Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (free romance novels .TXT) 📗

“You need to move on,” Sharilyn said. “For both our sakes.”

“I love you.”

Sharilyn said nothing. What was the point? Darlene refused to hear anything she didn’t want to hear. “I have to go.”

Sharilyn opened the driver’s-side door and stepped out into the rain. She planned to go inside, start working, and hope Darlene got the message and left. She didn’t know what else to do.

She ran around the side of the building – as much to get away from Darlene as to get inside where it was dry – but when she was only a few feet from the entrance, she stopped. There were people running across the parking lot toward the building. No, not people. Shadows shaped like people. Their movements were too fluid to be human, and their arms and legs seemed to stretch and contract as they moved, as if they were made of rubber. The sight of them sent a wave of revulsion through her. These things were a violation of everything she believed to be real. They should not, could not exist. In short, they were wrong.

It was hard to gauge their exact number. They moved fast and they didn’t run in straight lines, crisscrossed in front of one another as they came, making it difficult to count them. There were perhaps a dozen of them, maybe more. A man – ball-capped, bearded, and beer-bellied – had parked his pickup in front of one of the pumps and was busy fueling his vehicle when the shadow things reached him. He hadn’t seen their approach, but some instinct warned him at the last instant, and he turned just as the first raised a clawed hand to strike.

He didn’t have time to scream.

Sharilyn thought the creature would slash the man with its claws, but instead its substance stretched, lost definition, become amorphous, and flowed over him like a wave of darkness. And when it rolled past, the man was gone. Destroyed or absorbed, Sharilyn didn’t know, and really, what did the particulars matter? Gone was gone.

With each death they caused, each bit of destruction they wreaked, the creatures grew stronger, as did their ability to interact with and affect reality. The others also lost their forms, and they all flowed together, merging into a single large mass of black. They washed over the gone-man’s pickup, and it too disappeared. The edge of the dark wave caught part of the gas pump, and half of it vanished. The residue of gas in the partially disintegrated hose splashed onto the ground as the black wave rolled on toward the building.

“What the fuck is that?”

Darlene was standing at Sharilyn’s side. Her attention had been so focused on the shadow things that she’d been unaware of the other woman’s approach. Darlene’s voice jolted her out of her paralysis, and she grabbed the woman’s hand and dragged her inside the store. The man at the register – a skinny guy with curly red hair named Ray – looked over at them as they entered.

“Where the hell have you been, Sharilyn? My shift ended fifteen minutes ago!”

Sharilyn didn’t acknowledge his words, didn’t even look at him. The wave was coming, and she and Darlene had to get as far away from it as they could.

There were only a few customers inside the store – a heavily tattooed man perusing the snack cakes, a woman around Darlene’s age getting a bottled water from one of the coolers at the back, and an old dude with a thick white beard thumbing through an issue of Guns & Ammo in front of the magazine display. The three of them looked over when Ray shouted and when they did, they saw what was rushing toward Go Mart’s entrance. The tattooed man gaped, the woman screamed, the old guy shouted, “Fuck me!” and Ray said, “Jesus Christ!”

There was no sound of breaking glass or display shelves being overturned. The dark wave had absorbed the gone-man and his truck in absolute silence, and Sharilyn knew the same thing was happening now. She pictured the shadow wave flooding into the store, sucking in everything it touched with eerie silence, including Ray and the others.

Sharilyn was heading toward the rear of the store, hoping to reach the stockroom where there was an exit she and Darlene could escape through. Part of her realized that she could move faster if she wasn’t pulling Darlene along behind her, but she didn’t consider letting go of her hand.

I guess I still love her after all, she thought.

They had almost reached the door in the back, the one with the sign that said Employees Only, when Darlene screamed. Sharilyn knew she shouldn’t turn and look, but she couldn’t stop herself. She saw a wall of blackness rushing toward them, and she had just enough time to tighten her grip on Darlene’s hand before it engulfed them.

* * *

The Shadowkin continue spreading throughout Oakmont, causing havoc in different ways depending on the situation. Their choices aren’t conscious ones, but rather reactions to stimuli in the environment around them. Sometimes they cause damage solely with their claws, tearing chunks out of physical objects or inflicting terrible wounds on their victims. Other times, they loosen molecular bonds, attack on a mental or spiritual level, or dissolve pieces of reality itself. The Shadowkin have a single function – to break everything down, and that’s exactly what they do, in one fashion or another.

Oakmont and its residents die haphazardly, incrementally, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. Anyone currently in our reality, that is.

Chapter Eight

Justin Nguyen sat at a table in front of a window, watching the rain come down as he sipped his second double scotch. It was lunchtime, but he hadn’t eaten anything. When he’d first gotten to the bar, he’d intended to order food – something greasy, carby, and artery-clogging. What did eating healthy matter now? Besides, he could use some comfort food. But when a server came over to take