Free Dead in Bed by Bailey Simms, The Complete First Book by Adrian Birch Page A

overwhelming.
    This was real.
    When I was a kid I
used to think that being buried alive would be the most horrifying way to die.
Worse than drowning, worse than getting killed in a car accident, worse even
than being burned to death. The pain of burning would be unimaginably
excruciating, I knew, but the horror wouldn’t quite compare to suffocating inside
a narrow, hot box beneath six feet of heavy dirt.
    I even used to promise
myself that I’d never get close to a coffin as long as I lived. Inviting even
the remote possibility of ending up trapped inside seemed like a stupid risk to
take.
    And yet somehow, here
I was.
    I felt around for my
cellphone and clicked it on. The screen’s dim light glared.
    The battery was now
almost completely dead. I’d lost count of how many times I’d tried checking my
phone for a signal. Nothing had changed—there was no service this far underground
and there wasn’t ever going to be.
    I clicked off the
screen.
    Once again, I was lost
in darkness.
     
    * * *
     
    It all
started two days earlier, when Morgan fell into a coma.
    I don’t know if it was
because her mind just shut down from the trauma of being attacked by Mr.
Hershel, or if it was for some other reason that I didn’t fully understand. But
right after I saw her curled up in Ian’s lap in my car—his arms holding
her tightly and their lips pressed together—Morgan convulsed briefly and then
collapsed.
    Ian tried to wake her.
    “Morgan?” He shook
her, and when she didn’t wake he lightly slapped her face. “Morgan? Sweetheart,
you need to stay with me! Morgan!”
    But she wouldn’t wake
up.
    I threw the spare
clothes I’d grabbed into the back and squeezed in beside Morgan, who was now
lying slumped and unmoving in the passenger seat.
    Ian raced us back to
my parents’ house. All the way there I did my best to keep talking to Morgan
and calling her name into her ear, like Ian told me to do, but it was no use. Every
time I gave her another series of brisk slaps, her head only rolled back down
against her shoulder.
    In the middle of all
this, Ian tried to explain what I’d just seen going on between them.
    “I don’t know what
happened,” he said. “I don’t understand. I was trying to comfort her and
suddenly her hands were all over me. And then she was kissing me. After
everything she just went through…” He shook his head emphatically. “I don’t know
why she would do something like that.”
    Everything about Ian’s
tone should have told me he was telling the truth—that Morgan had just
pressed her body against his and started kissing him out of the blue—but how
could I be totally sure? The Ian I knew was an extremely honest person, but
that didn’t mean he was incapable of lying to me. I wasn’t naïve. After Morgan
told me at the fair that she was cheating on Jason with someone she couldn’t
name, and after I’d found Ian’s hoodie and gun in my car where Morgan had
slept, and after I’d just watched the
way she’d been kissing him… Well, I couldn’t shake the idea that Morgan and Ian
had been secretly sleeping together before all of this even started.
    For now, I tried not
to think about it. Somehow I’d find out the truth, but not now. Now, more than
anything else, I was terrified that Morgan might die. She still wasn’t waking
up.
    When we reached my
parents’ house, Ian carried Morgan upstairs to my old bedroom. I pulled back
the covers and helped Ian lay her limp body in my childhood bed.
    Most of the blood that
had spread from her face to her pubic hair was now dry and hardened. I ran
downstairs to get a mixing bowl to use as a washbasin.
    “What on earth is
going on?” my mom called out.
    “It’s Morgan,” I said
as I hurried by the living room. “She’s hurt.”
    I grabbed a washcloth
and filled the mixing bowl with soap and warm water. I could tell my mom was
totally confused about everything that was happening, but she didn’t ask any
more questions.
    While Ian kept