Read Online The Rabid (Book 1) by J.V. Roberts - Free Book Online Page B

Winfield.
    Tammy Brewer.
    Margerie Pennington.
    Alive? Dead? Feeding on the flesh of their family? Forced to shamble the earth in a state of eternal damnation?
    I’ve heard about the five stages of grief. I figure that because I’ve started to ask questions that I am somewhere between denial and anger. I figure I’ll hang out there awhile. In the “in-between.” It is comfortable. The denial brings hope. The anger brings resolve. I’ll need both.
    When she is done crying ( mostly), she turns the pages and finds my picture. She laughs. It is a haggard mucus ridden laugh, still tinged by the hand of loss, but it’ll do in times like these. I laugh too. More so at her reaction than at the poorly angled portrait of me at the center of the page. “You and that hat, same hat every year.”
    “If it ain’t broke…”
    “It’s shattered.”
    “I should change faces every year like you, huh?”
    “Now you’re on to something.” She closes the book and taps me on the knee with it before placing it back beneath my nightstand.
    “Dance for me.” She pushes me upright and claps her hands together, smiling big now, her makeup smudged beyond repair. The sad clown. It’s been our thing for years. After dad died, when things were rocky at school, or she just needed a vaca from life, she’d have me dance for her.
    “You know I’m always up for a dance, but no power, no music.” Batteries are just a pain in the ass, Momma had said when she’d purchased the electric stereo that had eventually become mine by virtue of the hand-me-down rule.
    “I’ll sing a ditty.”
    “A ditty?”
    “Isn’t that a word you and dad used to use all the time?”
    I smile. “Yeah, I suppose we did.”
    “So…I’ll sing one for you.”
    “What do you know? I need something soaring, you know, epic type.”
    She thinks on it, her eyes rolling towards the ceiling, tapping at her chin with an index finger and a nail coated in chipped black polish. “ Over the Rainbow , will that work?”
    I take a deep bow, she giggles. “It’ll do; at your signal madam.”

 
    13
    It sounds like an animal. A wolf perhaps, mourning our tragedies with a full moon howl.
    I sit up seconds apart from Lee; his ear is already bent towards the skin-prickling racket.
    “What’s that waling? You hear that?”
    It sounds more like a howl to me. “I’m up aren’t I?” I sounded more sarcastic than I’d intended. However, two nights with barely any sleep, and with the third looking to be all cloud and no lining, it wears on a guy.
    I hold my breath.
    There it goes again, like air escaping beneath a door.
    “What’s going on?” Momma asks groggily, sitting up behind Lee, and laying her face across his shoulder.
    “That noise,” he answers, “listen.” It seems to come hovering into the room with an increased clarity now that we’ve acknowledged its presence.
    Not wolf, but woman. Wolves don’t scream (or wale), “Someone help us, please.”
    “Oh my .”
    “It sounds like it’s probably coming from the road ,” I say.
    “What can we do?” Momma has her arms around him, a human anchor of sorts; as if doing her best to subvert any bravado he may be hatching.
    “Well, we can’t just leave her out there, that wouldn’t be right, would it?”
    Lee may be a bit of a limp wrist (dads word), but he’s no cowardly lion, or Tin Man for that matter, I mean, the guy has a heart. Like I said, not a bad guy.
    “You don’t know that there’s anything you can do. If those things have gotten to her, I mean, nothing you can really do.”
    “Please—somebody—”
    “Well, we won’t know unless we try. I’m not just going to sit here and do nothing and listen to her scream. We’ve lost a lot; I don’t really feel like losing my soul too.”
    There is that flare for the dramatic again , but when Lee is right, he's right.
    Survive or die, true enough.
    Nevertheless, we’ve survived, we aren’t in immediate jeopardy. We have the hands available