Free Seven Deadly Tales of Terror by Bryan Smith

be railroaded for sure. Hell, considering how high the blood-fever was likely to run amongst the locals, he might not even make it to trial alive this time. An assassination or a staged “suicide” in a holding cell seemed not just possible, but probable.
    Harley was going crazy, yapping his head off and dancing around the bodies prone on the ground. His barking had taken on that shrill, frantic quality again. Back at the trailer, Jasper was actually howling, his anxiety over what was happening out in the woods driving him crazy. Luke pictured him straining against his lead so hard he was nearly choking himself. Coupled with the reports of the gun, it was a lot of noise.
    Things were usually dead silent out here this time of night. Fortunately, though, there was little chance anyone would hear the ruckus, much less alert the local law over it. Luke had been a loner much of his life. Even before the bodies of dead girls started showing up around his property, he’d had few close friends, a fact that had cemented the public’s image of him as a creepy killer. Guys like that were always loners. But it was his lack of interest in the company of other human beings that had prompted him to acquire this isolated patch of land right on the southernmost tip of Rutherford County. The property’s location set it inside the county but outside the city limits of Murfreesboro, the nearest town. His trailer was so remote, in fact, that there was no trash pickup and no mail delivery. He had to burn his own garbage and journey to town once a week to pick up any mail that had accumulated at his P.O. box. These things were mildly inconvenient, but Luke enjoyed the solitude. He had never liked other people much, anyway, seeing most of them as duplicitous, backstabbing assholes only out for themselves.
    In the end, though, the isolation worked against him, setting up the circumstances that transformed him from being a typical loner—the kind of guy hardly anyone ever gave a second thought—into an outright social pariah. According to Luke’s lawyer, it was common for serial killers to dump their victims in remote wilderness locations. It was just his bad luck that this particular killer had chosen the area right around his trailer as his preferred site for corpse disposal. He understood the logic of this, but a more paranoid part of him wondered if there was something more than just bad luck involved. What if he was being specifically targeted by someone who wanted to pin the blame on him for mysterious reasons? Though the lawyer had assured him this possibility was unlikely, he wasn’t able to utterly dismiss it.
    Though immediate discovery of what had happened here was unlikely, Luke was anxious to calm his dogs and put an end to the noise. He wouldn’t be able to think properly about what to do next until that happened.
    So he rolled the corpse off him, sat up, and heaved a big breath. Harley was on him in an instant, slobbering all over him and licking his face incessantly with his sandy tongue. Luke endured the anxious canine attention with quiet stoicism for a few moments, happy that the dog had at least stopped barking. And though Jasper was still barking intermittently, he was no longer howling, another relief. Harley began to calm down after getting his neck scratched some and receiving many whispered reassurances that everything was okay. Everything was not okay, but for now he needed his boys to think it was.
    Luke got creakily to his feet and stared down at the dead boy, his face twisting in an expression of disgust. He hadn’t been any older than eighteen or nineteen. Too young to die, Luke thought. And too stupid to live.
    He felt sad for the kid and for the loss of his abruptly terminated life. Felt bad for his parents, even that mean old Stump. But these feelings were short-lived, giving way to a fury that surprised him. He was an innocent fucking man. A jury of his goddamn peers had affirmed this. Was it so much to ask