God Is Dead by Ron Currie Jr. Read Free Book Online

hadn’t known who they were I wouldn’t have recognized them.
    We all stood there, beers in hand, smoke curling off us in little wisps. Everyone appeared shell-shocked, except for Rick, whose expression of grim calm emerged from the cloud rigid and unchanged. Chad, who’d been standing behind and to the right of Manny, looked like Jackson Pollock had used his Shipyard Brewing Company T-shirt to make a splatter painting. I’d taken Explorations in Contemporary Art the previous semester, and we’d spent a lot of time on abstract expressionism, so I could imagine the description in our textbook for this particular piece: Pollock, Jackson. Suicide. Brain on cotton, 2005.
    There was so much blood. Blood on the walls, the bookshelves, the framed 8-by-10 of Rick and his folks, taken when we were still in high school. Blood running in languid red lines down the face of the high-definition TV, which had sat silent and useless since the power went out. Blood in little dots on Rick’s mother’s collection of ceramic figurines. And blood on the floor, pooled an inch deep, already coagulating at the edges like pudding left uncovered.
    Rick waded into the mess and picked up the pistols. “Get a mop,” he told me.

    We’d all lost something, of course. My mother was gone, dead in her sleep after the refills for her insulin pump stopped arriving in the mail. Manny’s father had a stroke around the time the real trouble began, and no ambulances were running by then, so he died kicking on the bathroom floor of their split-level ranch; after that Manny’s mom left with his younger sister for Florida, where she’d heard things weren’t so bad. Chad, Allen, and Ben all lost their families to the car accidents which became common after traffic signals went down and the roads began to pile up with wrecks. Wesley’s father and stepmother had flown to Tucson on a golfing trip and never come back. Leo’s parents were killed in an explosion at the Shell station while foraging for canned soup and Twinkies. The fire burned for a week, spreading through the middle-class residences of Cherry Hill and killing Cole’s family and Jack’s mother and twin sisters. And Rick had seen his parents shot to death by a neighbor intent on siphoning the gasoline from their Audi. Rick killed the man, an economics professor who used to come by for vodka martinis on Sunday afternoons during football season, with a garden rake to the back of the head.
    One by one, following our personal tragedies, we ended up at Rick’s house. Manny and I moved in while Rick’s parents were still alive; we were in the garage, looking for something to cover a broken window on the second floor, when the neighbor killed them over a quarter tank of premium unleaded.
    I often wonder how things might have turned out if we’d been in the driveway and seen the guy coming. If maybe Manny had clipped him in the knees like the star outside linebacker he’d been. If I’d busted his shooting hand with the official Reggie Jackson Louisville Slugger leaning against the workbench in the garage. Because then Rick’s parents would have lived, and we wouldn’t have been left by ourselves to decide what next. We were just boys, after all.
    The next morning Leo and Cole showed up together, followed by Jack that afternoon, and we all helped dig two holes in the backyard next to Rick’s father’s tomato plants. You don’t know the meaning of the term awkward silence until you’re standing over twin piles of freshly turned dirt with nothing to say. I nearly suggested we offer a prayer, then gave myself a mental kick in the ass for being so stupid. It didn’t matter anyway, because Rick had already gone back in the house.
    We dragged the neighbor’s body into the road and left it there.
    In many ways, the next few weeks resembled the lives we’d led before. We drank too much, played music