Top Ten Read Online Free PDF Page A

think...”
    But he did think, exactly what his partner could not voice, and for some reason even he did not understand Trooper James Fitzgerald Nance had to know. Had to see. Had to lay his gaze upon what he knew, just knew, was in that small room off the right of the hallway. Maybe to convince himself that this was real, or unreal, or something in between, some macabre scene come to life, to his life. And so he started down the hallway, his partner hanging back now, covering from where he waited. Stepping with care on either side of the ghastly trail, nearing the pile of papers, new ones shooting out from the doorway one after the other, one floating earthward and slipping down the side of the mound and landing face-up at Trooper Nance’s feet. He shined his light down upon it and swallowed hard.
    A dead face stared back at him in black and white.
    It was what they’d feared, and he’d seen the image captured, but not the truth from which it had been cast, and so he took one more step forward and looked through the doorway and saw the copy machine pushed almost out into the hall, its lid angled half open and resting upon the severed head of a woman, light flashing beneath it every second or so, blood and tissue dripping from the ragged edge of the neck, pooling in large, slick clumps on the glass.
    “Oh, Jesus,” Nance said, stepping back, the sight his now for all time. “Oh dear sweet Jesus.”
    “Jimmy,” Callahan said as he watched his partner back away from the door and through another opposite it. “Jimmy!”
    But Trooper Nance wasn’t hearing his partner. His senses were tuned to what was across the hall from him now, that face, that head, the machine chugging along, its rhythm seeming the echo of a dead heart’s beating, and nothing could have drawn him from his rapt fixation upon the horrid scene.
    Nothing but the hand that brushed his cheek and sent him reeling.
    He spun in place in the darkened space, the hand tapping him, and another, the beam of his flashlight slicing the din, tracking fast across the hand, and an arm, and a leg, a breast, all seeming to be in a floating stasis about his head. He swatted at the passive assault and his hand came back wet with blood.
    “NO!”
    He fell to the floor and scooted his way through a slick puddle, driving himself into a corner as his partner made it to the doorway and lit up the space with his own flashlight.
    “Oh my God,” was all Trooper Kyle Callahan could say at the sight of his partner huddled fetally, the severed pieces of a woman dangling above him in some grotesquely prepared mobile, each suspended to the drop ceiling supports by various lengths of twine. Chest in the center, legs at the rear, and arms and hands toward the door as if reaching across the hallway for the head that lay on the copy machine. “Oh my God. God. God.”
    “He’s not here,” Trooper Jimmy Nance said, laughing and weeping, hugging himself as blood fell upon him in a slow rain.

One
    Dots
    God’s gray rain fell on Damascus, New York.
    Special Agent Bernard Jaworski, stern and stick-like, bald and yellowed by the chemo and radiation the whitecoats were hopeful would do a number on the tumor raging low in his back, sat at his desk mid-morning on Monday, the weather glazing the window behind him, and read the orders just handed him for a third time.
    “I don’t get it.” He looked up to the person who’d brought the orders with her. “Why is Atlanta sending me personnel?”
    “I’ve been reassigned to you,” Ariel Grace told him, though to her a more proper term would be ‘exiled’. She’d thought that from the minute she saw the orders Saturday morning. Expecting Jack Hale to shift her to FEDBOMB for her perceived failure to get DeVane, or maybe have her sitting on a wire, or at worst running background on clearance applications, she’d instead gotten a letter with a plane ticket attached. And here she was, standing before her new boss, pissed as hell and