Dark Creations: The Hunted (Part 4) by Jennifer Martucci, Christopher Martucci Read Free Book Online Page B

deserted street before pulling her over.  Routine traffic stops had been the pretense he’d employed with all the other abductions.  They were effective, efficient ways of obtaining otherwise unwilling subjects.  But unlike his previous stops, the woman he had followed from the shopping center had been far from compliant.  From its inception, she had done nothing but protest.  His dislike of her had been immediate.
    He had told her that he was stopping all cars similar in make, model and color to hers.  She had found fault in his excuse immediately and had criticized him, and all police officers, for conducting such searches.  She had been agitated and complained loudly that he had been wasting her time.  She had railed and protested, pausing only when she had noticed that his badge was not from her town, that it indicated he was from the Santa Ynez Police Department.  He had been abducting women from surrounding towns in an effort to not draw attention to the town he and Terzini operated in.  Before her, none of the other pregnant women had noticed a detail as small as the engraving on his badge.  Perhaps the others had been too stupid or unobservant to spot it, but she had.  And she had become indignant.  She had raised her voice at him and spoke huffily, as if she were his equal.  She had had the audacity to question his jurisdiction.  No one had ever questioned his authority before; No one.  He had not liked being questioned by a human, her in particular.  
    He had wanted nothing more than to silence her, to strike her about her wretched face so that she would no longer be capable of speaking again.  But she had been pregnant.  That single fact had made her a valuable commodity.  So he had refrained from any irrational, albeit deserved, acts and allowed her to throw her driver’s license and registration at him. 
    He had walked back to his car, thankful for the brief respite from being forced to look at her face.  When he had returned, he had planned to inform her that she would need to come with him, but had asked her how far along she was in her pregnancy first.  Her answer had come as a great surprise to him.
    “ Pregnant ?” she had asked indignantly.  “I am not pregnant , you asshole!  I should report you for harassment, for pulling women over for no reason and insulting them!”
    He had been shocked by her revelation, and looked at her with equal parts bafflement and disgust.
    “You’re not pregnant?” he had asked without masking the incredulity he felt.  He had struggled to fathom how a woman managed to carry so much weight around her midsection without having a developing human inside it. 
    “No, I’m not, you jerk!” she had shouted, her hoarse, nasal twang clawing at his eardrums.
    She had inarticulately informed him that she was not, in fact, an overweight pregnant woman, as he had originally assumed.  Instead, she was a beastly creature who had overindulged gluttonously, regularly, until her body had swelled and bulged, dangerously close to eruption, from the excess blubber.  And she had had the nerve to be offended, to be mad at him. 
    He had never met a more revolting human being during his short period of coexistence with them.  He had not been sure what to do and had had no choice but to let her go.  She had not been pregnant.  Further interaction would have been utterly futile, nearly as futile as the time spent trailing her had been.  So he had given her back her identification and had sent her on her way.  He had watched her go until her taillights had disappeared from sight.  He had felt irritated and unsatisfied by his encounter with the corpulent woman.  She represented all that was wrong with humanity, all that his maker sought to rectify. 
    During Jarrod’s brief stint on Earth, he had come to share his maker’s viewpoint.  He was designed to feel an inherent aversion toward humans, but found that their behaviors often superseded the stringent