Burning Time by Leslie Glass Read Free Book Online Page A

small table that didn’t look like it was always there.
    “I’m looking for Ellen Roane,” she said.
    “Well, you won’t find her here,” the guard said. He was Hispanic, not very friendly.
    “How about Connie Shagan?” April said. Connie Shagan, the Roanes had told her, was Ellen’s roommate.
    “Won’t find her either. Or any of them.”
    “Is there a teacher, uh, a professor, who lives here I could talk to?” She hadn’t wanted to, but now she flashed her shield.
    The guard looked at it and shrugged. “There’s still nobody here. It’s spring break.”
    April Woo cursed herself five hundred times as she walked back to where she left the car. See what happens when you leave out one tiny question. One detail that changes the whole story. The parents didn’t bother to tell her everybody disappeared. All the students, and even the professors disappeared. And she didn’t think to ask. It wasn’t very smart.
    She would talk to the parents in the morning when they came in with the girl’s picture and ask them if they really wanted to put their daughter in the system when she was probably skiing in Vermont. With the Barstollers, who had a Chinese maid. She smiled at the thought, as she took the car back.

8
     
    Troland Grebs was up all night with bad dreams again. Monkeys were beating each other. A bull in the garden was goring somebody. He was in a cold sweat, only half drunk from a long evening of drinking. He couldn’t stop thinking about that girl in the movie. First time he saw it, he had to walk out.
    At three he gave up trying to sleep and went outside for a walk. The smells of the ocean off Pacific Beach, the palm and orange trees, the smooth green grass of front lawns soothed him. He walked around, circling his neighborhood many times. Just as the light was graying and before the sun rose, he was back in his one bedroom apartment, sitting on the tiny terrace on the third floor waiting for the jogger to come by.
    For months he had been waking up early to sit up there and watch her. She lived on the third floor, too, on the other side of the garden. He had heard people call her Jane, but he had never spoken to her. She kept her shades drawn. He never saw her undressed except this way, in the bicycle shorts and two tops. One stretchy thing made of afew straps over a similar thing with more straps in different places. Crisscrossed and so tight Troland wondered every day how she got them off. He knew how he would get them off. From the terrace he watched her dispassionately.
    She came out of the door and stretched. He could see her raise her arms and breathe. She started jogging in place, looking up at the sky. She plugged her Walkman into her ears. She never saw him, never looked in his direction. She took off at a moderate pace and disappeared into the street. After she was gone, he went in to shower, then dressed carefully and went to work at the plant just north of Lindbergh Field.
    He wasn’t talking much any more. He sat at his drafting table for hours every day, working on the intricate details of jet engine modifications, sunk deep in his own thoughts. Ever since the Persian Gulf War he’d been moving closer and closer to the insides of the cruise missiles he’d worked on all the years they hadn’t been needed, and no one believed would work. Now everybody knew that they could seek out and destroy. He felt his mark was on every hit in Iraq. It made him feel powerful. He had started seeking out and destroying, had gone back to where his own power used to be.
    What the soldiers did in Kuwait got him thinking about things he hadn’t wanted to do for years. But they just raped. He liked adding his mark afterwards. Long ago he got in trouble doing it to whores in Mexico, and had to stop. He had put the urge away in a drawer, along with the colored pencils and the old drawings. He had been good a long time, and then the war came. His very own missiles started killing people, started talking to him