Read Out of the Shadows for Free Online

found me, and everyone else had come running as if they’d heard him. Did these things communicate telepathically in some way?
    I imagined the woman in the group at the police station mutter as I drove away, “Nick Barren has fled the station. Nick Barren is gone. Nick Barren is probably going to his ex-wife’s house. Nick Barren will fall for our lame and simple trap, because he is a stupid drunk.”
    If punching myself could be productive, I would have done it.
    “Hello, Nick Barren.”
    I looked up at the door and saw a cluster of people – maybe ten of them – staring at me with dead eyes and straight lips. I glanced down at Sarah, who looked up into my eyes, crying, an expression of sincere apology on her face. It was only now that I noticed the blood staining the side of her shirt.
    She had been bitten, although I was still unsure what that meant exactly.
    I raised my weapon toward the threshold, a burning rage smoldering inside like an inferno threatening to explode.
    They must have noticed my anger, because three of them spoke in unison, not an ounce of fear in their tone. “Nick Barren, please. We don’t wish to harm you. We wish to help you.”
    “You bastards can’t help me,” I seethed.
    Now, five of them spoke at once. “Join us willingly. It’s much less painful that way.”
    “Did you give Sarah a choice?!” I spat, fighting back tears of anguish.
    All of them spoke in an eerie chorus, the men and women forming a dissonant harmony of words: “Those in who we see potential get a choice.”
    “Potential for what?” I demanded.
    “Join our community, and you will see, Nick Barren.”
    I shook with frenzied adrenaline, my gun trained at the face of the main person in the doorway. I exchanged a pained glance with Sarah, and in her eyes I saw the words I knew she could never utter aloud: “I love you.”
    I pulled the trigger.
    The man whose face I pulverized dropped to the ground in a bloody heap, the rest of them staring at me, expressionless.
    “Sorry,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow with my forearm. “I don’t do so well in groups.” I fired the next shot, and the next.
    The people-things began trying to push their way into the room, but they had to climb over the bodies of their comrades, and they stumbled. I took them out, one by one, sending smatterings of blood all over the shadowed hallway walls. As Sarah cried from fright, I advanced on them, trying to force my way out of the room. I stepped over their dead bodies as I approached the final two.
    My gun clicked its empty barrel, and I effortlessly holstered it, grabbing the neck of the woman in front of me and twisting it until I heard a sickening crack . I tossed her body to the ground as I kicked the final man backward, sending him into the closet doors in the hall, knocking them off their sliding tracks on the floor. While he was disoriented, I quickly reloaded my P228 and fired one quick shot into his forehead, a streak of blood smearing down the faux-wood door as he slumped to the carpet.
    I marched into the entrance foyer toward the front door, getting ready to slam it shut when I saw a mob of thirty people charging up the driveway toward me, having no doubt heard the telepathic cries of their fellow “community members.” I panicked only briefly before slamming the door and solidly bolting it, pushing the nearby hutch in front of it as they began pounding and rattling the doorknob, unable to bust through the makeshift barricade.
    I ran to the back French doors through which I had entered the house, knowing that those wouldn’t hold them back for long, since the majority of the surface area was made up of tiny windowpanes. They would easily break through, but at least this would buy me a short while to think. I bolted the door and headed back into Annie’s bedroom.
    Once inside, I promptly shut the door and locked it, pulling the bed away from the wall and resting it up against the only entrance into the room. I took a