Read Athena Force 8: Contact for Free Online

straining to catch this particular heartbeat. It pulsed more rapidly than the heart of someone who was simply taking care of tasks at work. It sounded more like someone doing something they shouldn’t. And in this otherwise lifeless room, surrounded only by hearts that never would beat again, she recognized it.
    The killer was coming.
    Time to leave, thought Faith—but her feet didn’t move. It wasn’t from courage. Some instinct more powerful than her desire to see the killer’s face was holding her transfixed, listening to those footsteps, listening to that heartbeat. What was different about it? A murmur? A rhythmic anomaly? Could she even be sure it was the killer, and not her imagination?
    Her head couldn’t. But her instincts weren’t letting her go out there, all the same.
    The problem was, he was coming in here. She didn’t have to be psychic to guess that. This room was at the end of a hallway. He was coming in here, and either she stood here and waited for him, or she left by forcing herself to walk right by him—
    Her feet weren’t cooperating.
    He was barely ten feet from the door, if that much. She could hear it. Nine feet. Eight….
    Faith wanted to stand her ground. But she’d been raised on paranoia for too long. Almost in defeat, she spun, tugged open one of the steel drawers at her feet—
    A man’s ashen face stared back up at her. One of the dead gangbangers. Being a crime victim, he didn’t look happy, even in death.
    The footsteps were only six feet from the doorway. Five….
    She kicked that drawer smoothly closed and yanked the handle of another. It glided open, empty. She swung in, feetfirst.
    Three feet from the doorway…
    Planting either hand on the disinfected, death-scented linoleum beneath the drawer, Faith pushed backward, sliding herself into the dark, steel confines of a drawer that normally held dead bodies.

Chapter 3
     
    I t was cold. Cold and dark, and so very, very close.
    Not that the former residents of this drawer had needed to see or stay warm.
    On her stomach, Faith tucked her arms beneath herself, both for warmth and to lever her face farther from the steel slab that had held countless corpses. She shivered. Even her extra-keen eyes could see nothing. She could hear nothing. Was this thing actually soundproof? If so, was it so the dead could sleep peacefully…or so that the living wouldn’t hear them?
    Stupid, thought Faith of her own fancies. Stupid, stupid. Now that she’d committed to this foolish course of action, she felt frustrated with her own cowardice. That, and its impetus.
    A person couldn’t really have such distinct hearing that she could recognize a specific heartbeat, from down the hallway. Could she? Not even a freak like her. It had to be her imagination. Or maybe she was mentally deficient. Her mother had never wanted to consult a doctor about Faith’s “condition.”
    Even if she wasn’t crazy, and the visitor to the morgue was the killer, why hide? She’d had a chance to see the man’s face, to finally know who had done this horrible thing to her friend…
    But even now, when she considered pushing out of this body locker, she couldn’t quite summon the courage. She’d been in shock when she’d gone after the killer at the bar. Now, in daylight, facing him down seemed even more foolish than hiding from him.
    Even in here.
    She could feel her muscles stiffen, her breath strain in this cold, solid tomb of sensory deprivation. If she raised her head, she bumped it on steel.
    Something felt sticky under one elbow— don’t think about it! —and she shivered harder.
    Minutes passed.
    Desperate, she harnessed her thoughts back to logic. Okay, suppose the intruder really was the killer from the bar. What the hell would he be doing here? How could he have gotten past security? Why would anyone take such a risk?
    The last question echoed through her skull as surely as her own heartbeat and chattering teeth echoed blindly, deafening, back at her