#184

Scott ran.

The street swept beneath him, his feet a blur, the puddles reaching up to soak his jeans, and he ran, wheezing, cursing until his lungs filled with molten lava.

But stopping was not an option.

Not so long as she was behind him.

He rounded the corner of the alley and collided with an elderly woman who squawked in surprise and fell heavily to the pavement, her plastic sack vomiting groceries out onto the road. Scott muttered an apology as he leaped over a rolling tin of canned peaches.

He ignored the enraged yells and cries of disgust from the people no doubt moving to form a protective huddle around the fallen woman.

Fine, let them, he thought. They aren't running from a fucking corpse.

A quick glance over his shoulder made his heart lurch and his stomach hurt.

She was there--still behind him, still gaining--and he wondered how fast she was capable of going, if there was any point in running from something that didn't need to use its feet to move.

But the fact that Tracy had come back for him wasn't the worst of it. Oh no.

The fact that he had slit her throat and almost decapitated that bastard she'd been blowing when he'd come home from work early should have put the whole mess to bed. But now here she was, floating two feet over the pavement like a ghost but proving herself all too tangible by thumping against people who shrieked and fled and thanked God it wasn't them she was after. He imagined them crossing themselves and soon moving on, muttering about the return of those long buried and how the world was going to hell.

Tracy filled his head with whispers, deadly promises and obscene threats, perhaps attempting to drive him mad. Madness was an eventuality he felt drawing as close as the reanimated parody of his dead girlfriend, hung like a puppet from God's fingernails and gliding toward him through the rain.

Another look over his shoulder and she was near enough to grab him.

With a strangled cry, he turned and raced down an alley much the same as the last, plumes of steam billowing upward toward a sky the color of steel, the concrete hollowed and filled with rainwater. She swooped into the entrance. Her long black hair was knotted but dry, despite the deluge hammering down from above. Her head lolled on a ravaged neck, black marble eyes fixed on her murderer.

"What are you running for?" a gutteral voice asked and Scott slipped attempting to come to a full stop. He went down in a puddle and gasped at the cold against his skin.

He looked up at the man towering over him and paled. "You!"

To anyone else, the guy with the baseball cap might have appeared normal, unless you looked closer, peered beneath that chiseled jaw and saw the tendrils of flesh dangling from the dark hole where his throat had been hacked open.

"Oh, shit," Scott moaned and backpedaled away from the grinning form of his dead girlfriend's lover. A cold breeze stopped him and he deigned not to look.

"Caught," she said as if it were nothing more than an innocent game of tag.

"I'm sorry," he whimpered and raised his arms over his face, anticipating a blow.

"Oh, there's no need to apologize," the man with the baseball cap croaked. "You did us a favor."

"What?"

"We've come to return it," Tracy whispered and grabbed a handful of his hair. Scott screamed as he was dragged to his feet. Rainwater blinded him, pounded against his widened eyes, reducing the clues to his fate to mere blurs. He felt the wind breathing down on him as he was lifted higher and higher and higher still, until the air grew cold. Tears ran and mingled with the rain.

"Please, Tracy, I'm sorry," he moaned, his voice strangled with sobs. He blinked and saw they had risen above the buildings. He shut his eyes, sobbed, his adrenaline fueling the stuttering engine of self-preservation and fooling him into thinking he might make it out of this alive.

"Now, now. Don't worry," Tracy gurgled. "David will catch you."

Scott almost allowed himself to be comforted, until he realized what she was saying. She meant to drop him from this height. How could her dead lover possibly...?

Her hands were gone. He fell. The ground rushed up to meet him. And as he drew in a breath to scream, he saw her lover waiting below and it registered in Scott's horrified, dying mind that David was not holding his arms out to catch him, as Tracy had promised. Instead, his mouth was open and growing wider.

And wider still...

There would not be time enough to scream.