The Extinction Club by Jeffrey Moore Read Free Book Online Page B

danger, my short furry legs ready to outrun the wind. Dozily, eyes half-closed, I looked out the living room window at a scene dim and vague with flowing mists and mastodonic shapes with tusks and horns. The trees were ghostly and bent, the ice burdening or breaking their limbs. I could feel myself out on one of them, saw in hand.
    Birds began to sing, reminding me that not all birds fly south. Nothing familiar to me, like the ovenbird’s teacher teacher teacher , or the catbird’s meow , or the towhee’s drink-your-tea . Just a few pigeon-like sounds, two repeated syllables, doo-doo , like the dodo is said to have made.
    While listening to them I made a decision, a snap decision: to bolt, to go back to where I came from and face the music. I’d failed as a tourist, failed as a hermit; it was the end of my nature experiment, end of my doctoring. I’d stretched myself as far as I could and had no more stretch. Chalk it up to a bad month to be buried with the memory of other bad months.
    Besides, how could I even think of living with a teenage girl after the charges I was running from? A teenage girl with serious enemies. A depressing foreign film is what I was in, complete with subtitles, handwritten ones. I was losing it, wobbling out of orbit. A pharmaceutical backlog—teenage acid, college weed, adulthood coke and alcohol, in unwiseconjunction, joining forces in a time-release attack on my brain cells. Turning my grey matter into shaving cream. Why else would I come to these alien pines, this gutted church surrounded by homicidal bog men? Heavenly callings? Delusions of sainthood?
    I would go to the police, turn myself in, report what I’d seen. And get her a doctor. A real one. Céleste would give me no explanation of what had happened to her that night, nothing credible at least, but she’d have to tell the cops. And they’d protect her.
    But first I’d go to the rectory for her, as promised. Or rather second. First I’d make breakfast. I leapt out of bed, glanced at my patient, then yanked open the fridge door. It’s not giving up, it’s growing up , an inner voice reassured me.
    While listening to the bacon and eggs in the skillet, to the pig and chicks cursing and spitting in anger and anguish, it dawned on me why Céleste wouldn’t eat my breakfasts, or much of anything else. So I put the kettle on.
    “You’re a vegetarian, right?” I asked when she opened one eye. I had deliberately dropped her plate with a clatter onto her tray table.
    She nodded slowly.
    “I made porridge for you.”
    No response.
    “You must be a rarity around here. Any vegetarian restaurants in these parts?”
    Unsteady, dazed, she sat up and reached for a pencil and paper on the bed table. As many as there are gay bars.
    I smiled. Wondered why she would make that comparison. “Are you gay?”
    Céleste paused, wrote a few letters, scratched them out. Then simply nodded.
    Can one be gay at fourteen? “That’s … you know, fine with me.”
    Glad you approve.
    “How do you feel?”
    Like I’ve been crumpled up in a ball for the last year.
    “And mentally?”
    I have a sense of impending doom.
    Join the club. “No, I mean physically mentally, if you know what I mean.”
    Like I’m underwater.
    I paused. “Why can’t you … speak?”
    She wrote something, scratched it out, wrote again. Tried to hang myself, damaged my voice box.
    This, I was almost a hundred percent sure, was false. “Would you like to tell me about it?”
    About what?
    “About who dumped you in the swamp. And why.”
    You writing a book? Make that chapter a mystery. She set her pencil down and turned away from me to face the wall.
    “And don’t tell me it was a gang at school because I don’t believe you.” I walked around to the other side of the bed. I know that girls this age love to keep their secrets, but this is ridiculous. “It’s time, Céleste. Tell me everything.”
    She stared right through me, stared at nothing. Her eyes were open