Sleepless by Charlie Huston Read Free Book Online

offered a much quicker, and therefore, many would say, more merciful death.
    SLP was something else.
    SLP.
    Sleepless.
    Or, to the kids,
    A slang variation playing off the chemical designation used in the patent for the only known treatment for the symptoms of SLP.
    Commercial name: Dreamer.
    Chemical designate: DR33M3R.
    A wholly fortuitous alphanumeric, speaking in terms of marketing, that is. So serendipitous, so instantly obvious to even the most slack-jawed account exec, that one could almost be made suspicious.
    If one were of a suspicious mind.
    I am suspicious of very little, having, in my sixty years, been assured time and again that people are an utter waste and capable of anything when contemplating their own fortune and well-being. With such a worldview, there is little need for suspicion. Easier to simply assume the bastards are screwing everyone else, out for their own good.
    Indeed, I was living proof of my own thesis, sitting there in my final generation Cadillac, listening to Gounod, my brow chilled by the cold air coming from the vents, reaping the benefits of a diseased population's need for distraction as manifested in the continued availability of broadband wireless service in the L.A. basin.
    Humanity endures.
    Excelsior.
    I was so at peace with the world and myself that when the shockingly sinewy vegan in the Mercedes 300 plastered with biodiesel stickers got out of her car and started rapping on my window, screaming at me that I was "killing the planet and the children," I almost didn't roll down that window and point at her face the Beretta Tomcat I'd pulled from my ankle holster.
    The Tomcat is a stunningly slight weapon, its 2.4-inch barrel virtually useless beyond the length of one's arm. In appearance, when wielded, it is often mistaken for a toy or tool of some kind. The nubbin of barrel poking from the fist doesn't appear to be a serious threat at all.
    But it feels serious when crammed under your chin. And it sounds serious when the hammer is thumbed back. And in case she was in any doubt, I made certain she knew that both I and the gun were quite serious.
    "You are going to die in front of dozens of witnesses, and none of them will do a thing to help you or avenge you. Because they know exactly what you know: The world is ending. The difference being, they have surrendered and are willing to watch it pass away as long as they can do it in relative comfort. You, on the other hand, are squandering what few resources of personal will and energy you have left by trying to stop an avalanche. Give up. Things are as bad as you fear they are. People are as self-serving as you fear they are. The universe does not care. And neither do you. Not really. Go find a warm body you can huddle against for animal comfort. Go get in your car and don't look at me again. I'm getting bored of talking now. Go away before I get bored of not pulling the trigger and not watching your brains fountain out the top of your head."
    She made a noise deep in her throat, and then she walked away, eyes fixed at a level just above the roofs of the cars, in a gait that could be taken for sleepless but was merely despair.
    And I touched a button, a button the engineers at GM, before going bankrupt, had considerately designed so that I did not need to hold it down while the window rolled up, and was sealed again in the perfect cool dimness of what the brochure had described as the car's cockpit, pressing the thumblike barrel of the Tomcat into the hollow below my jaw.
    But even with the perfect lyric accompaniment, this was not the moment.
    So, as the traffic began, mystically, to flow, all of it parting around the stalled Mercedes containing the sobbing woman, I slipped the gun back into its moleskin holster, and was carried smoothly on the pitted road, past the location shoot (an artfully reproduced scene of a traffic accident), wondering at the noise she had made, how in perfect dissonance with di Stefano's diminuendo on the high