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    Collected: Volume 5: Collections, #5
    Collected: Volume 5: Collections, #5
    Collected: Volume 5: Collections, #5
    Ebook100 pages1 hourCollections

    Collected: Volume 5: Collections, #5

    By M. K. Dreysen

    ()

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    About this ebook

    They lurk there, do you feel them? Hungering. Hiding. Reaching out.

    From where they feel so safe, so powerful. Would you seek them out, dear reader?

    Come with me and enjoy six stories of the monsters, the darkness...

    And those who would face both.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAimward Drift
    Release dateNov 11, 2020
    ISBN9781393737049
    Collected: Volume 5: Collections, #5
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      Book preview

      Collected - M. K. Dreysen

      Collected, Volume 5

      Collected Short Stories and Tales

      By M. K. Dreysen

      All Stories Copyright © 2020 M. K. Dreysen

      Cover Image Courtesy of Pexels user Simon Matzinger

      Graphic Design Via Gimp by M. K. Dreysen and Aimward Drift Publications

      Published By Aimward Drift Publications. Visit aimwarddrift.blogspot.com for news, updates, and upcoming stories.

      Dedication

      Family, friends, readers, always. And especially the readers of the blog who've kept up with me. Thank you all.

      A New Old Thing - A Story of That Which We Know Nought Of

      A new thing a borning, it slouches toward where it is expected to be.

      She got off at the first stop out of town. Buses run everywhere, still, and this one ran where she needed to be. Where she'd been asked to be.

      I want to get out of this place.

      Where can you meet?

      Like that. Lines on a screen, tapped out by thumbs. Her parents had watched since she first got the phone, Isn't it amazing how fast she is? They are? when they noticed all her friends were just as quick.

      They didn't quite notice how those friends drifted away. Not 'til they had to ask the questions.

      It wasn't the other girl on the other end of the phone that came for her. That was the surprise, how often is the persona, another teenage girl lonely for something like companionship, another voice sounding in her ear, the way it works out?

      Not often said the cops. They were kind of surprised, too, but then, they only really hear about it when the persona and the person who shows up in the beat up old white pickup don't match.

      Her name was Wendy, and she rolled her eyes whenever she said it. Like it was a curse or something her parents had laid down on her, squalling bittie thing in the hospital can't go through life without people quoting Disney at her.

      She'd just come because she was worried. They'd met before, at a band competition, four thousand kids getting together for a weekend of brassy noise and precision walks. Oh, and the uniforms, and the loading and unloading and sleeping on the buses. Couple hours, exchange phone numbers, Wendy and Alayna, names not handles, that waited until they were on the yellow dogs back to normal and there was all that time on the highway. Texting, might as well, the time ain't gonna pass on its own once all the adrenaline passes and the kids around start passing out from exhaustion.

      That's how it started. Alayna'd started excited, like Wendy but more amped up, she was on the path to drum major, maybe, the band director wanted her to try out for it and she didn't know, do they give scholarships to drum majors?

      Like that. Wendy got caught up in her, fascinated.

      Not a crush. Not at first. That happened, sure. But slow, when Alayna started texting more than once a day. Couple months ago, really.

      The last couple weeks, that's when something changed. Alayna wasn't amped anymore. She'd lost something. And when she'd said she needed help, needed a place to run to, that's when Wendy got worried. I didn't know what happened, but I knew somebody had to look out for her, make sure she didn't end up by herself, on the streets.

      Wendy broke down, then. Looking at the parking lot of the truck stop, cop lights flashing off the walls, blue red white blue red white, hypnotic message on repeat, girl lost. Her parents came, and the cops knew they'd have to look for someone else.

      Alayna's parents wanted to blame someone. They wanted to blame Wendy, her parents. The easy targets.

      The cops couldn't go along with it, but there was this crusading reporter, always on the make for a new twist. So the secondary monster came to visit. In the form of the tv cameras, the headline news, the cable channels and the twenty-four hour a day noise machine. Wendy and her parents ended up moving somewhere else, as far away as they could get from the crusader.

      Far enough the tv station wouldn't approve the travel budget, anyway.

      Not that it mattered. That monster had to be fed; it didn't have to return Alayna. It couldn't, no matter what it was fed and who did the feeding.

      Alayna was gone. She'd stepped off the bus, walked into the truck stop to pee, grab a candy bar and a coke, and then she went to sit in a booth and wait for her friend. The waitress remembered her, though she'd only been there for a little while, no coffee or water or anything just her candy and the soda.

      Then the girl had got up and walked out of the place, like she'd seen her friend's truck. That's what the waitress believed, she'd asked her and Alayna had said I'm waiting for a friend, she's got a ten-year old Chevy pickup, it's white, just like that, she sat there, kind of jumping every time another pickup came in, we get a lot of those, and then just when it looked like no one was gonna come, she jumped up and left.

      Not in a hurry. She made sure she got her backpack and her soda and candy bar.

      There are an awful lot of old pickup trucks, out past the city limit signs. They don't make much of an impression, except for the locals. The ones that pass back and forth on the interstate are just noise. More farmers, cowboys, welders, going back and forth to work, that's all.

      Alayna walked out to the front of the store, phone to her ear. She went past the butt stations and the lady sweeping the store front, and then she was gone.

      Wendy showed up in her own truck about five minutes later. The security cameras had it pegged, when the cops got a hold of them. The girl walks out on the video, time stamp says about 6:15 a.m., then she walks out of the view of the cameras. About 6:20 a.m., Wendy pulls into the parking lot, right up front, she's there to pick up a friend who needs her, why wouldn't she?

      The new old thing is on that video. Those five minutes show it, sitting there, starving. Waiting, and then going with the girl off camera to the feeding place.

      But the cops don't know what they need to look for, then or now or any old time at all.

      It came to the expected place. It came also to an unexpected place.

      But both places are the same. They are the space between. The place where it has always lived. But it knows, it knows it's always known one little thing.

      Humans see what they want to.

      Sand at dawn, gulf water rolling in old blue brown muddy mix of surf, rare curl thudding down ahead of the storm. Surfers have chased it, long boarders cherishing the chance to shine along the short boards. The lifeguards sit in their trucks on the seawall, waiting for the inevitable.

      The sun rose across the water just on the time between, and an old woman walked her dog, a muddy sand burled up mess of hair hiding an ancient young again cocker spaniel. She worried just a little at the mess he'd make when they got home.

      Not a lot. Worrying about the mess was a long way behind, back where she'd ditched the house for a walk-up on the seaside. Let the kids fool with the old barn, she'd take the dog and some peace and quiet and come visit when the holidays rolled around, thank you very much.

      Margeretta, Margie de Lopez-Hamilton. That was her name, the name still on the checks, the ones that weren't Mrs. Oscar Hamilton. She smiled at the surfers, wondering how anybody could be so anxious to get in the water that they'd seek out a hurricane. Or in this case, a little old tropical storm with just enough in the tank to get the rollers going, maybe drop a

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