69 INCHES AND RISING by Rebecca Steinbeck Page B

passed each other at such high speed they hardly had time to say hello. The bullet fired by the man in black whizzed passed the officer’s ear so close that it burned the hair sticking out of it. It rocketed into the wall behind the officers and a cloud of smoke puffed out of the wall and into the air. The bullet fired by the police officer smiled sweetly as it hit the man in black in the chest. It burned a hole in his flesh then cracked a rib on its way into his heart. The man in black froze for a moment as the bullet peeled away layer after layer of muscle to reveal the man’s soul and it shattered it into a thousand bloody pieces. The man dropped the rifle and fell to his knees. The white light at the end of the tunnel he was promised by a church when he gave up his dark ways was nowhere to be seen. Instead he found himself coming face to face with the demons he thought in a very good moment were gone forever but they weren’t. They had only hidden themselves like children hiding from their parents and now, after much time had passed and in a feeding frenzy the great white sharks of the world’s deepest oceans would be proud of, it was time to come out and play.
    The room turned dark and slowly the darkness turned a deep blood red. The cries of a thousand dead men and a thousand deadly demons rang about his head and the demons leaped out of the darkness and feasted on him. He wanted them to stop but they never would because this was Hell and this was where he was destined to be and here he was. He had played his cards and lost. Now he belonged to the Devil.
    The floor beneath him gave way and fire rose toward him. His heart was full of fear, and the dreams he had dreamed began dying a painful death in the flames that reached for him like the bony fingers of dead men that were reaching for one last chance at life. He heard a voice from within the thick black smoke that swirled above him and he looked up, knowing in what was left of his heart that the Grim Reaper was about to swing his scythe through the putrid air and take his head all the way off. He hoped the voice belonged to God.
    “I give myself to you, O Lord,” the man in black said. Tears had sprung from the corners of his eyes and were burning the flesh on his cheeks as they rolled down the sides of his face.
    A ball of fire exploded from the thick black smoke. It engulfed the man in black and he screamed as the flames tore at his flesh and into his soul. He struggled as best he could against the fury of the fire and the razor sharp teeth of the demons, but he was weak and the fire was strong and the demons were too. Soon the fire won and the demons cut there way back through the Earth’s crust to the depths of Hell. They were carrying the soul of the man in black which was a trophy happily accepted by the Devil himself as a reward for winning the game the man in black had dared to play.
     
     
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
    J onathon ended the chapter and pushed back his chair. He stretched his arms and yawned. It had been a long evening and he had written well over three thousand words of the story inspired by his love for Serena, though started as usual dripped in blood. It would blossom soon enough into a full blown love story just like his own and he believed the time was right to write it. All of his stories so far had been based on what he knew and what he knew was all he knew, and all he knew was poured into every single story and all he knew was horror and that’s why he wrote it. That’s why every word of every story ripped at the heart of the worlds he created for his characters to move around in. Sometimes those characters lived and sometimes they died. Sometimes they loved and sometimes that love was torn away from them. Sometimes they were happy but they always ended up alone, sad, and quite often dead. Jonathon’s art had always imitated his life and that’s why the stories he had written were as bloody and bad as they were, and it’s why he knew the