Story Orgy Monday - Hunted pt 1

Good morning everyone! Long time, no see....

Sorry I've been gone so long, but I'm glad to say that I'm back in the game...or at least I hope so! So today's prompt is "Just below the surface..." -- sounds intriguing doesn't it?

Just as intriguing, in fact, as Hank Edwards' latest release, Repossession is 9/10ths of the Law, from Wilde City Press. You can find it here.

"Alan Baxter barely scrapes by working as a deejay in suburban Detroit. To make ends meet, he takes a job as an automobile repossession agent, and discovers his very first assignment is a car owned by his drug dealer ex-boyfriend. On top of that, a body is discovered in the trunk…by a cop. Soon Alan’s life is completely upturned as he is pulled into a mystery involving more bodies, a highly lethal new street drug, a mysterious man with a top hat and cane, raging dwarves, a house fire, a cranky police detective, and his even crankier cat!"


And now, without further ado...

Hunted, pt 1
It was there just below the surface. Numbness. Not the sleepy, tingly, annoying type either. It was bone deep, eating at his muscles and his will power. Painful, jarring, yet…numb. Even through Vance Henning’s exhaustion, he knew that was bad.

He continued on, moving slow but making progress. One foot in front of the other, he always faced forward, not daring to look over his shoulder.

They might be there, staring back at him. Waiting for him to falter, making the kill easier. Immediately he shut off that line of thinking. It wouldn’t do him any good to rehash those nightmares while he was still trying to escape.

Vance stumbled over a tree root, catching himself on a low-hanging branch before he could fall. He held perfectly still, pulling in the sights and sounds around him. Birds called to each other, a breeze shuffled the leaves on the trees. Nothing spoke of danger, of predators, nearby.

The forest was thinning and he prayed that meant he was getting closer to civilization. He’d had enough of the back woods to last him a lifetime. He needed concrete, traffic, noise. Food. People. A soft bed.

He stifled a moan as he imagined what it would feel like to lie on a feather soft mattress again. Every night, before he curled up in the corner on the thin blanket that served as his bed, he’d marked another tick on the floor beneath it. Counting. Keeping track of time, even as his captors mocked him, tortured him with peeks into freedom. Three weeks. That’s how long he’d been gone. He wondered if anyone noticed.

The taunting howls had stopped once he’d used the river to cover his tracks. That’s where he’d gone wrong, he figured. He had run blindly into the water, not bothering to take off his shoes or roll up his pants. It might be spring in northern Michigan, but the water was still icy cold from the long, fierce winter they’d had. In seconds his clothing had soaked through and his body temperature had begun to drop as a result.

Rubbing his hands together vigorously, ignoring the stabs of pain the movement caused, he worked to generate some level of heat. Fire was out of the question. They would see the smoke and be on him in a flash. It had been a risky move, going into that river, but he couldn’t bring himself to regret the tiny lead it had given him.

Briskly running his hands over his thighs to try to bring life into his legs, Vance thought back to the survival training he’d received while learning to hike in the mountains when he’d lived out west a few years ago. Before the sun went down again, he needed a shelter - if he couldn’t find help by then. He needed food. And he had to figure out how to get warm.

Judging by the cracks of sunlight he could see through the thick canopy of leaves, he had a couple of hours to walk yet before worrying over what he would do for the night. Vance let out a deep breath and set off again.
***

I truly hope you enjoyed the beginning of my latest story...Make sure you head over to the other blogs to catch more great stories!

Lee Brazil

Havan Fellows

Hank Edwards