Read Online The Wrong Goodbye by Chris F. Holm - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Chris F. Holm
Ads: Link
did come. I awoke hours later, my face still buried in the pillow, to the persistent buzzing of the alarm clock. Fucking thing must've been set by whoever stayed here last. After the night I'd had, they'd be lucky if I didn't hunt them down and throttle them for their thoughtlessness.
I pulled the pillow down tighter over my head, but it wasn't any use – that buzzing refused to be ignored. Fine, then – I'd just have to shut it up. I took a blind swipe in the general direction of the bedside table. A swing and a miss. I tried again. My hand whacked the corner of the table and came back smarting. The third time, I managed to give the alarm a good wallop, but the buzzing didn't stop, and why the fuck was my hand sticky?
I tossed off the pillow and looked around. Then my whole body clenched as revulsion washed over me. Every surface of the room was coated in a shifting mass of bugs – crawling, scrabbling, flitting back and forth with the electric hum of a thousand insect wings. They covered the floor, the ceiling, the bed on which I laid. A thick smear of snot-green flecked with shards of black encrusted the top of the alarm clock where I'd smacked it, and as I watched, the smear and then the clock itself disappeared beneath a teeming swarm of scratching, hissing, buzzing things.
It was then I realized that I was covered in them, too. Their tiny legs pricked against my arms, my chest, my back. I could feel them winding through my hair. When one sought refuge in my ear, I shuddered, thankfully shaking it free. I tried in vain to brush away the rest, but there were too many, and they just kept on coming. Thousands of them. Millions. They were pouring into the room from a vent high above the bed, its louvers bent out of shape by the sheer magnitude of the invading force. From the thick paste of carnage the creatures pushed through to enter the room, it was clear that thousands of them must've died in their attempt to gain entry – but why? What in God's name were they doing here?
The answer was right in front of me, but in my panic, I almost didn't see it. There, atop the shifting insect landscape before me, was my little beetlefriend. It drifted toward me from the foot of the bed as if by magic, its cohorts beneath it conveying it ever closer.
And with it, its payload.
Once the beetle and its earthen ball reached me, it stopped. The mass of insects beneath it still boiled with activity, all red and brown and iridescent blue, but the fat black beetle held its ground, regarding me with what I couldn't help but think was an expectant gaze. Then it nudged the ball toward me once more with one spindly, bristle-laden leg.
Gingerly, I accepted the proffered package, and the sea of insects seemed to calm a little – not receding, exactly, but quieting, as though waiting for my response. My heart was anything but quiet as it thudded painfully in my chest. What I'd taken for a ball of dirt wasn't dirt at all, though its surface was filthy enough that my mistake was understandable. No, what the tiny creature had been carrying was in fact a small bundle of cloth – once military drab, but now black from the dirt in which it had been buried.
I recognized that bundle. Of course, I should have – I'd buried it two days and a continent ago.
It was a soul – Varela's soul. And suddenly, the insects that surrounded me made sense.
These creatures were Deliverants.
They were Deliverants, and they were angry.
I wasn't yet sure why, but I was beginning to get an idea. Whatever was going on, Danny Young had set me up.
He'd set me up, and he was going to pay.
7.
That fucking son of a bitch. In all my time as a Collector, I'd never once had occasion to interact with my Deliverants, and now after my meeting with Danny, they flat-out reject the soul I'd buried? That was too much of a coincidence for me to swallow. The question was, why had they rejected
I pulled the pillow down tighter over my head, but it wasn't any use – that buzzing refused to be ignored. Fine, then – I'd just have to shut it up. I took a blind swipe in the general direction of the bedside table. A swing and a miss. I tried again. My hand whacked the corner of the table and came back smarting. The third time, I managed to give the alarm a good wallop, but the buzzing didn't stop, and why the fuck was my hand sticky?
I tossed off the pillow and looked around. Then my whole body clenched as revulsion washed over me. Every surface of the room was coated in a shifting mass of bugs – crawling, scrabbling, flitting back and forth with the electric hum of a thousand insect wings. They covered the floor, the ceiling, the bed on which I laid. A thick smear of snot-green flecked with shards of black encrusted the top of the alarm clock where I'd smacked it, and as I watched, the smear and then the clock itself disappeared beneath a teeming swarm of scratching, hissing, buzzing things.
It was then I realized that I was covered in them, too. Their tiny legs pricked against my arms, my chest, my back. I could feel them winding through my hair. When one sought refuge in my ear, I shuddered, thankfully shaking it free. I tried in vain to brush away the rest, but there were too many, and they just kept on coming. Thousands of them. Millions. They were pouring into the room from a vent high above the bed, its louvers bent out of shape by the sheer magnitude of the invading force. From the thick paste of carnage the creatures pushed through to enter the room, it was clear that thousands of them must've died in their attempt to gain entry – but why? What in God's name were they doing here?
The answer was right in front of me, but in my panic, I almost didn't see it. There, atop the shifting insect landscape before me, was my little beetlefriend. It drifted toward me from the foot of the bed as if by magic, its cohorts beneath it conveying it ever closer.
And with it, its payload.
Once the beetle and its earthen ball reached me, it stopped. The mass of insects beneath it still boiled with activity, all red and brown and iridescent blue, but the fat black beetle held its ground, regarding me with what I couldn't help but think was an expectant gaze. Then it nudged the ball toward me once more with one spindly, bristle-laden leg.
Gingerly, I accepted the proffered package, and the sea of insects seemed to calm a little – not receding, exactly, but quieting, as though waiting for my response. My heart was anything but quiet as it thudded painfully in my chest. What I'd taken for a ball of dirt wasn't dirt at all, though its surface was filthy enough that my mistake was understandable. No, what the tiny creature had been carrying was in fact a small bundle of cloth – once military drab, but now black from the dirt in which it had been buried.
I recognized that bundle. Of course, I should have – I'd buried it two days and a continent ago.
It was a soul – Varela's soul. And suddenly, the insects that surrounded me made sense.
These creatures were Deliverants.
They were Deliverants, and they were angry.
I wasn't yet sure why, but I was beginning to get an idea. Whatever was going on, Danny Young had set me up.
He'd set me up, and he was going to pay.
7.
That fucking son of a bitch. In all my time as a Collector, I'd never once had occasion to interact with my Deliverants, and now after my meeting with Danny, they flat-out reject the soul I'd buried? That was too much of a coincidence for me to swallow. The question was, why had they rejected
Similar Books
