MicroHorror

I leap through the window, the hideout burning behind me.

Above, Tony hisses, cursing as he watches me drop and roll.

I look at him, watching the flames burn all around him.

Tony.

We used to call him Tony.

I used to call him friend.

But now he’s my enemy, and as I stick a knife through the chest of an attacking vampire, I know I’ll make him pay for his betrayal.

***

Morning.

The monsters sleep.

Their lackeys stalk.

We caught one once–it almost made me feel something again. Poor brainwashed fools they were, intellect destroyed by the vampires. Too weak and feeble to become monsters, they became something worse.

Still had the strength to trash our hideouts, though.

I sit in the ruins of one now, looking at the walls. At the words written there.

The vow.

We’ll never let them take us.

And we didn’t; my friends shot their brains out before becoming like them.

But then Tony…

We were hiding in a chemist’s. He stood, walked to the window, said, “They’re not coming tonight.”

Then the claws burst through the glass and took him.

He had a weapon–he could have killed himself, like we all vowed. But he didn’t, and when I looked out I swear I saw him smiling.

Now he leads the monsters, selling them all our secrets. Selling the lives of his friends until only I remain.

Alone.

Hopeless.

I know they’ll get me sooner or later–the vampires, or their mindless lackeys. But I won’t let Tony take me.

Never.

I’m going to take him down.

***

I walk through the streets, and though they watch from atop buildings, none of the vampires touch me.

I think they know I have plans.

I found an axe along the way, and now I twirl it around. Calling out his name.

“Tony.”

I walk.

“Traitor.”

Spinning the axe some more.

“Come and get me.”

And he does.

He crashes into me from above, knocking me to the ground, driving out my wind, and though he could have just finished me off, he wants to make a game, have some fun.

He grins.

I stand.

Say, “You betrayed us, Tony.”

He laughs.

“We promised not to let them take us. Now look at you.”

I do look at him, saying this. He’s covered in blood–but excrement and urine as well, too concerned with the hunt to bother washing.

Plus, he’s naked.

And then there’s his eyes.

His eyes…

So red.

So deep.

Inviting, too… telling me that the pain will vanish if I just let him put his fangs in me…

***

And I’m almost there, almost floating in his veins. But then I remember the vow on the wall, remember all of our friends that he’s killed, and I scream “What about the promises?” and hack off an arm, and “What about the vow?” and take away half his face and “What about the promises?” and sweep away his legs and scream “What about the vow, you bastard?” as I finally cut off his head.

It plonks to the ground at my feet.

And now the rest of his breed appears.

Coming for me.

Expecting a fight.

But I’m done.

I drop the axe.

And let them take me.

***

But I wake.

Lackeys around me.

Pointing to the horizon.

Where the town ends.

I understand.

There’s nobody left for the monsters–they need fresh blood.

That’s where I come in.

They want me to head out… bring them victims. And if I do…

The vampires will make me forget. Forget all that’s happened.

They’ve already taken some of it away.

I head out of town. Determined not to do what they want.

But the memories are returning. And they hurt.

So I walk.

Thinking back.

Something almost came back to me there.

Something about a promise.

Something about a vow.

• Copyright: © 2011 Shaun Avery

I looked at the letter little Sarah had brought home from school, barely able to contain the rage coursing through me.

Noticing this, she looked up at me, bottom lip all aquiver, whilst in the background Nina stirred at the sewing machine, sensing too that something was wrong.

“Did I do something wrong?” Sarah asked, voice trembling.

Smiling down at her, I patted the girl’s head. “No, angel. Run off and play.”

She did so, and I watched her go, grinning. Then I turned to Nina and said, “Honey, we need to talk.”

***

“So what do you expect us to do about it?”

It was nighttime; our conversation had spilled over into bed. Now, as Sarah slept in the next room, I looked at her mother lying next to me.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It just makes me feel so angry.”

She touched my hand. “But it’s more than that, isn’t it?”

I met her eyes.

Felt tears threaten mine.

But blinking them back, I soon fell asleep. And dreamt of burnt skin, smoke spewing monsters that chased me down endless halls until I woke up and wept at the morning.

***

Nina had work to do, a dress to sew for one of her online customers, so I took Sarah to school.

The yard was filled with other parents, but I didn’t speak to any of them, feeling, like I always did, kind of out of place there. Four years I’d been living with Nina and her daughter, yet I still felt ill at ease with the whole family thing.

Possibly because it had been so long since I’d had one of my own.

Still, I took my stepdaughter in, and waved her off. Then did my best to ignore all the parents, who, in turn, had ignored the letter from the school.

***

“You need to relax,” Nina said, consoling me in the night following another bad dream masquerading as a memory. “Let the school deal with it.”

“But they’re not dealing with it,” I insisted. “One scabby little letter hasn’t made a blind bit of difference.”

She shrugged.

Then I did something stupid.

Said, “Don’t you care? Don’t you want better for your child?”

Wrong thing to say, and she rolled over, turned away from me. Leaving me alone with my nightmares.

***

In them, I came home from a party, like happened in real life, and saw the house in which I’d grown up burning in the night. Heard the screams of all my family, saw their burning shapes at the window. Then fast-forwarded to what the newspapers told the world: Father of Four Falls Asleep with Cigarette Burning–Leaves One Child Behind!

In this dream, though, there was a new twist. I ended up in front of my fridge, looking at the letter we’d pinned up there, the one from the school. The one that said, Despite constant reminders, people are still smoking on the school site. Please help us keep the school grounds a smoke-free zone. Then I zipped from my home and to those very school grounds, and saw all those parents who had paid the letter no heed–saw them, breathed in their smoke, and burned with rage.

Then I woke up.

Went downstairs.

And borrowed Nina’s laptop.

***

The items I’d ordered arrived soon after.

That was good.

It gave me time to give the other parents a chance.

I watched them, found out where they lived, discovered when their children wouldn’t be around. All the time hoping that the words of the letter might sink in.

They didn’t.

So I picked a constant re-offender, a guy with no teeth and a baseball cap, and turned up at his door.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’ve seen you smoking at school.”

“So?”

“Didn’t you see the letter from the school?”

“Nah–didn’t read it, mate. Now get lost.”

I sighed at him.

Then reached inside my pocket for the duct tape and the hunting knife.

• Copyright: © 2011 Shaun Avery

The thing with no face pushed me back onto the bed and slowly undid my belt.

I closed my eyes, in expectation of ecstasy.

That was when I heard the shots.

***

I’d seen the advert a few months before.

Are YOU confused? it asked. Are YOU jaded with all you’ve seen? Do YOU think YOU have all the answers? Well, if so, let US change your mind!

And below that, an address and a phone number had indicated just who “WE” were.

I’d not been able to stop thinking about it all day, unable to shake the spooky but not completely unpleasant suspicion that the ad had been written for me, just for me. And before too long, I’d dialed that number.

Had made my appointment.

***

I pushed the faceless thing away and ran to the door and opened it.

Across the whole of the building, people were doing the same. Most of them were strangers, but one wasn’t; Ross, a fellow member of the confused and jaded camp that I knew from work, was here too, and for that I thanked God–I knew I could rely on him to take charge in a crisis.

But he looked just as confused as me.

“Where’d it come from?” I asked.

He pointed.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said.

“What?”

I began running. “That’s Buck’s room.”

***

Buck had answered the phone that first time, his voice at once friendly and knowledgeable, like the wise tutor I’d never had but always wanted.

“What do I do?” he’d replied, in answer to my first nervous question. “Why, nothing. It’s not what I do, son. It’s more about what they do.”

Then he’d pointed, and I’d seen with a gasp the “they” that he meant.

***

Ross and I barged through the door.

And saw the blank-faced body with the gun in its hand.

But it wasn’t just any blank face.

It was the one we’d all wanted.

The only one not on offer.

Buck’s blank.

He’d called her The Princess, this bikini-clad beauty with the body of a supermodel topped by a featureless face. They all had great bodies, the blanks–some male, some female, some a mixture of both for the truly jaded–but none so great as this.

We’d all desired her.

But Buck had his one rule, and no one dared challenge his authority.

We’d all been too addicted by then.

***

“You haven’t tried it all,” he’d said that first night, “till you’ve been with a blank!”

He was right, and it was easy to see why.

They could be any fantasy you longed for, anything at all. With all the relevant fun organs except a mouth, you could use them how you wanted.

But damn, they were addictive.

And now, it seemed, deadly.

***

There were more shots.

We ran from the house.

To safety.

Next thing I knew, Buck was on the news.

So was his wife.

Missing, the newsreader said. Not murdered. So the blanks must have hidden his body.

Pretty crafty, I thought.

And with that thought came paranoia.

I started drinking to forget my terror, became a regular at the local bar. Outside of it, too, where the gutter became my toilet.

That was where they found me.

***

I woke up in motion.

Looked around.

And saw Buck and Ross grinning down.

“Had to get away from the wife,” Buck told me. He was caressing The Princess’s breast as he spoke. “Needed to spend all my time with the baby here.”

He looked at me.

“That was why I came up with the plan.”

He motioned around the moving van, where other familiar faces were waking up to see non-faces.

“Fake my death, that was the plan. Fake all our deaths. So we can be with our new loves forever.”

“But what about the shots?” Though I voiced doubt, I still cuddled up to one of the strangely sensual beings.

“Don’t worry,” he said, as an orgy commenced. “Those bullets were just blanks.”

• Copyright: © 2011 Shaun Avery

He’d been trying to make me do it for months, and I’d always said no. But the weekend it started, I finally relented.

“All right!” he said, his eyes suddenly flushing with excitement. I noticed that one of them was bruised, a shiner slightly fading, but didn’t want to ask what had happened. It might have crossed a line–he was my boss, after all.

Later on, I told Clyde in accounting what I’d agreed to. That I’d be visiting Mike’s home.

Clyde shivered. “Don’t do it, Don,” he said. “Please.”

I wished for more information–for a reason why I should take his advice. But Clyde got up and walked away, and it was only then, as he retreated, that I noticed the bruising around his knuckles.

***

I’d seen all the videos, of course; Mike liked to bring them into the office and make staff watch them on the breakroom TV.

So we watched.

Viewed the séances.

Heard him speak to the dead.

Never realizing this was only half of the story.

***

I asked one night why he wanted me.

It was the first of our after-work liaisons; we’d headed to the local swimming pool, and were now toweling off after a heavy session.

“Because I know you, Donald,” he said. “I know the stuff you left off your CV.”

In reality, I froze. In my mind, though, I relived it all–the accident and its aftermath that had left the two-year gap on my CV, when I went through therapy both physical and otherwise. I remembered a girl called Rita, and Mike saw it all.

“Still hurts, doesn’t it?”

I nodded, whilst looking at his body. Eyes drawn there by the catalogue of cuts and scars that wormed their way across his torso and shoulders.

“Wouldn’t you like to talk to her one last time?”

“What for?” I asked. “To say goodbye?”

“Something like that.” He looked at his reflection in the mirror, seemingly admiring his scars. “Something like that.”

***

His words had reawakened mental wounds that had never healed.

I told myself not to think of Rita.

That I didn’t want to think of her.

But there was no keeping her out of things.

The night of the séance finally came around, and Mike made me tell him what had happened that night–the drinking, the argument, the car skidding through the rain towards death.

Then he revealed the Ouija board.

I’d seen all this before, via the videos he showed at work. But I was about to see that they didn’t show all the facts.

His voice changed as he said, “Donny?”

I looked up sharply.

Only one person had ever called me that.

Rita.

“Darling,” I said. And reached for her–Mike’s–hand.

But then something happened.

Something unexpected.

She slapped it away.

Then slapped my face.

I looked at her, shocked.

Saw his/her face grimacing into a portrait of hatred.

“Hello, Donny,” she said. “Must be nice to be alive, eh? But then, I wouldn’t know about that.”

I backed away.

But she wasn’t finished yet.

“I never loved you,” she said. “I went with all your friends.”

Then she presented her face to me, willing me to hit it.

And suddenly I saw where Mike’s scars came from.

Saw what Clyde had tried to tell me.

Mike didn’t want to help me say goodbye.

He just wanted to feel pain. Pain provided by those mocked by their memories.

“All of them, Donny,” she said. “They pulled a train on me. I loved it. So hit me. Beat my slutty body.”

Her voice, Mike’s body–but who truly spoke? I didn’t know, I couldn’t know, but my anger chose my actions for me, and I leapt across the table at him/her, and beat and clawed until my fingers were covered in blood.

Until her voice was dead again.

Now, I sit here waiting for morning, for the justice and punishment to come.

A victim of loss twice.

• Copyright: © 2010 Shaun Avery

“So let’s get this straight,” the host said, grinning to the camera from beneath his toupee. “You’re…”

“A vampire,” the guest said.

“And you’re on my show to…?”

The guest looked around the studio in confusion, as if the answer were obvious. “To confess. Isn’t that what this show’s about?”

He seemed to be genuinely asking the question, the host thought. As if he really didn’t know the purpose of the show.

“Yes, indeed.” The host smiled, sinking back into the familiar chair. “On Let’s… Confess! members of the public confess their secrets.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Well…” The host faltered, struggling for words. “It’s just their secrets aren’t normally as wacky as that.”

“Oh?” As if aping the host, the guest got more comfortable in his chair, too. “So what are they normally like?”

The host was taken aback. “Don’t you know? Don’t you watch the show?”

A slight trace of mockery passed across the guest’s face. “No. Should I?”

The host looked towards the studio audience, trying to bring them in on the joke, trying to join them together with him in mockery of the guest in the time-honored tradition of the show. But they remained stony-faced, and with a small gulp of compressed nervousness the host pressed on. “I thought everybody watched my show.”

The guest stifled a yawn. “Not in the circles I move in, I’m afraid.”

“I see.” The host, never comfortable with criticism of his show, bit back a reply that may have offended some of the viewers. “And what circles might they be, Mr.…?”

“You can call me Curtis,” the guest said.

“Okay, Curtis. Now, about those circles?”

“The young future stars of tomorrow,” the guest said. Then locked eyes with the host. “Those on their way up.”

A brief pause followed.

But the host–and the audience–heard the subtext in the silence.

The implication that he, himself, was on the way down.

He swallowed again.

And asked:

“Any of them been in something I might have heard of?”

“Not yet,” Curtis said. “But things look good for some of them.”

“Yeah?” The host was beginning to lose his cool, could feel it leaking out of him. “They vampires, too?”

Curtis laughed, and the host was alarmed to see the audience tittering along with him. “No. But some of them are always asking me to turn them. Anything to get a leg up in the old entertainment game.”

The host grimaced. “They’d let you bite them for that?”

“Oh, come now, Des,” Curtis said, unnerving the host at the sound of his own name. “You telling me you haven’t done stuff untoward to get you where you are today?”

Des had indeed, and as a cornucopia of stabbed backs and broken promises ran through his mind, he opened his mouth to reply. But then he remembered who and where he was, and his tone was icy as he replied, “This show isn’t about me.”

“Right.” Curtis bowed his head in mock apology. “It’s about an up and coming star. One who got a call from a certain Pauly Wilcox the other day.”

Des blinked. “My producer?”

Curtis nodded. “And another call, from a Chester Best.”

The head of this channel, Des thought–who’s been on my back about the sliding ratings. Who shook his head whenever Des protested that the viewers had seen it all.

Looked like he was right.

Now Curtis stood, his mouth opening, something emerging from them.

Two huge and gleaming fangs.

“Would someone let a vampire bite them just to be on TV?” he sneered, mockingly inverting Des’s earlier question. “Of course they would!”

He pounced on Des, tearing into his neck.

Replacing him.

“And I did!”

The audience went wild, giving him a standing ovation.

And up in the monitoring room, Pauly Wilcox and Chester Best exchanged high fives.

That was the best audition they’d ever seen.

• Copyright: © 2010 Shaun Avery

“Murder one,” the voice cries in your head as you stare through the window at the stripping girl. “Take just one person’s life.”

Shivering in the cold, cradling the knife to your body, you remember that day. Remember the surprise you felt when the man calling himself Robinson walked into your house.

“Just one,” he told you, before reaching in his jacket. You gasped, thinking that he was reaching for a weapon. But what he produced was even more hurtful.

Pictures of your wife and two daughters.

It was the closest you’d come to them in weeks.

“Just one,” Robinson repeated. “And we’ll leave you–and these–alone.” Then his eyes met yours, seemingly seeing into the depths of your soul. “Maybe we can even help you win them back.”

“Nothing can do that,” you said.

“You’d be surprised what we can do.”

“We?” you countered. “Who’s we?”

His eyes gleamed. “The Murder One boys,” he declared. “All of those that came before you.”

His words made as much sense as the rest of your life had since Martina left: none. But his words struck a chord in you, and after Robinson departed, you couldn’t stop thinking about them. It was like something had been released inside you, and this was all you needed, the feeling that something was forcing your hand. Freeing you of all responsibility. Like maybe Robinson would be the one really doing the killing–you’d just be the middleman.

As you thought this, you saw the girl.

But you no longer saw her as a person.

Instead, you saw the reason you lived in solitude.

The reason your three lovely girls had left.

You’d tried to tell Martina that it wasn’t your fault, that she’d come on to you. But that no longer mattered–not when she’d caught you in the act.

“In our bed!” she’d screamed. Then launched a slap at you that nearly took your face off.

So now you’re alone. Alone and watching as Jess, the girl across the road, strips.

You walk in as if invited.

Robinson’s words ringing in your mind.

“Murder one. Just one.”

It’s all you need to hear.

Jess seems to be expecting you.

She lies back in her bed, purring, “I knew you’d come back for more.”

Looking like the cat that got the cream.

But when you mount her and unveil the knife, she gets something else entirely.

Next day, you feel good.

You even stop wondering if Robinson is watching you. If he even existed.

But you forgot to call in sick to work.

Cue the arrival of Hutchins, your boss.

He barges into your place, shouts into your face, “Where the hell were you, Cooper?”

You begin to tell him. To scrape and beg and apologize like so many times before.

Then you think, why the hell should I?

After what you’ve done, after getting away with murder, why let this bully grind you down?

Thinking this, you lash out at him.

He falls down.

Bleeding.

Which surprises you.

You can’t quite remember when–or why–you picked up the knife.

But it’s done now, and there’s no going back, so you continue to use it. And when you look through the hole in his flesh, you see Robinson opening the door.

A crony with him.

Robinson is handing money to the friend.

“I though you’d be different, man,” he says, shaking his head sadly. “I thought I was onto a winner this time.”

You look at him, confused.

And notice that his friend wears a police uniform.

It’s this man that says, “When will you learn? The losers I pick out can never stop at one.”

“Am I… under arrest?” you ask.

They look at each other, than laugh.

“Not yet,” the policeman says. “Not if you can keep up your payments.”

You look down at the knife in your hands.

Robinson laughs. “He’s thinking about killing us now!”

He’s right.

You were.

Welcome to Murder One.

• Copyright: © 2010 Shaun Avery

It drove me mad at first, did living with Cooper. The way everything had to be just so, the way he liked to clean everything. And then, three weeks in, the almighty scream he let out whilst in the kitchen.

Thinking murder had been committed, I ran in. “What?”

He was frantically rearranging the cutlery. “Eight items in each,” Cooper was saying, babbling. “Eight items in each.”

I watched, agog.

Whilst my friend thought it was pretty funny.

***

A few things about my friend.

I don’t know if you could call Mikey a “friend,” as such. He just turned up at my doorstep every payday, asking me out to play–a ritual he had been undertaking ever since our student days, when we’d first met.

I had to move here, into Cooper’s palace of OCD, when Mikey “borrowed” my rent money, prompting my out-of-pocket landlord to turn up, demanding the outstanding payment be extracted from my kneecaps. All well and good, I suppose. But when he saw the state that my friend had left the place in after his last party (I wasn’t invited), remaining there as a tenant was no longer an option. Hence my answering of Cooper’s “flatmate wanted” ad. Though, so far, “flatmates” was all we were to each other; actual friendship seemed out of the question.

Anyway, Cooper went mental on a payday, which put Mikey at my place, pigging out at my expense, feet up on the table and me too scared to ask him to move them. Not scared of him as a person, scared that he’d take his friendship away. Leave me alone.

Until I met Rowena.

She helped kill the fear.

Mikey was dismissive, not liking her much. Saying “you can do much better, mate,” before trying to set me up with his preferred choices.

Rowena pointed out his reasoning for this. “He doesn’t like you spending money on me, John. On us, I mean. That’s money you’re not spending on him anymore.”

I saw her point.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised when Mikey started sucking up to Cooper.

Either trying to make me jealous, or else wanting Cooper to pay his way, like I’d been doing for years.

Helping my flatmate do the washing up, all coy and smile as he simpered, “Eight items in each, right, Coop?”

Coop.

I don’t think he’d ever truncated my nickname.

But I let him have his fun. Until the night I came home and found them in bed together.

***

“I’m sorry, John.”

Breathing on my neck.

“It didn’t mean anything.”

Moving whilst speaking. Moving away.

“Please talk to me.”

Reaching the door.

“I’ll do it. I will, damn it. I’ll open this door and walk right out if you don’t talk to me now!”

Delivering an ultimatum, as if I was in the wrong.

But I didn’t want to talk.

I just sat back and watched Rowena leave.

One more thing my so-called friend had taken away from me.

My self-respect, my flat, my ability to make friends other than him, and now this.

Then I went out of my room. Hoping Mikey had had the decency, after betraying me in my own bed, to leave the flat.

He had.

Surprisingly.

There was only Cooper.

Doing his dishes.

I watched him.

And was suddenly inspired.

***

Mikey screamed against the gag as the first knife sank into his body.

I’d bought seven more on the way over here.

Maybe living with Cooper wasn’t quite as bad as I’d thought.

• Copyright: © 2010 Shaun Avery

The basement was silent now, but the atmosphere hung heavily around it, weighty with the memories of stories told, confessions made, souls all too temporarily cleansed. Only Bernard remained, waiting to talk about his secret mission.

Above him, Father Abe said goodbye and goodnight to the last of the members–who possibly left wondering why Bernard, a nobody by all accounts, had been asked to remain behind these last two meetings.

He had wondered the same thing, himself. But that hadn’t stopped him following Abe’s instructions.

Behind him, Abe walked down the stairs, his return heralded by the tapping of his walking stick against the wooden stairs. “Well, Bernard? How did it go?”

He leant forward in the rickety old chair, pressing his hands together and placing them between chubby knees. “It went well, Father.” Then added, as the older man came to stand behind him, “I found three, just like you asked.”

The Father tutted, and Bernard shrunk into himself, thinking that he’d messed up. But when Abe slowly shuffled around to sit in front of him, he saw that it was not anger on the old man’s face but disappointment.

“You found that many?”

“Yes, Father.”

Abe shook his head. “It is a sad world we live in.”

Nodding in agreement, Bernard studied his mentor.

Stories differed about the man’s history; all that was really known was that drink had driven him out of the priesthood, and now in his sober days he tried to redeem himself by leading the AA meetings here. But recently, he told Bernard the first time he asked him to stay after the meeting, being reactive to people’s problems had ceased to be enough; now he wanted to be proactive, to help those who would not admit they had a problem.

Now, he stood.

Held out his hand.

“You have the addresses of all three?”

“Yes, Father. I followed them home to make sure.”

“Good.” Abe smiled. “Let me have the details.”

It was closing time for real then, and as Bernard left Abe alone in the darkness of the meeting basement, he reflected on something: one fact that all the stories about Abe agreed on was he was a very kind human being.

They were wrong on both counts.

The door swung open.

A boozy, bloodshot face appeared.

“Yeah? You know what time it is?”

A pleasant smile frozen in place on his face, Abe looked down at the details given to him by Bernard. “Des Wilkins?”

The face turned suspicious. “Who’s asking?”

“I believe you spoke to a friend of mine recently: a Bernard Bridges?”

“That weasel in the bar? The guy said I was a drunk? You with him? Well, like I told him, buddy: I don’t want saved.”

“Good,” Abe replied. “Because I don’t want to save you.” And as the smile on the old man’s face became something unspeakable, Des Wilkins screamed.

And awoke tied to a chair.

Flanked by two other bound men.

Abe–or the thing inside Abe–watched them.

So tragic and pathetic, these humans–trying to fill the vacancies in their souls with various addictions. Well, he would fill them with something else.

He readied the scalpel and surgical mask that he’d removed from storage earlier this evening. To catch the blood.

These three weakened vessels, useless on their own, would make one great new whole for him, and the body known as Abe, who had also been a splice of three hopeless addicts, would vanish forever. For it was old now, faltering, succumbing to Earth’s wretched aging process. Hence his need to find new victims. Ones that couldn’t be traced back to his AA meetings. Which pretty soon would have a new leader. And if Bernard should tell any tales… well, who would believe the most pathetic of the group’s members?

He advanced, and six eyes grew wide as they watched the creature move, carrying rebirth–sharp, shiny rebirth–in the dark claws of his hands.

• Copyright: © 2010 Shaun Avery