A surgeon must make the most difficult cut of his life—or die trying...
Intense & extraordinary fiction from the mind of Edison McDaniels. A 99¢ novella, perfect for the plane, train, or other commute.
The sound was piercing, high pitched, and shrill, but quick and elusive the way a chirp is at once there and not. Irritating too, the midlife equivalent of that old elementary school trick of dragging one's fingernails across a chalkboard. That chirp was a curiously instantaneous sound, lasting, I came to think of it as defining, an instant. And that instant came again (chirp), and again (chirp), and again (chirp). I timed it later--not because I wanted to but because I had no choice--and found it to be exactly thirty seconds. Oh sure, sometimes it seemed shorter, like maybe only fifteen or even ten seconds had elapsed since the last chirp, but then I would watch the second hand of my timex jerk forward and when the counting was done the interval would be those same goddamn thirty seconds. No sir, that lousy smoke detector was never off by so much as a tick.
I guess maybe it was my sanity that was off.
Thus begins this fine novella of 14,000 words—all well calculated to keep you in suspense. If this doesn't get your blood flowing, you may not have any!
