Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense by Fynn Perry (popular romance novels TXT) 📗

the movement of the van. For the briefest of moments, he couldn’t identify the contents. All he knew was that it must be some kind of meat because blood was pooling at the base of the packaging. Then, suddenly comprehending, John backed away in horror.

“Oh, fuck!” The panicked eyes and a gaping mouth of a severed human head stared out at him from behind blood-smeared plastic. Next to it lay packaged limbs and pieces of a torso.

“Fuck!” John exclaimed again. He couldn’t help but think of the victim’s spirit standing frightened somewhere in a Dexter-type, plastic-sheet-covered kill room after having watched his body being chopped up by a psychopath.

He looked up at the partition that separated the load area from the driver. It had just a small window covered with steel bars. Through it, he could see the back and side of the driver’s head. He seemed oblivious to John’s presence, but as John knew, in this new world, appearances could be deceptive.

Just as he had feared, the driver’s head started to emanate a soft orange glow and then thin needles of orange light, gradually increasing in intensity and thickness, penetrated his buzz-cut hair. The emerging head of a spirit turned to look straight at John.

It had a round face with squinting eyes buried in deep sockets behind wire-framed glasses.

“Fucking get out!” It screamed, jowls quivering.

John just lay there, already exhausted from running away from one evil spirit. If this one wasn’t going to make a move toward him, he wasn’t going to use more energy to escape. Until, that was, he was sure he was far enough away from the other spirit to be safe. He figured that the fat-faced spirit wouldn’t leave the driver now and risk him running the van off the road. It didn’t, however, seem to share John’s concern about the van crashing and was becoming increasingly agitated by John’s inaction. It started to leave the driver’s body to move in John’s direction, causing the host to become drowsy and the van to veer.

This wasn’t good. John didn’t need the swerving of the van to attract the attention of the spirit chasing him. He needed to bail now—and he did so by rolling out through the side of the vehicle.

After half-hitting, half-sinking into the sidewalk, he staggered to his feet and ran toward an alley. As he did so, he heard screeching tires and the sound of a car-on-car collision and thought maybe he had just initiated the capture of a serial killer.

Sprinting down the nearest alley, John feared two things. The first was that the pursuing spirit from the club would figure that the erratic behavior of the van had something to do with John and would at any moment be right behind him. The second was that he wouldn’t be able to outrun it––he was again feeling the effects of fatigue hitting him.

Another alley branched off to his left. He glanced down it as he passed, looking for somewhere to hide but found none. Returning his gaze to the route directly ahead of him, he suddenly stopped in his tracks.

The spirit of a young girl had appeared in front of him, as if from nowhere. She was about his age and pretty, in a tough-looking way which she’d emphasized with a trendy biker’s-style jacket, jeans, and Doc Marten boots.

“So, you decided to stay on, rejecting the afterlife and all the powers it offers. Why?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Never mind, it’s probably something boring like ‘my life was cut too short’ or ‘I want to stay with my girlfriend.’” A knowing smile appeared briefly on her lips.

John had no idea who she was and wasn’t in the mood for what seemed like idle chat in any form right now. “What do you want from me?” he asked, starting to feel uncomfortable under the scrutiny of her smoldering orange eyes. “I don’t have time for this,” he added as he started to make a move to go around her.

“Count yourself lucky I’m even talking to you. I usually only talk to the ones I select.”

“Select for what?” John asked, suddenly curious.

“You can’t handle the ‘what,’ at least not until I decide you can,” she answered.

“Oh, I think I’m more than ready for some answers!” John retorted in annoyance. “I was just inside a van containing a chopped-up body and being driven by a psychopath with a spirit coming out of him! And anyway, how come you know so much about me?”

She ignored his outburst. “Think of your run-in with our serial killer friend as a glimpse into another aspect of your new world, John, a dangerous one where the mortal world you once knew and the spirit world overlap. Evil on that kind of scale, without empathy or remorse, requires, as you saw, more than just the mortal’s own dark soul in his or her body. It needs an earthbound spirit with equal or greater malevolence to join it and make that person do truly wicked things. But the suffering that serial killer can cause, even with his greater capacity for evil, pales by comparison with the suffering and death that someone like El Gordito and the spirit possessing him can inflict. You’d be wise to stay out of his way.” She paused looking at John’s shoulder. “Too bad you didn’t learn your lesson the first time you were attacked by a spirit, John.”

John was shocked by everything he had just heard. Her tone was dispassionate, coolly informative, but he sensed that there was also a trace of excitement in her voice. “How do you know my name, and why are you telling me about El Gordito?” he asked.

“Enough questions, John. The spirit that was chasing you is catching up!”

“How do you know––”

“If you don’t want to be ripped into pieces, you’ll listen to me. You’re no match for him. There’s a hobo farther along this alley. Possess him. It will be your first…Pop your cherry as it were…You have