Page 356 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 1

She shook her head.

His grin turned cajoling. “Come on. Get out of the truck. The nice policemen want to ask you a few questions, and I’m sure by now you’ve probably got one or two to ask yourself.”

Chilling fingers danced up her spine, spreading tingling tendrils of uncertainty through every nerve ending in her body before knotting in the pit of her stomach. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t possibly be. She must be in a coma or, dear lord, dying. Her mind had taken her, for whatever bizarre reason, into the movie she had been gearing herself up to watch. That had to be it. Which meant she was, in actuality, lying on her living room floor, dying from electrocution.

And if that was the case, well then, she felt a little bit cheated, to be honest. Where was the bright light that was supposed… oh, well, she supposed she had seen that. But not one spirit had beckoned her from the other side. Where were all the angels, or her Grandma and all the ancestors she’d lost over the years? Where was the warm glow welcoming her home? None of that had appeared for her. What did she get? A big-ass hairy spider, running across the road in front of a truck that wasn’t even hers.

Audrey gripped the steering wheel, her eyes widening all over again. She was in hell. That was the only explanation that fit. Not even God would let spiders into heaven. Well, crap! Mom had been right after all: the devil did love a potty-mouth.

Tap-tap-tap.

“Uh, hello?” the blonde man outside her window said. He half-smiled. “Unless you want to finish out the scene in the hospital, you should really make-up your mind and come out here. Police are either notoriously short tempered or Barney Fife in these old films.”

Audrey looked at him, her brain struggling to comprehend what he meant. Was she not in hell, after all? There was no way any of this was real. This might all be one big hallucination, and all she had to do was snap herself out of it.

She closed her eyes, but when she opened them back up, he was still there. She tried again, squeezing her eyes closed for a little longer this time. Nope, still there. She tried again. Nope. One more time. Still there. Damn. Maybe a series of rapid-fire blinks with a really energetic Samantha “Bewitched” nose wiggled thrown in…

She stopped when she noticed the blonde man had raised one eyebrow at her. Slowly, he turned his head to one side. “Are you… okay?”

“Oh damn,” Audrey blurted. “Are you real?”

He grinned. “Yes, I am.”

“But you can’t be real!”

“No?” His grin began to fade. There went the eyebrow and the head turning again.

“No!” She thumped passionately upon her chest. “I refuse to go to hell! This is my hallucination! My twisted, dying-brain illusion, and my rules. If I’m going to die, I want my hallucinations to be in color, without police, and sure as hell without big-ass, hairy spiders running across the road!”

He smiled. “Trust me. You are not dying. This is not a hallucination. The police aren’t going to disappear until the scene changes. And, if I were you, I really would not bring up the significantly larger than normal spider.”

“But it was huge! Big enough to eat people!”

“Yes, it was,” he agreed mildly. “And it will. But you’re not supposed to believe you really saw it.”

“I don’t believe I really saw it!”

“That’s my girl! Come on, now. Out of the truck.” He stepped back so she could unlock and open the door.

Glancing behind her at the two officers watching them from the road, she grudgingly reached for the handle. A gentleman of times long past, he helped her down, folded her hand into the crook of his arm and, as they walked back through the soft earth and ferns to the waiting police, whispered, “You’re a little shaky from the accident, but you feel fine. Something ran in front of your truck, you think maybe a rabbit.”

“No way was that a rabbit,” she insisted.

“Yes, it was. Because they’re not going to believe you if you say ‘spider.’ Also, your father disappeared last week—”

“My father’s been dead for ten years.”

“You’ve been searching for him all day,” the blonde man said with forced patience.

“He’s buried in Blodgett Cemetery!”

“You’re really worried.”

“About me, maybe,” Audrey snapped. “I don’t want to get eaten by a huge, hairy spider! Dad’s dead. There’s not a whole lot else that can happen to him!”

His voice dropped a little lower since they were almost to the police. “Just tell them what I told you, or we’re going to have to redo the scene.”

“You okay?” the first officer asked as they drew closer.

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