Halfkinds Volume 1: Contact Read Free

me.  He wears a large
sweatshirt, head covered with a hood.  He has thick, brown boots on, which
explains all the heavy thuds I heard when he entered the premises.
    From my position, I can see him
kneeling down over the woman’s body.  His back is still turned.  He’s
vulnerable, it is time to make my move.  With a rush of adrenaline, I run to
him and point my gun.
    “Freeze!  Hands up!” I yell.  He‘s
caught off guard and stands up immediately.  His hands remain at his side.
    “I said hands up!”  He does
nothing.  “Hands up!”
    I sense his fear, his head is
shivering.
    “It’s okay, I just need to ask you
some questions, now hands up!”
    Still nothing.
    “Now!”  I yell.
    In a blink of an eye, he runs
towards the kitchen counter.  I’m shocked that he doesn’t obey my orders.  I
still have my gun pointed at him, and his sudden movements make my trigger
finger itch.  But I remain calm, even as he makes his mad dash to the counter.
    I must remain calm.  I must. 
Until…
    … I see him reaching for a butcher
knife in the sink.
    When you only have a few seconds
to react, time stays still.  I see him reaching for the knife and my instinct
is to move, but my body can’t compute this.  I want to move my arms, my legs,
to charge after him, but I can’t.  That moment is frozen in time, and I feel
paralyzed.
    The only thing I can move is my
finger.  I fire a shot directly into his chest.  I fire another one to make
sure.
    His arms fly violently above his
head, and he stumbles backwards.  His legs flail up into the air and his head
jerks back.  The knife that was in his hand falls down as he does.  I see all
of this millisecond by millisecond.  That’s how it’s always like when I have to
kill someone.
    Time speeds up back to its normal
pace.  The attacker isn’t moving.  There are now two dead bodies on the ground
and I have a good look at his face.  I walk over to examine it and I am
floored.
    His skin is shiny, and the
greenest of greens I had ever seen.  His eyes are on the side of his head.  He
has no nose, it’s more like a pointy snout, and his mouth is as wide as his
head.  His legs are strong and muscular.  He looks like a frog, but there is
something strangely human about him.
    It is like he was made of puzzle
pieces that aren’t supposed to fit.  The overall picture is completely
unnatural and extremely frightening.
    What have I stumbled into?
     

Chapter
2 – Leonard Lawton - Homecoming
    November 15, 3040 5:01 AM
    I didn’t want to leave my brothers
and sisters, but I couldn’t abandon her.  My mother had died, and we left her
for the flies.  It was wrong; it’s not the way mothers should be treated.
    Tiago strongly objected when I
told him that we should go back, that we should have given our mom a proper
send-off.  After all, she raised us through blood, sweat and tears, kept us
away from the humans, dogs, wolves, and other animals who won’t understand what
we are.  Tiago never liked her, though.  He said she was a whore behind her
back and that the only reason we existed was because of her whorish ways.
    I may be the youngest of all my
brothers and sisters, and Tiago may be the oldest, but what he said was
incredibly immature.  How could you say that about your own mother?
    I would hear her talk about the
outside world.  She would say society would deem us freaks, that they would
never understand us.  She made sure that we never left the house, that no one
could ever see who we are, and I could see her point.  I read the news, watched
the TV shows and movies she let us see.  All of those animals I saw on those
programs, none of them looked like us.  I saw dogs and cats, humans and frogs,
bears and lions, they all looked like what they were supposed to.  We, on the
other hand, didn’t completely look like other humans, we didn’t completely look
like other animals, and I didn’t look like the normal frogs I’ve seen.  No, we
looked