Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Hill Road that ran alongside of the Spoon River for a stretch--that was morbidly referred to as Tombstone Highway for the number of drunk drivers killed going over a rail there.
    Stroud picked among some of the additional bones that'd been uncovered. It looked to him like it was the work of some animal that had unearthed the remains. He was wishing again for more light when he found a long femur. It seemed too long to be a match for the skull, unless the youth had been exceptionally tall. He put aside the other bones and again studied the small skull up close. The eye sockets were huge and empty like the innocent look of a sad animal, like the living eyes of a South Vietnamese child he'd once seen in two parts. Her torso and brain were both still operating, as were her eyes, while at the same instant her soul was taking flight from war.
    Stroud wanted to fling the damned skull away, but instead he doused the light, cradled the skull gently, and stepped back toward the trees that masked the squad cars and pickups on the roadbed. He wasn't aware that Carroll and some of the others watched him. Half of Briggs's people were here, the other half were out near Sagammon where another report had come from--a sighting of a boy alone walking the highway. Why didn't the same asshole who made the sighting bother to pick the boy up?
    Abraham Stroud empathized completely with the lost boy wandering on the highway; the boy's situation pained him to his core. Abe's bones talked to him all the time--bones left broken and riddled with metal by a firefight that had left him a lost boy on a battlefield. He had lain in a field of dead in Nam; he had assumed he would die there. It had taken sixteen hours before someone on his side had found him amid the dead, and by that time he had spoken a long time with his bones and the bones of others. The little skull in his hands talked volumes which all amounted to a whispering complaint: “Desecration.”
    He suddenly turned to Carroll, abruptly saying, “You don't just pick up little skulls in weed fields; they don't grow from the earth the way rocks do.”
    Carroll nodded and muttered, “Agreed.”
    “Don't you see, Mr. Carroll? Someone, earlier, this way came ... found this unusual  rock  and dug at it until it looked back at him. Curious, intrigued maybe, he picked it up, even carried it away from the other bones ... dropped it where we found it.”
    “Got pretty far away before he tossed it aside.”
    Stroud's eyes bore into Carroll's in the dark with the skull between them. Carroll felt the thought in Stroud's mind leap across the chasm between them. “Kids?”
    “Group of them, maybe? With a dog, maybe?”
    “A dog?”
    Stroud was instantly sorry that he'd mentioned the dog. If the locals knew of a dog that'd been with Timmy Meyers, no one had made a particular point of it. Yet, here he was, a relative stranger to the area, telling Carroll that the missing boy was accompanied by a dog. Information he had garnered through a hazy and halting vision. He didn't want Carroll or anyone else thinking strange thoughts about him, so he quickly tried to cover himself, dispelling the nebulous vision of Timmy's cringing below the sight of his dead dog, by saying, “Kids and dogs go together, as natural as pie and cream; out for fun, they stumble onto this bone field. Maybe one of them was Timmy Meyers.”
    “Lotta maybes....”
    Stroud stood and stared at the fog-bound field, trying to envision the scene. Who would these kids be? Where were they now? Were they friends of the Meyers boy who lived on a farm not so far from here? Could the boy have ridden his bike down here, or caught a ride behind another kid on a bike? A series of questions that led to questions which in turn led to more. The search for a missing kid had turned into an investigation of foul play. You don't bury a kid's skull in a wood far from any roads just because you want to save on the cost of a pine box, although Abe had met