Free The 13th by John Everson Page B

why?
    She ran her arm up and down the mattress, and then massaged her face. It felt thick, and weird. Almost like someone else’s. She touched her other arm, and massaged the biceps for a while until the needles began and left, and she could raise it. They both felt feeble and weak, but she ran them down her ribs to her hips. Something wasn’t right.
    She was thicker than she’d been yesterday, and this wasn’t water weight. Slowly she slipped her hands across her abdomen, and stifled a gasp when she reached her belly button.
    Jackie wasn’t just bloated.
    Jackie was pregnant. Majorly pregnant.
    And when she’d left little Jack at Becky’s, she’d not only not been knocked up, but she hadn’t been with a man in something like six months.
    She moved her hands across the definitely distended belly and her eyes welled up. Oh my God, she thought. What did they do to me?
    And then a scarier thought interjected: And where’s Jack?
    Light suddenly flooded the room as the door swung open, and Jackie blinked, trying to make out who was there. She could barely hold her eyes open, but there was a fuzzy man at her bedside just like that. And a stern, black-eyed woman.
    Hands stroked her head and she heard a voice say, “She’s come up.”
    “So soon?” the woman answered. “She’s had a heavy dose.”
    “After a few weeks, the body adjusts,” the doctor said.
    Weeks?
    “Time to do a little harvesting,” he continued. “Let’s take her back down. I don’t want her jumping in the middle of the procedure.”
    Jackie reached her arm toward the fuzzy pancake of the doctor’s face and tried to grab on. She slapped against something warm, but then her arm was flat on the bed, and the nurse whispered in her ear.
    “This won’t hurt a bit.”
    Then something stabbed her in the shoulder, and it did hurt, more than a bit, but she really didn’t have the strength to scream. Or to talk for that matter.
    She remembered suddenly, sitting with another woman on a couch. They both wore light blue and flower-patterned cotton robes, and they both just sat there on the couch, happy to be out of bed. They stared at a white wall. The white wall made them feel good. Complete. She remembered the white wall was all she ever wanted to look at.
    Jackie felt everything slipping away, as if her consciousness were a sink of water, and the drain had just been opened.
    Someone poured Drano in my head, she thought as her eyes closed.
    There was a pain in her belly then. Something sharp. It slipped inside her and pricked and poked, and she hoped it stopped soon. She wanted to cry, but her eyes had died.
    “That’s it,” the doctor’s voice said. “That’s just what we needed.”
    Then the pain slipped away. And so, for a long while, did Jackie.

C HAPTER F OURTEEN
    “Helloo Castle Point,” the woman said on the other end of the phone. Christy smiled, and said simply, “Hello” and “What can I do for you?”
    “This is Marie from the Oak Falls PD. Who’s this?”
    “Officer Christy Sorensen, Castle Point. What’s up?”
    The other woman sounded nice, and certainly exuberant, but there was an edge to her voice.
    “We’re a little concerned up here, I guess you’d say. Thought we should check in with our neighbors. Is Chief Maitlin around?”
    Christy shook her head, though the other woman couldn’t see it. Why talk to an underling if the “real” sheriff was in town. Well…at the moment, he wasn’t!
    “Sorry,” she said. “Chief’s out grabbing some lunch. What can I help you with?”
    “Don’t know that you can,” the woman said. “Just wanted to see if you’ve been running into any odd cases lately.”
    “Odd how?”
    “Well…” The woman paused. “We’ve had a half dozen missing persons reports over the past three months. Two of them in the past two weeks. And so far, not a one has popped up. We weren’t too concerned at first ’cuz they were just transients…kinda folks who come and go without warning.