Anything Can Be Dangerous Read Online Free PDF

sidewalks and street with limited
prowess, in uncoordinated numbers. But there was purpose in their
jerky movements, a visible determination in the folds of the
polymer material that covered their faces.
    And blood. Sucked from their victims
and dripping from swollen stomachs.
    Greg ran.
    He dodged left, around the wreck of
his car, and sprinted between two buildings, into a back alley.
There he found a steeply slanted concrete retaining wall on the
east side of the alley, marking the base of a wooded hillside. Greg
hit the wall running and clambered up eight feet to the top like he
was walking on air. And he didn’t stop. He tore into the forest,
grunting and cursing as he clawed aside leafy branches and tangled
networks of vines.
    The climb measured less than fifty
feet all together, but the pace at which he took it left him
gasping at the summit. He found himself at the rear of a
residential neighborhood, its parameter marked by row after row of
neat cedar fences. Greg scaled over the first barrier at the same
feverish pace he’d ascended the hill, not allowing himself to catch
his breath until he collapsed safely on the other side.
    He slumped back on his ass the moment
his feet touched the ground, falling to a rest atop a plush carpet
of healthy green grass. His lungs burned as if breathing acidic
vapors with each inhalation, while his legs had almost no feeling
at all. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d pushed himself so
fiercely.
    He took slow, deep breaths, attempting
to calm himself. At the same time, he knew he had to keep moving.
Those things could be coming.
    He wiped stinging beads of sweat from
his eyes in preparation to get moving again when he saw something
that stopped his breath in mid-draw and made him freeze where he
was.
    Minus his labored breathing, the day
remained eerily silent.
    He was in someone’s backyard, seated
several feet from the edge of a rectangular in-ground swimming
pool. It was a good size one, too, at least twenty feet wide by
forty feet long. On the far side of the pool, closest to the house,
Greg noticed a wide portion of the concrete walkway looked wet,
making it appear darker than the rest of the walk encompassing the
pool. The watery trail continued up the path toward the house,
soaking the steps and floorboards of a broad deck before vanishing
through an open sliding glass door, into the shadowy interior of
the home.
    Greg tensed as something moved inside.
Something big.
    Before he even had time to speculate
on what it was, the pool’s aqua-blue solar cover slid out the open
door, onto the deck, spilling forth like a gigantic
amoeba.
    Greg gasped.
    The portion he could see covered
nearly half the deck and it still wasn’t totally free of the house.
Of course it had to be the same size as the pool, but part of him
imagined it being much larger, massive, filling each room of the
house with its horrible bulk. The thing had no eyes, no mouth, no
real features whatsoever, yet it displayed the same mannerisms of a
predator searching the yard for prey, moving as if testing the air
for a scent, listening for a break in the silence, or watching for
any sign of movement.
    There was blood on it, too.
    Greg could see the crimson smears
coming off its belly as it oozed further into the light, then
caught sight of three or four darker shapes held within it, trapped
behind its almost-transparent skin. None of them were
moving.
    Greg leapt to his feet and burst into
a sprint, racing past the deep end of the pool in a terror-inspired
fervor, toward the front-left corner of the yard. He heard the hiss
of the solar cover gliding over the railing of the deck as he
crossed the walkway that ran parallel to the house, but he didn’t
look back in fear of going mad. Instead, he sprinted to a
central-air fan unit where the house met the fence and jumped on
top of it, using it like a booster step to launch himself over the
top of the fence. The barrier only stood six feet high on the pool
half of