Depraved Read Online Free PDF Page B

seen, which must have occurred in the womb. Another, more outrageous possibility occurred to her. Perhaps they weren’t human at all. Maybe they were demons or aliens. But she dismissed this notion as obviously ludicrous.Aliens in overalls wielding shotguns. Unlikely, to say the least. Which brought her back to the more logical culprit being some long-standing environmental contaminant.
    Oh, shit.
    She glanced down at the stream, thought of the water she’d drunk, and felt her stomach twist. Oh, shit . She tried to stay calm. This was no time to give in to panic. So…assume the water was tainted. So what? On a rational level, she knew she hadn’t consumed anywhere near enough to ignite a tumor or some other awful illness. The mutants were the way they were thanks to generations of exposure to whatever had fucked up their gene pool. The water wasn’t going to kill her.
    She began to relax, felt her breathing start to even out again.
    But then a resurgent thread of anxiety began to wind through her.
    Yes, the water wasn’t going to kill her.
    But the mutants might.
    She groped for the .38, felt her hand close over the handle, and began to stand up. Then she froze in a half-standing, half-kneeling position and scanned the line of trees on the opposite side of the stream. She didn’t see anything other than trees, but she was sure she’d heard something. Her head swiveled slowly left and right. Then she saw it, a little flicker of movement behind the thick base of one of the tallest and oldest trees. She surged to her feet and pivoted in that direction, swinging the gun toward the big tree.
    She thumbed back the .38’s hammer.
    The ratcheting of deadly metal was ominously loud in the otherwise-silent woods. The sound would scare anyone. Good. She relished the opportunity to make someone other than herself afraid. Keeping the gun aimed at the tree, she quickly waded through the streamand came up dripping water from her shoes and jeans on the opposite side. She made no attempt at a quiet approach as she walked toward the tree, and the tactic soon produced the desired result.
    A bare-chested young boy in a straw hat and jeans stepped away from the tree and began moving backward. He was scrawny and had a wiry build. Early teens, at best. But an exact age was hard to surmise, thanks to his deformed face. His lower jaw was slightly elongated. He had just one eye. The other eye wasn’t missing. It’d never been there in the first place. There was no second socket where the other should have been. His nose was too big and curved upward. Thick, throbbing veins pulsed at its sides.
    Like the men back at the clearing, he looked like something from a nightmare.
    Only this time the nightmare was afraid of her .
    The boy’s chest was heaving. He was shaking all over. And he was trying not to cry. Jessica’s revulsion gave way to simple human compassion. She eased the .38’s hammer down, pointed the barrel upward, and moved a step closer to him, causing him to flinch.
    “Easy, kid,” she said, striving to keep her tone even and nonthreatening. “I’m not going to hurt you, okay? I just need a little help, that’s all.”
    Maybe she could reason with him. Perhaps persuade him to guide her out of the woods. After all, he wouldn’t know his older cousins or whatever were chasing her. If he could help her find her way back to Old Fork Road, she would at least stand a reasonable chance of making her way back to some semblance of civilization.
    But the boy let out a high whine as she came another step closer.
    Then he turned and bolted.
    “Shit!”
    Jessica shoved the .38 into her waistband and took off after him. She overtook him with ease, throwing an arm around his waist and driving him to the ground. She flipped him over and straddled him to keep in place. He let out a wail of anguish, and Jessica began to panic again. He was making too much noise. The bigger ones would hear him and get a fix on her location. Innocent boy or