The Wrong Side of Dead

I can’t raise this baby by myself, without a daddy. I’m giving it up for adoption.

Once again, a return e-mail didn’t take long.

Please. Don’t do anything until we talk. I can make things right. You’ll see.

But now it was her turn to plead.

If you tell your son that we talked, he’ll think I contacted you first. He’ll take off again and leave us BOTH.

You leave that boy to me, was all the woman wrote.

Her e-mail was short and to the point again, tough love from a momma who indeed knew her son. After another exchange of e-mails, she’d agreed to meet tomorrow morning. Risky business to make actual contact with an online stranger, but she’d run out of options with her search.

“Well, Junior,” she said under her breath. “We may find your daddy yet.”

Hours later

Seth stared into blackness, his thoughts the consistency of primordial ooze. Although his brain sent a questionable message to the rest of his body that he could move, he chose not to try. His senses were gathering intel, and he was content to let the process happen at its own pace.

He blinked his eyes—slow and easy—the only motion he could muster.

It took time for him to recognize that something else moved in the dark. A faint edge of red stabbed through the shadows, a light blinking at a steady and insistent rhythm. He had no idea where it came from and didn’t care. The left cheek on his face hurt, and his head throbbed at the same measured beat as the light, inflicting a growing ache from behind his eyes and through the base of his skull. And with it, a chill sent a rush of pinpricks over his skin that cut deeper, especially with his back pressed against something cold and hard.

In front of him, images gradually took shape and emerged from the dark, pieces of a puzzle for his consideration. And like an artery, the red light pulsed, repeatedly teasing him with a glimpse and swiping it away. Crimson lunged across a blanched palette like a strobe effect, capturing a wild array of blotches that marred the surface. At first, the scene over his head looked like a harmless rendition of an artist gone berserk until a metallic sweet odor triggered something else.

Now a strong feeling of dread spoiled his creeping drift through oblivion. Muddled thoughts mercifully tempered the sensation, but he felt it all the same.

Do something!

Urging his body to move, he lifted an arm and dropped a hand to his belly, a sluggish, awkward struggle. His fingers felt dampness on his clothes. And a second bout with the cold swept over him, causing his teeth to chatter. He fumbled a hand to his cheek. It felt warm to the touch and throbbed a little, but he had no idea why. To get his blood moving, he rolled to his side and shoved an elbow under him, the cold tile pressed hard against his joint. When he lifted his head, dizziness brought on a surge of nausea. He nearly gagged but managed to control it.

What had happened? He pried through his memory, recalling nothing of how he ended up here. And where was here? He peered through the shadows of what looked like a cramped bathroom. And beyond where he was, the remnants of a cheap motel room, but none of it looked familiar.

Through it all, the flashing light persisted. Its grim red doused everything. He looked across two small beds and saw the light came from a window that had thin drapes partially drawn. Outside, a neon VACANCY sign flared its message, but he couldn’t see all of it. And after only a quick glimpse, the light sent shards of pain through his eye sockets and challenged his night vision. To recover, he shifted his gaze to the dark corners of the bathroom again, looking for anything that would trigger a memory.

Instead, he came face-to-face with a nightmare he would never forget. Dead eyes stared back at him from the edge of a tub, opened wide and accusing. A slack head tilted at an odd and unnatural slant. A woman. Her mouth gagged with a soiled towel. Dark hair matted to her head, a bloodied mess.

“Holy shit!”

He gasped and shoved his back to the far wall, scrambling for a place to hide. But he couldn’t shift his gaze from the filmy white eyes and gagged mouth. A face frozen in terror and awash in flashing crimson that stippled eerie shadows over the corpse.

“No…no. What…?” His mind couldn’t grasp what he saw.

The body smelled of violent death, the metallic sweet odor tinged with something more than he wanted to imagine. And the artist’s blotches he had seen when he first opened his eyes had morphed into the reality of blood splatter. He clutched at his damp shirt and pulled away his hand to see it colored by a dark substance. He knew in an instant that it was blood.

“Oh, God.”

This time Seth couldn’t hold back. He emptied his stomach, even knowing dead eyes stared down at him as he retched.

Sick and confused, Seth got to his feet and backed out of the bloody bathroom, but the eyes of the dead body followed him. He turned away from the gruesome scene and staggered off-balance. To catch himself, he leaned a shoulder into the doorjamb and gripped it with a hand. His legs barely supported him. And even in a stupor, he realized his brain was fried. Trusting his senses and his perceptions would be out of the question.

When he stumbled into the next room, he caught the motion of a shadow outside the window. He only had time to blink, but it was too late. A loud crack, and the door burst open. He lurched backward, his spine jammed against a wall, the only thing that kept him from falling.

“Move…MOVE!”

He heard a man yell and had no time to react. His heart hammered the inside of his chest. And when he sucked air into his lungs, he couldn’t let it out.

Everything happened way too fast.

CHAPTER 2

Lights flooded the room, and beams spiraled through the dark, zeroing in on him. Seth raised an arm to shield his eyes. Angry voices filled his head. Words whipped by him and through him. Only a few stuck long enough to register a meaning.

“On your knees…NOW!”

He tried to react, but panic gripped him, making him sick again. He froze where he stood. His whole body shook. And he knew he had only heard a fraction of what these men had been yelling. Everything surged off- balance—too fast for him to keep up.

What the hell was happening? Who were these men?

“Hands behind your head. Do it!” One man’s voice pummeled his ear, louder than the rest.

A bright glare blinded him. His eyes watered. He squinted between his fingers, filtering what little he saw through his muddled brain. It was all so surreal, like a bad movie, not happening to him. But when the silhouette of a man eclipsed the window, more shadows blocked the red blinking light. Now he felt the men close tighter around him. And in the flashes of light, he realized they had guns.

“Don’t shoot…PLEASE don’t shoot me,” he begged, raising his hands.

This was real. It was happening. And when the yelling intensified, he shut down, too numb and afraid to reason it out. All he wanted to do was collapse and throw up again.

“Oh, God, I’m…gonna be sick,” he mumbled, unsure they’d heard what he said.

When he bent over to empty his stomach, they rushed him. Strong hands grappled him to the floor. A knee dug into his back.

“Ah…. shit! Please,” he pleaded. His face was pressed hard to the carpet, muffling his voice.

“Relax…RELAX,” a man shouted. The way the man delivered his message would do little to calm anyone. “Don’t fight,” he added, yanking his arm back.

“He’s down. We got him.”

Seth felt the harsh slap of metal on his wrists, and for the first time, realized these men might be police. He forced his body to give up the fight, but that didn’t translate to those who hauled his ass off the floor and frisked him. They manhandled him, but he knew the drill.

He’d grown up knowing way too much about how cops operated.

“Let’s get light in here,” one man said.