Free The Damned Summer (The Ruin Trilogy) by Scott Weaver Page A

have been
his reply, and unless you were a member of that brave but crazy alumni, you
most likely wouldn't quite understand.
    Moving up to the tunnel split, he
stopped, crouching down, breathing slowly as he drew a circle in the dirt with
the butt of his flashlight, waiting for the right moment to go into the correct
tunnel.
    It took less than a minute for
him to decide to move down the left tunnel. In the same slow methodical pace,
he crept on for about ten feet before stopping. There seemed to be a quiet
scrapping, but he wasn't sure. It was so subtle, he couldn't tell if it was
real or just his imagination. Then something fell on his shoulder.
    It scurried down his arm in the
spindly way that only a spider moved. He swiped it away with the flick of his
hand, more out of concern of a potential venomous bite than the creepy feeling
spiders give most people. Spiders were just another pest, like all other
insects, like all other people.
    Then another fell on his head,
and another on his back. Brushing both off, he took a step back, realizing what
he might have stepped into. Turning on his flashlight, he confirmed his hunch.
The tunnel walls in front of him shifted and seemed to pulse. The entire
passageway was covered with small spiders with purple backs. He stood right
before the beginning of the horde, but he was more than close enough to be
exposed to a light rain of the arachnids.
    He increased his pace back to the
fork, which still wouldn't be classified as anything faster than a slow walk.
    Brushing the last of the spiders
off of him, he decided to head back topside. If he was gone much longer, they
might think something happened to him. Their concern meant nothing to him, but
if they sent some rookie down here after him, they might end up doing something
stupid, like throwing a grenade at Jack cause they heard him coming back. Nobody
wins against a grenade in the tunnels.   
    Jack wasn't sure what it was he
had found in the tunnel that day, and in all honesty he didn't really care what
it was. For the first time in his life, he had what he considered not just a
partner, but a friend.
    The demon stayed as nothing more
than a whisper in Jack's ear for the rest of the year, but in his dreams, the
fiend was much more: his ally and confident in all things, supporting all the
dark desires that Jack had hid all of his life.
    "This is the playground," it had whispered to Jack in his slumber. "You
can do whatever you want here and get away with it, you just need to be
cautious. Cover your tracks and no one will ever notice anything." The
monster's words sank into Jack's subconscious like hungry maggots, chewing away
his already stunted morals, slow and sure.
    It was soon after that day in the
tunnel that Jack started acting on his dark thoughts instead of just daydreaming.
It was quite surprising how easy it was to kill the hookers instead of just roughing
them up. He was a US soldier, who was going to stop him? His fellow soldiers
actually backed him up when it became an issue with the pimp. Of course they
never actually saw what Jack did to them. Perhaps the state of their dead and
torn bodies might have waived their loyalty to him, but they never went that
far. They just wanted to back up their brother in arms.
    With practice, he branched out to
victims he got on his own, with no witnesses. Women, whether they were hookers
or just women that trusted him cause he was a US soldier. They would follow him
regardless of where he took them, no dark hole was wrong as far as they were
concerned, because he was the good guy, the GI hero. The dark horror in their
eyes when they finally realized what his true intent was, was almost better
than when their lives faded away as he slowly killed them.
    It's not like they were real
people, they were the Cong, nothing more than animals waiting to be killed for
whatever purpose presented itself; like deer during hunting season. It's just
what they were there for. The demon cultivated this