Spooky Halloween Excerpts, Part 2
Halloween is almost here. In honor of this most spooky of holidays, I’m posting some of the creepiest passages from my new book Day of the Devourer. Here’s the second. While running from the bad guys, Rej Antares accidentally stumbles into a scary situation…
The sound of heavy boots behind him told Rej he’d better move faster. In front of him stood a shop with signs written in an alien language. He ran inside and found what looked like a butcher shop with a counter and a cold case full of meat-like things. The stench of rotting flesh and freon pervaded the place. The big windows in the front made him nervous. The Vul would easily see him inside, so he dodged the Hekkan shopkeeper and jumped behind the counter, ducking and barging through the door to the back of the shop. He snuck past a Hekkan butcher asleep in a rusty metal chair with a huge cleaver in his hand.
He could hear a commotion with Hekkan and Vul voices arguing behind him in the shop and realized he should keep moving. He found a doorway with thick strips of dirty vinyl hanging from the door frame, and its huge metal door left wide open. He pushed the vinyl aside and felt cold air inside. It smelled like freon. He stepped in. Huge slabs of frozen meat hung from hooks in the ceiling in row after row. In seconds, the Hekkans or the Vul would be on him. Rej pushed a big carcass with ribs and vertebrae poking out of it aside and slipped behind it. He kept pushing between the slabs. Some of them hung almost to the floor. It would be tough to spot him in here.
The further back he went, the more spread out the meats became, allowing him to see their shapes. They became more gruesome, too. His first shock was seeing a human-sized amphibian hanging upside down by its legs. Half of its skin had been pulled away from its muscles and rolled up like icy scrolls. Huge tentacles and what looked like the arm of a gorilla also hung there. The head of some unfortunate reptile grinned at him with a huge hook through its mouth. Beyond these unpleasant ornaments, he saw another door. It stood open and what looked like sunlight shone into the meat locker. He moved quickly toward the door and found another horror. Three frost-covered, naked Bargeerians hung by their legs from the ceiling near the door. The frozen blood from one of them streamed across the floor to a drain. Rej jumped at the sight of them and then felt a bit sick. He wanted out of this house of horrors as fast as he could and ran through the door. He dashed into a narrow alleyway, again almost crashing into the opposite wall.
A voice shouted at him, but not from the butcher shop. There in the alley he happened upon three big Hekkan thugs holding weapons and two Bargeerians on their knees with their hands tied behind their backs. Rej guessed he had interrupted an execution. These two Bargeerians were about to meet the same fate as the three hanging in the freezer. He had to get out of here.
Day of the Devourer is available on Amazon
