Double Dexter by Jeff Lindsay Read Free Book Online Page B

postal for a few hours. This seemed like a pattern, a way of being, a state that was permanent. Insane strength and fury, combined with a clinical control—I could not imagine what kind of creature was capable of that, and I didn’t really want to. But once again I had the feeling we would find more squashed cops in the near future.
    “Dexter?” Rita called softly from the bedroom. “Aren’t you coming to bed?”
    I glanced at the clock by the TV: almost midnight. Just seeing the numbers made me realize how tired I was. “Coming,” I said. I got up from the couch and stretched, feeling a very welcome drowsiness come over me. It was clearly sleepy time, and I would worry about Marty Klein and his awful end tomorrow. Sufficient unto each day is the evil thereof; at least, on the very good days. I put my plate in the sink and went to bed.
    From far away in the dim, wool-packed world of sleep I felt an uneasy sensation elbowing its way into my head and, as if in answer to a vague but demanding question, I heard a loud and explosive roaring sound—and I was awake, my nose dripping from a powerful sneeze. “Oh, lord,” Rita said, sitting up beside me. “You caught a cold from all that— I knew you were going to— Here, here’s a tissue.”
    “Tanks,” I said, and I sat up in bed and took the tissue from herhand and applied it to my nose. I sneezed again, this time into the tissue, and felt it disintegrate in my hand. “Ohggg,” I said, as the slime dripped onto my fingers and a dull ache rolled into my bones.
    “Oh, for heaven’s— Here, take another tissue,” Rita said. “And go wash your hands, because— Look at the time, it’s time to get up anyway.” And before I could do more than raise the new tissue to my face, she was up and out of the bed, leaving me to sit there dripping and wondering why wicked fate had inflicted this misery on poor undeserving me. My head hurt, and I felt like it was stuffed with wet sand, and it was leaking all over my hand—and on top of everything else, I had to get up and go to work, and with the way my head was rolling sluggishly through the fog I wasn’t sure I could even figure out how.
    But one of the things Dexter is truly good at is learning and following patterns of behavior. I have lived my life among humans, and they all think and feel and act in ways that are completely alien to me—but my survival depends on presenting a perfect imitation of the way they behave. Happily for me, ninety-nine percent of all human life is spent simply repeating the same old actions, speaking the same tired clichés, moving like a zombie through the same steps of the dance we plodded through yesterday and the day before and the day before. It seems horribly dull and pointless—but it really makes a great deal of sense. After all, if you only have to follow the same path every day, you don’t need to think at all. Considering how good humans are at any mental process more complicated than chewing, isn’t that best for everybody?
    So I learned very young to watch people stumbling through their one or two basic rituals, and then perform the same steps myself with flawless mimicry. This morning that talent served me well, because as I staggered out of bed and into the bathroom, there was absolutely nothing in my head except phlegm, and if I had not learned by rote what I was supposed to do each morning I don’t think I could have done it. The dull ache of a major cold had seeped into my bones and pushed all capacity for thinking out of my brain.
    But the pattern of what I do in the morning remained: shower, shave, brush teeth, and stumble to the kitchen table, where Rita had a cup of coffee waiting for me. As I sipped it and felt a small spark of life flicker in response, she slid a plate of scrambled eggs in front ofme. It might have been the effect of the coffee, but I remembered what to do with the eggs, and I did it very well, too. And as I finished the eggs, Rita dropped a