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    In the Rundown
    In the Rundown
    In the Rundown
    Ebook36 pages33 minutes

    In the Rundown

    By Joe Hill

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    From the New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Horns comes this e-short story—from Joe Hill’s award-winning collection 20th Century Ghosts.

    Imogene is young and beautiful. She kisses like a movie star and knows everything about every film ever made. She's also dead and waiting in the Rosebud Theater for Alec Sheldon one afternoon in 1945. . . .

    Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with big ideas and a gift for attracting abuse. It isn't easy to make friends when you're the only inflatable boy in town. . . .

    Francis is unhappy. Francis was human once, but that was then. Now he's an eight-foot-tall locust and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing. . . .

    John Finney is locked in a basement that's stained with the blood of half a dozen other murdered children. In the cellar with him is an antique telephone, long since disconnected, but which rings at night with calls from the dead. . . .

     

     

     

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 3, 2009
    ISBN9780061843952
    Author

    Joe Hill

    Joe Hill is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Fireman, NOS4A2, Horns, and Heart-Shaped Box; Strange Weather, a collection of novellas; and the acclaimed story collections Full Throttle and 20th Century Ghosts. He is also the Eisner Award–winning writer of a seven-volume comic book series, Locke & Key. Much of his work has been adapted for film and TV, including NOS4A2 (AMC), Locke & Key (Netflix), In the Tall Grass (Netflix), and The Black Phone (Blumhouse).

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      Book preview

      In the Rundown - Joe Hill

      In the Rundown

      A Story from the Collection

      20th Century Ghosts

      Joe Hill

      To Leanora:

      WE ARE MY FAVORITE STORY

      Contents

      Begin Reading In the Rundown

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      Other Books by Joe Hill

      Credits

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      IN THE RUNDOWN

      Kensington came to work Thursday afternoon with a piercing. Wyatt noticed because she kept lowering her head and pressing a wadded-up Kleenex to her open mouth. In a short time, the little knot of tissue paper was stained a bright red. He positioned himself at the computer terminal to her left, and watched her from the corners of his eyes, while he busied himself with a stack of returned videos, bleeping them back into the inventory with the scanner. The next time she lifted the Kleenex to her mouth, he caught a direct glimpse of the stainless steel pin stuck through her blood-stained tongue. It was an interesting development in the Sarah Kensington story.

      She was going punk, a little at a time. When he first started working at Best Video, she was chunky and plain, with short-cropped brown hair, and small, close-set eyes; she went around with the brusque, standoffish attitude of a person who is used to not being liked. Wyatt had a streak of that himself, and had imagined they might get along, but it was nothing doing. She never looked at him if she could help it, and often pretended not to hear him when he spoke to her. In time he came to feel that getting to know her was too much effort. It was easier to loathe and shun her.

      One day, an old guy had come into the store, a forty-year-old carnival freak with a shaved head and a dog collar cinched around his neck, a leash dangling from it. He wanted a copy of Sid & Nancy. He asked Kensington to help him find it and they chatted a while. Kensington laughed at everything he said, and when it was her turn to speak, the words came falling out of her mouth in a noisy, excited rush. It was a hell of a thing, watching her turn herself inside out like that over someone. Then when Wyatt showed up at work the next afternoon, the two of them were around the side of the store that couldn’t be seen from the street. The circus gimp had her flattened against the wall. They were

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