Gathering Dark, Candice Fox [inspirational books for students .TXT] 📗

“Drop her!” she shouted. An absurd part of her brain noted she was talking as if to a dog. A wolf. A werewolf. “Drop her! Stand back!”

The man raised his bloody face. The old woman in his hands bucked, tried to shift away. Too weak. Almost dead. Every vein in the man’s body was sticking out like a slick blue rope on his sweat-soaked skin. He wasn’t seeing Jessica. He was trapped in his fantasy.

“Back up now or I’ll shoot!”

The man lifted the woman to his lips. Jessica fired over his head, hit a dart board hanging on the wall, sending it clanging to the ground. He got up, staggered away from the noise. She fired again and hit him in the left shoulder. The bullet flecked his shirt with blood, embedded itself in the muscle. He didn’t flinch. The man came for her, gathering speed in three long strides. She fired again, a double tap in the chest. A kill shot. He kept coming. A big hand seized her face and shoved her into the wall, then dragged her toward him with the strength of an inhuman thing.

She thought of Wallert as the man’s teeth bit down into the flesh of her bicep. Her partner out there, somewhere in the dark, laughing at her.

Jessica grabbed at the man’s rock-hard shoulders and landed a knee in his crotch. They went to the ground, rolled on the floor together. He pinned her on her front, his belt buckle jutting into her hip. Another bite on her left shoulder blade, the pop sound of the fabric as his teeth cut clean through her shirt. Jessica pushed off the ground the few inches she could manage and smacked her elbow into the man’s face. The crunch of his nasal bone. He bit her left shoulder. Clamping down, trying to tear the flesh away, a good mouthful. She looked into the eyes of the now-dead old woman only feet away from her and thought again about how no one was coming.

He tried to get on top of her, accidentally nudging her dropped gun within reach. Jessica grabbed the weapon and twisted under him, put the gun to his forehead as the teeth came down again toward her.

She fired.

BLAIR

I started missing kids the morning after I was arrested. Nine years as a surgeon, four of those as a pediatric specialist, had brought me into contact with tens of thousands of children: mopey, sick teenagers and mewling newborns and wide-eyed, excited eight-year-olds whooping as they were wheeled down the hospital corridors on stretchers, their white-knuckled parents following. In an instant, my world was full of angry adults. For nine years the only kids I saw were behind scratched, faded glass in the prison visiting room or in the pictures fellow inmates stuck to the walls beside their bunks.

When I found my apartment in Crenshaw, there was plenty I didn’t like about it. Dangerous-looking men in long white T-shirts rode bicycles up and down the street, monitoring activity closely. The bathroom ceiling inside the apartment was black with mold. The whole place was exposed red brick on the inside, even the shower cubicle; the walls, close and impenetrable. On the day I inspected the property, a cockroach was swimming weakly in the dripping kitchen sink, and when I tried to flush the pathetic creature down the drain the real estate agent assured me he’d be back—he was a permanent housemate. I was about to shake hands with the agent and leave when a troupe of children came out of the apartment next door, each carrying a guitar case the length of their body, letting the screen door slap shut behind them, to the grumblings of the old man inside. From the lawn, after the real estate agent left, I watched the children waiting for their rides, saw a teenager arriving for her guitar lesson, a bright-red electric guitar slung over her shoulder. I called the agent and took the apartment right there.

The day after the robbery at the Pump’n’Jump, I was standing at the kitchen counter drinking a coffee and watching the morning news on the TV when a small, familiar knock came at my door. I crossed the apartment in five strides and found my usual Saturday morning visitor: a small Asian boy named Quincy, clutching his ukulele.

“Are you ready?” he asked, as he always did. I leaned in the doorway, still half listening to the news. Something about an elderly couple and a cop attacked and bitten by a crazed drug addict. Typical Los Angeles stuff.

“I’m always ready for you, Quince,” I said.

Quincy hefted his ukulele against his small chest and played “Somewhere over the Rainbow” haltingly, skipping the part about bluebirds completely. Upon finishing, he flashed me a set of big white teeth and bowed. I put my coffee on a shelf beside the door and clapped.

“Boy, when you’re a super-cool solo performer doing gigs downtown, I’ll buy you a martini,” I said as I retrieved the box I kept on the shelf. “But right now all I’ve got is chocolate.”

“What’s a martini?”

“It’s a special drink for grown-ups.”

“My dad drinks beer and my mom drinks wine. Lots of wine.” He rolled his eyes.

“She’s my kind of woman.”

“I’ll just have chocolate, please.”

“You got it, buddy,” I said. He dug around for a while in my collection of goodies, trying to decide on a reward, making the wrappers crinkle. “What’s for homework this week?”

“‘What a Wonderful World,’” he said, selecting a Twix.

“Good song,” I said. “Can’t wait.”

Quincy waved and ran to the corner to wait for his ride. I stood in the sunshine for a while, still watching the news. I knew that bribing kids to give me mini-concerts on my doorstep after their guitar lessons was weird, and potentially dangerous. It would only take one parent who heard I was a violent ex-con paying for child interactions with candy, and a world of trouble would erupt. The old guy