The Tea Party - A Novel of Horror Read Online Free Page B

only to rise again, flecked through with black motes like gnats swarming at dusk.
    An anxious look up the highway, searching for the truck that had to be careening wildly toward her, thinking for a moment she ought to move into the trees in case the driver didn’t see her and slammed into the car.
    The rumbling increased, and she felt a thrumming vibration penetrate her soles, tingle her calves, tighten her thighs.
    Then, before she could decide what was happening, the ground trembled.
    She started, and stared at the narrow verge, at the blacktop still cracked from the previous winter’s freeze.
    The ground rippled.
    A flock of crows bolted into the sky, calling hysterically, wheeling, swinging sharply overhead before disappearing south.
    The car creaked and began rocking, and she jumped away, holding up her hands as if afraid it would scorch her.
    “Hey!”
    Beneath her feet the rumbling became thunder, and the trembling became a quaking, rolling and violent. Before she could grab the door the hood slammed down, and before she could call out again she was thrown off her feet.
    The trees became palsied, saplings swaying like frantic whips until they blurred grey and green. A large gnarled branch crashed onto the road, bounced, and shattered into splinters as if it were glass; an oak lifted groaning out of the ground, roots dripping black dirt and dark wriggling things, screaming as it fell against a smaller, younger tree that bent under the weight and snapped like a gunshot, the landing raising a cloud that spun away as though the quake had given birth to a wind.
    The grumbling swelled to a roaring, a deafening bellow that made her ears ache.
    Liz was rolled into the middle of the road, jagged pieces of blacktop scraping her arms and legs while she screamed and tried to cover her head.
    A moss-stained boulder moved ponderously out of the forest and onto the verge.
    The car bounced on its tires, and the hood flapped and clanked like a toneless cymbal.
    She was tumbled toward the woods and tried to stop herself by spreading her legs, digging in toes and heels wherever she could. It didn’t work. The ground hunched and threw her, and she landed face up in a shallow ditch, the breath punched from her lungs; and she looked skyward to see a forty-foot tree leaning down toward her.
    She screamed for the children and crossed her arms over her face, drew up her legs and tried to stand, was thrown back again, her head slamming on a rock.
    The bellowing climbed, a dragon prowling the woods.
    She cried as the tree lowered, its shadows creeping along her chest, its rough-bark bole groaning in the effort to keep itself whole. A leaf raked her brow as if trying to skin her.
    She swore as she tried to squirm out of the way, and found herself pinned by a branch against the ditch’s wall, prayed when she could smell the bark, the leaves, the heaving roots lifting blackly.
    And she blinked when the dragon abruptly fell silent, the throes of the earthquake suddenly ended.
    The ground settled.
    The leaves stopped husking.
    In a nearby tree a cardinal was singing.
    “Good . . . lord,” she groaned as she sat up and pushed a twig away from her legs. “Good—”
    The kids! God, the kids are home!
    Her legs wobbling, her breath hard to come by, she staggered to the car, swallowing and gasping, her hands outflung to regain her balance.
    Midway there she stopped.
    The windshield was spiderweb-cracked on the passenger side from a rock striking it head on, a horizontal dent creased the driver’s side door, and the paint was badly faded by the dust raised by the quake.
    The only thing that surprised her was that the engine was running.

    No doubt there was some highly technical and for her totally incomprehensible reason why the engine had restarted during the earthquake, but as she left a smoking plume in her haste to get home, she didn’t really care. It had started, was still running, and that’s all that mattered until she reached the kids