The Impulse, Chapter 6
Hello, and welcome back to Fiction for the Cosmically Disturbed, a newsletter for family, friends, and readers of my work. As promised, my serialized story, The Impulse, continues this week with its sixth chapter. You can catch up on previous entries (for free) in the archives. If you’d like to support me beyond the newsletter, you can grab my latest book Goddamn Graveyard Zombies. That link gets you the book for $10, but it’s also available in the usual book spots, albeit for a slightly higher price tag. As always, thank you for reading. If you like what I do here, make sure you subscribe.
In the blackness, Slater Mars knew only pain and the sensation of falling. He didn’t know how long he was falling through the agonizing darkness before he heard the voices. It could have been a few seconds, or it could have been several hours. The voices shouted, screamed, wailed. He didn’t understand the languages, but he could detect the meaning of the cries. They were full of accusatory rage and unfathomable suffering. They belonged to victims of the past and victims to come. He opened his mouth to join the maddening choir, but before he could, the darkness lifted, and the voices fell silent.
When he regained consciousness, he was awash in blue light. Somewhere in the woods, lying on a bed of gravel.
The Impulse made him sit. He looked around, remembering where he was, what he was doing. He stood and saw her inside the ranger’s station. She held the phone in a white-knuckle grip and had wrapped herself in its cord. She was blubbering something into its mouthpiece. Slater could only guess, but she was of course crying about him, about what he’d done. All the while, she remained oblivious to what he would do.
She was his, he felt it down to his marrow. She had always been his. Their encounter had not been the result of chance. Rather, it was predestined.
He knew it because of how she fought him. How, already, she’d managed to bring him down twice. This would be a long-term pursuit, one with eternal potential.
The Impulse thrummed with anticipation of endless violence, and Slater Mars took a lurching step toward the ranger station.
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” Lauren shouted. “I just watched my boyfriend get his fucking head cut off by the same motherfucker who tried to kill me. How do you expect me to calm down?”
“I’m sorry, miss. I’m just trying to get as much information as possible, and it’s hard to concentrate when you raise your voice to me.” The operator’s voice was calm and clinical. He may as well have been a robot. “Now, please, tell me again where you are.”
“I’m inside the ranger station. At Henshaw Valley Falls State Park. The ranger is dead. My boyfriend is dead. The assailant is—”
She turned to the window facing the outside and saw the beastly man standing under the blue light. The illumination only added to his otherworldly aura, and she knew without a shadow of a doubt that this killer was not human. Even so, she shook her head in defiant disbelief. Her grip loosened on the phone.
“Miss, are you there? Miss?”
“Please hurry,” she whimpered.
The killer slammed his fist into the window, raining chunky shards of glass into the station. Survival instincts stamped down the urge to scream. Her fist tightened around the phone, and she swung it in a fierce arc. The blunt force collided with the killer’s head.
She reared back to strike again, but this time he caught her hand. With a sequence of quick motions, he snapped her forearm in two and dragged her across the windowsill. She twisted and kicked, screaming as the remaining shards dug crimson grooves into her flesh.
He took her by the throat and slammed her onto the gravel. The impact drove the air from her lungs and made her vision swim. The killer squeezed until her trachea collapsed.
Instead of the blackness she expected, a vibrant sheet of fire swept across her field of perception, and she wondered if she had gone to hell.
Currently reading: Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Flesh Eaters from Hell by Jonathan Tripp.
Currently watching: 1923 (Paramount+), Home Improvement (Netflix), The Legacy (1978, directed by Richard Marquand).