The Very Last Days of Mr Grey by Jack Worr Read Free Book Online

they used headphones. But then, how would that explain what he had heard? It wouldn’t , a voice said, and it wasn’t his. But it is inside your head.
    It’s my head , he thought. I hit my head .
    Something constricted around Mason’s ankle and he screamed out.
    Mason fell from the truck into the sparse grass that lined the side of the road. He flipped on his back and scurried away. It was a woman, roughly his age.
    “Are you okay?” she asked. “Do you need help?” Her car was parked on the side of the road, right next to them. He hadn’t heard it arrive.
    “I didn’t hear you.”
    She looked at his car, then the truck. “What happened?”
    Mason shook his head, sat up. “I was hit.” He pointed at the stoplight. Then he froze. He looked up and down the two lane highway. There was no stoplight, there was no intersection, there wasn’t even any girl.
    “Can you hear me?” the girl asked.
    Mason looked around for her. She shimmered in front of him, back now. Then she was naked, then clothed, naked, like a painting, like The Birth of Venus, in watercolor, the details indistinct, the scar on her left shoulder mere suggestion.
    There was a burning sensation on his left arm. He looked at his right, and saw nothing.
    He wondered why his arms were flipped.
    Then a flame began, and he knew it by its heat.
    “Help me!” the girl shouted in his ear.
    “What?” His voice was soft, weak to his own ear.
    “I need you to help me here,” she said. But the girl in front of him wasn’t moving.
    It’s a dream , someone said. But the sound was inside Mason’s mind. Wake up Mr Grey, or you will never make it to see Eila again. Something comes this way, and you’d better hurry. To get away.
    The ghost of an image shimmered next to him, but all he could tell was that it was a man, and that it was struggling to stay here.
    “Isla,” he muttered. He could hear the voice’s misspelling in his head. “It’s Isla.”
    Get up. You have seven seconds, and then the flames will engulf you both, and then it will be too late.

15
    Mason’s eyes opened. His arm burned, he was sweating, and his head hurt. He was still inside the wreck of his car. He saw steam through his windshield.
    Someone was tugging on him.
    He saw it was a woman. She was dressed very nicely. He hoped she didn’t ruin her clothes. “My seatbelt.” Mason reached down and unbuckled it.
    He and the woman fell from the car. She tried to pull him away, but the seatbelt was caught on his right arm.
    He flailed the arm, and the seatbelt came loose. The girl dragged him. His feet uprooted chunks of sad looking grass as they slipped trying to help, trying to get away from the heat and flames, from hellish image, the memory of something, of something sinister.
    A cloud floated into his window, emanating from the nozzle of a red bottle held by a man Mason only now noticed.
    The girl’s mouth was moving.
    “What?” he asked, but his own voice made no sound.
    The man kept spraying.
    The girl helped Mason walk; he had trouble keeping balanced, but at least he wasn’t in pain.
    The girl sat him down in her car, used her phone. He couldn’t hear what she was saying. She paced in front of him, hand on her forehead. On her hip. On her knee as she doubled over.
    Her face glistened, and Mason realized he was sweating.
    Eventually the man with the red bottle—the fire extinguisher, Mason realized—came over, and he and the girl talked. Mason recognized her from somewhere, but all he could think was that she was too young, and that didn’t make any damn sense, since he couldn’t tell where he knew her from, or if he even did.
    The ambulance arrived seconds before the fire truck. Mason watched it carefully cut around his cloud-filled car.
    Which was when he noticed where it was. Its tail had leapt the sidewalk and was smashed into a light post, which had absorbed it without apparent effect. He looked around for the truck that had hit him.
    He turned in the girl’s