2012 by Whitley Strieber Read Free Book Online

alive! His dad got a rectal probe. You try living that down at the age of twelve.”
    “The laughter is the failure, not the book. It happened.” He paused. “It just wasn’t what I thought.” There came to him, then, a feeling-a sort of pull, really. To go back to the office, to sit down…
    But not after sixteen straight hours, he’d be in heart attack country. Stroke country.
    “Thing is, this book-I’m not its author, babes, I’m its prisoner.”
    “You will be responsible, Wylie Dale. You will be!”
    “All right, that’s it! I’m going walking. You’ll be asleep when I get back, God willing.”
    “If I smell the least trace of cigar smoke-“
    “Kelsey’s gotta have Indian blood, the way she follows me and I never see her. But neither one of us is an Indian, my dear, so how do you explain that?”
    “By the fact that you’re two hundred percent hot air and half baked.” She came to him. “Which are two of the many reasons that I’m so damn crazy about you.”
    She kissed him. He was furious at her, but he kissed her back, and she felt so vulnerable and so-so Brooke. He held her tight.
    Noisy though it was, this marriage was a good fit for Wiley Dale. He needed someone willing to come up the side of his head on occasion, and Brooke had no compunction about that. But he was not going to change any names in any part of the book, this one included. “You’re so nice,” he said.
    Little feet went scurrying away. Kelsey could be heard whispering, “We have a kiss. Gawd!”
    Wylie and Brooke managed to swallow their laughter.
    When he went downstairs, she sort of tried to stop him, but he promised to come back soon. He really did need that air. If he didn’t get away from that keyboard and let this thing die down, he’d be up all night.
    He left the house, glad to enter his familiar woods beneath the familiar starry sky-and that good old moon up there, good old friend. It couldn’t be very romantic to have two moons.
    He sucked the air deep to rid his head of the fog that the writing had invoked. He shuddered. It was a mild night, but he felt cold in his blood.
    He had lived Martin’s sense of suffocation down under the pyramid, had cringed in anguish of terror with him as the blocks smashed down around him, had actually not known whether or not he was going to be annihilated.
    Creepy enough, but even creepier was the fact that he could still feel Martin’s presence. See him, sort of. He was down in Harrow, and things had gone very bad since his visit to the White House just-what was it-eleven or twelve days ago?
    He was down in Harrow and he was living in absolutely amazing terror, and Wylie knew that, as soon as he returned to his office, he was going to live that terror, too.
    Thing was, he could sort of see into the lenses, and what he saw there was another parallel earth, a third one, and it was bad news. Real bad.
    He couldn’t see it clearly, but he could feel that it was a fallen world, a real, living hell, and it was seeking to escape itself. He could sense its ravening hunger to escape the ruin it had made of itself.
    Amazingly enough, they’d done even worse than we had. “They’re old,” he muttered to himself, returning to one of the lines of thought that he’d been worrying for years. He thought he might now know the secret of the bizarre creatures he had encountered in these woods a few years back, that were the subject of Alien Days. They weren’t aliens at all. They were from here. But in their version of earth, the dinosaurs had never gone extinct. Instead, that dark reptilian brain had grown and evolved and changed until these sleek creatures had come about-tough, brilliant, and utterly heartless.
    Oh, God. God help the human beings.
    With our compassion and our softness of spirit, we were not going to be a match for brilliant reptiles, not in Martin’s universe or in this one.
    They were going to take it all. They really, really were.
    The woods were dead quiet, the