The Meridians(100)

He looked out the window. Tina's father still lay there, motionless in the dirt. But just as Kevin had said, Mr. Gray was gone. Gone but less powerful, growing weaker as he proceeded backward in time, until finally he was gone forever.

Scott thought about his wife and child. About what Amy would do in his situation. About the fact that he had visited - was it really Heaven? Was there really such a place? But even as he thought it he knew the answer. The purity of the love and hope that he had felt in that place was incomparable. There was such a place. His family was there.

And his family was here.

Waiting for him.

Scott got in the car. He hugged Lynette.

"What happened out there?" she asked. "Where did you go?"

"Let's get out of here, and I'll tell you," he said.

And he would. He would tell them all.

Because once upon a time, Scott had a family.

Sometimes history demands suffering and death. Sometimes it insists upon happiness and survival.

But no matter what, he knew that once upon a time his families - both of them, the one that was here and now, and the one that lived only in his memory - would live again, because there was a place called heaven, and a little boy would unlock the door between this world and that one.





And don't miss Rising Fears,

another thriller by Michaelbrent Collings...





RISING FEARS





***





PROLOGUE:

UNCAGED

***

In spite of her name, Amy-Lynn Rand was not a small-town girl. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, it had seemed like the probable end of the world when she got married to a man who not only haled from an improbably small town in Washington, but was determined to return to it someday.

She had put off the inevitable for seven years. Seven good years. Then she had finally gotten pregnant, and looked around at the big city for the first time through the eyes of a mother-to-be...and shuddered.

The avenues and promenades that had seemed so inviting and fun to a woman of twenty were now harbingers of doom to her. Boardwalks that had once beckoned now seemed like nothing but warrens for child molesters and potential murderers.

Amy-Lynn, the big city girl with the small town name, looked around her beloved Los Angeles, and for the first time in her life she shuddered rather than smiled.

They moved back to the town where her husband Ron had been born, back to Rising, Washington, and though Amy-Lynn would have been the first to admit that the move was one borne of fear, she also would have been the first to admit that the end of her trip carried almost as much foreboding as her beginning had.

Within six hours of her arrival in Rising, however, she realized two things: first, that her only idea of small-town living came from television shows where small towns were most often portrayed as the birth-place of bigots and busy-bodies; and second, that those shows had clearly been written by big-city folks with no more idea of what a small town was like than she had had.

Instead of insular life, she found the people open to the point of being a shock to the system. She and her husband had arrived late, Ron driving the small U-haul that carried every one of their meager possessions - only enough to furnish the small apartment that was all they could afford in Los Angeles. Amy-Lynn had fretted about how they would get everything unloaded: Ron's family were all dead or moved away, and at seven months pregnant she knew she wasn't much for the heavy lifting. Ron, however, had merely smiled in a particularly infuriating way and chuckled whenever she broached the subject.

But sure enough, within ten minutes of opening the back of the U-haul, there were a pack of neighbors, passers-by, and even two sheriff's deputies that were all buzzing like ants in and out of the house, each of them summoned not by a phone call or a plea for aid, but merely by the fact that there was someone new in the neighborhood, and that someone needed help. Amy-Lynn found herself being coddled in her own home as the wives in the area descended on her as well, each bearing not just friendship, but also foodstuffs for the pantry - nothing frozen, they all knew from experience that the movers wouldn't want or be prepared to deal with frozen items just yet - and advice for the new mother.

She felt like she had somehow managed to get to heaven without the burdensome and occasionally messy process of dying getting in the way.

Now eight years after moving to Rising, the view was of the same idyllic small town that it had been eight years ago.

Main road.

A schoolhouse, for grades K through twelve, a small brick building that somehow managed to convey both an inviting air and one of permanence, as though the building could speak and was even now telling all that it had gone through many long winters...and expected to go through many more.

Behind the schoolhouse was a small football field, the pride of the town, where each Friday night almost everyone for twenty square miles could be found.

A few children were out riding their bikes in the waning light of day, a few honest-to-goodness Bicycle playing cards in their bike spokes. Amy-Lynn smiled at that for a moment, then shuddered as the sound of the playing cards carried to her ears: it sounded like the flap-crack of splintering bones.

She cast her eyes around for something else to focus on, gripped by a sudden feeling of dread that she had not experienced in almost a decade, not since leaving Los Angeles.

She looked up, and saw the mist-shrouded Olympic Mountains, the huge range casting long shadows over the town in the last pale gasps of day. Usually the view comforted Amy-Lynn: the mountains exuded permanence, lending a sense of stability to an otherwise oft-changing world. Today, however, at the end of this long day, at the end of a short trip through memory that played host to darkness as much as light, the mountains seemed less like the ponderous guardians that they usually were, and more like an omen of coming doom. The mist that hung on them seemed to Amy-Lynn like the darkness that hung at the edges of so many pleasant dreams: a constant reminder that what was light could be made dim at a moment's notice; that what was lovely could be rendered vile and horrifying in an instant.