thriller - Joan Harbor

Prologue – A Late-Night Visit — from MATTIE: A Thriller Horror Novella

Enjoy the read!

PROLOGUE – A LATE-NIGHT VISIT

TWO

DARREN TOOK THREE DEEP breaths and turned the corner into the barn. He jerked to a stop. He could not believe his eyes. The carnage was unimaginable. Dead, mutilated rabbits and bloody white rabbit fur were everywhere. The rabbits’ wooden and wire mesh cages were torn apart. “Damn it,” Darren said. “They destroyed thirty rabbits.” He spun around when something hit a horse stall. It was one of the horses. He watched it collapse to the ground. “What in the hell?” Then he heard the cows running across the field. “What the hell was going on?”

What Mattie might look like! By MagicStudio AI

He ran out of the barn, looked into the dark field, and raised his shotgun. The moonlight helped him to see. He adjusted his aim to get a straight shot at the shadowy figure riding on the back of one of the cows. He squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked when it fired. He hoped he had not hit the cow. He squinted into the dark to see if he had shot anything. A wild dog? A wild animal? A bear? A coyote?

“Aaaahhhhh!” he yelled and covered his face and fell backward. Something had attacked him. It moved quickly from his face to his neck. He tried to grab it. It jumped to his back. He reached over his shoulder. It moved to his chest and the back of his neck. He grabbed at whatever was on top of him and screamed, “Aaaahhhhhh!”

“Darren!” Denice yelled, running off the porch with her rifle in hand. She could see Darren fighting with a figure. “Darren!” She raised the rifle and squeezed off a shot. Then something plowed into her with such force she left her feet. She hit the ground and gasped. The thing tore at her stomach. It ripped her clothes and her skin. She yelled. But no one heard her or came. She fought, got to her feet, and ran. Her knees buckled. She stumbled toward the house. She was in severe pain when she reached for the door.

Claws wrapped around her face. They were crushing her head. The thought of dying gave her a second wind. She grabbed at whatever was on her back and spun around in circles, trying to get it off. Then she gasped, froze, dropped to her knees, and fell sideways.

Darren and Denice lay twenty feet apart. Both were too bloody and out of it to see where the blood was coming from. They lay still. The cows, horses, and chickens were quiet. The area was back to dark and quiet as it was most nights. Moonlight shined on the one cow lying halfway over the fence. Deep tears down to the bone went down its side. Its tongue hung out. Its large head was nearly decapitated from its thick neck. The other cows stayed far away from the dead cow. It was as if they knew something terrible had happened there.

I hope you enjoyed Part Two of Mattie. Mattie is on Amazon. It’s available on Kindle Unlimited, too! Check it out. You’ll enjoy the rest of the book.

See you soon.

Joan Harbor

MATTIE – A Thriller Horror Novella by Joan Harbor

MATTIE was a story that came to me after I watched several old vampire movies. A young actor caught my attention. I don’t recall the names of the movies. They weren’t blockbusters. But I remember a few scenes. And I wondered if a vampire could be helpful and brutal. It would just depend on the situation. Well, that was Mattie. Kind of. Here is the beginning of my novel MATTIE! Enjoy!

PROLOGUE

A LATE-NIGHT VISIT

ONE

DARREN COFFEN, SEVENTY, SAT up in bed and looked to the right out his window. He slung his feet from under the covers and slid them into his boots on the floor by the bed. He reached into the corner and grabbed his coat and shotgun. He heard his chickens clucking outside. The cows and horses were running or pounding the dirt with their hooves. There was a lot of commotion near the barn and in the fields. The animals were anxious about something.

He hurried to the back door to get outside and catch the culprits. This was not the first time whoever or whatever had trespassed onto his property. He was going down the hall and thought of Denice. She was seventy-one, his wife. He forgot to wake her. She was going to be angry.

Denice rarely heard him when he got out of bed. She wore a sleep mask and earplugs when she slept. The crickets were too loud for her sometimes. She had told Darren when he went outside to let her know. Then if something happened to him and he was not back in time, she would know to look for him. Her concern grew from an incident when Darren’s tractor turned over on him in a field when it slipped down a ditch. He lay half under the tractor and in the mud for three hours. It was dark when she realized how late it was for him not to be home. She went and found him and had to call for help. One rescuer told her if she had not gone out to look for him, the mud would have suffocated him. The mud had already covered half of Darren’s face.

Darren felt he could not go back to wake Denice. He had to put a stop to whatever was upsetting the animals and killing some of them. He opened the door and stood on the steps. The porch light lit things up near the house. Only one of the three pole lights was on. The light mounted on top of the barn was off. The lights in the barn’s doorway were off too. He knew he did not turn them off. Nor did Denice. They were on every night.

He held the shotgun up with the barrel toward the sky. Something ran out of the barn into the field. He fired two warning shots in the air and ran to the barn. He stopped outside the barn door. The noise from the horses inside the barn was louder than before. They jumped and kicked their stalls. The noise was so loud he feared the horses would split their hooves or break their legs trying to escape. Escape what?

If you like this chapter, please pass it on to a friend. You can read more of MATTIE or pick up the book on Amazon. It’s scary and entertaining!

Take care,

Joan Harbor

Hello and Welcome!

Mattie - My latest book on amazon. — Mattie – A Thriller Horror Novella

I just have time for a quick update. After a few friends encouraged me to expand a short story I published years ago, and publish some of the others I have written for them over the years, I have gone and done it! Please, go see my new and much-improved book “Mattie.”