Shell Shocked (The Cosmic Carapace, #1) Read Online Free PDF

getting harder and harder as he moved. He was starting to breathe heavily, forcing himself forward against the pressure as he reached the doors. He was leaning forward as though walking into a gale, but the air was calm. Calm and solid. A few metres from the door and he was having to dig his toes into the soft earth to push forward. As he strained in slow motion, he noticed the tortoise staring up from under his arm, seemingly oblivious to the forces around them. It blinked slowly. Spencer's mind was clouded, scrambled. He couldn't think about what was happening, when he tried it slipped away like mist. All he knew, with every fibre of his body, was that he had to keep going. This may have had something to do with his bladder somehow reacting to the pressure in an alarming way which suggested that getting inside to a toilet would be a rather good idea. Something strange was happening to his body, he could feel it... stretching some how. Like he was being pulled apart by tiny hands. It wasn’t painful... yet, there was the sense that it was going to be. It felt like it was going to hurt a lot.
    He heard a voice, muffled and distorted, cry out in front of him.
    “Wait!”
    Not being one for following orders, he pushed forward with one last effort and fell forward into blackness.

4

Drugged Bacon
    ––––––––
    “D id you see the way his legs seemed to come a bit... sort of... later than he did?”
    “They definitely didn't arrive at the same time as his ears.”
    “Yes, the ears were strange weren't they? The way they went on ahead a bit and then sort of snapped back into his face. I think he's definitely going to have a couple of black eyes.”
    It sounded like the same female voice, but was clearly a conversation between two, a conversation that made no sense to Spencer, but a conversation nonetheless. His eyelids seemed to be swollen and stuck together, his head was ringing like a bell for the second time in 48 hours and for some reason, he craved bacon. He put this down to good sense and concussion, which he almost certainly had.
    The voices continued.
    “Has anyone ever done it without having fog before?”
    “I doubt it, who'd want to?! You get shell shock even with it, imagine what it's like without it?! He's going to need some fog when he comes to, that's for sure. And bacon of course.”
    At the mention of the pig product, for which Spencer's craving was now reaching epic proportions, Spencer involuntarily spoke, or at least tried to.
    “Ughh!”
    “I'll get the fog.”
    “I'll get the frying pan on.”
    Spencer heard the sounds of two people walking away across a hard floor and the door closing behind them. He forced his eyes open into slits and looked around the room he found himself in. A shaft of light cut across the room from a window so thick with grime it cast the room in a buttery glow. Wooden floor filled the small space from the single brass bed Spencer was lying on fully clothed, to the door on the far side. There was nothing else in the room, no pictures, no ornaments, it was completely bare.
    The door swung open suddenly, framing a shape that was roughly the same shape as the door frame it now filled. The figure strode in towards Spencer and the light caught fair hair, a jaw that you could almost certainly chop wood on and a chest (under a white shirt with one button too many undone) that could stop a train. The man fixed Spencer with a stare from piercing blue eyes and ran a hand through his tousled blonde hair.
    “Hi there friend, good to see you made it through. The name's Colin. Quite the double shiner you have there, but don't worry, the ladies love a man with an injury, mothering instinct and all that.” He leant forward and winked at Spencer in what was clearly intended to be a conspiratorial manner.
    “Don't worry, I can help you out here. I'm something of a big deal in these parts, maybe some of it can rub off on you.” He studied Spencer for a while as if deciding if