3 TERRIFYING THRILLERS

by Jude Hardin

  And she couldn’t scream for help.

  She dropped to the floor, reached up and tried to twist the cold brass doorknob with the soles of her feet. It was slippery, and it took a few tries, but she finally managed to turn it enough.

  Finally, she heard the glorious click of the bolt clearing the lock plate.

  She gave the knob a good yank, nearly ecstatic now with anticipation, knowing the door would swing open freely and she could run out to the road and scurry toward the nearest neighbor a quarter mile away.

  Unfortunately, Jason had secured the chain at the top of the door.

  “You bitch,” he shouted.

  She heard him coming. Like a freight train. He was breathing hard, wheezing, snorting. Within seconds, he was on her, pounding her face with close fists. She felt her life forces fading. This was it. She’d done all she could do. She’d tried. She’d given it her all, but she had failed.

  And now she was going to die.

  Mark

  The front door was ajar, and there were slapping noises coming from directly inside.

  Someone was fighting.

  Mark tried to push the door open, but the chain was latched.

  “What the hell’s going on in there?” he said.

  Silence, and then he heard something being dragged across the floor.

  “I’m calling the police,” Danielle said. “Come on, we’ll wait in the car.”

  Mark thought about the foul odor coming from the locked bedroom.

  “I have a feeling somebody’s going to be dead by the time the police get here,” he said. “I’m going in.”

  He stepped back and kicked the center of the door with the bottom of his shoe. On the second try, the jamb splintered and the door swung inward.

  Mark took one step into the house and was greeted with a fist to the gut.

  A fist, he thought, for a second or two, until he realized that something very cold was inside of him.

  Something cold and hard and sharp.

  And deadly.

  Danielle

  Danielle had punched in 911, and she was on the line with the dispatcher now, frantically trying to remember Jason’s street address.

  “You go past Publix, and there’s a windy road, and then you turn onto a dirt road by a—”

  Before she could say double-wide trailer, Jason grabbed her by the hair with a quick jerk and started dragging her toward the house. When he did, the phone flew from her hand and skittered across the driveway.

  “Let go of me,” she screamed. “Jason—”

  “Shut up.”

  Jason spun her around and swatted her with the back of his hand. If the blow had connected solidly, it probably would have knocked her out.

  But the blow did not connect solidly.

  It only grazed the side of her head.

  Danielle ran toward the road, screaming for help at the top of her lungs. She looked back, and Jason was in pursuit, but he was losing ground. He was limping along behind her, sort of listing to one side, holding his crotch with both hands.

  There was no way he could catch her.

  She found her rhythm, started jogging at a steady pace, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth. When she looked back again, Jason had given up. He was standing in the middle of the road with his hands on his thighs.

  Danielle could see the mobile home now.

  It was only about a hundred yards away.

  There was a car parked in the gravel drive.

  The porch light had been turned off, but a couple of the windows glowed yellow now through the dusty gloom. Someone was home. Thank God.

  She continued running at a steady pace, and she was almost there when the unthinkable happened.

  Jason

  Someone had taken a pair of pliers and had popped Jason’s left testicle like a grape. That was the way it felt, anyway. Jason was in severe pain, and he needed medical attention immediately.

  He couldn’t run after Danielle. He could barely even walk.

  He’d pretty much given up any hope of catching her until he heard her scream and saw her collapse on the dirt road.

  Danielle had rolled her ankle.

  It had happened in an instant.

  Bad luck for her. Good luck for Jason.

  She tried to get up and stand on it, but she could not. It must have been a bad sprain, or maybe even some torn ligaments. An extremely painful injury, to say the least.

  She couldn’t walk, but she was trying to drag herself along now by pushing with her good leg and pulling with her elbows. It was a pitiful sight, really. Jason liked Danielle, and he almost felt sorry for her.

  Almost.

  But she needed to be disposed of, like the others. There was simply no way around it now.

  Jason started hobbling toward her. He was still carrying the butcher knife, the one he’d buried in Mark Taylor’s gut. He would use it to slit Danielle’s throat, and then he would drag her back to the house. Everything was going to be all right. He would think of a way to make it all work out. He just needed some time.

  And maybe some surgery.

  It took him about five minutes to catch up with her. Five slow, excruciating minutes. She was crying, clawing at the dirt, expending an incredible amount of energy just to move a few inches at a time.

  “It’s over,” Jason said.

  She rolled onto her back, looked up at him. “Please. I’m begging you. Please don’t do this.”

  “Like I really have a choice.”

  Jason straddled her, pinning her arms with his knees. She tried to wriggle free, tried to resist, but she was too weak. Her muscles were exhausted from the run and the crawl. The pathetic crawl. All she could do was lie there and cry hysterically.

  Jason’s balls were swollen. It felt like he was sitting on a couple of cantaloupes.

  The pain had started to subside a bit, though. His pelvic region felt numb now, mostly, with an underlying dull ache in his upper thighs. Lisa had ruptured him. Crazy bitch. At least she was gone now, rotting in the darkest regions of hell where she belonged. Jason didn’t feel sorry about killing her, not even a little bit.

  Danielle was another story. He was going to miss her.

  But it had to be done.

  One slice across the trachea, he thought, and that would be it. She might take one or two more gurgling breaths, but death would be pretty much instant. That was the way he wanted it. He didn’t want her to suffer.

  She looked up at him through glassy, panicked eyes. She wasn’t screaming anymore. She wasn’t saying anything. She knew it was useless. She knew she was going to die.

  He put the sharp edge of the blade against the front of her throat.

  Just do it, he thought. Just swipe it across her windpipe and be done with it.

  He pressed the steel against her skin, gripped the handle tight, tensed his back and shoulder muscles.

  And a split second before he made the cut and ended Danielle Wise’s life, Jason felt an intense burning sensation in his left kidney. The pain radiated inward, toward his stomach, through his stomach, and soon engulfed his entire body.

  He dropped the knife, rolled onto his side, stared at the dusty road in front of him.

  The crummy, washboarded dirt road.

  It was the last thing Jason Powers saw before his peripheral vision closed to a pinpoint and he slipped off into oblivion.

  Danielle

  Six weeks later, somewhere over Arkansas

  At thirty thousand feet, en route to Denver, Colorado, Danielle Wise used her tablet computer to skim through some recent magazine articles. The internal and external investigations into the incidents at Hallows Cove Memorial Hospital were ongoing, but most of the authors of the op-ed pieces had reached the same conclusion: that Jason Powers was a serial killer. If the initial estimates were correct, he’d intentionally killed at least thirty patients over the past seven years.

  Those were the allegations flying around, but it was a known fact th
at he’d murdered one person, and that person was Mark Taylor, Danielle’s ex-boyfriend.

  Mark had died from a stab wound to the abdomen. He’d bled to death on the linoleum floor of Jason’s foyer.

  But before he died, he’d done something heroic, something unbelievably courageous, something Danielle would eternally be grateful for.

  In essence, Mark had saved her life.

  As he lay bleeding, Lisa Webber staggered to the door and tripped over him. Mark reached out with his hand and felt her bloody face, and he untied the gag around her mouth and the blindfold around her eyes. He pulled the washcloth out of her mouth, and then she begged him to unwind the duct tape binding her arms.

  It took him a while, but he finally got all the tape off. Lisa was free now. She called 911. She told Mark that help was on the way, and then she grabbed the first weapon she could find.

  She stumbled outside and followed the sounds of Danielle’s moans and screams. When she reached the spot on the dirt road where Jason and Danielle had ended up, she didn’t bother with any sort of warning. With all the strength she could muster, she lanced Jason through the back with the razor-sharp steel blade of his great, great, great grandfather’s Civil War sword.

  The blade pierced Jason’s left kidney, and it clipped his aorta on the way to the other side of his torso. Death was almost instantaneous, the coroner had said. He doubted that Jason had taken another breath after being stabbed. The autopsy showed one clean cut from back to front. One cut was all it took.

  Lisa and Danielle were transported to the emergency room via ambulance.

  Mark and Jason were pronounced dead at the scene.

  Even though Mark had helped save her life, Danielle still felt compelled to tell the police about the shooting down in Key West. Mark had stressed that it was an accident, and Danielle had told the police that as well, but there was no way she could just remain silent about it. She wouldn’t have been able to live with herself. That man’s family deserved some sort of closure too.

  Six weeks had passed, but Danielle knew that she would never, ever, completely recover from the trauma she’d experienced on that fateful day in Hallows Cove. Maybe the scars would fade in time, but they would always be with her. In her thoughts, and in her nightmares.

  But Denver awaited her now, a new job and a new life as a traveling nurse.

  Jason had said there was a story that went along with the antique sword, and there was. Danielle had done some research, and she was even thinking about writing her own article about the ordeal she’d been through. Or maybe even a book. She’d exchanged a few emails with Lisa Webber, thinking the two of them might be able to collaborate on something, but Lisa didn’t seem to want any part of it. Apparently, Jason had left her for dead. He’d done a number on her face, knocking out several teeth and fracturing her right eye socket and left cheek bone, and she was having a rough time dealing with the surgeries and the ongoing medical care necessary for recovery. What they say is true: doctors and nurses make the worst patients.

  At any rate, the story behind the sword was an interesting one. Apparently, Jason’s great, great, great grandfather, a Confederate soldier named Henry Wilson, had pried it from a dying Union officer’s hand during the Battle of Olustee in 1864. After the war, Henry felt bad about what he’d done, and he managed to find Sarah Spaulding, the officer’s widow, and return the weapon to her. One thing led to another, and Henry and Sarah ended up marrying and having eight children together.

  So the sword had been instrumental in bringing Jason Powers into this world, and in taking him out of it.

  The story of Henry and Sarah was a sweet and romantic one, and Danielle wondered if things like that ever happened anymore, if it was even possible.

  Maybe it was, she thought, and maybe something like that would even happen to her someday.

  Maybe someone was out there, somewhere, and maybe she would fall in love again.

  But she wasn’t in any hurry.

  GHOST

  Copyright © 2014 by Jude Hardin

  CHAPTER ONE

  Judy Smith and her husband Charles had taken the two-lane blacktop, thinking they might be able to avoid the Friday evening interstate traffic. Now Judy braced herself against the dashboard, as if by sheer will she might be able to stop the eighteen-wheeler barreling directly toward them at ninety miles an hour.

  “No!” Judy shouted. The truck kept coming.

  Charles had a deathgrip on the steering wheel. He was frozen. Judy had to do something. She reached over and pulled the emergency brake, and at the same time grabbed the wheel and jerked it to the right. The car spun out of control and then rolled onto its side, finally landing upside down in a roadside drainage ditch. The airbag deployed, pinning Judy against her seat, and her neck was bent at a painful angle against the car’s headliner.

  But she was alive.

  She was alive, and she could wiggle her toes.

  The semi’s airbrakes hissed to a stop on the other side of the highway.

  It was dark, and Judy couldn’t see Charles, but she could hear him groaning. He was alive, too. Surely the trucker would call 9-1-1 now and help would be on the way shortly.

  Judy felt something dripping on her left arm, something ice cold and stinging hot.

  Then she smelled it.

  Gasoline.

  The tank must have ruptured when the car rolled. The liquid trickled down her arm in a steady stream and welled in her armpit. She could feel it starting to saturate her black dress.

  “Charles? Honey?”

  “I’m here,” he said. “I think my legs are broke. God, it hurts. It hurts so bad.”

  “We’re going to be okay. They’ll take us to the hospital and fix us up good as new. You’ll see. I bet we’ll even get to ride in a helicopter. I’ve never ridden in a helicopter. Have you, honey? It’ll make one heck of a story for our grand—”

  She almost said grandchildren, but she caught herself in time. No, there would be no grandchildren now. They had buried that dream earlier in a mahogany casket with brass hardware.

  It was just a casket, she’d told herself, albeit a very expensive one. Just a casket, and the battered earthly shell that had once contained her son’s soul.

  Charles had wanted Colin to be cremated, but Judy wouldn’t hear of it. She wanted to see him, to be near him, to touch and hold and kiss him before saying goodbye for the last time. She couldn’t bear the thought of him being slid into an oven on a slab.

  “My legs are broke for sure,” Charles gasped. “I’m in agony. If I had a gun right now, I would shoot myself.”

  “Don’t talk like that, honey. They’ll give you something for the pain. Dilaudid, or morphine, something like that. It’ll knock it right out. You’ll see.”

  Charles didn’t respond. All was quiet and inky black. No traffic, no sirens in the distance, no chopper blades whirring to the rescue. What was taking them so long?

  Judy tried to reassure herself. It hadn’t really been long at all. Five minutes, maybe. Of course help couldn’t have gotten there yet. They were on a stretch of road in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest town. It would take at least twenty minutes for a rescue unit to arrive, maybe more.

  The safety glass on Judy’s side had crumpled inward, and there was a gap between the window and the doorframe that allowed fresh air to enter the car’s interior. If that window hadn’t broken like it did, the noxious gasoline fumes flooding the car’s interior probably would have choked Judy and her husband to death by now.

  Thank you, Jesus.

  The door to the semi’s cab slammed shut and a pair of heavy shoes clomped across the pavement. Judy’s broken window faced that way, and she watched the trucker approach. He didn’t seem panicked, or even in much of a hurry. He stopped a few feet from the wrecked vehicle, pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket, put the cigarette in his mouth and lit a match. He held the burning matchstick for a few seconds, staring into it, entranced by the flame. He finally
lit the cigarette and blew the match out with a lungful of smoke.

  “Hey,” Judy said. “We got a gas leak here. Would you mind not smoking?”

  The trucker took another drag. He didn’t say anything.

  “Hey,” Judy repeated. “Can you hear me? There’s gasoline leaking into the car here.”

  He still didn’t say anything. He hot-boxed the Marlboro like no tomorrow, blue-gray smoke jetting from his nostrils and rising into the cool night air.

  What an idiot. Was he trying to blow them all to Kingdom Come? Judy wished he would go on back to his truck. She wished the ambulance would hurry up. She wished—

  Then, faintly, there was a distant wail. Glory be. Help was on the way.

  The trucker turned and started to walk away. He hesitated, pivoted back toward Judy, and flicked the smoldering cigarette in her direction. In slow motion the fiery butt twirled end-over-end and landed inches from Judy’s window in the dry roadside scrub grass.

  She tried to pick it up, hoping to extinguish it, but it was out of reach. She leaned into the broken glass and stretched with all her might. If her arm had been a fraction of an inch longer, or if she had made it to her nail appointment that morning, she could have snatched the nasty thing and squashed it into the dirt.

  No such luck.

  Her heart pounded and her breath came in shallow gasps. She leaned and stretched, leaned and stretched, leaned and stretched and, finally, touched the filter with her middle finger.

  She touched it with her finger but it was wet and slippery from the trucker’s saliva and she couldn’t get enough friction against it to guide it her way.

  A plume of black smoke rose from a single blade of grass near the lit end of the cigarette, and then the unmistakable crackle of brush fire chewed its way into Judy’s consciousness like a team of hungry rats. She saw the flashing red lights of an ambulance and a fire truck seconds before bright orange flames engulfed the car and slowly roasted her and her husband until they were crispy dead.