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.Her fingernails etched bloody grooves in her palms as she struggled not to hyperventilate.She swallowed hard and said, “Please…don’t hurt me.”The thing made Warren’s face screw up like a man pondering one of the universe’s most impenetrable mysteries.Then it smiled again.“Okay.”Jasmine felt the warm tickle recede from her head.She breathed a relieved sigh and sniffled again, hot tears racing down her face as she tried not to think about the possibility that she was nearing the end of her life.That a descent into eternal darkness might only be moments away.“You don’t want to die do you, Jasmine?”She shuddered and shook her head.“No.” Her voice was barely audible.“I don’t.”“Then come over here and sit at my feet.”Jasmine experienced a flash of panic.She considered a run for the apartment’s front door, but dismissed the idea at once.She wouldn’t get two feet before the thing stopped her with nothing more than a thought.So she stood and moved haltingly toward the grinning thing in the recliner.It bade her forward with its gleaming eyes, and soon Jasmine was kneeling in front of it.It said, “Lay your head in my lap.”And she did, feeling broken, utterly robbed of any will of her own, like a whipped dog desperately attempting to curry the favor of its abusive master.Then it was stroking her hair and saying, “That’s a good girl.You’ve learned your place.” It chuckled.“Now let’s see about Zekey-boy, eh?”Emily managed to recover some measure of her wits while Warren entertained himself with the debasement of Jasmine and Zeke.She came back to herself slowly at first, like a heroin junkie coming down from a rush.Voices floated in from the living room, but at first the words were just meaningless noise.She detected cruelty in the male voice, and fear in the female’s.She focused on those base feelings until her head felt marginally clearer, then the words started to register.She sat up and moved to the edge of the bed, listening in growing horror as Warren played some sadistic mind game with the woman named Jasmine.She thought at first they were acting out a kinky master-slave scenario, maybe some routine they’d worked out during their days spent walking across the country together.This thought sent a flash of jealousy through her and she came close to dashing out to the living room to kick the bitch’s ass.But she sat there and listened some more, and the jealousy faded.What she was hearing was no game, she was sure of it.There was something desperately wrong with Warren.This cruel man was nothing like the Warren she remembered.That Warren, though flawed, had been a man worthy of love and devotion.At least until he became almost terminally self-destructive.But this person that looked and sounded like Warren was a stranger.It was as if some malevolent being had hijacked Warren’s body.Emily’s eyes went wide at the thought.She flashed back to the confrontation at Aaron’s hiding place, saw that little girl walk out of a black supernatural soup into that too-brightly lit room.The girl’s eyes had possessed the same strange, leering gleam she’d seen in Warren’s eyes.A possibility so awful it nearly made her cry out bloomed in Emily’s mind like a black flower.The girl was a vessel, a flesh and blood prisoner of some darker consciousness.If the thing that had possessed Abby could leap to another body…Emily rose slowly from the bed and moved in careful steps to the door.She kept her mouth closed, suddenly certain it was crucial she not make a sound.She reached the door and stood behind it, listening as Warren (not him, only looks like him…) ordered Zeke to do something that made her stomach churn.She didn’t want to see what was happening.Could hardly bear the thought of it.But she had no choice.She needed visual confirmation, a final bit of condemning evidence, before she could write Warren off forever.She took a careful breath and shuffled one foot to the left, then peered around the edge of the door.At first her mind couldn’t process what she was seeing.It was too insane to be real.Zeke Johnson was sitting on the floor next to the coffee table.His cheeks looked bloated and were speckled with gore.His right hand was pressed through his open mouth and his jaw was moving in a mechanical way as he worked at chewing off his fingers.Emily’s stomach clenched and she felt nausea rise in her throat.She felt the strength seep out of her legs as she gripped the edge of the door in an effort to keep from falling, but she only succeeded in pulling the door the rest of the way open—and thereby exposing herself to the monster inhabiting Warren’s body.It looked at her, grinning as if it’d been aware of her scrutiny all along.She realized with a dawning sickness that it probably had been.Jasmine looked up from the thing’s lap and showed her a sick, demented smile.Blood dribbled from the corners of the woman’s mouth.The creature had done something to her brain, had either short-circuited it or rewired it in some fucked-up way.Either that, or she’d simply snapped from bearing witness to so much horror.The expression on the woman’s face made her look more like a rabid animal than a human being.The thing that looked like Warren giggled, reminding her so much of Aaron Harris her skin crawled.“Look everybody.Emily’s come out to play.I had a good time with that nimble little body of hers.What say we see what else we can do with it, eh?”Emily shook her head.“Nuh-nuh…no.”Another giggle from the Warren-thing.“No? Oh, I don’t think so.”But Emily’s terror and physical shakiness overwhelmed her before the creature could issue a command.She let go of the door and fell unconscious to the floor.CHAPTER TWENTYOctober 7,High Noon“It’s time.”Flash heard the voice in his head in those last blissful moments of sleep.He’d been dreaming of a better, happier life in a lush and green paradise somewhere far from this blighted world.A place where the sun always shone and the sky was always the same achingly brilliant hue of blue.And the most common sounds were laughter and birdsong.There’d been a smile on his face while he dreamed of this place, but the expression faltered at the sound of those two words.In the final seconds of the dream the bright blue sky suddenly darkened and a cold wind came sweeping across the verdant land.Then his eyes snapped open.The first thing he saw was the damnable billboard.And the washed-out, faded blue of the sky overhead.He was still in the truck, but the old man was gone now.Flash knew he’d never see him again.“I’m on my own from here on out,” he said, addressing the comment to the peeling image of the female country singer.“With only you to watch over me.And somehow I don’t think you’re gonna be any help.”Flash sighed.“Ain’t nothin’ for it, I guess.”He pushed open the truck’s creaking driver’s side door and stepped outside.He moved to the front of the truck, where he groaned and stretched, working out the kinks in his body
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