Free The Meridians by Michaelbrent Collings

that that sounded so very good to him these days. What did he have to wake up to? An empty apartment. A room full of toys that would never be played with again. Presents that had not quite been unwrapped for his child's last birthday, and never would be unwrapped, for the child for whom they were intended was gone forever.
    So Scott walked through the place, looking at the rooms, at the evidence that once he had been alive, and wondered if he wouldn't be better off just ending it all. It wouldn't be hard, he knew. He could cut his wrists in the tub and sink into a warm oblivion, leaving the world as he had come into it: in blood and water and pain. Or he could just throw back a couple dozen of the OxyContins that he had been prescribed in the aftermath of his ordeal, to help him cope with the almost daily pain he now suffered.
    Either way, it would be easy, quick, and final.
    All good things.
    He actually got as far as filling up the tub for a final bath when it happened.
    There was a sound.
    Immediately, Scott was transported back to the alley, to the sound he had heard when the hitter - the man Scott called Mr. Gray, a man who had never been identified, though Scott had spent countless hours and even entire days looking through various photo files of criminals and killers - had crept up behind him with the intention to end his life.
    Scott froze. He turned off the water, which dripped for a moment and then was silent.
    He listened. Waited.
    He watched the doorway to the bathroom, wondering if what he had heard had been real, or simply some post-traumatic hallucination dredged up from his subconscious to torment him.
    The sound did not repeat.
    Even so, Scott went from room to room in the small apartment, clearing the area with the precision of a Delta Force member sweeping for hostiles.
    Nothing. The apartment was empty, save only him.
    Even so, there had been a sound. He was sure of it. It was the sound of a shoe scuffing on the floor, the sound of someone trying hard to be stealthy and not quite succeeding.
    The sound of a killer, of a predator, laying in wait for its prey.
    Scott went through the apartment one more time, this time more carefully. He looked not only in each room, but in each possible hiding place in each room. He opened every closet. He looked under every bed and table. He even opened the cabinets under the kitchen sink on the off chance that a very small intruder might be hiding there.
    Nothing. Still nothing.
    But then the sound came again. The soft scrape of leather on wood, the murmur of a shoe on the floor.
    Scott ran to the front room, the area he thought he had heard the sound.
    But again, there was no one there. Just him. Just him and....
    Scott turned in shock. It hadn't been the sound of a shoe on the floor. It hadn't been anything as easily explained as that. Instead, Scott watched as a paper fluttered off the small writing desk where he wrote checks and paid his bills each month. The sound had been the movement of the paper.
    Scott stared at the paper. How had it fallen? He was always very meticulous about his stationary, placing it in the exact center of the desk where it could be easily reached when necessary, but where it was out of the way whenever not needed. There was no way a page could have fallen from the pile of papers on the desk.
    Scott looked at the nearest air conditioning vent. It was a good fifteen feet away. Besides, even if a breeze might have explained the movement of the paper at a different time, there was no fan or air conditioning or heater active right now. The air in the apartment was inert; stagnant.
    Scott hobbled over to the paper where it sat on the floor. A strange foreboding gripped him, as though he knew in some portion of his mind what he was going to find, and dreaded the discovery.
    He reached out, surprised to see that he was actually shaking, and took the paper by the corner, holding it as gingerly as he would a dangerous pit viper. The side that had been