FOR A PREVIEW OF RED FOX,
BOOK #2 OF THE EXPERIMENT IN TERROR SERIES,
PLEASE KEEP READING…
RED FOX
My eyes flickered open. Something had woken me. I froze and let my eyes adjust to the darkness. I was still on my side, facing the wall. I wasn’t sure what time it was, or how long I had been asleep, but it must have been the middle of the night. I listened and heard Dex snoring lightly beside me. His back was to mine, his butt square against me. Good thing he was wearing pants after all.
Despite that warmth and contact, I felt scared. I often did when I woke up for no reason. I tried to remember the dreams I just had but they were flitting away from my memory. Something about an owl…Dex…rocks.
The rocks! I remembered what had happened earlier downstairs. Could the sound of rocks have woken me up? I listened again, harder. I couldn’t hear anything hitting the window or the roof.
But I felt something brush up against my foot.
My feet were underneath the covers but far away from Dex’s feet. It couldn’t have been him. My heart stopped. I felt icky. I had to roll over and see what it was but every instinct told me not to.
I took a deep breath and slowly turned over.
I felt the life being sucked out of me.
There was an animal sitting at the foot of the bed on top of my feet. As they turned over with the rest of me, I could feel my toes jabbing up into its soft bottom.
It was a fox. I couldn’t see it clearly but I knew that’s what it was. A fox about the size of a collie, sitting on its hindquarters, ears creating a pointy silhouette. It was looking right at me. Its eyes were a hazel color. They didn’t glow like most animal’s eyes did; instead they locked with mine with feverish intensity. It was like looking into the eyes of someone I knew.
Was this for real? Was this actually happening? I wanted to look at Dex but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it. The more I stared into those knowing, harmful pupils, the more I felt entranced. My legs and arms were replaced by lead pipes. But I still felt the animal’s weight on my feet, which had to mean that what I was experiencing was real.
I don’t even know if I was breathing, I didn’t think I was. My heart was thumping away loudly in my chest, but even that was starting to slow down. It wasn’t like I was calming down in any way – in fact I could feel the terror slowly taking hold of my body – but my heart was slowing until the thumps were further and further apart. My thoughts became sluggish. All I could think about was how I needed to look away from those eyes.
Then the fox shifted onto its front feet, perfectly positioned between my calves. It was closer now and our eye contact had not been broken. I began to feel like I was drowning internally, my lungs were without air and I was too weak to gasp for it. The room started to spin, with the fox still front and center.
It took a step forward, mouth open. Was it smiling at me? Its eyes said the opposite. They said I was dead.
I tried to talk, to scream but nothing came out. Either I was going to wake up in a second or something horrifying was about to happen. And I couldn’t do anything about it.
It took another step, its tail waving subtly in the background. The eyes narrowed, as if it was glaring at me.
I felt Dex shift and a smattering of hope rushed through me. The fox didn’t break its stare but it paused at that.
Dex stirred again and rolled over. I couldn’t turn to look at him but I prayed for him to open his eyes.
I felt him shuffle back a bit in the bed and then stop. Pause. He saw.
“What the fuck?!” he yelled.
The fox leaped off of the bed and ran out the door. The door had been open the whole time.
Dex sprang out of the sheets and yelled for Will, “Will! There’s an animal in here!”
He followed the fox out the door, leaving me alone for a sickening second, then ran back to me. I still couldn’t move, I still couldn’t breathe. My eyes and body were locked down.
“Hey!” He jumped on the bed and shook both my shoulders. “Perry, are you OK?”
I tried to answer but couldn’t.
“Answer me! Perry, what happened? Perry?”
He kept shaking me, then took my head in his hands and physically moved my face until it faced his. His eyes – as crazy and worried as they were – brought me to a sense of reality. I felt my limbs coming back, hot flashes of nerves climbing up and down them.
Then my breath. I gasped loudly as if I had been underwater for the last five minutes. He held my face steady. “You’re going to be OK.”
There was a commotion in the hallway and a panicked-looking Will appeared at the door. “What happened, is she all right?”
“She’s fine,” Dex said quickly and gestured with his head, “the animal went downstairs.”
Will nodded and took off down the hall, the walls shaking from his lumbering run.
Dex looked back at me, my wide eyes searching his as all the fear came rushing in.
“Hey, you’re fine,” he said. I started to shake and he brought his hands to my arms and held me sternly. “You’re going to be OK. But we need to go find out what that was.”
I shook my head violently, still unable to speak.
“We have to,” he implored. “And I am not leaving you here by yourself.”
He was right. I wouldn’t be able to sleep not knowing what was going on but going downstairs didn’t seem like a good option either.
“Will has his baseball bat, whatever it was, was small, we’ll be OK.”
He climbed out of the bed and walked around to my side. He looked down at me, smiled, and proceeded to pick me up in his arms.
I tried to protest but couldn’t. Despite his slight frame and my rather dumpy one, he picked me up with ease. He carried me past the bed, stooping down to pick up his camera from the dresser and then we were out of the room and into the hall. Will’s door was open, as was Sarah’s. They must have been downstairs.
We made it to the bottom of the stairs when I felt fine enough to walk.
“Please put me down,” I croaked in a pathetic whisper.
He stopped and lowered me. My legs felt like jelly but at least they felt like my own again. He held the camera with one hand and gripped my hand with the other. We walked slowly through the downstairs area. The lights were still all off, the shadows more deceptive.
“It was a fox,” I said thickly as we peeked around into the empty living room.
“What the fuck was it doing?” he asked.
I shook my head.
We flicked on the lights and saw neither a fox, nor Will or Sarah in the living room, dining room or kitchen. A breeze rustled in through the holes in the glass. The clock on the microwave said three a.m.
The front door was wide open, so we walked over to it and peeked outside. I couldn’t see them but I could hear Will, Sarah and Miguel all talking excitedly about the animal. I didn’t want to step outside into the cold New Mexico night so I stuck my neck out further and peered around the doorframe to see where they were.
WHOOSH!
A huge white owl flapped in front of me, mere inches from my face.
I screamed and ducked as Dex stuck his arm out and thwacked it. He hit the owl square in the chest.
I peered up, my hands around my head. The owl squawked and flew off into the night. I looked up at Dex. He took back his clenched fist and let out a low breath. He was just as freaked out as I was. He looked down at me and offered his hand.
“What a hoot,” he joked but his voice was pinched with nerves.
Seconds later, Will, Sarah and Miguel came around the corner to see what happened. I explained as much as I could. The owl part of the story paled in comparison to the fox. It turns out that they hadn’t seen either creature. Out of all three of them, I knew Will was the one who believed me whole-heartedly. Sarah had only a few choice words and a couple of poignant sighs but for the most part she didn’t argue with what I said too much. I knew she didn’t want us there at all but I saw that she did (finally) believe something was going on. And Miguel, well Miguel was a sneering, sniveling son of a bitch. But even he walked back to his quarters looking more wary than before.
And that was the end of the night for me. I wasn’t about to go to sleep again and neither was Dex. So we stayed up, sitting on top of the bed and playing games with a bunch of cards we found in one of the bedroom drawers. We stayed up until the sun began its quick rise above the mountain tops and the fears of the night were washed away by the desert light. Only then was I able to close my eyes for a few minutes.