Unearthed by Robert J. Crane Read Free Book Online Page A

been doing your thing, there was a whole ’nother world, one you couldn’t survive in? All you could do was flop around and gasp, trying to draw breath, trying to survive in this new place, this new order.
    Reeve reckoned it wasn’t that dissimilar from what he felt like at the moment. He wasn’t dying, though, not yet. Just flopping around a lot.
    He watched the bass struggle, relating it to his own struggles of late, and eventually the movement subsided, the gills stopped flapping, and it lay still in the bottom of the boat, twitching. Yep, Reeve figured, that was about he felt.
    *
    Dr. Lauren Darlington sat in her car out by the freeway, in the parking lot of Fast Freddie’s. In the realm of dives, this one was close to the top of her list, beating out a horde of bars she’d visited in her med school days. It was the sort of shithole that gave other shitholes a bad name, attracting the sort of unwashed masses that were also assholes that she couldn’t imagine finding even at a place up in the hills like the Charnel House. At least those guys were nice. She’d been up there a couple times, and everyone was so damned friendly, even to a city-slicker doc like her.
    The sun heated her car to oppressive temperatures as she sat there baking, the engine and air conditioner off, and she wondered why October sucked so much this year. Was it just the natural state of the weather? The warm climate of Midian seemed to match the eighteen manners of hell that the town had been through lately, with death and tragedy permeating the culture of the place.
    Or was it that she was seeing demons everywhere she went, hiding behind the eyes of every person she talked to, every patient she treated at the ER?
    Lauren was inclined to the think the latter was the culprit; she’d dealt with tragedy before, after all. Being a single mother going through med school and a residency had been a sort of tragedy all its own, especially now that her daughter was a teenager.
    She stared at the door of Fast Freddie’s, willing it to open and disgorge the one person she wanted to actually see, but the door stubbornly refused to comply. Even the door here was an asshole.
    Giving up on the idea that she was just going to be able to sit in the parking lot until things worked out her way, she opened the door to her car and stepped out into the hot air. The parking lot was dusty and unpaved, a condition unlikely to be remedied anytime soon. She crossed the parking lot, her shoes kicking up an orangish-red cloud with every step. Her white coat trailed her, and she suddenly wished she’d left it in the car, if for no other reason than it proudly proclaimed her as Dr. Darlington, M.D. on the right breast pocket. It had been a gift from her momma when she’d completed her residency, and here in Fast Freddie’s it would stick out like an erection at an all-girls school.
    She paused at the door and took a breath, hoping that at least they’d have air conditioning here. She pushed open the door and found that even in this most modest of expectations, Fast Freddie’s had once again failed her.
    It was sweltering in that pit, neon beer signs the décor of choice, a pitted and stained bar the biggest draw, set up in the middle of the room. Worn and battered tables filled the majority of the room with the exception of a small corner set aside for a dance floor, she presumed. The jukebox was playing low, a wailing song that she didn’t know—she didn’t listen to country music—coming out of hissing speakers above.
    She found her target within seconds of walking in. It was afternoon, it was Midian, and only the hardest of the hardcore drunks were at work on their hobby right now. Them and the warehouse workers that did graveyard shifts. Well, she supposed that the person she was here to see was working graveyard shifts lately, too, which accounted for why she had to come here right now to catch her.
    Lauren thought about ordering a beer and discarded it as a