Chapter 5 - The Imposter
The highway blurred into a gray smear through my windshield.
"What did you just say?" I shouted, my hands clamping so hard around the wheel the leather groaned. "I was just standing on my patio looking right at her! I slapped her across the face!"
"We ran the dental records from the marina container ten minutes ago," Cross shouted over the wail of his cruiser's siren behind me. "Evelyn Vance has been dead for at least seventy-two hours. Whoever is driving that Mercedes has been using her identity, her cards, and her house since Tuesday. Back off and let our pursuit vehicles box them in!"
"No! She has the antidote!"
Ahead of me, the silver Mercedes swerved violently off Highway 4, ripping through the wooden barricade of an abandoned gravel quarry.
The Mercedes didn't slow down on the dirt road. It careened through the deep ruts, spitting stones and clouding the air with chalky white dust before bottoming out hard against a mound of crushed limestone.
The car bounced, spun sideways, and crashed into the rusted steel legs of an old conveyor tower.
I slammed the Subaru’s brakes, sliding to a halt thirty yards behind the wreck.
Steam poured from the shattered radiator of the Mercedes.
I kicked my door open and sprinted through the limestone dust, dragging the heavy tire iron from Elena’s trunk.
The driver’s door of the Mercedes popped open with a screech of twisted metal.
The woman who looked like my mother tumbled out into the dirt, coughing blood, her platinum blonde hair matted with grime. But as she raised her head in the glare of my headlights, I saw it.
Along the jawline, just beneath her left ear, the skin wasn't bruising—it was peeling. A thin, flesh-colored seam of medical-grade silicone was lifting from her neck, revealing coarse, scarred tissue underneath.
"Who are you?" I screamed, leveling the tire iron at her chest. "Where is my son?"
She looked up at me with pale, dead eyes and smiled with bloody teeth.
May you like
"Check his pulse, Mark," she rasped, her voice dropping an octave into a gravelly, guttural cadence that had nothing to do with my mother. "He wasn't poisoned. He was incubated."
The next chapters are on the left side of your screen. If you enjoyed the story, bookmark my site: https://vibe.treeiq.biz New stories are posted daily, so check back for updates.
