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

sure he got it, whatever it was. Hence, their stopping at Sprinkles. She wondered if Brian simply wanted to take a break from their search, maybe discuss a new strategy with her over ice cream. Could he still eat? She wasn’t clear on how this whole coming back from the dead thing worked.

Brian reached Sprinkles’ door and pushed it open. An old-fashioned jingling of bells announced their presence, but there was something off about the sound, and Reeny realized it was some kind of recording. She found this sad. Was Brian only a recording too, a facsimile, an imitation of the boy he’d been? She didn’t want to examine this thought too closely, so she put it aside and followed her son into the shop.

The first thing she noticed was the blood. It was everywhere. On the floor, the walls, the ceiling…. A half-dozen bodies in various states of mutilation lay on the floor, where they hadn’t been visible to her from the car – four adults and two children. There was blood on the front counter and on the large menu hanging on the wall behind it.

Three living customers sat at a table, each holding ice cream cones. Reeny couldn’t tell what flavors they had, but their ice cream was dotted with blood. Sprinkles, indeed.

One of the women had a long gray braid that undulated in the air like a serpent. The other had clawed hands, sharp teeth, and uneven tufts of fur covering her skin. The man looked as if he suffered from some kind of hideous skin disease. His shirt was open, exposing a lumpy mass of discolored growths on his chest. There were smaller ones on his neck, face, and hands, as if whatever was wrong with him was spreading outward from his chest to infect the rest of his body. Their clothes were soaked with blood, and if Reeny had had any doubt who was responsible for the dead bodies scattered on the floor, she no longer did.

The three looked at Reeny and Brian as they entered, and the cat woman hissed. The one with a braid put a hand on the woman’s shoulder.

“It’s all right, Katie.” She smiled. “They’re our kind of people.”

Reeny hadn’t recognized Justin at first. Part of that was due to the obscene growths covering his flesh, but a bigger part was that he was so out of place in this nightmarish scene – the blood, the bodies…. She didn’t know Justin well. Lori hadn’t been seeing him all that long, and while Reeny had invited them over for dinner once, Justin hadn’t talked much about himself. He’d talked about his job as a lab tech, when he talked at all. Justin had struck Reeny as a nice enough guy, not particularly complicated – which was a point in his favor after Larry, who was all complication – but he’d also come across as anxious, almost neurotic, and she didn’t think he and Lori were going to work out as a couple. This was fine with her, as she thought her Sissy could do a lot better.

“Hello, Justin,” she said.

He started to speak but was overcome by a sudden burst of violent coughing. Small black chunks were expelled from his mouth to land on the table, as well as on the ice cream cones of his companions. Neither of the women seemed bothered by this, and the cat woman even licked one of the gobbets from her cone and purred as she chewed it. Reeny had heard the expression coughing up a lung before, but this was the first time she’d actually seen it happen. Brian seemed delighted by the man’s discomfort. He clapped his hands and laughed as the man struggled to get control of himself.

“Sorry,” Justin gasped when his coughing fit subsided. “We’re still having some trouble adjusting to each other.” His voice changed then, sounded like a chorus of voices speaking in unison. “Trouble, yes.”

We’re? Reeny thought.

“You two know each other?” the woman with the braid asked.

“Yeah,” Justin said. “She’s Lori’s sister. The boy’s Lori’s nephew, Brian.” His voice changed again. “Lori bitch. We no like.”

The woman with the braid smiled, displaying her teeth. “Well isn’t that just wonderful,” she said. “Won’t you join us? Justin, would you please pull up a table for our new friends?”

Justin rose, shuffled over to the nearest table – the surface of which was speckled with blood – and dragged it over next to the trio’s. The table’s metal legs slid through blood on the floor and made streaks on the tile. He then brought over a couple chairs and set them down. There was blood on them too, and he tried to wipe it off with his hand but only managed to smear it around. He gestured for Reeny and Brian to sit.

Brian did so without hesitation.

“Would you like some ice cream, sweetie?” Reeny asked him.

“Yes,” he said.

Brian might not be able to digest ice cream, she thought, or even taste it, but maybe he’d enjoy the texture. She walked over to the counter, stepping carefully around both blood and corpses. When she was behind the counter, she saw a seventh body, that of a young woman wearing a blue apron with the Sprinkles logo on the front. There were copious amounts of blood on the floor, but no sign of the girl’s head. She wondered where it was.

She made Brian a cone with a double scoop of butter pecan – his favorite – and took it over to the table. She didn’t get any ice cream for herself. She didn’t need the calories. And she didn’t have much of an appetite at the moment.

When she handed Brian the cone, he looked at it for a moment, then he looked at her. It took her a second to get the message, but when she did, she bent over, ran her fingers through a pool of blood on the floor, straightened, then held her hand over Brian’s ice cream. Blood dribbled onto