Strangers of the Night. Megan Hart

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       Chapter 13

      Waking from a nightmare, she realizes all too quickly that this has not been a dream. The ringing in her ears is still so loud all she can do is clap her hands to the side of her head and rock back and forth until it eases. She’s alone. Whoever did this to her has left her for dead, she thinks, and risks running a hand over her body, checking for wounds.

      The blood covering her is not hers. The bits of flesh and bone and brain, also not hers. Her fingers clench, remembering the feel of the weapon in her hands, but she can’t remember shooting anyone. Unsteadily, she holds her hands out in front of her, inspecting the nails, grimy with filth.

      She has killed with these hands.

      The question, with the answer she can’t remember, is has she killed now? Or perhaps not if, because it feels so obvious that she has, but who? She can’t even remember who she was fighting. Staring at the tufts of fur beneath several of her fingers, stroking along the slices in her clothes and the torn flesh beneath, Samantha thinks maybe she needs to ask not who.

      What.

      Blinking to clear her vision, she makes sure she can stand upright before she tries to go anywhere. She’s in a safe house, not one she remembers, but she recognizes it without too much effort. Bare floors, bare walls, utilitarian furniture. Nothing to show anyone on the outside that there’s anything here but an almost empty house waiting for someone to occupy it. Nothing to stand out to anyone who came to the door.

      She hopes nobody does that now. The beige walls are spattered with thick dark fluid that smells of dank earth. The furniture, a brown plaid couch and matching armchair, are overturned, the stuffing torn out. It would be so very clear this house was the scene of something awful.

      She doesn’t call out. The ringing has faded enough that she can, if she strains hard enough, hear more than the buzz. Her feet are steady, planted shoulder-width apart. Her fingers ache; she forces them to relax and open. She doesn’t search for her weapon. She already knows it’s gone.

      Whatever happened here was recent enough that the blood is sticky, but not dry. Her wounds still seep. She could not have been unconscious for more than twenty or thirty minutes. Listening hard, Samantha waits for some clue to tell her what went on, but she hears nothing but the harsh rasp of her own breathing.

      In the next room, she finds him. Eyes wide. Mouth open. He stares at the ceiling, the ribbons of maroon on his throat evidence of what killed him. A familiar face.

      Her father.

      She kneels next to him without bothering to check for a pulse. You can maybe survive a wound that leaves your trachea hanging out of your throat, your bones poking through the skin, but only with immediate medical attention. It’s very clear that her father went down alone. He won’t get up again.

      She tries to cry and can’t. Later, she thinks she ought to have tried harder. He raised her, after all, in the absence of a mother. He did the best he could. But she thinks he wouldn’t have wanted her to weep, not because it was a sign of weakness, but because he’d passed from this life and into the next. The one he’d always taught her was the better one.

      The rest of the house is empty. There are signs, left behind by other safe house users. A code—something like the symbols used by transient hobos in the thirties to distinguish friendly homes from those where a man looking for a meal and a hot shave would instead get a serious thrashing. This house, she reads, is no longer safe.

      “No shit.” The words leak out of her on a tongue sore from being bitten.

      In the kitchen, she finds no signs of struggle. In the fridge, a gallon of milk hasn’t turned, and she gulps it greedily although she doesn’t СКАЧАТЬ