She’s dead, he thought in horror. She tore her mask off in her sleep and died.
Which explained why the machines were off. And yet, even with his limited experience, Drake knew that when things went wrong, these machines didn’t go quiet. They beeped and blipped and chirped loudly. Shit, that was their job.
No, there had to be another reason why they had shut off, and Drake’s searching eyes quickly found the cause.
Someone had unplugged them.
And that someone was Ray Reynolds.
Chapter 6
Ray Jacob Reynolds stood at the head of his mother’s bed, just out of the shaft of moonlight that spilled in through the window, which was why Drake hadn’t noticed him at first. The boy’s face was shrouded in shadows, and he stood perfectly still. In fact, the only thing in the room that moved was the twisting and twirling of the cigarette smoke coming from the white cylinder dangling between his fingers.
Is he sleepwalking? Drake wondered. Did Ray sleepwalk here?
Drake wasn’t sure if you could sleepwalk and light a cigarette at the same time, or if you can do anything while sleepwalking other than just walk, but he hoped that that was the case. He considered reaching over and tapping his friend on the shoulder, but recalled hearing somewhere that waking a sleepwalker prematurely could kill them.
Even knowing that this was silly and childish, Drake stayed his hand. The truth was, he wanted to see what happened next without his intervention.
A moment later, his friend started to move, slowly bringing the cigarette to his mouth. Like Drake, Ray was a casual smoker, a teenage smoker, if there was such a thing, but the aggressive drag that he took now, and the thick cloud of blue smoke that he expelled, was something different.
It made him look older.
It made him look like his mother.
And then Ray did the unthinkable: he brought his hand with the cigarette slowly to his mother’s lips.
It was no secret that Angelina’s cancer was a result of her smoking. Which was why John had vehemently forbidden cigarette smoke in the house, smoke of any kind, actually. The one time that he had caught his son smoking, a year or so back, Ray had shown up to school with a welt above his eye the size of a small turtle.
And yet, as Drake watched, Ray lowered the cigarette to his mother’s lips. He expected the woman’s eyes to open and for her to flail, to shout for John, to yell at her son to get away from her, but nothing happened. Nothing that overt, anyways. But when the filter grazed her lips, he saw them pucker ever so slightly and then grip it.
The entire time, Angelina’s eyes remained closed. Even as she took a small drag and exhaled through her nostrils with her next breath, she didn’t wake. Ray pulled the cigarette away from her mouth, took a drag of his own, and then extinguished it on the bedside table.
And then Ray tilted his head sideways and observed his mother from this new angle.
Put her mask back on, Drake pleaded silently. Come on, Ray. Come on, put the mask back on and plug in the machine.
His heart was racing now, and a chill coursed through him.
Please, Ray, just do it. Put the mask back on and plug in the machine.
Drake stood in the doorway for what felt like an eternity, watching his friend as he stared at his mother.
Ray became so still then, that once again Drake was convinced that the boy was sleeping. In fact, Drake had to pinch himself to confirm that he wasn’t the one that was sleeping.
Ray suddenly twitched and to Drake’s relief, he grabbed the mask that lay on Angelina’s pillow and placed it over her nose and mouth. Then he went over and plugged the machine back in. It started with a whir and a beep.
Satisfied and relieved, Drake slowly backed down the hallway towards his bedroom. As he climbed into bed, he heard the mechanical click followed by the wheeze of Angelina’s artificial respirator.
Drake closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep when he heard Ray’s feet shuffle into the room. The bed beside him creaked as Ray lowered himself onto it. Less than five minutes later, Drake heard another sound in addition to the machine that helped keep Angelina Reynolds alive.
He heard his friend snoring softly.
Despite his exhaustion, Drake stared at the ceiling for more than an hour before falling back asleep.
Chapter 7
“Drake? Drake, you awake?”
Drake rolled onto his side and opened his eyes.
“Yeah,” he replied groggily. “I’m up.”
“What time is it?” Ray asked, as his eyes drifted over to the clock. It read 8:22. “That’s weird, dad didn’t wake us up today.”
The sun was already shining brightly, and seeing as Drake had forgotten to close the drapes when he’d looked out the window last night, it shone directly in his face. The light caused a headache to start behind his eyes, and he squinted.
He must’ve drifted off at some point between five and eight, but he couldn’t remember falling asleep. Part of him wanted to believe that he had slept through the night, that what he’d seen in Angelina’s room had been a dream, but when he inhaled deeply through his nose, he could still smell the second-hand smoke.
Drake had heard John wake up, had heard the man grunt and groan as he made his way down the stairs. He even heard John making his coffee then pouring cereal. These noises, however annoying, had served as a welcome reprieve to listening to Angelina’s machinery, to making sure that the woman was still alive.
Drake had even heard John make his way back upstairs sometime later and then traipse down the hall to Angelina’s room. Thankfully, he had closed the woman’s door, finally offering Drake some silence.
“I didn’t hear him wake up,” Drake lied.
Ray rubbed his eyes and then swung his legs over the side of the bed. Drake watched him curiously as he did this, needing to see if Ray would give any hint, any clue that he knew what had happened the night before.
“You all right?” Ray asked. “Why you eyeballing me?”
Drake shook his head and looked away.
“Nothing, I mean, sorry—I didn’t sleep well last night.”
Ray frowned, but said nothing as he made his way to the door. As he left the room, he turned back and looked at Drake.
“I’m gonna have a quick shower. You wanna head to the pond, after?”
Drake also rose out of bed.
“Sounds good. I’ll go fix us something to eat.”
***
As soon as he heard the shower start, Drake made his way down the hall. But instead of heading to the kitchen, he walked to Angelina’s room. The door was still closed, and for some reason, this made him uneasy. He felt like a voyeur, like the time that he had gotten a peek in the girls’ change room at school and had glimpsed the side of one of Becky Hanscom’s large, pale breasts.
Only this time he didn’t feel a tingling in his groin, but a flutter in his chest.
Don’t be dead, don’t be dead, don’t be dead…
Drake took a deep breath and slowly opened the door, ready to slam it closed again and run at breakneck speed toward the kitchen should Angelina shout or cry out.
And he wanted her to do just that; to scream at him, to cry, moan, burp, fart, any excuse for him to get the fuck out of there.
But she didn’t. As Drake opened the door, he heard the sound of the click and then the wheeze of the respirator filling her diseased lungs with air.
Drake leaned his head inside the room. He was surprised that it didn’t smell like smoke, but he didn’t give this much thought. As soon as his eyes fell on Angelina’s pale, sunken cheeks, he became preoccupied.
She looked worse; worse than he had ever seen her before. Her fingers, laid out nicely on top of the crisply folded bedsheet, had taken on a bulbous appearance, with each of her knuckles standing out like hubcaps glued to a baseball bat. Blue veins on her forehead extended down and seemed to encircle her eyes. The capillaries on each of her nostrils were bright red even through the plastic mask.
<
br /> The woman’s eyes were closed, and in the brief moments between the click of the machine and the forcing of the air, she was completely and utterly still.
Click, whoosh. Click, whoosh.
Drake finally managed to peel his eyes away from the woman’s face, but just as he started to pull his head back into the hallway, he noticed a pile of ash on the bedside table. And then he noticed something else that he hadn’t seen the night prior. There was an orange pill container beside the ash, and although Drake couldn’t be certain, the top seemed cross-threaded.
John was in a hurry. That’s why he didn’t wake us. Didn’t even have time to put the cap on right after giving Angelina her medicine.
With a nod to himself, Drake started to back out of the room again. But his right heel pressed down on one of the worn floorboards and it groaned loudly. He froze, and for a moment he thought he would get away scot-free—after all, the shower was still running behind him, and Angelina Reynolds was in some sort of—
To his horror, Angelina started to turn her head in his direction. The woman’s eyes were partly open, revealing yellowed sclerae and cloudy irises.
Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck…
At first, Drake didn’t think that the woman was seeing him, that she was just shifting in her sleep or coma or whatever she was in, but when her pale lips parted behind that mask, Drake knew that she was trying to say something. He tried to make out the words, but with the sound of the shower behind him and the machine puffing her lungs in front of him, he couldn’t pick it up. Instead of trying to hear, he concentrated on her lips and tried to read them.
Just as he thought he understood, Angelina started to cough. Only this wasn’t a normal cough, a deep grumble with designs to expel mucus from one’s throat. No, Angelina Reynolds was far too frail for that. The woman’s entire body trembled, something that made her eyelids, which were thin as wax membranes, shudder, and her eyes to jog about in her head like loose ball bearings.
Drake was frozen in spot as he watched this terrible cross between a cough and a seizure. He was terrified, scared in a way that he had never been before. As he stared into her eyes from the doorway, which had since rolled back into her head, he knew that she was dying. And he knew that if he did nothing about it, she would soon be dead.
The machine started to beep, a high-pitched noise that carried with it an ominous reality.
The scene was so provocative, so captivating in its horror, that Drake didn’t hear the shower shut off, nor did he hear his friend running down the hallway toward him, shouting at him, yelling and cursing for him to tell him what he was doing in there.
Even when Ray pushed him aside and ran to his mother, Drake didn’t move.
It was the scene, yes, but it was more than that.
It was also what Angelina Reynolds was saying before she broke into the coughing fit.
Drake thought he recognized the words that those pale, cracked lips made behind the mask.
Two simple words, repeated over and over again.
Kill me, Angelina Reynolds had said. Kill me, kill me, kill me.
To keep reading, grab your copy of SKELETON KING today!
Books by Patrick Logan
Chase Adams FBI Thrillers
Book 1: Frozen Stiff
Book 2: Shadow Suspect
Book 3: Drawing Dead
Book 4: Amber Alert
Book 4.5: Georgina’s Story
Book 5: Dirty Money
Detective Damien Drake
Book 1: Butterfly Kisses
Book 2: Cause of Death
Book 3: Download Murder
Book 4: Skeleton King
Book 5: Human Traffic
Book 6: Drug Lord: Part One
Book 7: Drug Lord: Part Two
Dr. Beckett Campbell, ME
Book 0: Bitter End
Book 1: Organ Donor
Book 2: Injecting Faith
The Haunted Series
Book 1: Shallow Graves
Book 2: The Seventh Ward
Book 3: Seaforth Prison
Book 4: Scarsdale Crematorium
Book 5: Sacred Heard Orphanage
Book 6: Shores of the Marrow
Book 7: Sacrifice
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents in this book are either entirely imaginary or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or of places, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © Patrick Logan 2017
Interior design: © Patrick Logan 2017
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This book, or parts thereof, cannot be reproduced, scanned, or disseminated in any print or electronic form.
Second Edition: September 2018
Detective Damien Drake series Box Set 1 Page 76