Ping - From the Apocalypse by Susan Lowry Read Free Book Online

pleading voice that had been begging for help each night as she slept — but now, she was awake — and it would not leave her alone. She grabbed Madeleine’s prescription bottle from the coffee table and stared at it for a moment. The pills she’d already taken hadn’t been nearly enough. Pouring the contents into her palm, then tossing them into her mouth, she washed them down with several gulps of water.
     
    She’d forgotten to light the fire. The temperature had plummeted to sub-zero and the wind was howling through the open window. She must have passed out on the floor trying to close it; and now, snow was blowing in on her; it had piled along her side and on top of the couch and there was a thin blanket of white forming on top of her.
    S he tried to reach for the bottle lying beside her head but her arms and legs were too numb to work. The container was empty — if only she’d made that hike to the pharmacy when it had still been possible, it could have all been over, painlessly.
    Her fingers were like wood but she folded them toward the palm and tensed the muscles in her legs. Still in a drugged haze, as she wriggled over the icy floor to the sofa, there was suddenly a list in her mind of things she still wanted to do.
    She sat up and shook her limbs until a bit of feeling came back, then pulled herself onto the frosty cushions. Eventually — stiff, like an old woman, and woozy — she staggered from room to room, searching for her lighter, knocking the ceramic lid off a bowl, so that it cracked as it hit the table.
    Finally, igniting the paper that she’d stuffed between the logs the night before, she felt the heat spread out all over her. Cold as she was, her body wanted to go to sleep but she resisted — instead, she closed the window, wiped all the melted snow off the floor with a towel, and while blotting the water from the couch cushions, her unfinished painting was staring at her from the dining room. She walked over to it, picked up a tube of paint from her supply box and then flipped through the other canvases leaning against the wall.
    Finally she wandered past the front entrance and around the corner to the den — it hadn’t been entered since her return home. She went inside, sat at her piano and played chords that vibrated through her thawing cells.
    It continued to storm the entire day , the wind shrill, and unfriendly, and the snow piling a foot higher; but she thought about the phone call, and the voice that wouldn’t leave her alone — wondering if that child was still alive. And when she fell asleep finally, the dream returned — and this time, she heard the beat of the boy’s heart.
     

Chapter Ten
    The Hole in the Ottoman
    ( February 4th, Year One, PA)
     
    Kate took the blanket from Wendy’s bed, brought it back to the front entranceway and covered the woman’s disintegrating body. “I’m sorry, but I wasn’t myself before,” she said. There was something she’d meant to get last time. And now, she was determined to find it. Peering into the living room, and scanning the shelves, she recalled one of her last conversations with her neighbour, after she had dropped over unexpectedly:
    “ Is that a gun?”
    Wendy had gazed at her with a familiar spark in her aging, blue eyes. “It's no toy if that's what you think. I’m a retired cop, what do you expect? Here,” she’d said, picking up the gun and handing it to Kate. “It’s not loaded.”
    “ My luck, some burglar would shoot both me and Jon with it,” Kate had said, examining it more closely.
    “ Well, the two of you should be able to protect yourselves — even in this country. Everything’s going to hell. You never know what could happen these days.”
    “That’s why I paint for a living,” Kate had chuckled, aiming the gun at an imaginary target across the room. “You sure it’s not loaded?”
    The lines in her face had seemed to deepen. “I’m not trying to scare you. But you shouldn’t have a false