Page 53 of Cadaver Lab: Mind Over Murder

With a sigh, she picked her way gingerly along. Careful not to trip as she stared down at her feet.

She knew the path well enough. She’d walked it countless times and it wasn’t far.

The spotlight Liam had installed on the outside of the warehouse came on automatically at dusk nightly, so she wasn’t in complete darkness.

She saw the light now, guiding her as she glanced up to gage how much farther she had to go.

But then the light was gone. Blacked out by something large and dark. Something solid yet not. Something that made her unable to breathe.

She fell to her knees, unable to remain upright as her heart pounded painfully.

Her hands connected with gravel and wood and metal rail.

She was on the train tracks.

She tried to crawl off them as she felt consciousness slipping away from her.

Just a few feet and she’d be clear. But that’s when the assault moved from her body to her mind.

Images screamed through her brain. The pain she’d felt being electrocuted by that downed power line in the storm.

The image changed and fear coursed through her. She was back in Liam’s industrial-sized freezer. Trapped. Cold. The air thinning by the moment as she knew she was going to die inside there, if not from cold then from lack of oxygen.

She still couldn’t breathe as the scene switched again. She felt the oppressive darkness of the entity in Utica closing in on her. She was running down the hotel’s hallway again, the entity chasing her. Closing in. Not that it had to catch her. Its rage reached out to assault her from a distance. Her only hope was to reach the elevator and escape…

Natalie was reliving every horror she’d survived over the past three years.

But she had survived them. She knew she had. She was there, alive, to prove it.

She might be on her knees now, unable to move, but she was alive. She had survived.

The scene in her brain changed again to something unfamiliar this time.

Blood.

So much blood. On her hands. On the knife. On the woman whose screams became weaker as the life seeped from her and onto the floor.

It wasn’t Natalie’s blood. It wasn’t her hands.

It was his.

The brain ghost.

These were his memories.

The feeling of satisfaction. Arousal at seeing her die, slowly, painfully. It was all his.

He was sick. Disturbed… and dead.

Yes! He was dead but Natalie was alive.

“You died. You didn’t win. You lost,” she gasped with her last bit of breath before the pain shot through her chest.

Or maybe it was her lungs that hurt.

It was hard to tell. The pressure. The pain. It radiated through her as darkness closed in.

A train whistle sounded, far in the distance.