Read Online Almost Everything by Tate Hallaway - Free Book Online

down to wiggle through seemed like a recipe for getting grabbed. How was I going to do this fast? Was there another way?
    I could feel myself slowing down as I anticipated the problem. Someone got a hold of my ankle. My foot slipped through the grasp, but it was too late. I could feel myself falling. I wasn’t quite close enough to slide underneath, baseball-style, but I did manage to hurl myself close enough that I was able to grab the links of the chain and hold on tight. Hands closed around my legs and started to pull. I heaved myself in the other direction with all the strength of desperation.
    Teeth grazed my jeans, and I started kicking. Someone grunted in pain as my sneaker connected to a jaw or teeth; I wasn’t sure which. But I took advantage of the moment and dragged myself under. Of course, to do this while still holding on to the fence, I had to twist around. For the first time since I started running, I was face-to-face with the seething mass of pale flesh grasping hungrily at me. I was glad I hadn’t given in to my earlier impulses, because the shocking sight of the naked, twisting forms just about caused me to lose my stranglehold on the fence. I screamed despite myself.
    Whenone of the vamps managed to puncture the cloth of my Converses, I realized that giving in to that panic had cost me precious time and breath. I redoubled my efforts to pull myself the rest of the way through the fence. My shoe came loose. I pulled myself upright and then scampered with one stocking foot for the shaft of sunlight that had slanted into the tunnel.
    I’d been
so
smart up to this point that I can’t quite tell you why, but when I reached the outside, I stopped and turned around. Maybe I just felt as if I’d made it to gool, base, safe. Or perhaps I was just curious to see the effect of sun on vampires. I leaned against the mouth of the tunnel to catch my breath and watch.
    I think I was hoping for something spectacular—bodies bursting into flame or instantly crumbling to dust. At the very least, I thought they’d … stop.
    To be fair, most of them did halt just at the edge of where light cut the darkness. But many more than I would have liked barreled right out into the morning sun. A woman managed to tackle me before I could get over my surprise enough to make an escape. I landed hard on the tracks with her full weight on top of me.
    The wind was knocked from my lungs, and, as I gasped for breath, I had a close-up view of her face. The sun definitely had an effect on her.
    She lookedlike a corpse.
    I mean, technically, that was what they all were—sort of. As I’d said, a vampire had explained the process to me, and it involved human sacrifices who were taken over by the entity—the vampire—brought by the witches’ talisman from beyond the Veil. The original human body didn’t die, but that person was gone, overcome, emptied.
    I could see the truth of that with the daylight on her face. Her eyes looked glassy and dead. There was a gray cast to her skin.
    The sight shocked me so much that, at first, I forgot to fight. In those few precious seconds, the other vampires who had ventured out came to her aid. She leaped off my chest and grabbed the waist of my jeans, clearly intending to haul me back inside the lip of the cave. Someone had my feet again. My head bumped on the ties and gravel as I was being inched closer to the hungry horde waiting in the shadows.
    I started flailing and screaming. My fingers scrabbled painfully as I grasped for the steel rail or anything. Where were the police when you needed them? Or even a helpful passerby?
    But it turned out I didn’t need either. Without warning, the woman let go. She clutched her own stomach instead. Her body was shaking violently, and then she lost it.
    She puked all over.
    And what came up was blood.
    It splashed myone remaining shoe, my socks, and everything. I jumped back, suddenly able to find my feet because the other vampires either rushed to help her