Sleep No More by Susan Crandall Read Free Book Online

pound the inside of Abby's skull.
    A frog croaked incessantly, its voice like sandpaper on her brain. And it was close. So close. Under her bed?
    She shifted and heard gravel raining from her ceiling.
    Then she realized she was sitting--and listing to the right. Her feet were wet.
    She opened her eyes--or eye; the left one refused. Raising her left brow to elevate the upper lid, she managed a useless slit. Her right eye began to focus. There was a greenish glow in front of her. A dashboard.
Her
dashboard.
    The white deflated balloon of the airbag hung from the steering wheel.
    A cool, damp breeze moved past, sending a clammy shiver down the back of her neck.
    She lifted her hand to her head. With her movement, gravel ticked as it hit the interior of the van. Not gravel, she realized. Broken glass.
    The windshield was intact. Dead ahead, the illumination from one headlight, the right one, glowed just beneath the surface of the brown water. Tendrils of mist curled from the water's surface, twining through clumps of tall marsh grass. The world beyond was wrapped in impenetrable darkness.
    The window in the driver's door was missing, which accounted for the glass bits.
    Her head throbbed with each sluggish heartbeat.
    She touched her temple, then held her fingers close to the meager light from the dash. They were dark. Blood.
    That frog continued to croak, louder.
    "Shut up!" She was rewarded with a slice of fresh pain in her head, much worse than what the frog had caused. Nevertheless, she felt better for having yelled at it.
    The clock on the dash said three-fifteen. The last thing she could remember was Jason Coble walking her to the van in Jeter's parking lot. Hours ago.
    She tried to lean forward but the seat belt held tight.
    With trembling fingers, she fumbled to release the seat belt buckle. It came undone, but did not retract. She slid it off her left shoulder and the metal plate on the belt clanked against the door panel, startling the frog into temporary silence.
    With effort, she pushed open the driver's door. It moved cumbrously, not because of the pressure of water on the outside--it wasn't deep--but because she was fighting gravity. The van's right side was at least two feet lower than the left.
    For a moment, she sat there, putting off getting into the water. She hated swimming in anything where she couldn't see what was swimming with her. She never got more than ankle deep at the beach. The marsh looked like something from a horror film, dark, misty, and endless.
    But it couldn't be endless. She'd driven her van into it. The road couldn't be very far.
    She slid off the seat, her pencil skirt riding up her thighs. She eased lower, until her feet met with solid ground--solid being an overstatement. What was underfoot had the consistency of tapioca pudding. The cold water was deeper than she'd expected, up to her thighs.
    Common sense said the road had to be on the left. Unless she'd been spun around. There were no visible lights in any direction.
    She listened. Nothing but crickets and frogs. No traffic noise to orient herself.
    The shock of the cold water began to clear her head. Her cell phone!
    She turned around and boosted herself back into the tilted van by grabbing the door frame.
    Her purse wasn't on the passenger seat. Reaching toward the passenger floorboard, she hit water almost immediately.
    "Crap."
    She started to shiver.
    Groping blindly in the water, she located her purse.
    Not much chance the cell would work. She dug through the soggy contents of her bag anyway and located the phone. She pressed several buttons before she gave up on there being a glimmer of life in it. She threw it back in her purse, opened the glove box, and retrieved a flashlight.
    "Please let these batteries be good."
    When her trembling fingers flipped the switch, the light came on. "Thank you, God."
    With flashlight in hand and her purse on her shoulder, she once again lowered herself into the water. She swept the flashlight