each other as Edgar drove. Lori wondered just how toxic the air she breathed was, but she didn’t really care. Being stranded without a working car on the Nightway was far more dangerous than huffing pesticide fumes.

Edgar could get around fine on his prosthetic legs but he needed help to drive. He had a handle to the left of the steering wheel that allowed him to control acceleration and braking, and a knob on the steering wheel, which made it possible for him to operate it with his right hand while the left was busy with the handle controls. Edgar drove with an easy confidence, and she guessed he’d been using the equipment for some time.

He had the van’s radio on, the volume turned low, but Lori could still hear the eerie, indecipherable chanting coming from the van’s speakers.

“How can you stand to listen to that?” she asked. “The sound makes my skin crawl.”

Edgar answered without taking his eyes off the road. “You get used to it. And sometimes, I think I can almost make out what they’re saying, you know?”

Lori didn’t know, but she didn’t want to discuss the Nightway’s sole radio program any further.

The collision with the scorpion thing had wrecked her Civic. She’d tried starting the engine, but she couldn’t get it to turn over. And even if it had started, one of the front quarter panels had been smashed against a tire, making it impossible to steer. So when Edgar had offered to give her a ride she’d accepted, although not without hesitation. He seemed ordinary enough, but she knew he was hosting hundreds, maybe thousands of carnivorous beetles inside his body, so many that they couldn’t possibly all fit inside him, and yet somehow they did. The insects had made quick work of the scorpion thing, and they’d be able to devour her even faster if they wished. Sitting next to Edgar was like sitting next to a ticking time bomb. If he wanted her dead, all he’d have to do was open his mouth and let his beetles out to do their thing.

If he wanted you dead, he’d have killed you already, she thought. Then again, maybe his beetles’ tiny bellies were so full after killing the scorpion creature that the insects wouldn’t be hungry again for some time. Maybe Edgar wanted to keep her in reserve until his friends’ appetites returned. It was a risk she felt she had to take, though. If the beetles did decide to eat her, at least her death would be brief, if agonizing.

“Thanks for coming to my rescue,” she said.

“No problem. I couldn’t just let the damn thing kill you. I hate void crawlers. Fucking things are worse than a million roaches. And did you get a whiff of it?”

“Yeah. I don’t know if I’ll ever get the smell out of my nasal passages.”

“Right? And given what I used to do for a living, I was exposed to all kinds of horrible smells. But void crawler stink is the absolute worst.”

Luckily, she hadn’t been injured seriously when her Civic hit the scorpion thing…the void crawler. Her knee throbbed, but now that she was sitting, it felt a little better. She had a couple of other aches and pains, but they were minor for the most part. She was surprised she didn’t have a killer of a headache, but so far, so good.

“So what brings you to the Nightway?” Edgar asked. “I assume you’re new here or you’d have known to watch out for void crawlers. No offense.”

“None taken. I am new to the Nightway. If you hadn’t stopped to help me, I’d be dead.”

She told him her story then, glossing over some of the details but making sure to hit the high points.

When she finished, he said, “Sounds like you’ve been through a lot. I hate to tell you this, but you probably have more to go through yet, and it’s going to get worse. Maybe a lot worse.”

His words didn’t exactly