Read Online Lost Cargo by Hollister Ann Grant, Gene Thomson - Free Book Online

34th Street signal glowed through the haze across the silent intersection, quite a change from daytime when the crossroads streamed with traffic.
    He stared back down the hill. Maybe they could shake whatever was following them if they got off Porter. He took her hand and headed up 34th Street. The fog grew thicker. Macomb Street was somewhere nearby. They could forget the cell phone and go back to her house. It was closer than his place.
    The sound of claws came after them. His heart was racing a hundred miles an hour. When he looked over his shoulder, he still couldn’t see anything. They stepped up their pace. Darkened condominiums gave way to homes surrounded by towering magnolias and the deep shadows of walled gardens. Hiding places, but he wasn’t stopping. If a dog was after them, it would be able to smell them out.
    The hill sharply rose. Then 34th Street forked, and he realized they were on the wrong side of the road.
    To reach Burke and Lexie’s house, they would have to take the right fork and dash across the pavement, where the streetlights would expose them in the middle of the road. They continued up the left fork, heading in the opposite direction from the way he wanted to go.
    “What are we doing?” she whispered.
    “Listen,” he said. The footfalls came to a halt and started again. He turned, trying to locate the sound.
    “Do you hear anything?” she asked.
    “I’m not sure,” he lied, but when he saw her face he knew she could hear it, too. They began to run uphill, hand in hand, past brick walkways and arched doorways and shuttered windows, racing over the grass to muffle the sound of their shoes, covering several blocks in silent panic until they doubled over, gasping for breath.
    Lexie clutched the camera. “Where are we? How did we get lost in our own neighborhood?”
    “I hear something,” he said, his skin prickling. “It’s coming after us.”
    A street sign materialized out of the night.
    “Newark!” she said. “We’re all turned around.”
    They began to climb the steep hill, past more nineteenth-century homes that rose like magnificent ships sailing in a sea of fog. The block was too long. His sides ached. Lexie struggled beside him with her damp hair plastered to her coat. The fogbank closed in behind them as they pushed up the hill.
    The sound of claws turned up Newark.
    A dog, Travis told himself. Some crazy dog hellbent on catching them. He hoped it wasn’t a pit bull. The thing could probably smell them and hear them no matter what they did. He tried to swallow his panic, but he was running out of ideas. The hill leveled off and fell away into a shallow valley bordered by dark woods. He knew Newark Street went on for blocks until it ran into Wisconsin Avenue, a busy commercial boulevard far out of their way. They couldn’t keep going in that direction.
    They hurried over the grass, keeping to the trees. A pale mansion decorated with intricate plaster swags and flowers and framed by stately hollies appeared, followed by more palatial homes. At the edge of one of the grand lawns they crept under a spreading pine tree and lay side by side on the damp needles, hiding their faces.
    The peculiar footfalls came closer. Travis lifted his eyes, expecting to see a pit bull or a Doberman pad into sight, its claws ticking on the sidewalk, but instead a familiar shape stepped out of the darkness. The giant stopped under a streetlight as though she was listening for them.
    It’s her. Don’t move
. His pulse pounded. The pine boughs barely hid their bodies.
    She was even bigger than he remembered. Her head seemed too small, a mere stump. For a nightmarish moment her neck and chin seemed to be missing, melted away like heavy wax into her shoulders, but then her whole face appeared after all. Yes, she had a neck, and a chin, and her mouth was where it should be.
The fog must be doing something crazy to my eyes
. What kind of shoes was she wearing? Her voluminous gray cape pooled over