J.L. Doty - Dead Among Us 01 - When Dead Ain’t Dead Enough by J.L. Doty Read Free Book Online

into a mirror-smooth pond. It churned, began to twist into a spiral, as if his image was nothing but wet paint on a canvas with a child smearing it around.
    The image in the mirror so engrossed Paul that when someone started pounding on the front door, it barely registered on his consciousness. It was not a polite knock but loud, incessant pounding, and yet to Paul it was a distant, remote sound that couldn’t draw his attention away from the mirror. A man’s voice came from the same distant place, shouting, “Let us in.” The voice carried real desperation, almost hysteria. “Now, please.”
    Paul’s image in the mirror distorted even further and took on an almost reptilian cast. His skin darkened to near black, his nose elongated into a flat snout with gaping nostrils, his ears morphed into tall, spiked, leathery things more on the front of his head than on the sides. The pupils in its eyes slowly elongated until they were slit horizontally like those of a goat, and they glowed an angry blood-red. The monster in the mirror looked at him greedily, and he sensed its hunger and hatred as if it welled up from his own soul, as if he was himself the monster in the mirror.
    Suddenly a hand emerged from the depths of the mirror. It was the black, clawed thing from his dreams, with knobby joints and knuckles. And just like in his dream it reached forth and gripped his throat viciously, snapping him out of the stupor that had possessed him. He grabbed at the monster’s wrist, praying that it was a dream, that he’d snap awake suddenly, lying in bed and bathed in sweat. But as he tried to pull the claws away from his throat there was no dislodging the vice-like grip.
    The pounding on the door changed suddenly to a wall-shaking thud, as if someone large had thrown a shoulder against it.
    The hand protruding from the mirror emerged farther, pushing Paul back a step and revealing a spindly arm with a web-like, leathery flap attaching it to a bony torso. The head emerged and it screeched at Paul with a sound like fingernails on chalkboard. With its other hand it gripped the frame of the mirror, thrashed about as if the glass were a viscous puddle of some thick fluid sucking at it and resisting its efforts to struggle free. And with blood pounding in his ears, terror clutching at his heart, Paul could do nothing as it shook him about like a child’s doll.
    Bit-by-bit a bat-like being out of hell emerged completely into the room and stood in the middle of the floor, holding Paul at arm’s length. He struggled uselessly as it craned its neck and screamed out a cry of triumph and hunger. It looked at Paul with the hungry eyes of a starving predator and its blood-red goat-slitted pupils flared blindingly, a stream of ichorous drool dripping from its chin. It stepped forward with an ungainly shuffle, pushing Paul back until the back of his legs hit the coffee table. He tumbled backwards, pulling the monster down on top of him. He landed on the couch in a flurry of envelopes and bills and was almost impaled on the letter opener. A horrid smell of rotting meat washed over him as he shouted, “Suzanna, run.”
    The monster clamped down on his throat, digging its talons into his neck, cutting off his air and any possibility of shouting another warning. Behind it another monster emerged from the mirror, born of the same hell as the first. The monster atop Paul looked over its shoulder at its companion, turning its head about as no human could. “Get the necro,” it growled in a snake-like hiss. Its companion nodded and darted into the kitchen with ungodly speed.
    The monster turned back to Paul, and as it opened its mouth to reveal a bony ridge of razor sharp teeth, he thought of the letter opener still jabbing him in the back. Paul beat at the side of the monster’s head with his left fist, searching behind him with his right hand. He wasn’t a weak man, and the monster did nothing to defend itself, nothing to block his blows, nothing