Read Online Fires Rising by Michael Laimo - Free Book Online Page A

hip. A burst of pain shot across his midsection and he grunted out loud. The dead flashlight he'd left there toppled in with a clunk.
    "You all right?"
    Breathing deeply despite the stench, Jyro angled the penlight's beam toward the backed-up toilet. Motioning with his head, he replied, "No. Not at all."
    Timothy's eyes traced the beam. After a deadly pause, he whimpered, "Dear God..."
    Beneath the diffused glow of the penlight was the puddle of blood. It was pooled around base of the toilet: a foul moat welling and rippling like a gush of dark lava. Thin streaks of it flowed up along the porcelain surface like veins, glistening as they vanished over the soiled rim, into the sludge.
    In a sudden sweat, Jyro uttered crazily, "Drink this, for this is my blood."
    As If in response, the sludge in the toilet gurgled. Once at first, and then twice, and then like a science experiment gone bad, the horrid stuff spewed over the brim of the toilet onto the floor, soaking up what remained of the stirring blood.
    Looking bewildered and nervous, Timothy stuck the rosary out. Its small charms dangled like pods in his shaking hand. Jyro heard him utter something but couldn't make it out over the bubbling sounds the sludge was making. He stepped back and hit against the doorjamb, unable peel his eyes away from the erupting sewage.
    Timothy leaned forward, arm still outstretched, fear and curiosity painted on his face like grease. He shook his head back and forth.
    "What's happening?" Jyro's eyes darted between the boy and the toilet. For a crazy moment, he hoped for all this to be some run of the mill plumbing issue, one they could walk away from once and forever, never to look back. But his instincts told him otherwise: If this were your ordinary backed-up toilet, you wouldn't have felt compelled to come in here in the first place. There was blood on the floor, and you saw it seep in here as if it were alive. And when you came in here, you saw it rise up to meet the sludge, and the sludge move down to meet it.
    The blood. That which brings life.
    Timothy didn't reply. Jyro pressed him, more urgently now. "What do you see, kid?"
    "I don't know ," he answered sharply, and then the toilet exploded, spraying them with shards of porcelain and thick, brown sludge.
    Jyro screamed so loudly it hurt his throat. Both he and Timothy cowered and screened themselves with their arms. Shouts erupted from the hallway. Jyro heard someone call out, "What the hell's going on in there?" but no one ventured in to investigate.
    "Kid, c'mon!" Jyro grabbed Timothy by the arm. The slanted beam of the penlight bobbed and weaved across the bathroom walls. "We need to get out of here!"
    Timothy didn't move. Terror had him: eyes bulging, body trembling like a bundle of charged wires, mouth downcast as if weighted.
    Jyro shook him, but the boy remained unresponsive. A whisper fell from his lips, "Oh my God…"
    There was a dull sound, an odd shaking thump that Jyro felt in his feet. He looked toward the toilet…and saw something rising up from its shattered remains: a hideous bulk of malformed legs —vestiges of some freshly slaughtered carcass bound together like a hunter's bounty. The thing was moving , shaking loose its foul coating of waste…and then the animal legs—those of deer's perhaps—rendered themselves apart from one another with brutal tearing sounds: Phrrrrak! Phrrrrak! Huge claws burst out of the thing. They latched onto the edge of the shattered porcelain and pushed upward, the central bulk from which they surfaced rooting firmly into the toilet's plumbing. Jyro gasped as the massive thing rose up to the ceiling, a misshapen lump of feces wrenching back and forth and to and fro like a birthing animal, black craggy slabs of sewage sliding from its splitting surface, leaving behind slick patches of blood.
    He spun away from the thing, a silent scream snared in his throat. He lunged for the exit but the door slammed shut in his face with a deafening