Eaters Read Online Free

oval. “I’m going to get some water. Why don’t we break for lunch until the ambulance or the police or whoever comes to take away that lunatic?”
    She agreed. Thanks to her busy morning, she hadn’t had anything more than a cup of coffee, and the butterflies in her stomach had calmed enough now to reveal the rumbling.
    She stopped by Mary’s office and saw her cradling the phone on her shoulder.
    “It’s the weirdest thing. It just rings and rings. Nobody answers.”
    “We should go online, see what’s going on. I heard there was some flu going around. Maybe they’re overwhelmed with calls.”
    Mary shrugged. “I’m thinking of leaving and getting my kid from school. If there’s something bad going around, he should be home.”
    Cheryl asked her to stay on the phone for just a few more minutes to try and get through. When she turned to leave, she saw Paul standing in the hallway blocking her path. His hands stretched across to each wall, and he leaned forward, leering at her.
    Lanny rushed up behind him. “We couldn’t hold him. He forced his way out.”
    She glanced from them back to Paul.
    Paul? Was that really him?
    As he snarled at her, she saw that his face had changed even more dramatically. His skin had turned gray, and it looked like he’d been tearing at it with his fingers. The flesh was peeling away underneath his eyes, and underneath the flaps of skin and blood, she saw the white of bone.
    This wasn’t Paul anymore. It was something else.
    He rushed towards her, and she held her hands up in front of her face and screamed. But, instead of attacking, he ran past her…and out the front door.
    They watched as he continued across the street, nearly getting hit by a passing utility truck then disappeared in the dense stand of trees at the edge of the park.
    Bob walked over and put a hand on her shoulder. “Well…I guess we can tell Mary that the patient has left the building. You okay?”
    “Yeah,” she said. “I think so. Just a little startled.”
    Lanny hiked up his slacks. “Let’s get some grub. All this drama has made me hungry.”
    And that’s that, she thought. No one’s too worried about Paul…about what just happened…what might be going on in the world. They just needed a Philly cheese steak sandwich and a beer and all would be well. Maybe they thought that Paul had always been just one notch short of going postal anyway, and his illness had just tipped the scale.
    She waved them off. “Yeah, me too.”
    She was relieved when they left and didn’t ask her to join them. There was too much adrenaline still coursing through her veins for her to concentrate on playing bullshit volleyball with them or joining in with the whining about sales figures and quotas.
    Normally, she brown-bagged it, but she hadn’t had time to pack anything for her lunch this morning, so she decided to run out for a sandwich. There was a place two blocks away that had hedonistic six-inch calorie bombs that would fill her stomach with enough carbs and fat to put her in a blissful semi-coma for the rest of the afternoon.
    She grabbed her purse and walked out the door.

Chapter Three
     
     
    It had been a little overcast earlier, but it was sunny now. As she walked along the warm sidewalk, Paul’s sudden illness seemed a little less disturbing. He’d always been a bit of a pest, annoying her by stalling her clients’ claims to get his processed faster, and he frequently talked to her cleavage instead of her face. She hoped that he had a long recovery period in a hospital before he came back— if he came back . She couldn’t think of anything that would cause his bizarre behavior, unless it was a brain tumor or some rare tropical disease. But that didn’t explain either the rotting, peeling flesh, or the fact that at least for a few minutes, Paul had appeared to be completely dead .
    She paused in front of the building, looking for any signs of Paul or the strange man that had approached her earlier,