Crescent Read Online Free PDF

whoa!” He raised his hands in a surrendering gesture.
    “Are you always so rude?” she asked, hands on her hips.
    He immediately regretted coming to the cafeteria. Clearly, all the crazies came here for breakfast.
    “Sir!”
    He snapped to attention.
    “At the very least, apologize.”
    “I’m…   sorry?”
    “Like you mean it!” Her eyes flashed and she crossed her arms over the small but perfectly adequate swell of her breasts.
    “I’m sorry, Miss.”
    “And you should be.”
    She harrumphed and continued on her way to the food dispenser. Gerald got to his feet and made a quick exit, fearful of what she might drop in his lap once she had gotten her breakfast.
    Gerald returned to his quarters. He hadn’t gone back since he had been spat out of that terrible hallucination. No, he told himself, terrible dream . He looked at his hands. There was still a little rust-colored grime caked beneath his nails. But even that didn’t sway his conviction that the ghost lady had been a figment of his space-weary, drunken mind. Hell, bad cases of the crawl were usually accompanied by hallucinations. But you had to be in space for weeks to feel the crawl that severely—not days. See, then, it was a dream. Not the crawl. Not a ghost.
    It made sense.
    “If you’re so convinced it was a dream, why are you staring at your door like an idiot?” he asked himself. He took a deep breath and punched in the key code. The door opened, and Gerald prepared himself to flee at the first sign of any thing off kilter. A talking duffle bag, a bleeding ceiling fan—he’d run straight back to Bean and that’d be that. But the room was empty. The bed was still unmade. There were still clothes scattered around the gray floor. The ceiling fan creaked as it spun on a wobbly axis. It was not bleeding. Dirty as sin, but not bleeding.
    There was a communications terminal set into the wall beside the disheveled bed. Fingerprints left behind by the apartment’s previous resident were greasy marks on the dull screen. The comm flashed with the words: one missed call . Gerald pressed his thumb to the overlay marked “message retrieval.” Downloading message , the comm informed him in a friendly but clipped voice.
    “A brief word from our sponsor, and then on to your message!” a voice said in a nauseatingly cheerful tone. A purple cartoon octopus with a bulbous body and wriggly, puffy arms floated into center of the otherwise dark screen. It began scratching at its body furiously.
    “Do you suffer from itchy, dry skin?” a male voice said. The octopus nodded its head.
    “Are you ready to strangle the first person you see because of it?” From behind its back, the octopus revealed a cartoon puppy, a purple tentacle tight around the small critter’s throat. The puppy’s eyes were little black x’s and its tongue hung out the side of its cartoon mouth. The octopus fluttered its single large eye in a look of innocence.
    “Then you need Gemar’s body cream!” The octopus tossed the puppy aside. A tube—it looked something that’d hold toothpaste—fell from above and the octopus caught it with a sucker. Gemar’s Body Cream was written on the tube in bubble letters . Identical tubes rained in from off-screen to land on each of the octopus’ outstretched tentacles. The octopus shook the tubes over its head. Out poured thousands of tiny, glittering drops of light. A white glow soon covered the octopus. A big smile curved across the creature’s face. The octopus floated off screen, expelling a realistic looking cloud of ink. The ink cloud filled with sparkling red letters that proclaimed: Gemar’s !
    “ Gemar’s ! A trusted brand for 175 years! Available at a pharmacist near you!”
    A rapid voice added:
    “Warning, Gemar’s body cream may cause constipation, loose stools, abdominal pain, and blindness. If you experience any of these symptoms, discontinue use and immediately notify your physician.”
    The body cream logo dissolved