Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

should keep to my usual vacation routine. With caution. But not too much caution.
    Midnight arrived.
    September 15 began.
    Nothing happened right away.
    “Maybe nothing will,” Mom said.
    “Something will,” Grandma disagreed, and smacked her lips. “Something will.”
    If I had not been obliterated or even badly crushed by nine o’clock the next evening, we would meet here for dinner again. Together, we would break bread while remaining alert for the whiff of natural gas and the drone of a descending airliner.
    Now, after demidessert, followed by a full dessert, followed by petits fours, all accompanied by oceans of coffee, Dad went off to work, and I helped with the kitchen cleanup.
    Then at one-thirty in the morning, I retired to the living room to read a new book for which I had high expectations. I have a great fondness for murder mysteries.
    On the first page, a victim was found chopped up and packed in a trunk. His name was Jim.
    I put that book aside, selected another from the stack on the coffee table, and returned to my armchair.
    A beautiful dead blonde stared from the book jacket, strangled with an antique Japanese obi knotted colorfully around her throat.
    The first victim was named Delores. With a sigh of contentment, I settled down in my chair.
    Grandma sat on the sofa, busy with a needlepoint pillow. She had been a master of decorative stitching since her teenage years.
    Since she had moved in with Mom and Dad almost two decades ago, she had kept baker’s hours, sewing elaborate patterns through the night. My mother and I kept that schedule, too. Mom had home-schooled me because our family lived by night.
    Recently, Grandma’s preferred embroidery motifs were insects. Her butterfly wall hanging and even her ladybug chair cushions were charming, but I did not care for the spider-festooned antimacassars on my armchair or for the cockroach pillow.
    In an adjacent alcove, which Mom had outfitted as her studio, she worked happily on a pet portrait. The subject was a glittery-eyed Gila monster named Killer.
    Because Killer was hostile toward strangers and not housebroken, the proud owners had provided a series of photos from which Mom could work. A hissing, biting, pooping Gila monster can really spoil an otherwise pleasant evening.
    The living room is small and the shallow art alcove is separated from it only by silk curtains in a wide archway. The curtains were open, so Mom could keep an eye on me and could be ready to move fast in case she recognized, say, signs of impending spontaneous human combustion.
    For perhaps an hour, we were silent, immersed in our various pursuits, and then Mom said, “Sometimes I worry that we’re becoming the Addams family.”

    The initial eight hours of my first terrible day passed without a disturbing incident.
    At 8:15, his eyebrows white with flour, Dad came home from work. “I couldn’t make a good
crème plombières
to save my ass. I’ll be glad when we’ve got through this day and I can focus again.”
    We had breakfast together at the kitchen table. By 9:00 A.M ., after more than the usual day’s-end hugs, we went to our bedrooms and hid beneath the sheets.
    Perhaps the rest of my family wasn’t hiding, but I pretty much was. I believed in my grandfather’s predictions more than I cared to admit to the rest of them, and my nerves tightened with every tick of the clock.
    Going to bed at an hour when most people are beginning their workday, I required blackout blinds overlaid by heavy drapes that absorbed both light and sound. My room was quiet and dead black.
    After a few minutes, I urgently needed to turn on a bedside lamp. Not since early childhood had I been this disturbed by the dark.
    From my nightstand drawer I withdrew a plastic sleeve in which was preserved the free pass to the circus that Officer Huey Foster had given to my father more than twenty years ago. The three-by-five card appeared newly printed, marred only by the crease through the middle,