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

crouching on top of the van next to Edgar, gun held tight. She hadn’t been able to grab hold of the blanket as she exited the vehicle, and she was naked and cold. She hadn’t grabbed her purse either, which meant it – and her phone – were still somewhere in the van. She didn’t remember seeing her purse as she climbed out, and even if she had, retrieving it hadn’t been her first priority. Getting the fuck out of the van had.

The beetles hadn’t re-entered Edgar’s body. Instead they buzzed angrily around his head, as if ready for battle. Lori thought that if she survived this, she might actually grow to like the carnivorous little fuckers.

She saw the car that had pulled up close to them was indeed the Driver’s vehicle. He got out, leaving his engine running and the headlights on, and he walked toward them. He wore his crimson robe – Must be a pain in the ass to drive in, Lori thought – with the hood back. He had on a pair of sunglasses, but he removed them and tucked them into a pocket, revealing the smooth, pulsating patches of flesh that covered his eye sockets.

“Thanks for making it easy for me to catch up,” the Driver said, smiling. He looked at Edgar and his smile widened. “Hello, old friend. I’m surprised to find you in Ms. Palumbo’s company. Helping her was a mistake, you know. You might have thought you’ve been evading us all these years, but we’ve always known where you were. We could’ve reclaimed you whenever we wished. We hoped that giving you a long leash might help you discover what you did to upset the Balance and how to correct it. It appears that hope was in vain, though. Pity.”

Edgar pointed at the Driver and shouted, “Eat him down to the fucking bone!”

The beetles surged toward the Driver in a large black cloud.

The Driver’s smile didn’t falter as the beetles came at him. He then did something Lori hadn’t thought possible – he opened his eyes. The patches of skin stretched tight and split apart, blood running down his cheeks like red tears. The Driver had no eyeballs in his sockets, only twin pools of darkness. The ebon substance blasted forth from the Driver’s head to engulf the beetles, and they disappeared inside it, the buzzing of their wings suddenly muffled, as if the insects still flew, only now they were very far away. The darkness rushed back inside the Driver’s head, curling into his sockets like sentient smoke. When it was back where it belonged, the skin patches resealed, became smooth and unbroken, but the blood that had fallen onto his cheeks remained there.

The beetles were gone.

Edgar stared at the Driver in shocked disbelief.

“You motherfucker!” he shouted.

Before he could react any further, another pair of headlights appeared in the distance. This vehicle, however, had flashing red-and-blue lights on top.

Rauch, Lori thought.

She heard the rumble of a motorcycle engine then, and she turned to look in the other direction and saw a single headlight approaching. Goat-Eyes, she guessed. Who else would it be?

Did the Cabal have a way to contact each other, some kind of telepathy or simply a Nightway version of cell phones? Whichever the case, she felt certain the Driver had informed his fellow mystics of their location, and they were hauling ass here as fast as they could. How many had been traveling the Nightway in search of them? Just these three? More? Would the entire fucking Cabal converge on them in the next few minutes?

Lori thrust the Gravedigger Special toward Edgar, but he didn’t take it, didn’t even seem to notice she was offering it to him. He jumped off the van, clearly intending to confront the Driver, but when he hit the ground, he cried out in pain and his right prosthesis snapped. Lori didn’t know if it broke or became unattached, but either way, Edgar fell onto his side with an oompf.

“Graceful,” the Driver said, amused.

Anger flared bright in Lori, and she raised the Gravedigger Special, pointed it at the Driver, and fired. The weapon roared and bucked in her hand, and she thought for sure that the round had gone wild. But the tooth-bullet struck the Driver on the left shoulder. He staggered backward, letting out a cry of pain that Lori found deeply satisfying.

“Son of a bitch, that hurts!”

A dark stain appeared on the shoulder of the Driver’s robe, and Lori wanted to cheer. Whatever kind of being the Driver was, he bled just like anything else when he was hurt.

She was going to take another shot – hopefully this time she’d get the bastard in the heart – but before she could squeeze the trigger, Rauch came racing toward her in his police cruiser, lights flashing and siren blaring. She realized he intended to hit the van, and she had no choice but to jump. She threw herself into the air and was on the way down when the cruiser slammed into Edgar’s van, sending both vehicles spinning.

She landed on her feet, her bad knee screaming in agony, and then she hit the ground and rolled. She came to a stop lying on her side, her hands empty. She’d lost her grip on the Gravedigger Special when she landed, and she didn’t see the weapon in her immediate vicinity. It was then that she remembered Edgar. He’d been lying on the ground too, in front of the van, when Rauch—

She pushed herself up into a sitting position, ignored the pain blazing in her knee, and frantically searched for Edgar. She feared she’d see his broken body lying near the two wrecked vehicles, but he was on his feet and very much alive. Well, on his foot. His damaged prosthesis hung from his knee at an odd angle, forcing him to hop on his other one.

He was heading for the Driver. The mystic had pressed his left hand to his shoulder wound in an