Read Online Apocalypse Weird: Genesis (The White Dragon Book 1) by Stefan Bolz - Free Book Online

that held his head within her hands? He could feel the pressure increase inside his temples. The woman smiled. But now the teeth were rotten and pointy, a foul stench emanating from her mouth. Her eyes took on a yellowish tone. Her nails dug into the skin of his face, her right thumb pushing into the eye that was swollen.
    Jack couldn’t scream. His vocal cords didn’t belong to him anymore. He couldn’t get any air either. And while the woman screamed in utter rage, she — it — stood up. Jack saw what he later remembered as hooves. They disappeared too fast for it to become a solid memory. But deep inside, he knew he had seen them.
    “He will give it to me,” she said. Her voice was much deeper than before. “He will not want the pain anymore.”
    The men came back. Two of them pulled Jack up and tied his hands to the pipe, securing his legs to the floor.
    “He will give it to me,” it said again. “Or his mind will seize upon itself long before I will feed upon his flesh.”
    The lights came back on. Jack shut his eyes. But when he did, he looked straight into an abyss. He saw himself cowering at its edge with nothing to hold on to. He felt its pull on him. Hands grasped for him from below. “Come down to us,” the voices whispered. “There will be no pain.”
     
    Over the next six hours, Jack learned several things. If he tilted his head downward and away from the lights and opened his left eye slightly —actually, he was able to open his right eye a tiny bit as well — he saw a blurred image of the floor and his knees. He didn’t have to look into the abyss and the bright light was bearable. The pain in his knees and arms were a different story. They had become a red maelstrom in his mind, a vortex into which every thought he tried to hold on to fled. He wished to slip away, to let go and somehow lose consciousness. But he knew he wasn’t there yet. It would take longer. He began to look forward to it. Death and oblivion seemed like a release.
    There was a movie theater in Albuquerque that only showed Kung Fu films. Jack had been there many times as a kid. His favorites were the ones with Shaolin monks. In one of them, called The 36th Chamber of Shaolin , the main character, San Te, wished to enter the monastery and live there to learn Kung Fu. But in order to be accepted, he, together with all the others who wanted to join, had to kneel outside its walls for days on end with nothing to eat or drink. That was the first test to becoming a Shaolin monk.
    As a kid, Jack had dreamed of traveling to China and entering the order of the Shaolin. He wanted to learn Kung Fu, mainly because of the bullies in his class. Until he hit fifteen, he was smaller than most of the other kids. He also stuttered. Not much but enough to be teased relentlessly. During projects, when he had to give a presentation in front of his class, he froze after the first few words, unable to continue, to the laughter and ridicule of the others.
    Someone turned the lights off. One of the men grabbed Jack’s head and jerked it up.
    “You gonna take it off?” the man shouted. Jack felt the spit on his face when he spoke. “Hey, I’m talkin’ to you. You gonna take it off?”
    “Why don’t you take it off yourself,” Jack replied. “What do I care?” He didn’t have anything left. He didn’t think he could open the catch on the necklace even if he wanted to. The question of why he had to be the one taking it off and not them hadn’t yet entered his mind.
    The man cut Jack’s ties and removed the bar above his knees. Jack slumped to the ground. Someone poured a bucket of water over his head and chest. The cold made him jerk onto his side. The steps moved away. He was left with silence.
    In The 36th Chamber of Shaolin , after day five of waiting outside the monastery, someone came out with a large pot of rice. Most of the candidates were completely exhausted at that point. They crawled toward the pot, grabbing the rice with