Domino Falls Read Online Free

cheeks and matted blond hair were ghoulish. Kendra stood behind Terry, who had pulled out his Browning 9mm. Sometimes freaks could talk! After the way she’d lost Grandpa Joe, Kendra didn’t think she could ever forget it, but those girls had fooled her. What if one of them had been too close?
    Everyone who’d brought a gun had it trained on a member of this bizarre family. Terry’s was on the stranger. “What do you want from us?” Terry said, raising his voice to be heard over Hipshot’s ferocious growling and barking. “Why’d you bring us back here?”
    â€œThe girls were born on Christmas Day,” the man said. Now Kendra could hear his pain, grief, shock. “We’ve always celebrated all month, so they wouldn’t feel cheated. Can you help me give them their present? I know it’s what they’d want.”
    Terry backed up a step, and Kendra gladly retreated with him. Piranha cursed, and they formed an instinctive half-circle to protect themselves, ready to fire and flee. His family was straining at the end of their ropes now, mouths stretched wide, yearning, fingers questing.
    â€œWhat present?” Terry said, his voice unsteady. “Man, you’re crazy. You can’t help them. Let us make sure you’re not bit, and you can come with us. Leave them here.”
    The man shook his head, insistent. “I need you to help me give them their present,” he said, and his voice broke. “I can’t do it. Can’t you see? Look at them! Listen to my girls laughing! They sound exactly the same. I want to, but . . . I can’t.”
    Those might have been his sanest words yet, Kendra realized. Her throat swelled with grief for a family she’d never known.
    â€œLet’s get the hell out of here,” Sonia said, tugging on Piranha.
    But Piranha didn’t move. He was staring at Terry. And Ursalina. For the first time Kendra could remember, they didn’t have a plan. They didn’t know what to do.
    â€œShe’s right,” Kendra said. “Let’s go. We shouldn’t have stopped.”
    Terry shook his head, taking another step back. “I’m sorry,” he told the pleading man. “We can’t help you.”
    But Kendra’s eyes were drawn to Ursalina, who was gazing at the kids with curled lips and dead eyes. Then Ursalina looked toward Dean, and their eyes locked with a spark of communication. A pair of barely perceptible nods between them, in a secret tongue only they seemed to know.
    Ursalina, after all, had fought in a war when her National Guard had fallen to an army of freaks. And Dean’s war had followed him to his dreams; the war he’d fought at home.
    â€œI can do it,” Dean said.
    Ursalina nodded. “Yeah. We can handle this.”
    Dean looked at Darius, who shook his head. All jokes were far from Darius’s face. “Not me, bro,” Darius said. “I’m going back to my bike.”
    â€œGo on,” Dean said, nodding. “You and the others wait for us.”
    â€œSir?” Terry said gently to the man. “Step around front with us, please. You don’t want to be here right now.”
    Kendra dared to hope that if she made it back to the bus fast enough and covered her ears, she could pretend she’d never seen the bizarre Christmas scene in the backyard. But she never had the chance.
    The stranger didn’t come toward Terry. Instead, he rushed to the picnic table, toward his wife and children, his arms wide to embrace them. All Kendra saw was the ecstatic grin on hisface. “I’m sorry, Melissa,” he said. “I’m sorry, Caitlin and Cathy. Merry Christmas, angels. Happy birthday!”
    For an instant, Kendra thought they were only trying to hug him too; they were all wrapped in an iron embrace, a tangle of frantic limbs.
    But Kendra closed her eyes when she saw their teeth.
    By the time the gunshots finally