Suspended In Dusk by Ramsey Campbell, John Everson, Wendy Hammer Read Free Book Online Page A

couch.
    “Ah, Radouane,” he murmured, unclasping the watch from the dead man’s wrist. “I always said you’d get yourself in trouble, mec . Too much for you, the big boys’ game, no?”
    “Antoine, are you crazy? Whoever did this––”
    “Relax, Michele.” He turned to me with his false smile and his dead, dangerous eyes, the Glock held in one hand and the watch dangling from his fingers. “They just fucked each other over before we got here. It’s fate, mec . Providence. Life is making it easy for me, huh?”
    It was then that I saw how crazy Antoine really was. In my sweat-stained panic, my fear that made that hot, stinking room feel cold, I could see the edges of his madness, and the bare, hard face of the monster staring back at me.
    A movement near one of the bedroom doors caught my eye, and we turned. I thought at once of the girl at the window and, at first glance, it could have been her. She was young, her black hair pinned back high and tight, but her pink leather jacket was riddled with bullet holes, and she was misshapen, miscast; a creature made to look human but wrought from different proportions.
    Oddly elongated wrists forced her hands into a loose-jointed pose, blood-dipped fingers splayed and reaching out. Hips, back, neck… everything seemed shifted somehow, angled wrongly, and her chin, cheeks, forehead, and nose all hung crooked, swelling and moving beneath the skin. Lips peeled back from a raw, red mouth, that whole inhuman face rippling like water breaking beneath a stone.
    Only her eyes seemed real: dark and wide, but more full of life than any I had ever seen. Unafraid, yet not brave through anger or blind fury. The stare that met mine was that of another creature entirely, and with it she looked straight into my soul.
    I heard Antoine speak as he raised the gun. He called her a stupid whore, and I barely saw my hand move. I struck him, pushed him as hard as I could, sending the shot off-balance and him stumbling to the floor, falling among the dead.
    He rose angry, angry like a wild dog, and yet his eyes still held that same dullness, that lie of life. I saw the Glock’s flat muzzle swing toward me, heard the noise and saw the flash, but felt only the concussive force of the blow. No pain. I was aware of falling, of the preternatural movement of the girl as she sprang at Antoine and split his throat apart. His blood spattered my face with wet heat.
    I tasted salt. How strange that she seemed more real than him… more honest, if not more human. Antoine gave one last gurgle, and the soft growl of the girl’s breath scraped the air as she left him and moved closer to me. It brought with it the scent of blood, a heat that washed over me in bitter sourness.
    Her teeth closed on my throat, and I knew nothing more.
     
    * * *
     
    Esther
     
    She didn’t know why she did it. She didn’t know why he had done it, come to that. What human was moved to save a monster? But he had. He had walked into that theatre of death—the scene of all that rage and mistrust—and he had tried to save her… and now he was dying on the threadbare carpet.
    Radouane had shot first, killing one of the Slavs. That had been his plan from the start, though he’d over-reached himself, as usual. Always thinking he could have it all: keep the product, knock out the competition, kill the dime-bag boy—when he arrived—and be the big man left holding all the goodies. He always had been an idiot. Of course, it had ended poorly, ended in a firestorm that grew frenzied after the first bullets passed harmlessly through her. Suddenly, it had stopped being about the men, their money, and their macho pissing contest… it was almost funny to watch the ones who hadn’t already shot each other come together in panic, firing blindly at the monster.
    Silly, silly boys. Esther was not sure which she had killed and which were down to the number of bullets flying. After a while, between the feeding and chaos, it grew hard to