Free The 13th by John Everson Page A

blue dinosaur one-piece. “Night, kiddo,” she’d said, giving him a big hug and thanking Becky who stood behind him, arms crossed and waiting to take the boy to his weekend bed.
    Was that last night? Last week? It all seemed strangely distant. But it was all she could pull up. Work at the bar. Yellowed lights blearing over fifty bottles of booze…rowdy customers…a college kid buying shots of Jaeger for his girlfriend…a stubbledregular slurring, “I’m all right, I’m okay,” over and over while holding out his glass for more…
    The memories were a blur, almost overshad-owed in sepia, as if she were watching someone else’s old film. But they seemed like the last things she could dredge out of her memory.
    There were pins and needles in her arm. Damn it.
    She hated that. Especially since she couldn’t seem to move a muscle to calm them. One, two, three, she counted mentally…and threw herself to the side.
    Her body didn’t move.
    But maybe her finger did. She tried again.
    One, two, three…
    Her arm flopped. And, oh shit did the pins and needles come on then. She opened her mouth to cry out and then thought better of it. She didn’t know who she’d be waking yet, and it seemed oddly important that she remember that.
    She tried again to piece together the night before, but instead of bar scenes, she found herself seeing the eyes of a man looking down at her. He wore a white lab coat or smock—as if he was a doctor.
    “Relax,” he told her. Something pinched her arm, and his eyes drew in very close to hers. “Everything is going to be all right now.”
    There was a cold sensation in her arm, and something tugging at her waist. The doctor pulled at something by her thigh, and cold washed over her as her coverings slipped away. Then his hands were on her, rubbing the places that hurt, and the places that felt good. She could feel sensation returning all over her body in a wash of pricks and feather tickles.
    “Everything is going to be all right now,” he said again. And then a nurse put a hand on her brow. “Just lay back and enjoy it,” the woman suggested.
    Enjoy it?
    Something cold pressed between her legs, something slimy and cool. She flinched, but the nurse again rubbed her brow. And then something definitely not cold pressed itself there, something warm and fleshy and she fought to stop its entrance, but then she realized that her arms were strapped and her legs were strapped and the doctor was leaning over her, grinning, ice blue eyes like daggers stabbing their poison into her soul, as his wide, thin lips bent down to touch her own…
    “Oh shit, shit, shit,” she moaned again. The pins and needles had gotten worse and she could make a fist. Where am I? Who was that man?
    She tried to think again about the night she’d left Jack with Becky and the people she’d served at the bar. It all seemed a very long and foggy time ago. But then she did remember one thing. At the end of the night, near last call, two hicks had come into the bar. They’d pulled up stools and ordered beer…but had seemed half trashed already. When she’d told them it was last call and that they’d have to drink fast, the bigger one had grinned and said he could do it fast, could she?
    Then what?
    She struggled through the fog to remember.
    She saw the doctor, big chin and scary eyes looking over her.
    She saw the hick, laughing at two A.M. and staggering out the door with his buddy in tow.
    She saw a big hand cupped across her face as she tried to put her keys in the lock of her car. “I told you I was fast, didn’t I?” he said, and then there was a cloth over her face and a smell like turpentine and then…
    She was able to move her arm and she reached her hand across the bed and confirmed what she suspected.
    The other side of the mattress was empty, but she already knew that. She hadn’t gone home with some loser after last call, and she hadn’t gotten drunk on the job.
    Some asshole had kidnapped her. But