Wolf Angel, Mark Hobson [best free ebook reader for pc .txt] 📗

he felt his eyelids drooping, and so he put the TV on standby, kicked off his shoes and, too tired to even head to his bedroom, he lay back on the couch and was asleep within seconds.

Once again he dreamt.

As before, his dream was in monochrome, and all jerky like an old silent movie.

Stepping from bright sunlight into a dark world. With walls on either side, hemming him in tighter and tighter, he moved along the twisting passageway, deeper and deeper into the bowels of the rank underworld of the city.

The smell was appalling, making him retch. A stench like vomit and piss and animal shit. When he reached out to touch the walls he found them all sticky and slimy, and his fingertips came away smeared with something like thick mucus.

On he went, drawn inwards.

The passage was part of a huge and corrupt living thing, the walls becoming narrower but pulsing and sucking. From somewhere ahead came a dull and rhythmic thud, faint but growing louder with each step he took. A heartbeat.

Turning his head to the left and right, he saw windows that lined the walls, with the girl’s faces and bodies pressed against the glass. Beckoning him inside, their lithe body’s dancing seductively.

Just ahead the passageway entered a curved brick tunnel, and beyond the darkness was infinite, stretching away to nothing.

He hesitated.

Hearing a shuffling noise, bare feet scraping and sliding across the ancient cobbles underfoot.

From out of the pitch darkness emerged a naked woman, with dark hair and smoky eyes and pouted lips entrancing him with their beauty. He knew this was Mila, the girl from Estonia, and she smiled as though she recognized him too.

Unable to prevent himself, his gaze shifted downwards, over her breasts, and lower across her stomach. Yet there was no stomach, just a gaping wound, glistening like raw meat, parts of her ribs and spine showing through. From her butchered belly slithered coils of her intestines, and she held them out as though offering them to him.

From behind her stumbled a naked man. He was twitching and jitterbugging, his eyeballs bulging and their pupils shrunk to tiny pinpricks, like a person tripping on drugs. Between his legs was a bloody hole where he’d been castrated.

After him came his father, hunched over on spindly legs, a twisted and stooped old man with a wasted face. His bare skin was starting to corrupt to a sickly grey and green colour, and parts of his flesh had been eaten away, nibbled by tiny creatures. In his wake he left damp footprints on the ground.

Finally the fat jeweller, his huge and bloated body rippling and trembling, with his arms  outstretched as he groped around like a blind man, for his eyes had been gouged out. He tried to speak, but all that came out of his mouth was a quiet mewling noise.

They came out of the shadows, their hands reaching forward to grab him, their cold, dead fingers probing his face and mouth and eyes.

Pulling him back into the dank tunnel.

Pieter awoke with a loud yell, twisting and thrashing and pushing the hands away.

He sat bolt upright and looked around at his surroundings, and then remembered falling asleep on the couch. The living room light was still on, and the wall clock told him it was the very early hours of the morning.

Slowly his heartbeat came back to normal and he sat forward and rubbed at his face, his eyes blinking away the residual images of the dream.

He heard the door opening behind him and he turned to see Lotte standing there with a concerned frown on her face. She moved towards the couch and placed her hand gently on his back.

“I heard you shouting.”

“Sorry,” he mumbled sleepily.

“Bad dream?”

“You could say that.”

She gave his shoulder a comforting squeeze and came around to the front. “Budge up.”

Pieter shifted across and she squashed in next to him, the hem of her nightie rising over her thighs. She pressed against him and hugged him tightly.

“It’s been a long day for you.”

“The longest of my life,” he corrected with the faintest of smiles. “A tough few days in fact.”

“I waited up. I didn’t want to text you, thought you’d be swamped with work, but you should have woke me when you got back.” She took a hold of his hand and splayed her fingers between his, squeezing them affectionately. “But never mind.”

Pieter wrapped his other arm around her and held her tightly, and his body gave a huge shiver as the tension came out. Then he stretched his legs out, the last dregs from the bad dream slowly evaporating from memory.

“I heard about everything on my way over, and then spent most of the evening watching the news. Was kinda hoping to catch a glimpse of you, maybe the big hero being interviewed, having your fifteen minutes.”

“Well it wasn’t quite like that. To be honest, everything is such a whirl that my head’s still spinning. I think I mostly acted on instinct…and training.”

Lotte looked up at him earnestly, her big eyes roving over his face, and that worried frown back on her brow. “Tell me what happened.”

Pieter told her everything. From his and Daan Beumers meeting with Levi Kohnstaam earlier in the day, the phone call from Beumers telling him about tailing their suspect to Schreierstoren Tower, his panicked drive over and hoping to catch his colleague before he did anything rash. The fierce gun battle that had developed, followed by him chasing one of the gunmen, and the youth’s shocking leap to his death. Then later seeing his dead friend. He explained a little about the massive manhunt currently underway, how the whole country was on high alert. He finished by telling her that the investigation was massively complex and there was no end in sight just yet.

Lotte listened attentively, without asking any questions, happy to let him talk and get things out of his system. When he was done, she prodded him in the stomach.

“You know, you can’t