LITMIR.BIZ

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hairdo in place. It rolled from the topknot and onto her shoulders without so much as a tangle. Since it wouldn’t hold a curl, it only stood to reason it wouldn’t hold a knot, either.

      Her hair was thick and straight and a color her sister, Brenda, called dishwater blond. She’d been told all of her life that she looked a bit like a young Goldie Hawn, minus the giggles, of course. It hadn’t helped Jessica’s opinion of herself at all. She didn’t want to be minus anything. She wanted…

      Before she could finish the thought, the room went dark, lit only by the screen of the computer still in operation. The backup battery began beeping a frantic warning for her to shut the system down before all was lost.

      Frantically, Jessica exited the program, breathing a quiet sigh of relief when she switched off the computer. She hadn’t had time to print out the checks, but payroll had been saved. However, now that the screen was dark, she couldn’t see a thing. Outside her office, she heard the sound of a folding chair tumbling to the floor, and then an unnatural silence.

      “Perfect. Just perfect,” she muttered, and wearily laid her head down on the desk to wait for the power to resume.

      A man’s muffled voice sounded as he ran past the outer door to her office, and Jessica thought he said something about fuses and flashlights. Flashlights! There was one in the file cabinets by the door. Although good sense told her to stay put until the power returned, she pushed her chair back from the desk and then stood. It was her first mistake.

      The absence of light was disconcerting. It made the air seem thicker, her balance less sure. Circling her desk with hands outstretched, she was forced to orient herself by touch alone. When she bumped the edge of the desk with her knee, she winced. Even though she was wearing pants, the fabric wasn’t heavy enough to prevent the bruise that was bound to appear.

      “Fish guts,” she muttered, rubbing at the ache in her knee.

      When she could bend it without further pain, she moved again, still aiming for the file cabinets by the door. Once more, the absence of light threw her off balance and she staggered, this time stumbling backward. Her sleeve caught on something sharp, and when she heard fabric rip, she groaned. That had been her favorite blouse.

      Another ripple of thunder sounded overhead as something thumped against the outside of her door. A muffled curse and then a slight moan drifted beneath the crack. It gave her a modicum of satisfaction to know she wasn’t the only one fumbling around in the dark. Still fuming over the tear she’d put in her blouse, she started forward. It was to be her second mistake.

      The office that had been her refuge now seemed close and confining, and in a panic, she hastened her steps. Seconds later, something hard and round rolled beneath her shoe, and in dismay, Jessica remembered the umbrella she’d tossed on top of a cabinet hours earlier. Even as she’d been walking toward her desk, she’d heard it roll off and onto the floor. She’d meant to go back and pick it up, but the phone had rung. And then she’d sat down and started to work and thought nothing more of it…until now.

      The sensation of moving through space without seeing where she was going was frightening. All she knew was that her feet were no longer on the floor and she was on the way down. And then pain shattered her consciousness. She’d found the file cabinets…the hard way.

      * * *

      Lamplight flickered in a corner of the room.

      Jessica groaned and clutched at her head as she rolled toward the glow, but the act of moving had not been wise. Her stomach lurched and she gritted her teeth. With a moan, she closed her eyes as she grabbed at the floor, waiting for the world to quit bucking.

      She took a deep breath and, choosing one of her more colorful epithets to express her dismay, dug her fingers into the carpet’s pile and muttered.

      “Rat feet. Rat feet. Dirty little rat feet.”

      Quick bursts of bright colored lights went off behind her eyelids as she rolled into a sitting position and covered her face with her hands. When her fingers came away damp and sticky and she discovered part of her hair was stuck to her forehead, she began to shake.

      Testing the place where her head hurt the worst, she was horrified to feel a large gash and a steady stream of blood flowing out and down. Her head was throbbing. The room wouldn’t stop spinning. And she needed help. She closed her eyelids, gritted her teeth and took a slow, deep breath.

      When agony had subsided to a dull, pounding ache, she opened her eyes again, this time focusing on the lamp and the soft, yellow glow across the room, and she wondered if she would be able to move. When someone suddenly walked between Jessica and the light, her first thought was that help had arrived. But the woman by the desk didn’t look up.

      “Help me,” Jessica said, but the woman didn’t move. In fact, Jessica could have been invisible for all the reaction her plea evoked.

      She blinked slowly, trying to coordinate the action between a fresh surge of pain. The woman’s image kept wavering in and out of her consciousness, and she knew she was going to pass out again. Frantic for help, Jessica lifted her arm, waving in the woman’s direction as she tried once more to gain her attention.

      “Help me. Please, help me.”

      And then the woman turned and walked to the end of the desk, revealing her identity. Jessica went weak with relief.

      “Olivia! Thank God it’s you.”

      It didn’t seem odd to Jessica that Olivia Stuart, the mayor of Grand Springs, would be here at the lodge. After all, she was the mother of the groom who was about to be married. Where else might she have been? But Jessica didn’t think to wonder what Olivia would be doing in her office, smiling when she had so obviously been injured. All she knew was she was no longer alone.

      Once again, Jessica tried to stand and got no further than her knees before the room began to spin. She paused on all fours with her head down and her arms trembling from the effort of trying to hold herself up, then slumped back to the floor with a moan.

      “Olivia, I can’t do it alone. You’re going to have to help me.”

      To Jessica’s disbelief, Olivia kept smiling. Then, out of the shadows, a second figure suddenly emerged. Jessica instinctively shrank back against the wall as someone grabbed Olivia from behind. A hand was clamped roughly over Olivia’s mouth, and then Olivia was shoved forward by the momentum of the attack, pinned against the end of the desk and the attacker’s body. Jessica gasped. Some stranger…a tall, powerful woman…was trying to hurt the mayor!

      The struggle between the two women was horrifying. Olivia’s arms flailed helplessly as the assailant’s grip seemed to tighten. Jessica watched as Olivia struggled, trying to pull free of the woman’s clutches.

      And then it seemed as if everything began to happen in slow motion. Something glittered in the assailant’s upraised hand. Jessica moaned and covered her mouth, suddenly aware that she could very likely be the woman’s next victim.

      Dear God, she thought. It’s a needle! A hypodermic needle! A vein throbbed horribly at the back of Jessica’s neck, blinding her to everything but the motion of the needle as it was plunged into the back of Olivia Stuart’s leg.

      Moments later, when Olivia crumpled to the floor, Jessica began to scream. Led by the sounds of her distress, Jessica’s co-workers soon found her—alone and unconscious—and bleeding profusely from a wound to the head.

      * * *

      Vanderbilt Memorial Hospital was a beacon in the darkness that had fallen upon Grand Springs. Operating on backup generators, faint light spilled out of the windows and doorways and into the streets beyond. Ambulance sirens screamed a warning as the first of the victims to fall prey to the blackout began to arrive.

      Stone Richardson had been thrust into the ongoing scene at the hospital, almost from the onset of the blackout. After transporting an accident victim to the hospital in his own car, he found himself caught up in the turmoil going on inside. Although he was a detective on the Grand Springs police force,

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