Welcome to the 3rd Annual Brain to Books Blog Hop
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| http://amazon.com/author/annswann |
from 5 Prince Publishing
Beth went in
search of an old flame, but she found a serial killer instead.
Mandy was on her way to work
the evening shift at the Waterhouse Bar & Grill when she spied a small boy
standing beside the road, alone. She immediately decided to
pull over and check on him.
This is what happened next:
The
setting sun made the trees appear as black-paper cutouts in a landscape
collage.
After checking her
mirrors to make sure no one was behind her, Mandy pressed the button to lower
the passenger-side window. It was almost all the way down when a man yanked
open the door and exploded into her world like a tornado into a trailer
park. Her hand flew to the gearshift, but she couldn’t engage it.
Even as her flight instinct kicked in, part of her mind was telling her this
was almost certainly the same strange guy who had requested her section at the
restaurant the night before. His eyes had seemed to follow her all around
the crowded dining room, and his oily stench had made him stand out like a spot
of mold on white linen.
Mandy drew in breath to scream, her hand
scrambling across the console for her phone or the gearshift, whichever came
first, but he was too fast. With lightning speed, he dove across the seat
and slapped a rectangle of duct tape across her mouth.
He buried his free hand knuckle deep
in the thick blonde braid at the base of her skull even as his other hand slid
down to her windpipe and began to squeeze.
Mandy’s fight instinct kicked in then, and she whipped
her head back and forth in an effort to dislodge his hands. His stench, and the
oily filth of his unkempt hair, was sickening. She clawed at his eyes, ripped
at his skin, but it was no use. The psycho laughed and simply leaned his
head back out of her reach.
That’s when Mandy began to claw at her own face,
attempting to scratch the silver tape off her mouth. It didn’t matter. There
was no one around to hear her scream even if she could have gotten it off.
Mandy wasn’t
a quitter. She did her best to get her feet out from under the
steering column to try and kick him off. But he was pressing down on her with
his entire weight.
She
was trapped.
Calmly,
the psycho took one hand off her throat, doubled up his fist, and hit her
so hard the back of her skull struck the driver’s side window with an audible whap!
Then
he went back to her throat. Mandy’s grip on reality began to loosen. Tiny
strobes flashed inside her skull.
He
squeezed even harder, the tips of his fingers disappearing into her flesh.
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