Orpheus - Haunting the Dead.pdf - Dice

HAUNTING THE DEAD
STEFAN PETRUCHA
4. IF THIS IS THE REVEAL,
DOES THAT MEAN THERE
WAS A VEAL?
The gray rainbow of Shutty’s emotions bubbled and
boiled—fear, regret, sadness and more. Yet all were
overshadowed by a single dominating thought. It was
born just below her consciousness , but soon grew far
too swollen to completely ignore: If this was death, why
had she wasted so much precious time longing for it? It
was, after all, as far as she could tell, not all that
different. There was no release from pain, no comfort
and not so much as the memory of an ending.
What a waste being suicidal had been. What a deep,
ungodly waste of wanting.
Staring down through her black shoes to the dull,
scratched plastic sheen of the gray tiled floor, she
realized how little, how very little, death had changed
her. That was it, then. She’d been stuck with herself,
she was still stuck with herself, and despite her hopes to
the contrary, as far as she now knew she would always
be stuck with herself.
Then a glint of brown crust and white cardboard
box caught her eye.
“Was it… was it something in the pizza?” Shutty
asked quietly.
“No,” Kleck said, unable to conceal his deep-seated
glee. “It was something in this.”
Then she heard him say to the thin air, “You can kill
them all now.”
And he answered himself, quite politely, “Thank
you.”
The grinning Kleck drew an automatic rifle, as if
he’d pulled it from the thickening air, then leveled it at
Jobe’s head.
“One for you,” Kleck said.
“You crazy bastard!” Jobe cried as the trigger was
pulled. The loud firecracker bang, the flash, the recoil,
Jobe’s perfect body led backwards through the air by his
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