Elvendude Read Online Free PDF Page A

there, he felt Steve's chest, recoiling at the coldness there. No beat, no nothing. Daryl was running out of things to check.

    Maybe the girls . . .

    He touched their shoulders.

    Maybe not . . . 

    Daryl stepped back and regarded the scene numbly, never before feeling as devoid of emotion as he did then. I am nothing, I feel nothing. Nothing happened. Nothing will happen to me. . . .

    He left the living room, first checking Colm, who was lying facedown in the carpet, and wondered why this didn't seem strange at first. Colm felt as cold and lifeless as the others; when Daryl turned him over, his eyes were still open. One pupil had withdrawn to the size of a dust speck. The other was wide open, blocking the iris completely.

    There have to be others in the house. They can't all be dead.

    There. He said it. Dead.

    "Anybody up there?" he called up a long staircase. No one answered.

    Daryl found himself at the top of the stairs, not remembering how he had gotten up there. The last bedroom upstairs belonged to Steve, but Daryl knew Steve wouldn't be in there.

    A wall of bright light blinded him as he opened the door. The fluorescent desk lamp, turned upward, stared at him with its long, luminous eye. On the desk, which had a visible layer of dust on it, sat a pile of schoolbooks. Steve's. There's the trig book we were supposed to be looking at last night.

    The phone trilled, this time a different, more annoying sound. The plastic receiver looked like it came out of a Cracker Jack box. Daryl sat on the edge of a waterbed and reached for the cheap phone.

    "Yeah?" he said, making no effort to conceal his annoyance.

    "Daryl?" Adam again. Over the phone loud music thumped away, something electronic. Adam had to shout to be heard.

    "Christ, what time is it?"

    A long pause. "Look, some of the guys who were over there last night are getting a little worried." Another pause. "You been there all morning?"

    "Well, yeah," he said. "Some shithead blocked me in."

    Then he remembered the horrible nightmare, in which he found those dead bodies. Including Steve's. But it was only a nightmare, he reminded himself as the blood drained from his face.

    "Well, I thought I'd check," Adam continued. His happy, lighthearted tone was getting on Daryl's nerves. "I'm at the Yaz. You sure you're okay?"

    "Yep. Listen, I gotta go. Say hi to your mom for me," he said, then hung up.

    I gotta find Steve, he thought.

    He went downstairs to the living room, where he saw Steve, two girls, and a boy named Colm lying dead.

    Daryl sat on the floor, staring down at his feet, thinking, thinking. "Jesus Christ," he said to his dead friends. "How the hell did this happen?"

    He tried to remember the events of the previous night, his memories muddied with time and drugs. Grief lay somewhere deep in his throat, held back by the immediate need to cover his ass. He saw the drugs lying on the glass coffee table, which in itself was strange only because this was after the party, when everything should have been used up.

    Wait a minute, wasn't there a weird group that crashed the party? He remembered the strange punkers in leathers and chains who rode up on Harleys and crashed the party uninvited. He still didn't know how they got past the gate, which could only be opened from the house. This was one of the reasons Daryl wanted the party here, because he knew cops couldn't break the gate down without a warrant, and video cameras would let them know who was knocking at their door long before that happened.

    Steve tried to throw them out, but when they offered more drugs, he let them stay. About fifty people had arrived by then, and the newcomers began handing out vials of crack, for free, from a silk bag covered with hobbit runes and occult symbols and shit. The vials had black stoppers; other dealers used different-colored stoppers to label their product, but black was not one of the common ones. He remembered reaching for the bag, but had stumbled