Rushed Read Online Free PDF Page A

planet.”
    “Yes you do.  Now please explain the cornfield to her.”
    “That’s going to be tricky.”
    “I was worried it would be.  What are you doing?”
    “I don’t know.  Really.  I have no idea what’s going on.  All I know is the farther I drove, the more sure I was that I was doing what I needed to do.  And when I finally pulled off the road, I felt just as sure that I needed to get out and walk.  I followed the river to a little path in the woods and I found my way to this house…” 
    In as much detail as he could recall, he described his encounter with the old woman and the enigmatic things she’d said to him. 
    “That’s so weird,” Karen said when he’d finished.
    “I know.”
    The road curved to the right, winding ever deeper into the field, and again he was struck by that strange sensation of something changing.  It happened only briefly this time, for merely a second or two, but the cell phone crackled in his ear as if he’d passed quickly through a tunnel. 
    “Do you think she really knew you were coming?”
    “She couldn’t have.  I didn’t even know I was coming.”
    Karen was quiet as she contemplated the idea. 
    “I don’t think she was entirely there.  She probably thought I was somebody else.”
    “Maybe…  That stuff about the half-there man…  That’s creepy.”
    “I know.  Kind of gave me a chill.”
    “I can believe she might’ve just been crazy, but it’s really weird that she said she expected you two days ago.”
    “I know.  That was a spooky coincidence.”
    “It was.”
    Again, something changed.  At the same moment, the phone crackled.  He stopped and began to walk backward.  After a few steps, everything suddenly seemed normal again. 
    This was interesting. 
    He began to walk forward once more.  It seemed that he needed to walk almost twice as far as the first time, but that queer, shifting feeling came back as reliably as he could have hoped.  There was a definite chill to the air here.  And although the sky and the corn and the weeds and the earth remained unchanged, something about the underlying quality of it all seemed altered.  It wasn’t as if it had grown darker, exactly.  It was, as crazy as it sounded, as if everything had grown deeper . 
    He couldn’t wrap his head around it. 
    “Listen,” he said as he glanced ahead and saw that the corn was becoming shorter again.  “My phone’s been cutting out a little in this field.  I lost the signal completely just before you called.  So if you lose me, don’t freak out, okay?”
    “I don’t ‘freak out.’”
    Yes, she did.  She simply managed to do it with considerably more grace than most.  But he decided not to tell her this. 
    “You just worry about yourself.  Don’t get rattlesnake bit or anything.”
    “I’ll watch where I step,” he promised.
    Karen’s next words were gnarled into a sputtering of disjointed sounds. 
    “Karen?”
    Another quick burst of noise crackled in his ears and then there was nothing.
    “Karen…?  Hello…?”
    He ended the call and glanced around.  Again, he had that uneasy feeling.  On either side of him the corn became shorter and shorter until it was little more than sickly sprigs jutting out of the cracked earth, most of them half wilted, some completely dead.  He found himself in an odd valley of pathetic stalks barely clinging to life and was unnerved by how silent it was here. 
    What was killing the corn?  Was there something in the soil?  Pollution, maybe?  Or Radiation?
    A hard shiver raced through his body as he imagined himself being slowly irradiated by something buried in the ground beneath him.  Was he being exposed to something?  Would it kill him if he remained here long enough? 
    Countless old movies began to surface from his memory, gleefully filling his head with thoughts of crashed alien spacecrafts that oozed terrible chemicals into the ground and filled the air with strange fumes,