Through Glass: Episode Four Read Online Free PDF Page A

away from the ever growing
wall of dust I was surrounded by, my lungs aching as they fought
for air, desperate to be rid of the gunk that I had accidentally
swallowed. It was all I could do not to cough.
    I moved quickly to the next aisle,
desperate to escape the poisonous curtain I had created, even
though I hadn’t checked all the boxes. I knew at once I needed to
either move slower, or I would have to retrace my steps. Neither of
which I was really interested in doing. I was already feeling far
to jumpy from being in the claustrophobic space the high selves
provided, my eyes darting around wildly as if I expected something
to be there.
    As if I wanted it to be.
    I moved to the next aisle, this one
full of a vast array of what I was sure had once been top of the
line cookware, now it only looked like blobs of grey in differing
shapes and sizes.
    I held the light before me as I
walked, the long beam casting over the dust covered relics, the
layers of dust sparkling and shining. In some ways, it looked like
a layer of snow. Well, the snow you see in movies anyway. I had
never actually seen snow, and unless the black world suddenly
decided moisture was a good thing, I never would.
    I knelt down to inspect the boxes that
were lined up below the displays, sure I was wasting my time when
the rhythmic noises of Travis moving boxes around stopped. All
there was, was silence. A void that rippled through the air and
tensed in my chest in cold, hard fear.
    My hand froze in front of me as my
breath caught, the sound of my heart in my ears increasing as I
waited for the sound to return.
    Click.
    The noise shot through me like a
million volts of energy, the memory of the sound of talons against
wood stitching my heart together in fear and pain. I didn’t dare
move. I only froze in place, my focus on the light I held in my
hands, praying it would be enough as I waited.
    Click.
    My head jolted toward the echo of
sound that ricocheted through the dark, my heart tensing and
pulsing until it pulled at my lungs, making it hard to
breathe.
    Click.
    This one was closer. So much closer. I
fought the need to call out to Travis, fought the fear that I
didn’t want to accept was so prevalent in me. My body uncoiled
slowly as I pulled myself to standing, my free hand twitching as it
slowly moved toward the gun I had tucked in my pocket.
    Click.
    Closer still. I couldn’t pull my eyes
from the blackness at the end of aisle where the sound was coming
from, the abyss that swallowed up the light.
    I didn’t dare breathe as my fingers
tensed around the handle of the gun, waiting for the sound to come
again, to echo through the dark, waiting for the sound to become
something more.
    Waiting to attack.
    Time seemed to stretch on, a second
turning into an hour, when, instead of moving, everything stood
still. My whole body tensed in raw fear in a strength that I had
never felt before.
    My breath picked up all on its own,
fearful and heaving, as a grey mass shifted into the shadow at the
end of the aisle. It moved into the edge of grey and black where my
light barely touched, where the shadows lived. It was a mass that
moved and shifted through the light and the dark, in a blur of
shadow and smoke, yet somehow dense like fabric. Like the strips of
black I had watched fall from the sky so many years before. It
didn’t dance like those had, though; this one only seeped into the
light, the color so much deeper than the darkness that lived just
beyond where the light could touch.
    A scream swelled in my throat, the
sound fighting to escape the tense coil of fear that held it there.
The sound grew inside of me, only to have the murderous sound
stolen into silence as the shadow seemed to grow, a dark mass that
moved closer to me, swallowing up the light that I held. The sound
of fear and blood flowed through my ears as I tried to look away,
tried to run, tried to scream.
    Anything.
    “ Lex!”
    The shadow moved as the voice rocked
through the dark, leaving me