The Heavens Rise by Christopher Rice Read Free Book Online Page B

Marshall, tried to tackle him to the ground like he was a quarterback, she might have been able to prevent what happened next. But the kid was a good two feet taller than her. And it was a moot point anyway because when she reached for his shoulder, she missed.
    Marshall hurled himself face-first into the perforated glass. Like something out of a goddamn cartoon, Marissa thought. The collision made a deep, bone-rattling thud tinged with the violent metallic rattle of the giant window’s frame.
    But the window held.
    The kid’s right shoulder was wedged inside one of the holes he’d punched with the chair; it looked to Marissa like he was trying to pry himself free. He was dazed and disoriented, his forehead sprouting blood from a dozen different cuts. But when he looked back into the room, his eyes found Marissa and she saw utter lifelessness in them. It was as if the kid’s spirit had literally been drained out of him.
    In the years to come, Marissa would try to convince herself that it was the impact with the window that had knocked Marshall Ferriot’s senses from him, but that look—the emptiness of it, its soullessness —would stalk most of Marissa’s quiet moments for the rest of her life.
    The group of tuxedoed men who had gathered behind her and Donald Ferriot froze where they stood. The glass Marshall was plastered against was too fragile for anyone to make a sudden move, she realized.
    Marshall’s jaw went slack. His Adam’s apple jerked in his blood-splattered throat.
    “I . . . I . . . put a . . .”
    And as soon as his son’s words seemed to sputter out into ragged breaths of delirium, Donald Ferriot broke free from the group and lunged for his son. And even though the men all around him could sense Donald’s terrible mistake before he made it, none of them got to him in time.
    Donald crossed the carpet with too much speed and force. He stumbled in his final steps, pitching forward into his son’s body. And for a few seconds, it seemed like it would just be a slight nudge, that’s all. But as Donald Ferriot threw his arms around his son’s waist and prepared to pull him free of the glass spiderweb he’d hurled himself into, the window gave way right in its weakened center and both men became a single tangle of limbs that vanished in an instant.
    Then it sounded to Marissa like all the chairs in the room had gone over at once. Silverware and glasses were knocked from the tables as everyone jumped to their feet at the same moment. The screams camenext; a single piercing wave of them that said the shock of what they had all witnessed had worn off almost instantly.
    To Marissa it felt like a stampede, and in the midst of it somehow, Heidi Ferriot ended up in her arms, her knees going out from under her, the bellows coming out of her a blend of rage and agony. Marissa wanted to lift her hands to her ears to blot out the terrible sound; instead she held tight to the shuddering wreck of a woman who was making them.

8
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    T he oak branches outside Ben Broyard’s window cast dancing shadows on his bedroom ceiling. Night had fallen hours ago, but he was too exhausted to reach for the bedside lamp. This wasn’t just exhaustion, he knew, but a bone-deep sense of loss that felt completely alien. Not just alien. Adult. That was the thought he kept returning to; that what had happened this week to him, to Anthem, to all of them, was an adult thing, more significant and lasting than graduating high school or having sex for the first time.
    Loss. Grief. Words that had tumbled off his tongue too easily over the years but which he’d learned the real meaning of only that week, when his best friend was replaced by a yawning, fathomless darkness surrounding miles of empty swamp road. He’d always been the mature one, the one who said the adult thing in every situation, but now he realized that to be mature, you had to know more than the dictionarydefinition of words; you had to know what it felt like