No, he didn’t think he would.
“What are you?” he asked, squeaking the words out.
“Oh, a little of this. A little of that.” She let her head fall sideways and set her eyes on him. He stared back, looking into the shimmering black orbs that filled in her irises. “My kind are the creators of the void. And I’m its keeper. Its protector. Its mother. Like my mother before me and hers before her. And, like all good mothers, we need to feed our babies.”
Her eyes were normal again, bright as two blueberries.
Rob could barely speak, his windpipe feeling about as wide as a drinking straw. He croaked. “W-what d-did you make us watch?”
“Just a film. One of my favorites.”
“That wasn’t just a film.” Rob felt weak, barely able to move. His thoughts began to bleed away. “What… was it?”
She shrugged. “The void needs to feed, and there is nothing more nutritious than the human noggin. Not the outside, of course. The shell is too bony and tasteless. But what’s on the inside, what exists within the brain, where thoughts and imaginative cognitive skills are brewed—now that’s the ticket. One human imagination can sustain the void for a thousand years, which is a long time for your kind, but, in the grand scheme of the megaverse, it only equates to about a day or two in Earth time.”
“Why… me?” Rob felt all strength abandon his limbs. As he wasted away, he looked into the sideview mirror and saw his features had yellowed, grown overripe with jaundice. “Why…”
Brianne, or the thing she truly was, shrugged. “Because you were easy. And the film was here. Dan had his copy stashed away, the one he’d stolen once upon a time ago, just waiting for the right opportunity to come along. I thought I could nudge you in the right direction. You wanted to impress me with the film, didn’t you? That was your plan? Scare your way into my pants? Hm, how shallow you are, Robert.”
“Didn’t…”
“Save your last words as they mean nothing to me.” A sleek grin spilled across her features. “The only thing I require is what’s inside here.” She tapped his forehead.
Everything suddenly ached. His arms, legs. Bones. Head. His muscles swelled with pain.
“Now, come on,” she said, leaning over him. “Give me a kiss.”
She opened her mouth and instead of seeing a tongue, teeth, the hanging pink orb in the back of her throat, he saw nothing but a glowing, white light. A heavenly flash of nothingness. Like staring into a xenon bulb, completely blinding.
She pressed her lips against his and he tasted chaos. Scented ash floating above burning buildings. Sniffed salt in the air over eroding shores. Inhaled smoke over cities on fire.
She tasted like the apocalypse.
And then he experienced the void, that floating black ocean of perpetual nothingness.
LIKED THIS BOOK? CHECK OUT THE AUTHOR’S OTHER WORK:
DEMON BLOOD BOXED SET (BOOKS 1-3)
Sunfalclass="underline" Season One
Sunfalclass="underline" Season Two
Sunfalclass="underline" Season Three
The Organ Harvest: An October John Novella
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Meyer dwells in a dark cave near the Jersey Shore. He’s an author, husband, father, podcast host, blogger, coffee connoisseur, beer enthusiast, and explorer of worlds. He writes horror, mysteries, science fiction, and thrillers, although he prefers to blur genres and let the stories fall where they may.
You can follow Tim at https://timmeyerwrites.com
OR like his Facebook page here: www.facebook.com/authortimmeyer
CHAPTER ONE
Never had I given much thought to the timeless debate of fate versus freewill, until I found that damned camera, the one that nearly cost me my life, and threatened the existence of the universe as we know it.
But that comes later.
I guess I should start at the beginning.
I pulled my car off of the Garden State Parkway around a quarter to two, on the first Friday of January. The green sign I passed welcoming me to the Jersey Shore stood like a titan on the side of the highway, exactly how I remembered it when I was a kid. It’d been about six years since I’d been back in my home state, ten since I lived there. Once I moved to Atlanta after college, I left and never looked back. Never thought about returning. Never cared to.
But in that moment, I was glad to be back. When I crossed the state line an hour earlier, my stomach knotted with nervous excitement. It had died when I left the parkway and pulled onto Route 7, passing a sign for Treebound, a town I never spent much time in when I was younger. I was headed to Red River, the town I grew up in, a stone’s throw away from the infamous beaches of the Jersey Shore. It was the largest town in the county, bringing together a diverse blend of people. It was always a good town, never high on crime or anything like that. There was always stuff to do, whether you wanted to spend a night with the family or go drinking with the guys, Red River had everything for everyone.
My sister, Anne Naughton, never left The Riv (what we called it when we were kids) and now has kids of her own. She married Robert Davis, her high school honey, and had three little bundles of joy. I called Anne about a week before, asking if it would be okay to stay with them temporarily until I got my feet back on the ground. “We can empty out the basement,” she told me. “Stay with us as long as you like, as long as you can handle a noisy household.” Besides her, Robert, and the three kids, they also had two dogs and two cats. “Things haven’t been quiet around here in a long time,” she said, giggling. Oddly, this seemed to please her. Yes, the teenage girl who locked herself in her room every day so she wouldn’t have to listen to me blast my music, or hear my mother and father argue about things that didn’t matter, now enjoyed a rowdy family life.