Crossroads Read Free

realized she couldn’t move, a memory sparked in her mind and she was suddenly wide awake, only to discover that the waking world was the true nightmare.
    She lay on a dry wooden surface, worn silvery gray with age. Its surface was covered with painted symbols and designs and surrounded by a ring of candles that cast the only light in the room. Plastic ropes bound her arms and legs to the platform, and dark shapes moved in the flickering light just at the edge of her vision. Elaine looked straight above her and let out a scream that echoed in the chamber and brought titters of laughter from the shuffling shadows.
    Hanging above her was a corpse suspended by a rope around its neck. The creaking was coming from the rope as the grisly form swayed gently back and forth. Elaine struggled and thrashed against the ropes in a mad effort to get away from the horrible sight, but the ropes held firm. Finally, the skin on her wrists and ankles rubbed raw and bloody, she stopped and went limp, gasping for breath and shivering in terror.
    She looked around and saw a number of dark-clad figures standing outside the ring of flickering candles. One figure detached itself from the group and moved into the circle of golden light. He was an older man, wearing a long black robe made of some velvety material. He had dark hair, graying at the temples, and a salt-and-pepper beard. He looked rather like someone’s kindly uncle, except for the long knife he held, its razor edge gleaming in the light. Elaine recognized him as the man from the subway, the man who spoke to her before everything went blank and she found herself here.
    As the man approached, Elaine shrank away from him as much as the ropes would allow. He smiled warmly, like he was comforting a scared child. She noticed a murmur that began in the shadows outside of the circle, a rising chant that kept time with the steady, creak, creak, creak of the swaying body above.
    The chant grew louder and louder, and the man reached out to stroke Elaine’s hair gently. She wanted to scream, to struggle, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t think. All she could do was listen to the echoing chant, the dull, creaking rhythm, and watch the dark-haired man smile silently at her. His eyes were strange, like he was looking right through her, past her flesh into her very soul. Elaine wondered for a moment if he really saw her at all. He never said a word, only continued to stare and smile as the chanting built all around them, higher and higher.
    When Elaine Dumont’s blood stained the front of his robe bright crimson and the lingering power of her life filled his veins with a warm rush of power, Anton Garnoff was still smiling, and the swaying corpse seemed to smile with him.

1
    I hate bugs. I always hated them, even as a kid. I think there’s just something hardwired, deep in the human brain, that says bugs are wrong somehow. Just looking at them creeps me out. So, naturally, there I was inside the rusting corpse of a factory complex some fifty kilometers outside the Federal District of Columbia, facing down a guy in charge of some bugs bigger than me. Not a nice feeling, let me tell you.
    I flattened myself against a support girder along one of the upper walkways of the dimly lit complex and tried to still the sound of my own breathing so I could listen. I heard a distant humming echoing through the large open space above the maze of machinery quietly rusting away on the floor of the factory. It was broken up by random clicks and tapping noises. I tried to ignore it and focused instead on closer sounds that might give away the presence of my quarry.
    I heard a faint rattling of the catwalk behind me and to the left and a muffled cry that was just as quickly cut off. I spun around the support girder and leveled my Ares slivergun across the open space toward the opposite wall and fired off a shot. It went wide of the mark, but I wasn’t actually trying to hit anything. Gunfire would endanger the