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

the red light, sharp and pointed. It hung high in midair, a hundred feet, maybe two hundred. It was difficult to estimate. After the experiences she’d been through in the last day, she thought she understood what it meant to feel terror, but now – looking at the tip of the Intercessor’s horn as it worked to make the entrance large enough for its titanic body to pass through – she understood she’d known jack shit about terror.

That noise…. Was it the sound of the entrance being forced open wider, or was it the voice of the Intercessor, bellowing to the world that it was coming? Maybe the sounds were one and the same, she thought.

The Driver’s lips moved, but Lori couldn’t hear him. She stepped close, lowered her head to his, and turned her right ear to his mouth.

“It’s over,” he said. He shouted these words, and she could still barely hear them. “Nothing can stop the Intercessor now.”

“I think I know what I did,” she yelled back. “It happened a week ago, but I don’t know how to fix it.”

More of the Intercessor’s horn protruded into the real world. She tried to estimate just how much. Ten feet? Twenty? Would the Intercessor have to continue slowly widening the entrance, or would there come a point where the strain would be too much and the entrance would suddenly open the rest of the way, like the lid of a jar that was stuck? You strain to open it, giving it all you have, and just when you think the goddamned thing is never going to loosen, it suddenly moves, and after that it comes off easily. She supposed she’d find out soon enough.

“Do you remember the exact time and place?” the Driver shouted.

“Yes, but like I said, it was—”

The Driver pressed the flat of his palm against her chest and shoved – hard. Lori stumbled backward, her bad knee gave out on her, and she fell….

Chapter Fifteen

And fell….

And fell….

It felt as if she dropped for hours, the world around her a hazy-gray nothing, the entire universe one vast cloud bank.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, her bare ass hit something solid. Pain jolted through her tailbone and up along her spine, and she let out a loud, “Fuck!”

A woman holding hands with a toddler boy shot her a dirty look. Lori realized her face was more or less level with the child’s, and the mother seemed to hover over them both like a giant.

“Watch your language!” The woman’s upper lip curled in distaste. “And put some clothes on, for godsakes. And why are you all wet? Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

She turned away and continued on, dragging the boy with her. He looked back at Lori, eyes wide. He mouthed a word that she thought was fuck, but he said it so softly, she wasn’t sure.

She put her hands down, felt the cold hardness of concrete. I’m sitting bare-assed on a sidewalk, she thought. Cars passed by, going in both directions. Dry cars. It wasn’t raining. It looked like it hadn’t rained in some time.

She rose to her feet. Her injured knee still hurt like a motherfucker, and now her tailbone felt as if she might’ve broken it. When she was up, she checked the leather jacket to make sure it was zipped all the way, then she tugged it down to make sure it covered as much of her nether regions as it could. That accomplished, she tried to get her bearings.

She was downtown, on the same street where she worked. Everything seemed normal. Not only wasn’t it raining, there were no Shadowkin causing havoc everywhere. If she were to go to Woodlawn Cemetery right now, would she hear that terrible sound, see the awful sight of the Intercessor’s horn forcing its way into this reality? Or would the cemetery by calm, peaceful like here?

Now that she wasn’t in immediate danger, the full impact of what had happened hit her. They were all dead – Aashrita’s parents, Melinda, Katie, Justin, Larry, Reeny, and Brian…. Grief overwhelmed her, and she felt dizzy, light-headed. She moved toward the building closest to her, one that housed a store called Fresh Air Vape. She leaned back against the wall next to the store’s entrance, fighting tears. She knew that if she allowed herself to start crying, she wouldn’t be able to stop. She’d fall to the sidewalk, put her hands to her face, and sob uncontrollably. She couldn’t afford to surrender to her grief, not yet. The Driver had sent her here for a reason, and she had to keep herself together until she—

A woman came walking down the sidewalk toward her – a woman wearing a blue smock. Her face was pale, eyes squinted almost closed to shut out the worst of the light. She swayed a bit as she walked, as if she was having difficulty with her balance. Lori recognized the woman, of course. It was her. And she knew what was wrong with her other self. She was suffering from a migraine, a bad one, and she was out of her medicine and heading to the pharmacy, desperate to get a refill on her prescription.

Somehow, the Driver had sent her back in time to last week. She’d known the members of the Cabal were powerful, and supposed if they could pull her across dimensions, they could send her back in time a week. Still, the realization of what the Driver had done was staggering, and she found herself unable to do more than stare as her other self walked past. The Lori-That-Was didn’t look in her direction, showed no sign of noticing her. No surprise, given how much pain she was in.

She watched herself go, then saw an older man step out of an alley and into the other Lori’s path. White hair, mustache, brown suit, fedora, ugly yellow tie…. She recognized him, of course – the man with the shadows in his eyes – and