Nearafter (D.E.A.T.H. bk. 1)

Chapter Fifteen: [Sam]

Somewhere in the darkness a disembodied voice called to Samantha.

She felt herself groping in the blackness around her, reaching out for something tangible, though her fingers felt only cold, empty air.

Her back was to a wall, hard and uneven. She felt jagged stones dig into her spine. The back of her head throbbed with pain. The voice was getting louder now, but she still felt no one there, and she couldn't move. She tried to scream and suddenly there was pressure on her shoulder, like some invisible force was reaching out from the blackness all around just to violently shake her.

The voice called to her again, so close now that she could probably reach out and touch whoever it was that was calling to her. If she could just...

Samantha opened her eyes and found herself staring into the familiar wrinkled face of an old man. She recognized the old man almost immediately as the guy who had bothered her at the service desk earlier, dressed in old, worn-out camouflage jacket and trousers and complaining of the painful lumps on his lower back. She had shooed him away, as if he were a stray dog bothering her in the street. But he stood over her now, more hunched than standing. In one hand he held a shotgun that she only just noticed, the other continuously nudged at her shoulder.

Upon seeing the shotgun, her eyes went wide, and she tried to scramble to her feet, but the old man was stronger than he looked. With just the one hand he held her down. He shook his head.

"Don't you go tryin' to rush into things too quickly now," he said. "You took a mighty big blow to the head, and you'll pass out again if you go to standing up too quickly," he warned her. Samantha was confused.

Was he the one that had me? She wondered. And why, or how, for that matter? And what the hell was he doing with a shotgun!

The answer to all her questions lay twitching on the ground next to her. She turned her head, which was a mistake, she soon realized the moment that the pounding in her brain started... and saw him. A boy, a few years older than her, laying there, with his left leg spasming as if it had a mind of its own, while the rest of his body lay still.

The old man helped her to her feet.

"Easy there," he said. Samantha's head spun again and the pounding in her ears was like a chorus of gongs going off at the same time. She felt sick to her stomach and stumbled to the side, but the old man was there to right her. He'd dropped the shotgun, as his hand flashed to his hip where a pain must have suddenly erupted. The man groaned. "Damn these old bones," the old man muttered.

Staring down at the body on the ground, Samantha realized that she knew the kid from school. She didn't know him personally, of course. He was three grades ahead of her and on the varsity baseball team, so, she only knew of him, the way every small town knows of its student athletes/heroes. He'd been kind of cute when he was alive. But she couldn't say that now. He was missing his head, and it was nowhere to be seen. Not that Samantha wanted to find it, though it was a disgusting yet curious sight to behold, nonetheless.

She assumed the old man had blown the kid's head off with his shotgun, except the way that the neck had been cut clean, all the way through, only something like a guillotine could have done that. Then again, maybe someone had chopped his head off. Though upon closer inspection, Samantha could see the broken stitching in his skin where the boy's head had clearly been sewn back to the neck long before the old man had shot him, which would mean... No.

It didn't make any sense. It wasn't logical.

The confusion in her own head caused the pounding in her ears to grow anew. Her stomach flipped and she turned to puke without warning. The old man was there to pat her back as she spewed chunks in the parking lot of the clinic. When the wave of nausea finally passed, he walked her to his truck and sat her in the passenger seat. He grabbed an emergency cool pack from his glove compartment and pressed the cold bag to the back of her head.