Blood Harvest by Michael Weinberger Read Free Book Online

floors. The black lights still illuminated bright colors in an electric fashion as if the music was still playing and nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
    Phillip pressed the lapel of his shirt tighter across his face as the smell was becoming almost palpable. He continued to hurry across the floor to the exit. The doors were only about fifty feet away at this point and Phillip was desperate for a lungful of clean night air, free of the fetid stink enveloping his Eden. He moved faster toward the exit doors. Only thirty feet or so now before he was free of the one place in the world he had, only moments before, felt most liberated and at home. The irony was not lost on him. He felt the crushing pang of sorrow and regret as he moved; his drive to escape overwhelming his sentimentality.
    Suddenly, not ten feet from the exit doors, he noticed a familiar green glow to one side of the dance floor. He froze in place then slowly turned toward the glow as all thought left his conscious mind. Phillip lowered his hand from his face allowing the lapel of his shirt to dangle loosely to one side of his chest. As he moved away from the exit doors and headed toward the bright electric green glow on the floor he didn’t notice the smell anymore. His subconscious mind quickly erupted in fear, urging him to turn around and flee the scene, yet something drove him forward to that green glow on the floor.
    He stared…at her.
    It was the young woman he had seen from his office window in the fluorescent green spandex mini-dress. She didn’t look so alluring anymore. He was embarrassed at himself for having looked at her the way he had before. She looked so young now as she lay prone across another woman. He didn’t see her breasts anymore, or her body, or her dress. No, now all he could see was a little girl who had been the victim of some undetermined accident.
    Unable to restrain himself, Phillip knelt down and placed two fingers to her neck. He felt a very slow and shallow, but steady pulse. She was alive! He quickly stood up and glanced over all the people in the club. They were all alive! He was sure of it.
    The need to get help for all of these poor people sent him into motion. He stood, intending to sprint for the exit, and turned head on into another man who had been standing quietly behind him. The man was frail, but not short, and had a camera in his hands. Placing his index finger to his lips as if to “shush” him, the man turned from Phillip and glared down at the girl in the green mini-dress. Raising the camera up to his eye he began to take pictures of the girl like a photographer on a fashion shoot. Uncomfortable and confused, Phillip looked back down at the girl. Each flash exposed her flesh as her dress, which was not made to truly cover any of the more private areas of her body in the first place, completely revealed her to the man’s camera lens.
    Rage welled up in Phillip. He lunged for the man grabbing his shoulder and spinning him around. The force of the spin practically sent the frail man into the air, but Phillip caught him before he could fall away.
    “What the hell do you think you are doing?” Phillip screamed into the man’s face. 
 The man showed no fear. Only mild amusement flickered in his eyes.
    “Now, where were you when the lights went out…or in this case, on?” the man chided in a deep guttural voice.
    “Who the fuck….”
    Phillip’s words caught in his throat as he frowned at the man, searching a face which he now felt he should recognize. The man looked somehow familiar, but he couldn’t place him.
    Unseen by Phillip, the man slipped his index finger over a small button on his camera switching the setting from “flash” to “red eye reduction.”
    “I know you, don’t I?” Phillip stammered.
    “Not really,” the man returned in that too-deep-for-his-frail-appearance voice. The inflection in those two words made him sound cocky and confident.
    Nothing made sense but somehow