Dead Ends

Dead Ends

  Joshua Winters

  This written work, fictional characters, fictional locations, and cover art are,

  Copyright Joshua Winters 2014

  Version: 1.3

  Cover Art is created by and used by permission from Calvin Dunlap 2014

  No unlawful replication of these works, please respect an artist’s rights to put food on the table for his family. If you have received a copy you have not paid for please consider purchasing the story from your EBook retailer.

  All characters, places, and events in this book are fictional and of the writer’s creation. Any similarities to actual places, people, or events are pure coincidence. The few places, companies, or people mentioned that are from reality are used in a purely fictional sense and are not meant to portray their reality.

  Dedication

  This collection of shorts is dedicated to Jaiden Noah Gilbert-Winters, my son who has given me reason to live and write, to try and make a better life for both of us.

  I would also like to dedicate this novel to Stephen King, Dean Koontz, the late Michael Crichton and other masters of the Macabre, as it was their dark worlds that inspired in me a love of writing.

  Thanks

  I owe Calvin Dunlap a debt of gratitude for the excellent cover art he provided me. If you wish to check his work out you can do so at his Deviant Art account ‘cdunlap1’, where he displays both his talent in drawing and writing. A word of caution, his writings and art, much like my own, are of a mature nature.

  I want to thank my mother who, as always, has put up with her child for longer than most mothers are forced to, and has often been my strength, if not guiding voice who pushes me to do what I should be doing, no matter how much I don’t want to do it.

  Table of Contents

  Creeping Death

  Blood Letting

  Crickets

  Tall Trees

  The Harvest Moon

  The Hunters

  Looped

  The Barking

  Sequa

  Other Works

  Unsuspected

  When the city of San Antonio is threatened by the biggest natural disaster to ever hit the state of Texas none are prepared and thousands may lose their lives. Follow the struggle of eleven characters that attempt to survive the night of unstoppable terror. Includes a epilogue in memory of storm chasers Tim Samaras, Paul Samaras, and Carl Young

  Creeping Death

  The boy saw him, no more than an initial glance, a shadow walking out the corner of his eye, but once he glimpsed him the boy couldn’t turn away, and judging by the lack of reactions he was the only one who could. In years to come he’d realize that a select few could notice him, some like him had the talent while most had experienced so much death that those people were to a large extent a part of him as he was of them. But today was his first time to see him, and it wouldn’t be the last, not in this year, not in this week.

  Who was he? Saying he was an inappropriate misnomer, as he was more an it, with no more quality of sex or sexuality than form. He was a shadow dressed in dark robes, darkness that rolled out if it’s billowing dress, smoke from an unseen inferno. A shade whose scent at a good fifty feet away wrinkled his nose with the sweet rot of corpses. How did a ten year old boy know how a corpse smelled? He didn’t, and yet he knew the thing reeked of them.

  The creature personified death, the dark robes over the demonic shadow and smoke, as did his actions, but he didn’t seem to be responsible for anyone’s demise. The thing which carried itself tall with wide, sharp shoulders, caused demise without a direct hand in it, he didn’t reap people, nor did he walk out with any discernible trace of the deceased’s soul. It seemed less a job and more a hobby.

  Hi this is Bob, he makes model trains, and this is death, he has others kill others for fun.

  But the boy saw him that day, as clear as the blue of the sky, and he watched him at work. Wrapping one clothed shadowed arm around an obese man in a line of open carry protestors in the downtown district of San Antonio at the graying cream colored concrete base of the Tower of Americas, the creatures so close to his ear he could have been chewing tenderly upon it, if he had teeth.

  The fat guy raised his assault weapon, and before any officer watching over the proceedings could react, put one in the chest of the boy’s mother. The boy didn’t flinch, never taking his eyes off the thing wrapped in darkness to grieve, until it came close. Then he closed his eyes, but even with them shut tight he felt the chill of that ghastly being pass right by him, moving beyond, not pausing a moment to savor the harm it had done.

  There was the growl of a large engine rolling over and a loud glass pack, those muffler attachments which made the car sound like it was dragging a piece of plastic along behind it, fleeing the scene. It wasn’t until he could no longer hear the crackle of that vehicle he felt safe enough to open his eyes. Before him on the ground lied the fat man, his eyes wide and unbelieving as he bled to death from a bullet wound of his own, the boy hadn’t heard the officers return fire.

  The boy sunk his knees into a pool of tacky blood, scooping up his mother’s cool pale hand now that, at last, he found enough peace to weep.