by Nicky James
Lost in a Moment
(Trials of Fear #4)
By Nicky James
Lost in a Moment
Copyright © 2019 by Nicky James
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover Artist:
Nicky James
Proofing:
LesCourt Author Services
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.
Contents
Note to Reader
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
Where you can stalk find me:
Stay Tuned for Book 5 in the Trials of Fear
Other Titles by Nicky James
Note to Reader
This book is 100% standalone. The Trials of Fear Series all take place in the same fictitious city of Dewhurst Point. You might see or hear of characters you know from other books, but they bear no relevance to the storyline.
Phobia
An extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something.
Chronophobia
A persistent, abnormal, and unwarranted fear of time or of the passing of time.
Time is very slow for those who wait.
Very fast for those who are scared.
Very long for those who lament.
Very short for those who celebrate.
But for those who love, time is eternal.
-William Shakespeare-
Prologue
Grayson
The pain was excruciating. It canceled out the howling winds and the perilous cracks of thunder that continued to shake the earth. My shrill cries were swallowed up and washed away by the torrent of rain flooding the mucky remnants of the winter thaw in the backyard and were carried downhill to the bloated stream.
There was no one nearby to hear my mournful wails. Mother Nature herself had decided it was my time, and the bitch was determined to make me suffer.
Had I really lived such a horrible life that I deserved to be tortured? I always hoped that when I died, it would be quick and painless.
But doesn’t everybody?
The darkness surrounding me was so dense I couldn’t tell if my eyes were opened or closed.
My mouth filled with saliva. Stomach acid climbed my throat as I groped my jean-clad leg with a trembling hand, inching lower, feeling and praying I was wrong. Fear shadowed reasoning, and before I confirmed what I already knew, I thrashed, jerking my body as hard as I could to prove my thoughts wrong.
My punishment was severe.
A flash of blinding white light filled my vision, but it wasn’t a result of the storm. Stabbing, knife-like pain radiated through my entire right side. Confirmation. My body reflexively heaved with the overwhelming pain, and I emptied the entire contents of my stomach. Thankfully, my subconscious knew enough to instruct me to turn my head so I didn’t wear it.
I was stuck. Something had landed on the bottom half of my right leg during my escape to the basement, pinning me in place.
Something immense.
Heavy.
Unforgiving.
Tasting bile, I spat and tried to wipe my mouth on the shoulder of my T-shirt without moving too much. Inhaling sharp breaths of air through my nose, I lay back against the cement floor, urging my stomach to calm, doing all I could to regain control over the lashing pain. Somewhere in my muddled brain I thought I could wish it away, force it into a tight little box and close the lid so I didn’t have to feel it anymore.
It didn’t work. The pain was like nothing I’d ever experienced in my life. All-consuming.
I squeezed my eyes closed and counted, working to steady myself. Something jabbed into my back, but I couldn’t move, and it was so dark, I knew, even if I managed to shift my body around, I wouldn’t be able to make out what it was. So I conceded to the small discomfort as I worked on refocusing my mind.
The longer I lay still, the more punctuated my senses became. For a brief moment, I was convinced I was dreaming, and that the nightmarish storm ravishing Dewhurst was only a figment of my imagination. It was too crisp, too violent, and too terrifying to be real.
Then, the incessant shivers started and fog descended, scrambling reality and blurring time and space. Things moved in the darkness just out of reach. My mind played tricks on me. When I managed to capture snippets of clarity as I drifted into a timeless expanse of semi-consciousness, I understood that I was going into shock and this was no dream.
I snapped to alertness, jolting my leg again and sending a piercing pain to shoot over my body. My abdominal muscles tightened, but I clenched my teeth to avoid losing my stomach. Propped up on an elbow, I blindly ran my hand down my pants again, knowing I had to free my leg so I could get out of there.
There was no doubt it was broken. A person didn’t experience this kind of agony without a serious injury. My body screamed in protest at the incurring wrath. Whatever had landed on me was heavy enough it had certainly crushed the bones. Perhaps worse.
Just past the kneecap of my right leg, my fingers made contact with something cold and wet, hard and jagged like a slab of rock. Cement? A beam? I struggled to form thoughts, to paint the picture so I understood what I was up against. How had I gotten here?
Navigating my brain was like trudging through thick mud. I kept getting stuck by the suctioning pull wanting to drag me down into sleep, and I lost my train of thought. Confusion set in. My understanding distorted.
A crack of thunder vibrated across the night sky, rumbling at such a decibel I felt it deep in my core as it rattled my bones. Was it going away? Was the storm passing?
Think.
I squeezed my eyes shut, drawing up what I could remember about my evening, pinning each consecutive thought in order so I could make a clearer picture.
Watching TV in the living room.
The emergency broadcast interrupting my show, flashing severe thunderstorm warnings and tornado watches for the Dewhurst area across the screen.
High winds.
Torrential rains.
Take cover.
Shelter… right. I’d sought shelter in the unfinished basement of my house. Or tried to.
Something had happened. There’d been a noise, a different noise than rumbling thunder. Popping. Cracking. Breaking. Something…
I opened my eyes and tried to piece it together.
The darkness was impenetrable. No light filter through from anywhere. It was an endless abyss of nothingness. Not even the flashes of lightning—if there were any—showed. My hand disappeared before my eyes. Yet my mind continued to trick me, making me dart my gaze to perceived images in my peripheral vision.
Nothing was there. Even if there was, I’d never see it.
Think!
I’d descended the concrete stairs. Or mostly? Had I made it to the bottom? I couldn’t remember.
Clenching my jaw, I tried to adjust my ass on the hard ground. Something wet soaked through my pants, and I didn’t know if it was rainwater or blood. If it was blood, I was screwed because there was a lot of it.
Every movement rewarded me with more pain. Trembling, unable to stop the shakes, I moved my fingers to the ground under me, touching the pooling wetness and analyzing its consistency with my heart in my throat.
I brought my fingers to my mouth and touched them to my tongue before sagging back onto the ground with relief when the telltale tang of metallic blood was absent. Rainwater. Distinctly earthy tasting and pungent, but I wasn’t bleeding out. It must have been leaking in from somewhere.
Again, I tried to make sense of the recent events that had landed me trapped in my basement. Whatever had happened, I knew for certain I had to get myself out of there.
I bent my left knee and placed my sock-covered foot against the heavy concrete block that laid over my right leg, then I put weight behind it, conjuring up as much strength as I could, imagining I was working the leg machine at the gym as I tried to shove it off.
Jolting hot pain ripped through me, and I nearly passed out. Stopping that effort, I sat again and felt with both hands, looking for a place to grip the block so I could try lifting it off. Cold fingers blindly found a decent grip. My heart knocked tripled time, and I knew my pulse was through the roof.
Sucking in a deep breath, I put all my muscles behind the lift, doing everything I could to ignore the rippling agony running through my body. I growled, pulled, shoved, yelled, and cursed.
But I was rewarded with nothing. Not even an inch of movement.
Out of breath, with tears streaming down my cheeks, I fell back and covered my face. Panic dug her claws in deeper, dragging me into her lair and suffocating me. I needed help.
Frantic, I dug through my pockets in search of my phone but came up empty with my mind spinning as I tried to remember where I’d left it.
My coffee table.
“Fucking motherfucker!”
I slammed a fist onto the hard ground and wrenched my head back as I screamed. The cords of muscles in my neck pulled taut against the strain as I emptied my lungs, cursing everything from the storm to my shitty unstable house. I cried, yelled, begged, and prayed, but in the end, I remained alone with nothing more than strained vocal cords and my new companion: fear.
A blanket of unusual warmth encapsulated me, drawing me down to somewhere I didn’t think I wanted to go. Overwhelmed by this sudden onslaught of fatigue, I sniffled and searched the unforgivable depths of nothingness surrounding me, wanting and needing an escape. An answer.
Blackness and nothing more. No sense of time or space. How long had I been down here? Would help ever find me?
Trembling with shock, the pain slowly faded along with consciousness. There was no escaping the pull, and I submitted, letting it take me down, down, down…
When I awoke—hours or minutes, I couldn’t be sure—later, the first thing I knew for certain was the storm was gone. The battering rains no longer fell; the booming thunder no longer split the earth in two. There was nothing but eerie silence and the unending darkness that wouldn’t retreat.
Blessedly, there was no more pain.
My leg had gone numb. There was no feeling except a slightly uncomfortable ache from having lain on the hard ground for too long. My clothing beneath me was saturated with pooling rainwater, and I shivered. The cold was bone deep, and my teeth chattered mercilessly.
Lifting my head a fraction, I blinked into the abyss, wondering how long I’d been out of it. Was it nighttime still? If the sun had risen, would its bright rays penetrate this chamber of death? Had a whole day passed and was this the next night?
Groaning, I pulled myself up on shaky arms until I was partially sitting, feeling once again along the edges of the concrete block pinning me down. Even if I managed to remove it, could I find my way out? Was I just at the bottom of the stairs? Had the entire basement caved in?
Again, I tried to move the obstruction, tried to shift it aside, anything, but it was too heavy and resistant. I was weakened. Exhaustion had drained any strength I’d once had, and my effort was pitiful at best.
Following the curve of my leg, I cautiously traced my fingers around to its underside and prodded as best I could at the part that laid against the ground. I couldn’t feel my own touch, and a spike of adrenaline surged through my blood, prickling the hairs on my arms to attention, shivering up my neck and over my scalp.
Teeth chattering, I continued to move my hand upward, over my kneecap, seeking the point where sensations returned. My lips were dry. A thick layer of phlegm coated the inside of my mouth making swallowing a challenge. Relenting, fear swarming me at the realization of my predicament, I abandoned that task, unsure I wanted to know the answer, and tried to think of what to do.
“Hello! Can anyone hear me?”
Each breath I took was ragged. My surroundings swallowed my cries, and I got the horrible sense that they wouldn’t travel far enough to be heard. I yelled again, raising my voice.
“Anyone? I’m stuck. I need help. Hello?”
After another ten minutes of fruitless yelling, I slumped back onto the hard wet ground and battled with raw, undiluted fear as it tore through me relentlessly. I didn’t like where my thoughts were taking me. When I considered where I lived, and the amount of exposure I had with people on a daily basis, the horror of my situation became too real.
Exhaustion returned without my permission. The mundane task of lying on the ground and screaming my head off was apparently more work than I anticipated. Before I could stop it, I was sucked into unconsciousness again.
Dreams of sunshine toyed with me, making my reality less clear and more surreal and confusing. Haunting childhood memories of monsters came and went. Ones who chased me through dark landscapes. Except in these newer versions, the monster caught me and began devouring me alive… starting with my right leg. The pain, intolerable and too real.
Drifting. I spent a long time floating in a state of semi-consciousness. Partially aware of my surroundings but mostly lost in a tangle of these broken dreams that didn’t make sense. Every time I woke fully, it was the same. Darkness. Nothing to help me distinguish the passing of time. No noise outside my own breathing and cries for help, but even those were waning.
I counted the beating of my own heart for a while but quit when I was convinced it was slowing down. The alarming realization that I might truly be dying was too much to accept.
Thirst made swallowing difficult. My tongue and throat swelled to the point I thought I might choke. At one point, I managed a meager effort at maneuvering my body around enough to turn my face against the concrete floor so I could slurp at the puddle. I was rewarded with icy cold fluid and enough dirt to make my teeth grit together for hours. I didn’t care. It felt too amazing as it slipped down my throat to complain.
Pivoting between consciousness and slumber made it impossible to keep track of time. I convinced myself it’d only been a few hours, but then desperation for help and nourishment haunted me and said I’d been there much, much longer. Days perhaps.
No one was coming.
I’d run out of energy to call for help. My breathing was labored and staying awake was harder and harder.
They’ll find me soon. They have to.
How long until someone realized I was missing? How long until help arrived? How long until my body gave up?
Awakened by a nightmare, the spear-toothed monster again, I jerked and tried to scramble upward, immediately reminded of my predicament when I couldn’t move. Pain lashed out again, but it was different now. Duller. It was everywhere and nowhere. A headache pounded behind my eyes. I was so tired.
Another day gone? Or only a few hours? What time was it?
I no longer prayed t
o be rescued, I prayed for death to find me. Prayed for an end to this timeless, dark agony.
Chapter One
Grayson
Death never came.
Perhaps I should have been grateful I still had my life, but self-pity was a suffocating emotion that left me more resentful than thankful.
Thick sterile bandages covered the stump left behind from the amputation of the lower half of my right leg. I stared at it in disbelief every day, convinced my eyes and brain were playing tricks on me. There were times when I was certain I could feel it, so it must be an illusion, right?
It wasn’t.
It’d been twelve days since I woke up in the hospital. Twelve days since my life irrevocably changed. Twelve days staring at the unbelievable as I cursed the monster for not finishing what he started and leaving me maimed.
A light tapping on my open hospital room door made me flinch, and I flung the sheet back across my lower body as I peered up to see who was there.
A petite brunette wearing pink scrubs and a pixie haircut strolled in without waiting for permission. It was Addison, my semi-regular day nurse. In one hand she dragged a blood pressure machine, in the other she carried a little paper cup which I knew contained my morning dose of pills.
“Good morning, Gray. How are you feeling today?”
Was it that time already? I scrambled on the bed, shifting and wrenching my head around, straining to see the clock on the wall behind me. Ten after seven.
Seriously? Seven fucking ten? How is that even possible?
I’d awoken at just shy of four in the morning with a steady throbbing pain and an itch I couldn’t satisfy. Too stubborn to call for painkillers, I’d endured as I’d thought about my miserable life and what lay ahead. I knew I hadn’t returned to sleep, yet there was no way that many hours had passed already.
Whipping my head to the only covered window in my private room, I tried to determine if there was light seeping around the curtains. The stupid night nurse had insisted on closing them, even when I’d adamantly objected. “You need to sleep,” she’d told me. Plunging the room into darkness was not conducive to helping me relax. So, I’d kept my bedside light on, ignoring her disapproving glare.