Supernatural: Night Terror Read Free

and thought she would throw up any second. She realized she was sobbing.
    Steven hadn’t paused to zip up his backpack. Every few strides a beer can slipped free and tumbled to the ground, letting out a protesting hiss of pressurized foam. Finally, he cursed and tossed the backpack aside.
    Lucy couldn’t help glancing back every other step. She stumbled again and again, but Tony’s momentum kept her upright. She saw the horseman bear down on Steven and swing his sword in a whistling arc, determined to reduce the young man to his own headless condition or perhaps remedy his cranial loss by random substitution. Lucy gave an involuntary shriek.
    The gleaming blade missed Steven’s neck by a whisker.
    Steven must have felt its swift passage. He clapped a hand to the nape of his neck, as if checking for blood.
    They were near the edge of the park, within sight of the municipal building, when Lucy was jerked to the side. She stumbled and fell against Tony for a moment before he led her to the right.
    “What—?” she began.
    “We need to split up,” Tony said, his breathing ragged.
    “Can’t chase all of us.”
    “But Steve...”
    The vibration in her legs was gone. She glanced back but could no longer see the headless horseman. In his gray sweatshirt and faded jeans, Steven was a blur of motion running and stumbling toward Park Lane.
    “C’mon,” Tony said, pulling her attention back. “Think we lost him.”
    “What was that?”
    “Sure as hell wasn’t the neighborhood watch.”
    Steven had never run so fast in his life. At some point, between tossing aside the backpack he’d used to smuggle beer out of the house and feeling the horseman’s sword whistle past his neck, he forgot about everything that had led up to the nightmarish chase. He stopped questioning the impossibility of a man without a head riding a horse that had appeared out of nowhere. Every iota of his concentration focused on racing from his imminent death, while suppressing the powerful urge to vomit up every last ounce of beer he had imbibed. A single hesitation, for whatever reason, would mean the difference between life and death. Even so, a man, even a sober man, couldn’t outrun a horse for long. Steven veered close to tree trunks, favoring those with low hanging limbs. Unseat the horseman and the chase turned in his favor. But it seemed he couldn’t shake the headless rider, only postpone the inevitable. The thunderous rumble of hooves was never more than one false step away.
    Face contorted in a rictus of pain, he burst from the edge of the park, bounded across the wide sidewalk and sprinted onto Park Lane. Several steps into his panicked flight across the blacktop, he stumbled and almost fell to his knees. Doubled over, he cringed, waiting for the hard steel to bite into his flesh. Then it occurred to him that the thundering noise of hooves had stopped. He looked back and saw that the headless horseman had vanished. He had never followed Steven out of the park.
    Steven straightened and peered behind him. Nothing moving between the trees. No horse. No headless rider. Looking left and right, he couldn’t see Tony or Lucy. Vaguely he recalled them veering to the side, away from his mindless, straight-line flight. Sensible strategy, but he would have had their back.
    Or would he?
    Staring back at the park, he wondered if the horseman was confined within its boundaries. If his friends remained in the park now, were they in danger? Would the rider seek them out after his solo target had escaped? Steven could go back and warn them... but he had no idea where they had gone. Was the horseman even real? Could they have imagined the whole thing? When you really thought about it, it made no sense. How could it? Unless...something in the beer? Product tampering? LSD in the cans? No, because Lucy had seen it first and she hadn’t had any beer. Then how—?
    BEEP!
    A battered Ford pickup truck swerved around him, the driver leaving behind a string