The story that started it all...

NINE DAYS TO EVIL
By Nancy Glass West

Chapter One

Thursday. Day One.

    Half asleep, Meredith felt Conrad's hand brush her lips, touch her throat, and explore the mounds of her body. When a thunderclap jarred her fully conscious, she reached for him and found him gone. The ringing phone sent her scrambling for the receiver. “Hello?”
    “Good thing I left early,” Conrad said. “Traffic was a bitch.”
    He was making weekly rounds to clinics outside San Antonio. He sounded excited, like a runaway. They should be driving north together to escape the August heat.
    “I’m off the interstate, looking for a scenic route. See if this Jag can navigate some curves.”
    Why must he drive so fast? “It’s lightning and thundering like crazy," she said. "We’re in for a deluge. Is the storm coming toward you?”
    “Looks kind of cloudy. What are you up to?”
    “Not much before classes start on Monday.” They had argued about her starting graduate school. Conrad was on staff at Methodist University Hospital and saw private and clinic patients. During his precious free hours, he wanted a loving wife waiting for him, not a stressed-out student.
    “Maybe I’ll meet Claire for lunch,” she said, knowing that with a storm brewing, eating out wasn't enticing. The summer drought had carved rock-hard crevices in the soil. With torrential rain, water would fill the cracks, overflow, and erupt into flash floods. Meredith had seen San Antonio’s roads under several feet of water.
    “Have Claire tell her old man to quit working so hard,” Conrad joked. “Dr. Walker is a little cog in a big old medical wheel. Hey…what are you…Hey! Look out…Oh, my God!”
    Meredith heard brakes screech and gripped the phone, straining to hear over thunder detonating on the roof.
    “Conrad! What is it? What’s happening? Can you hear me?”
    The sky exploded with thunder and lightening. The crash of glass and metal bombarded her like a slap. She dropped the phone. Hand quivering, she recaptured the receiver and drew it cautiously to her ear, afraid of the clatter that would assault her.
    “Conrad,” she shouted into the receiver, “Say something. Are you all right? Conrad!” She held her breath, straining to hear over the storm.
    Nothing.
    The line was dead; their link severed.