The Echelon Vendetta

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At six minutes after midnight everything changed: Runciman sensed it, even in his drunken sleep. He was not alone. There was a thing in the room with him, and an unfamiliar scent drifting on the stale air, mingling with the tang of cut pine and the rancid reek of grease from the Arby’s across the highway — a sharp biting scent almost but not quite like eucalyptus. Runciman, his heart pounding against his rib cage like a boxer working the heavy bag, snapped fully awake, lying on his back in the damp tangle of his sheets, staring up at the bars of blue light that rode upon the ceiling of his trailer, listening so hard to the breathing silence in his room that his skull began to ache.

He looked carefully to his right and saw a dim manlike figure, wrapped in a formless darkness. It appeared to be standing in the middle of the long narrow room. Runciman slid a hand under the pillow, got his fingers around the grip of an old blue-steel Smith & Wesson, and rolled off his bed into a crouch on the side away from the shape, the revolver aimed out into the darkness.

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