Hunted Read Online Free

I suddenly got the idea that any second I’d hear a scratch at the door: the dead woman wanting another kiss, except now she was some withered skeletal thing, moaning with hunger. Or maybe it would be the queen with her blood-cracked claws, trying to break down the door and stab me with her stingers, just to ease the pain in her venom sacs.
    I held my breath, waiting for the scratching noise. Scared stiff to move for fear something outside would hear me. But nothing happened. The dead don’t really get up and walk…even when you panic yourself into thinking it’s possible.
    After a while, I thought of turning on a light. I did it fast, before I had a chance to get the creeps about that too. With the light on, it wasn’t so hard to get out of bed and get dressed; maybe it would be a good idea to go to the cafeteria for something to drink. Not alcohol—I was acting captain. But in stories, people talk about warm milk making you feel better. I couldn’t remember ever drinking warm milk, but I thought why not give it a try.

    The corridors were quiet And empty. And dimmed down to twilight because this was Willow’s sleep shift. I could have ordered the ship-soul to power everything to daytime brightness or to play bouncy music wherever I went, but that wouldn’t fool me. The manuals pretend that night and day are just arbitrary conventions on a starship, that you can flip them back to front and no one will know the difference. Me, I felt the difference. Deep in my bones, I felt pure night smothering all around me—like it’d been waiting for years and years to catch me alone, and finally had its chance to grab me by the throat.
    Samantha would have slapped me for imagining those kind of things. She used to roll her eyes and laugh: “You’re such a child, Edward.” Usually I’d laugh too and say she was the child—younger than me by a whole ten minutes.
    But I knew I was acting like a kid, letting myself get scared of nothing. Fifty-seven years old; I should know better. Halfway to the cafeteria, I turned around and headed for the captain’s quarters instead. I was supposed to be master and commander, not some puss-puppy trying to make it all better with warm milk. As of now, I’d devote myself to captainly things instead of hiding back in my cabin.
    Besides, it’d be harder to have bad dreams in a captain’s bunk, wouldn’t it? Captains don’t let themselves get carried away by imagination.
    “Ship-soul, attend,” I called out loudly as I entered the captain’s room. “Vidscreen on, forward view.”
    The room had a nice big monitor, filling up a whole half of one wall. The screen flicked on, showing a calm empty starscape. Nothing out there but nothingness.
    “Aft view,” I said.
    More stars in the infinite black. No nightmares chasing us.
    I took a breath. “Interior view, recreation lounge.”
    The screen changed to show the lounge and all the bodies, still exactly where they’d fallen. Most of the holograms were gone: their battery power had run down. Instead of the Roman soldier and the alien thistle bush, an ordinary man and woman lay crumpled against each other, both of them naked except for the harnesses that held their holo-projectors.
    The dead people looked so sad and pointless. Even the admiral woman, lying where I’d set her down…she wasn’t going to turn into a kiss-hungry demon who came slobbering at my door. She was just going to lie there and lie there and lie there, never getting up again.
    “Interior view,” I told the ship-soul, trying not to let my voice crack. “The hold with the Mandasar queen.”
    The image on the screen shifted to show the hold…and nothing had changed there either. The queen lay dead, her claws smashed bloody, her stingers dangling limp, her venom sacs…
    Her venom sacs…
    They weren’t bulging quite so full. They had a tiny sag to them now. And their grass green color had faded a bit.
    That wasn’t right.
    “Ship-soul,” I said, walking up to