We Carry Them

By Kevin Tumlinson

CANCER AND DISEASE ARE THE MONSTERS WE FACE

When Teresa was diganosed with terminal cancer, she knew it for what it was—the thing consuming her life. And her response was to let it.

Walking away, refusing treatment, was the only power she had over her life. And though the pain was excruciating, though she found herself alone with no one to turn to, she was determined that her last days were going to be on her terms.

And then she started seeing the monsters. 

Vile, ugly, creeping and crawling, clinging to people everywhere she looked—was this some hallucination brought on by her slowly dying brain? Or were these things real?

Real. Very real. And, she soon discovers, they are the source of illness and disease for all of humanity.

And she's the only one who can see them.

She's the only one who can kill them.

There's a new predator in town.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Happy Pants Books
• Release date: Jun 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781513079387

Kevin Tumlinson

Kevin Tumlinson is an award-winning and bestselling novelist, living in Texas and working in random coffee shops, cafés, and hotel lobbies worldwide. His debut thriller, The Coelho Medallion, was a 2016 Shelf Notable Indie award winner. Kevin grew up in Wild Peach, Texas, where he was raised by his grandparents and given a healthy respect for story telling. He often found himself in trouble in school for writing stories instead of doing his actual assignments.  Kevin's love for history, archaeology, and science has been a tremendous source of material for his writing, feeding his fiction and giving him just the excuse he needs to read the next article, biography, or research paper.

Book preview

We Carry Them

WE CARRY THEM

A SHORT STORY

KEVIN TUMLINSON

Happy Pants Books

Copyright © 2014 by Kevin Tumlinson

Revised edition 2022

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

A Note at the End

Here’s how to help me reach more readers

About the Author

Also by Kevin Tumlinson

CHAPTER

ONE

Teresa always thought the worst thing that could happen to her was the cancer. Just hearing the doctor say the words—you have cancer—had been enough to send her into a full-blown panic. It lasted days. She had kept to herself and hadn’t really confided in anyone because she had this vague (albeit unrealistic) hope that she could make the whole thing go away. Ignore it. Let it vanish along with the day’s headlines, the crappy movie she watched last week, the new deodorant commercial that everyone thought was funny, but she just didn’t get.

Pretend it didn’t exist, and it wouldn’t.

But it did exist. It was gnawing at her every day, chewing away at the interior of her abdomen.

The doctor said she could start treatment right away, but Teresa had refused. She would wait, she said.

This can only get worse. The longer you wait, the more dangerous this becomes. It’s treatable now. You should deal with it now.

But she couldn’t. Dealing with it now made it real, couldn’t he understand that? And after a week of not dealing with it she couldn’t face going back to his office. After a month of ignoring phone calls she couldn’t face returning any of them or even acknowledging them. Before she knew it, three months had passed.

She hadn’t told her family.

Not that she had much family any way. Who would really miss her? Her brother, who lived three states away and only called on Christmas? They hadn’t seen each other in almost fifteen years. They were strangers.

Her mother? She was barely able to understand that the nurse who took care of her wasn’t trying to hurt her. She’d been in the home so long that Teresa couldn’t think of her any other way. There was a time, she knew, that this woman had taken care of her, nurtured her. That time was so far in the past that it was less than a memory. It was just some story she’d heard somewhere.

And the thought of ending up like her mother …

She hadn’t told her friends either. They would have made a fuss, for sure. Flowers and cards and words of encouragement. Maggie, her closest friend since high school, would have insisted that Teresa get the treatments. So, to cut off that line of thinking Teresa had distanced herself