“My dear boy, how could I know when and where a t-tornado would strike?”
“I don’t know, but we wouldn’t be in this mess if not for you. And another thing–”
“Emma, child,” Polonius said, looking at her. “Is that b-blood on your shirt?”
Emma looked down and gasped. Yes… dark, reddish brown stains on the lower right of her shirt, near her beltline.
“Em!” Ryan cried. “Did something bite you?”
She lifted her shirt and gasped again when she saw a bloody bandage. Gingerly, she lifted a corner of the bandage and looked beneath. A one-inch slice ran down her appendectomy scar. Thin little strips of tape held the edges together.
“I’ve been cut! And bandaged up again!”
“You mean somebody operated on you?” Ryan said, leaning forward for a look.
She pushed him back. “Don’t look. I don’t want you hurling on me.”
“Operated?” he repeated. “Really?”
“Yes! Right where my appendix was removed!”
Ryan shook his head. “That’s crazy!”
“As I recall,” Dr. Polonius said, “you both had appendicitis at the s-same time, didn’t you? I remember hearing the story from Telly.”
Emma nodded.
Five years ago on a family camping trip they’d both come down with terrible belly pain. Mom and Dad thought it was some sort of food poisoning. Lucky for them a doctor – a surgeon – had been camping nearby. He made the diagnosis, rushed them to his clinic, and operated on both of them. He told them their appendices had ruptured and if they’d waited much longer, they would have developed peritonitis – whatever that was – and might have died.
“And you say s-someone cut into the scar?”
“Yes!” Emma said. “I can see that it’s very shallow – doesn’t go all the way through. Why would somebody do that?”
“Most unusual. I c-can’t imagine any reason.”
Ryan said, “You’re assuming whoever did this is sane. Would a nossie or a necro have any reason to do something like that?”
Polonius shook his head. “Not being either, I couldn’t possibly say.”
“More likely it was a pluriban,” Cal said.
Polonius glanced at him. “Why do you s-say that?”
“Well, they’re always cutting people up for parts.”
“But Emma still has all her p-parts.”
Cal threw up his hands. “Well, then, I don’t know.”
Emma pulled her shirt down and leaned back. She’d been kidnapped and someone had cut into an old scar. It totally scared her and creeped her out. What else had they done to her while she was unconscious?
And then she remembered something…
“Did anything bad happen today?”
Ryan and Cal looked at each other. “We had a bad run-in with the Uberalls. And then–”
“No, I mean big bad – like a cataclysm.”
“How do you mean?” Dr. Polonius said.
How could she explain this? “After I woke up I started walking. I didn’t know where I was or where I was going but I knew I had to move. I hadn’t been walking long when I was knocked clear off my feet by this… feeling.”
“‘Feeling’?” Polonius said.
Ryan cleared his throat. “Emma gets ‘feelings’ about things that are going to happen.”
“This wasn’t going to happen – I could almost feel it happening right then.”
“That is called clairvoyance,” said Polonius.
Emma continued to stare off as if experiencing it again. “It felt… far away… something awful. Hasn’t anything been on the news?”
“We were too busy looking for you,” Ryan said. “But there’s a radio in the dash. Let’s see.”
They didn’t have to wait for the news. It seemed all everyone was talking about was the explosive obliteration of Mount Evers in The H’malya mountain range at the northern end of the Yeti-Rakshasa Commonwealth. The damage was so extensive that no one had been able yet to assess it in any credible way.
Dr. Polonius reached out, turned it off. He looked shaken. “It’s happening.”
“What?” Ryan said.
“The end.”
“End of what?”
“Everything – if the rest of The H’malyas go at once.”
“He’s right,” Emma said. “More of the same ahead, all over Nocturnia.”
“A ‘feeling?’” Ryan said.
She nodded. “A very bad feeling.”
Among the million questions buzzing through her head – especially about what Dr. Polonius was doing in Nocturnia – Telly kept popping up.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “His last words to me were ‘find Emma.’”
“Then we’ve got to let him know. He’ll be worried sick.”
“I’m sure he is,” Cal said. “But he’s got other things to occupy his mind at the moment.”
“Like what?” She looked at Cal, whose expression was unreadable.
Ryan squeezed her hand and that scared her. He never squeezed her hand. “What, Ryan?”
“Telly’s a lycan.”
“What?!”
Emma listened in mute shock as Ryan told her – and Cal confirmed – what had happened to Telly among the Uberalls.
“But…but that can’t be!” she said when they were finished.
“Exactly what we said,” Cal told her, “but seeing is believing.”
What was happening to her life – to all their lives? Trapped in this nightmare world where someone had knocked her out and cut her, where her brother had become a werewolf, a world that was going to blow itself apart before too long.
“Someone tell me this is all a bad dream and I’ll wake up soon!”
But no one said anything.
Because this was no dream.
end of
Book Two
Coming soon, the last of the trilogy:
The Silent Ones
also by Thomas F. Monteleone
Novels
Submerged
Serpentine
The Eyes of the Virgin
The Reckoning
Night of Broken Souls
The Resurrectionist
The Blood of the Lamb
Fantasma
Dragonstar Destiny
The Magnificent Gallery
Crooked House
Lyrica
Terminal Road
Night of the Dragonstar
Night Train
Day of the Dragonstar
Ozymandias
Night Things
Guardian
The Secret Sea
The Time-Swept City
The Time Connection
Seeds of Change
Nocturnia
Definitely Not Kansas (with F. Paul Wilson)
Family Secrets (with F. Paul Wilson)
Short Story Collections
Fearful Symmetries
The Little Brown Book of Bizarre Stories
Rough Beasts & Other Mutations
Dark Stars and Other Illuminations
Non-Fiction
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Novel
The Mothers and Fathers Italian Association
Anthologies (as editor)
Borderlands 5
Borderlands 4
Borderlands 3
Borderlands 2
Borderlands 1
Random Access Messages
The Arts and Beyond
also by F. Paul Wilson
The Adversary Cycle
The Keep
Reborn
The Tomb
The Touch
Reprisal
Nightworld
Repairman Jack
The Tomb
Legacies
Conspiracies
All the Rage
Hosts
The Haunted Air
Gateways
Crisscross
Infernal
Harbingers
Bloodline
By the Sword
Ground Zero
Fatal Error
The Dark at the End
Nightworld
Quick Fixes – Tales of Repairman Jack
The Teen Trilogy
Jack: Secret Histories
Jack: Secret Circles
Jack: Secret Vengeance
The Early Years Trilogy
Cold City
Dark City
Fear City
The LaNague Federation Series
An Enemy of the State
Healer
Wheels Within Wheels
Dydeetown World
The Tery
Other Novels
Black Wind
Sibs
The Select
Virgin
Implant
Deep as the Marrow
Nightkill (with Steven Spruill)
Mirage (with Matthew J. Costello)
DNA Wars (formerly Masque with Matthew J. Costello)
Sims
The Fifth Harmonic
Midnight Mass
The Proteus Cure (with Tracy L. Carbone)
A Necessary End (with Sarah Pinborough)
Definitely Not Kansas (with Tom Monteleone)
Draculas (with Crouch, Kilborn, Strand)
Panacea
Short Fiction
Soft & Others
The Barrens & Others
Aftershock & Others
The Peabody-Ozymandias Traveling Circus & Oddity Emporium
Quick Fixes – Tales of Repairman Jack
Sex Slaves of the Dragon Tong
The Christmas Thingy
Editor
Freak Show
Diagnosis: Terminal
The Hogben Chronicles (with Pierce Watters)
Omnibus Editions
The Complete LaNague
Calling Dr. Death (3 medical thrillers)
(back to contents)