Hang Wire Read Online Free
Author: Adam Christopher
Tags: Urban Fantasy, San Francisco, The Big One, circus shennanigans, Hang Wire Killer, dream walking, ancient powers, immortal players
and blood from his eyes.
The soldiers formed a row – five men, rifles raised. They continued to fire into the trench. From where he lay, Robert couldn’t see the carnage within.
“Stop!” he yelled. “For god’s sake, stop!” But his voice was weak and choked with dust and dirt. The soldiers kept firing. Robert clutched his aching chest and arched his neck, looking back at the trench and the soldiers upside-down.
A black figure leapt out of the trench – lithe, naked, caked in black ash, long matted hair swinging. A woman, the first victim Robert had tried to pull out of the ground. Either the soldiers had somehow missed their targets at point-blank range, or the bullets were having no effect. The woman leapt onto the front of a solider, and then pulled him backward. The pair toppled into the trench.
“Retreat!”
The firing stopped. Robert felt himself lifted by four soldiers, one on each limb. As he was carried back to dynamite trucks, he looked back at the receding trench. More black hands appeared over the lip as the creatures began to pull themselves up.
The soldiers had seen. As he got nearer to the trucks there was a flurry of movement, orders shouted. Someone cried out that they couldn’t be stopped, that they’d be out soon, all of them, that they would be all over the city by nightfall, that the street had to be blown right now.
There was a crump, like a gunshot underwater, and the street and the trench disappeared in a cloud of brown dust and red and orange flame.
Then the shockwave from the explosion hit the trucks, and Robert’s world vanished into darkness.
WHAT HORROR SLEEPS BEYOND THE KNOWLEDGE OF MEN?
INDIAN TERRITORY, OKLAHOMA-TO-BE
APRIL 22, 1889
Now, this is the story of a young man by the name of Joel, a young man with nothing to lose and everything to gain by traveling west into Indian Territory, where the Unassigned Lands were ready and waiting for those seeking their fortune, for those wanting to start something special, something new.
Young men like Joel, who had arrayed himself with the multitude assembled in one great line that stretched north to south. A train of wagons and horses, men and women and children, the young and the old, the fit and the infirm alike. The way ahead was free, and at high noon the land run would begin, each settler able to stake a claim on one hundred sixty acres of the finest soil that had once belonged to the native people, but no longer did.
Those on horses would be first off the mark and they’d get the best of the best, of course. Those in wagons would be slower, but the Unassigned Lands were big and even if there were fifty thousand people standing in the line like the whispers rippling back and forth through the crowd said there were, then there would be plenty to go around. And if you were in a wagon, well, then maybe things were looking better for you already, if you were smart and had that there wagon loaded with the tools and means to improve the land you staked.
If you were desperate, you could go on foot. You’d be slow, you’d get the scraps, but maybe, just maybe, you’d find your lot and live happily ever after.
Joel was on foot, and he was desperate, and that was yesterday. Today he watched the sun rise in the east from his camp, nothing more than a makeshift bivouac of blankets over a fallen log. The sun rose into a clear blue sky, the color so deep, so real that if he lay on his back and looked straight up into the apex of the dome above him, the sky was almost black. It filled his vision, and made him feel like he was swimming in an ocean of nothing but color. Joel lay there in the dirt for a spell, staring at the sky until a shining diamond of light struck the edge of his vision as the sun crawled higher, toward the west.
Toward the future. Joel’s future. This he knew, somehow, like it had been foretold, like it was written in his blood and the blood of his father and in the blood of his father before him.
Joel
The soldiers formed a row – five men, rifles raised. They continued to fire into the trench. From where he lay, Robert couldn’t see the carnage within.
“Stop!” he yelled. “For god’s sake, stop!” But his voice was weak and choked with dust and dirt. The soldiers kept firing. Robert clutched his aching chest and arched his neck, looking back at the trench and the soldiers upside-down.
A black figure leapt out of the trench – lithe, naked, caked in black ash, long matted hair swinging. A woman, the first victim Robert had tried to pull out of the ground. Either the soldiers had somehow missed their targets at point-blank range, or the bullets were having no effect. The woman leapt onto the front of a solider, and then pulled him backward. The pair toppled into the trench.
“Retreat!”
The firing stopped. Robert felt himself lifted by four soldiers, one on each limb. As he was carried back to dynamite trucks, he looked back at the receding trench. More black hands appeared over the lip as the creatures began to pull themselves up.
The soldiers had seen. As he got nearer to the trucks there was a flurry of movement, orders shouted. Someone cried out that they couldn’t be stopped, that they’d be out soon, all of them, that they would be all over the city by nightfall, that the street had to be blown right now.
There was a crump, like a gunshot underwater, and the street and the trench disappeared in a cloud of brown dust and red and orange flame.
Then the shockwave from the explosion hit the trucks, and Robert’s world vanished into darkness.
WHAT HORROR SLEEPS BEYOND THE KNOWLEDGE OF MEN?
INDIAN TERRITORY, OKLAHOMA-TO-BE
APRIL 22, 1889
Now, this is the story of a young man by the name of Joel, a young man with nothing to lose and everything to gain by traveling west into Indian Territory, where the Unassigned Lands were ready and waiting for those seeking their fortune, for those wanting to start something special, something new.
Young men like Joel, who had arrayed himself with the multitude assembled in one great line that stretched north to south. A train of wagons and horses, men and women and children, the young and the old, the fit and the infirm alike. The way ahead was free, and at high noon the land run would begin, each settler able to stake a claim on one hundred sixty acres of the finest soil that had once belonged to the native people, but no longer did.
Those on horses would be first off the mark and they’d get the best of the best, of course. Those in wagons would be slower, but the Unassigned Lands were big and even if there were fifty thousand people standing in the line like the whispers rippling back and forth through the crowd said there were, then there would be plenty to go around. And if you were in a wagon, well, then maybe things were looking better for you already, if you were smart and had that there wagon loaded with the tools and means to improve the land you staked.
If you were desperate, you could go on foot. You’d be slow, you’d get the scraps, but maybe, just maybe, you’d find your lot and live happily ever after.
Joel was on foot, and he was desperate, and that was yesterday. Today he watched the sun rise in the east from his camp, nothing more than a makeshift bivouac of blankets over a fallen log. The sun rose into a clear blue sky, the color so deep, so real that if he lay on his back and looked straight up into the apex of the dome above him, the sky was almost black. It filled his vision, and made him feel like he was swimming in an ocean of nothing but color. Joel lay there in the dirt for a spell, staring at the sky until a shining diamond of light struck the edge of his vision as the sun crawled higher, toward the west.
Toward the future. Joel’s future. This he knew, somehow, like it had been foretold, like it was written in his blood and the blood of his father and in the blood of his father before him.
Joel
Readers choose
Cathy Glass
Louis Auchincloss
Eva Joly
Catherine Cookson
Linda Francis Lee
Elizabeth Peters
Deila Longford
Walter Jon Williams