Fireflies by David Morrell Read Free Book Online Page B

sound equipment.
The spring is taut.

(Silently strumming)
Backstage while pandemonium
Sweeps the hall and people
Crowd the arena as ants flow to a cake.

The stage is set, the
Instruments tuned and placed.
The musicians work out last minute
Kinks as the lights dim.

(Striking power chords)
An intense force hits the spectators.
Energy is released in every form.
A power rage beyond comprehension.

18

    Fourteen years old, and to have written a poem so promising of future achievements.
    Gone. All lost and gone.
    Sinking.
    Dimming.
    Dwindling.
    And yet …
    And yet …
    In David’s mind, he seemed to rise above his dying body, to float above his soon-to-be corpse, to see his daughter sobbing over him and the nurses rushing toward him, raising the bottom of his bed.
    David knew what raising a patient’s feet meant. He’d seen it happen to Matthew. When the nurses raised the bottom of your bed, your blood pressure was dropping, and you were, to use Matt’s words, in serious shit.
    So what did it matter? David’s time had come, and he looked forward to it, hoping he’d reencounter a great love of his life, be replenished from his greatest loss.
    In his mind, he floated ever higher, through the ceiling, and higher yet, away from the shadows into a brightness, drifting toward it, toward a door that somehow didn’t interfere with the beautiful brightness.
    When David’s stepfather had suffered his first heart attack, the weary man had wakened to describe a dream in which he’d been floating through brightness toward a door.
    “I reached the door. I knocked and knocked. But no one answered.”
    Three months later, when a second heart attack had completed the job, maybe the tired man had reached the door and this time his knock had been answered.
    But David didn’t need to knock. Floating to the door, he merely turned its knob. At once he heard power chords. An electric guitar strummed ecstatically.
    David opened the door. The brightness increased its glare; the strumming chords became more powerful.
    The brightness he saw was caused by fireflies. Millions of them. Radiant. All around him. Enveloping. Silently rejoicing.
    The chords throbbed with greater intensity. David peered all around, squinting past the fireflies.
    Matthew? David’s joy became frustration.
    Matthew? Doubt became despair.
    The radiant fireflies swarmed around him. But he recognized none of them!
    Matthew?
    Where was Matthew?

A POWER RAGE
BEYOND COMPREHENSION

1

    Fireflies swarmed. Power chords throbbed. David opened his eyes. Sunlight gleamed through a window. Through a swirl, he saw a cupboard above him, the edge of a sink, a stack of dishes. About to vomit, managing not to, he turned his aching head to the left and saw the blur of a kitchen table. His movement bumped an object and sent it rolling.
    David strained to clear his vision. He recognized the rolling object, an empty glass that the turn of his head had sent clinking to a stop against a leg of the table.
    His hair was soaked. He lay in a pool of water. But his body was drenched with more than water. Sweat. His bare legs, arms, and chest were slick with perspiration. His shorts clung sweat-soaked to his groin and hips. What was going on?
    Through misty vision, he focused on the digital clock on the microwave to the left of the table: 12:55.
    A calendar (the kind you tear a page off each day) showed …
    It couldn’t be.
    1987?
    June?
    Thursday?
    The eighteenth?
    Impossible! The last moment he’d known had been sometime in March. The delirium of morphine and the distracting pain of his mortal illness had made him unsure of the date. But without doubt he’d entered Intensive Care in March.
    Forty years from now. So what was he doing on the floor of the kitchen of a house that he’d sold five years after Matthew’s death because he couldn’t bear the memories of …?
    A year after Matthew’s death? Intensive Care forty years later?
    With tingling feet and hands, David raised his head