Dead in Time

Prologue

Copyright © 2013 Anna Reith
www.annareith.co.uk

ISBN-13: 978-1907623448 (paperback)

All rights reserved. Except for review purposes, the reproduction of this book in whole or part, electronically or mechanically, constitutes a copyright violation.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, events, and characters are fictitious or are used fictitiously, a product of the author’s imagination. Any similarities to actual events, or persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.

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“Rock ’n’ roll is dream soup; what’s your brand?”
~ Patti Smith

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Prologue

August 28th 1976

It started as a long, hot summer. Only now it wasn’t just heat but a dry, sucking, breathless thing. Still, stagnant air that choked all it touched, malicious and unrelenting… and it scared him. He stared at the polystyrene tiles on his bathroom ceiling. Longest summer of his life, and now he wouldn’t see the end of it.

Shit, man.

His lips, parched and sticking, pulled back into a grimace. This wasn’t funny anymore. He flexed against the vinyl, not quite feeling his hands or feet and not quite managing to move his head.

Nope. Definitely not good.

How long had he been lying here? Hard to be sure. He remembered… not much from the last twelve hours, he decided, but then it had been turning into a hell of a party. Yeah, and that was a thought, wasn’t it? There had to be plenty of people still in the house. Someone would be bound to find him. Bound to come blundering up the wrong stairs, back into these private rooms, this small sanctuary—because they always did, and that’s one of the things Inez got pissed off about, right?—and they’d find him.

Inez.

Consciousness started to slip away from him again. He tried once more to turn his head and groaned when the pain hit, searing and crushing, his whole skull gripped by some huge claw. His neck was on fire, but his feet felt cold. Trippy. Weird, but not as weird as seeing part of his own temple smeared across the side of the maple sink cabinet. A few strands of hair waved in the convection of the shower heat, and there was blood… a lot of blood, painted stark against the white basin.

Oh.

Funny, he didn’t remember doing that.

His body spasmed in an attempt at a retch. Coughing, he barely felt the bloody ooze and the phlegm slide down his face. His vision blurred again, the bathroom walls misting in a jumble of melting shapes. Steam coiled across the room in a liquid prism of unimaginable colours.

“Whoa, man,” he murmured, because… because, like, this could really be it.

The end.

This time, maybe. And it was so quiet. He hadn’t expected that. The house lay far enough from the road for him not to hear the cars. Secluded—the reason he’d bought it. You weren’t s’posed to hear cars in the country. He realised that no birds were singing in the trees outside, either. He noticed that now, now that he’d got used to it. The birds almost replaced the dim thrum of the traffic he’d grown up with… rarer, sweeter, but still the same; still the sounds of life, the sounds of living. All swallowed up in silence now.