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Back The Bone Factory Save as PDF
Chapters (48)
  1. Cover
  2. The Bad Man
  3. Epigraph
  4. PROLOGUEBLOOD
  5. PART ONE
  6. CHAPTER TWO
  7. CHAPTER THREE
  8. CHAPTER FOUR
  9. CHAPTER FIVE
  10. CHAPTER SIX
  11. CHAPTER SEVEN
  12. CHAPTER EIGHT
  13. CHAPTER NINE
  14. CHAPTER TEN
  15. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  16. CHAPTER TWELVE
  17. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  18. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  19. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  20. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  21. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  22. PART TWO
  23. CHAPTER NINETEEN
  24. CHAPTER TWENTY
  25. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  26. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  27. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  28. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  29. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  30. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  31. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  32. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
  33. PART THREE
  34. CHAPTER THIRTY
  35. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
  36. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
  37. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
  38. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
  39. CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
  40. CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
  41. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
  42. CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
  43. CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
  44. CHAPTER FORTY
  45. EPILOGUE
  46. Acknowledgments
  47. High Praise for Nate Kenyon’s
  48. Other Leisure Books by Nate Kenyon:

She was going to die here.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Amanda Seigel, Doctor of Psychiatry and an expert in the study of paranoid disorders, found herself shaking like a baby. They were out of the wind and the snow now, but the cold refused to leave her bones, and she sipped eagerly at the coffee Babcock had given her from a paper cup, welcoming its heat. The coffee was bitter and had probably been sitting around for a while, but she didn’t care as long as it was warm. And though the warmth did nothing to calm her shaking hands, she didn’t really expect it to anyway. The shakes didn’t have much to do with the temperature, really.

On their mad dash through the storm to the station, the spiders had returned. This time, she had hardly been able to tell the difference between what was real and what wasn’t.

It took them only a moment after David Pierce’s mad dash out of the diner to figure things out. Angie, the waitress, told them about the murder of the local farmer and the disappearances of the little girl and the deputy who had gone looking for her. Clearly, Pierce had decided his own family was in danger. When Flint had explained more about the suspected chemical leak and its effects, Amanda felt the pieces click into place. If Jonathan had been exposed to something like that, there was no telling what he might do. They had to act fast.

She followed Dan Flint out into the wind and blowing snow, thinking that it was lucky the police were practically next door. It was hard not to think about Jonathan and David, but it was important for her to keep her head, and if she started thinking about them, she was afraid she would lose whatever cool she had left. The wind was fierce, and the snowflakes thick. She could hardly see Flint’s back, even as he stumbled along five feet ahead. He looked more like a troll than a real human being, hunched over with his jacket pulled up around his ears. She remembered a cartoon she had seen as a young girl, based on The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien: Bilbo the Hobbit and his gang of treasure hunters sneaking through the forests of Mirkwood, where unspeakable creatures lurked in the blackness, ready to pounce. The group had stopped to camp in the middle of the forest. Don’t go to sleep! she had screamed at the screen. But they had, of course, and when they awoke, something horrible had happened.

The spiders had come.

It came back to her all at once. Those terrible creatures that didn’t look like cartoons at all; giant, hairy legs, black bristles and huge fangs, their faces with their insect eyes and yet so horribly human. Their hissing language, and fat, black underbellies. And most of all, their thick, sticky webs.