Dark Luck (A Suspense Thriller) (11 page)

They got lucky—or maybe that was the typical way it
worked: the cops hadn’t fingerprinted him before he got carted away to the
hospital morgue. They must have believed that he wasn’t going anywhere, anyway.

“I guess you learned a valuable lesson today,” Jeremy
said when Zack was three blocks away from the hospital. “Never spare a life, no
matter how young they are.”

“I’m going to cut this ungrateful asshole’s head off.”

“That’s the spirit, buddy!”

“I wish I hadn’t gone through this, though. My leg
hurts like hell. Why didn’t you warn me about this kid back at the house? I
thought you love giving advice.”

“It’s all part of your education, Zack. You need to
harden up in order to move on to bigger things. You won’t survive for too long
if you’re soft.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“Are you ready to make a dent in history, buddy?”

“I sure am.”

Yes, he sure was.

THE END

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The following is a sample
of Tim Kizer’s horror novel “Days of Vengeance” (about 106,000 words).

“Days of Vengeance” description:

Frank Fowler, a man suffering from amnesia, suspects he
may have murdered his wife Kelly, who vanished three days before he lost his
memory. The bad news is Kelly's family has the same suspicions.

As memories trickle back to him, Frank is still unable
to figure out why he slaughtered his wife and what happened to his accomplice.
He is not even sure he has nothing to do with the disappearance of his young daughter,
who went missing a few months earlier. Things take a darker turn when he
realizes that his in-laws will stop at nothing to make him remember what he has
done to their beloved sister. The situation gets even more complicated as an
anonymous blackmailer accuses Frank of the murder and demands money to keep his
mouth shut. 

Frank's search for answers becomes a fight for survival
after he rediscovers that his wife's relatives are a clique of bloodthirsty
serial kidnappers serving a mysterious one-legged man. His chances of
prevailing are slim: one of the in-laws is a cop and another is a
multimillionaire.

However, the question still remains: Why are these
people so hell-bent on getting hold of Kelly's dead body?

His options are limited: he either finds his wife--dead
or alive--or dies. In his race against time Frank has all the clues to the
puzzle, he just needs to remember them before it’s too late.

The novel is currently available on Amazon Kindle
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006SPQRFS
.

Please visit Tim Kizer’s website
www.horror-suspense.com
for more
news.

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Tim Kizer

Days of Vengeance

Chapter 1.

DREAM

1.

The note read: “Dear Frank, I know you killed your
wife, and I can prove it. You are a reasonable person. I’m sure you don’t want
to go to prison. All I need is a $20,000 loan. Please think about my request
very carefully.”

But before this, the last six years had been wiped from
his memory.

Then there were darkness and dreams...

2.

Owl. Owl. Owl? This word flickered at the edge of his
mind for a few seconds and then vanished. Frank somehow knew that it was not
the word he’d been trying to recall. His very life depended upon this important
word buried deep inside his memory, and he had to fish it out as soon as
possible if he didn’t want the one-legged man and his people to cut his throat.
He had no idea who the one-legged man was. Sometimes he doubted this man
actually existed.

The word sounded similar to ‘owl.’

He would give it another shot later. Right now, he
would like to focus on something else. Those dreams. Yeah, on those amazingly
vivid dreams.

Frank had been having bizarre dreams while he was in a
coma. When he regained his consciousness, he did not remember their contents.
As a matter of fact, he was not even sure he’d had any dreams at all.

Very hard. Really damn hard! It was so hard to open his
eyes. To unglue his eyelids, which, as he had begun to suspect, must have been
sewn together, otherwise how could one explain the fact that he had been trying
to put them in motion for ten minutes now (or maybe ten days), and they had not
budged one bit?

Then two flashes of recollection lit up his mind.
First, Frank remembered that there was a steel-plated safe holding a body the
one-legged man’s people would love to get back. He had no clue where he’d
hidden it. Within seconds, this memory disappeared into the ether.

The second flash was one of those strange dreams.

Frank remembered seeing a man who stood by the bathroom
door, collecting his thoughts. The man clasped a nine-inch long knife in his
right hand, but Frank knew he was nursing a hope that he would not have to use
it. Strangle... He would prefer to strangle her.

Frank could also see a woman in the bathroom. She was
in the shower cabin, carefully rubbing soap on her shoulders, forearms, and
breasts, firm jets of hot water massaging her back, her hands sliding smoothly
on the soft lather. The man wrapped his fingers around the knob, turned and
pulled it, swore at himself—this door opens inward, idiot!—and then began
pushing the door slowly until the gap became wide enough for him to see the
woman.

The woman’s progress was easy to observe since the
bathroom fans had been doing a great job of venting most of the steam out. The
man asked himself if he should wait until she finished showering. The answer
was no.

The woman turned around towards the showerhead and remained
in this position for a while as the water rinsed the front of her body. Then
she grabbed the shampoo bottle and squeezed some of its contents into her palm.
She seemed preoccupied with the task at hand and would have hardly noticed if
someone had sneaked into the room, especially with all that mist on the shower
door. After gently lathering the top of her hair, the woman poured more shampoo
into her palm and applied it to her hair in the back.

The man gathered his courage and finally stepped over the
threshold. He quickly shut the door behind him so as to prevent the draft of
cold air from breaking into the bathroom and thus alerting the woman. Frank
still couldn’t discern both the man’s and the woman’s faces—they were the only
blurry spots in this vivid dream—but at the same time he had a feeling he knew
these people very well. The man stood mere feet away from the shower cabin,
watching his target massage the shampoo into her scalp. He was excited she
didn’t see him enter the room. Lucky for him, the woman usually closed her eyes
when lathering up her hair, which meant he had the surprise factor on his side,
just like he’d hoped. Now there was a chance he wouldn’t have to hear her
ear-piercing scream after all.   

With a pleased smile, the woman breathed in the hot
steam, letting it warm up her nasal passage and lungs, as her hands slowly
moved from her forehead to the back of her head, her fingers digging into the
shampoo foam in circular motions. She obviously enjoyed taking shower.

Hiding the knife behind his back, the man made the
first step towards the cabin. Through the water jet noise, he heard the woman
start humming some tune, and he froze for a second to shake off the momentary
doubt that he would be unable to yank that bitch out and accomplish what he had
planned. She’d better shut up and quit distracting him! He inhaled through his
nose and exhaled through his mouth and quickly calmed down.

The tune reproduced by the woman was Dancing Queen by
ABBA. Like millions of other people, the woman loved singing in the shower,
where there were no critics or gawkers.

With her eyes still shut, the woman stepped closer to
the showerhead, allowing the water to rinse her hair. As the shampoo lather
streamed down her naked body, she kept humming Dancing Queen, while running her
fingers through her locks. She was enveloped in puffs of steam, the water noise
drowned every other sound in the bathroom; oblivious to the world outside the
foggy shower door, she didn’t see the man approach the cabin.

3.

The memory expired as abruptly as it had come to his
mind. A few seconds later, he only had a vague idea of what the dream had been
about. And the memory of the one-legged man had vanished completely.

 So, one, two, three. He was summoning his strength.
Summoning his strength. He had to open his eyes. And here was the light. His
eyelids finally opened. Focusing, and...

A woman's face. Perhaps he should go to the bathroom
and wash his face and brush his teeth. He also did not want to be late for
work. By the way, where did he work?

“Mister Fowler,” the woman said in a low voice, putting
her warm palm on his hand.

Lying in bed was pleasant. The woman’s palm was very
warm, as if it had rested on a hot towel for a while before landing on his
hand. He had no desire to get up. It felt as though he had grown into the bed,
become part of it. The woman was apparently kind. Kind as a mother.

He moved his lips apart and forgot to register how
difficult this action was because all of his attention was drawn to the face of
the kind woman clasping his hand. His right hand. Or was it his left hand?
Damn, which hand was she holding?

“Mister Fowler, if you can hear me, move your right
thumb.” A pause. “Move any finger if you can hear me, Mister Fowler. Hang on a
second. I'm going to get the doctor.”

Yes, sure, he could hear her. He moved (or so it seemed
to him) his right index finger. Yes, it was the index finger on the hand the
woman was squeezing. He wagged it with sufficient amplitude so that the woman
would easily notice the movement.

“Hang—” the woman fell silent after seeing his finger
twitch, which meant he had actually moved it. “Very good, Mister Fowler. I'll
get the doctor.”

As she rose from the chair, she poured a pleasant sweet
smell over him—everything coming from this woman was pleasant. Then she left
the room, her heels knocking softly on the floor. Or maybe it wasn’t her heels.
Now he wasn’t even sure he had heard the knocking.

Knocking? And what about breakfast? Or was it time for
lunch?

Or dinner?

“Hello,” he whispered. He realized it had been a
whisper and wanted to believe he had intended to whisper that word, but in
reality he had been going to shout it. The sad fact was his vocal folds were
not up to the task at the moment. Right now he sounded like a punctured balloon.

“Hello.”

You might as well just keep silent, buddy, considering
that your voice is so faint. It’s as if you are afraid of waking up a little
child. Yeah, keep silent, man, don't make people laugh.

After the last thought had fully formed in his mind,
there was another fleeting memory flash—the final half of the dream.

He opened the shower cabin door. The woman was applying
conditioner to her hair and was completely absorbed in this task when he
grabbed her by her left arm. To his surprise, she didn't scream. He attempted
to step inside the cabin, but the woman managed to push him out. However, it
was too early for the woman to celebrate because he pulled her out of the
shower as he stumbled back.

He lost his balance, they fell down on the floor, and
he began to strangle her, holding her torso tightly with his left arm and
crushing her throat with his right forearm. The woman was kicking, wiggling,
and scratching his arms as she tried to writhe out of his grip. They rolled
over, and the woman found herself on top of him, but it didn’t help her one
bit. His grasp remained firm and his arm kept blocking the air from entering
the woman’s windpipe.

He throttled her for a minute or two as she wheezed and
squirmed like an epileptic. At last, she fell silent and her body went limp. He
breathed in the steam coming out of the shower, shook the woman up, checking if
she was actually dead, and finally let her out of his hold.

When he rose, his hands were trembling and his legs
were giving way, as if he had just run five miles without a break. Damn, it
couldn’t have been more than ten minutes since he had dragged the woman out of
the shower cabin, but it felt as though a whole day had passed. Thankfully,
everything was fine. Everything was fine! Now he could relax and maybe go to a
bar later tonight; he had done the deed and earned a few hours of leisure
time. 

He had never thought it would turn out so simple. Not
complicated, at any rate. He wiped sweat from his forehead, nearly scratching
his nose with the knife, which thankfully hadn’t had a chance to cut human
flesh tonight. He didn’t want bloodshed; blood tended to splash every which
way, and he would hate to throw away the fairly new shirt he was wearing.

He sat down on the brim of the tub and listened to noises
in the room and in the hallway. A chill ran down his spine when he thought that
his life would be over if someone caught him here, next to the corpse, with a
knife in his hand. But, you see, he had remembered to properly lock the front
door, and the privacy of his rendezvous with the dead woman was guaranteed.

He touched the edge of the blade with his left thumb
and grinned. Everything was fine, the job had been done; he could get some rest
now.

He breathed out sharply as
if marking the end of the venture he had just undertaken, poked the woman’s
body with the tip of his right foot—she was dead as a rock—and got up. He was
happy he hadn’t had to use the knife; this realization came to him as he walked
to the shower cabin to turn off the water. We should save water, dear friends;
otherwise our planet is doomed.

Then he left the bathroom. And displayed a remarkable
psychic ability by lingering by the open door for a few seconds: the woman
moved.

Yes, she moved, turned her face to the door. She looked
dazed and upset as if she’d been woken up by a street noise at four o'clock in
the morning, right before the culmination of a fabulous dream. She didn't see
the man lurking at the entrance as she touched her neck and rose slowly.

The sight of the naked woman struggling to her feet,
with a sulky expression on her face, fascinated the man. Somehow this picture
seemed a bit surrealistic to him: a hundred and thirty pounds of naked flesh
(adorned with beautifully shaped breasts shaking in unison and a neat patch of trimmed
pubic hair) standing in the middle of a semi-steamy bathroom. Someone with a
perverted mind could come up with a really weird caption for this image.

The man braced himself and ran back into the bathroom.
‘I'm like a projectile,’ he thought, ramming into the woman and pushing her
towards the tub.

One more thought: he would have to use a weapon. With
this idea in his mind, he stretched forward his right hand, which was gripping
the knife as firmly as a vice. The blade slowed down for a moment as it pierced
the skin and then proceeded deeper into the rib cage of the woman, who was
sliding into the tub after hitting the wall, her legs spread widely apart, the
back of her head cracked and bleeding. When the man yanked the knife out of her
body, the woman squirmed and crashed down to the bottom of the tub, twisted in
an awkward manner.

He plunged the knife into the woman’s chest, aiming for
the heart, kept the blade inside for a few seconds, afraid that his victim
would recover if he withdrew too soon, and then pulled the knife out. He
stabbed the woman two more times, each additional cut within inches of the
original one. Now the woman was dead, or they would have to rewrite all books
on penetrating trauma. A perforated stomach, a gutted (hopefully) heart, and a
fractured skull—he had no doubt the woman had kicked the bucket. He had killed
her at last.