The Hell Season by Ray Wallace Read Free Book Online

flashlight and walked outside, got in his car and headed off into the rain and the fading light.
     
    *
     
    As I look back over those first couple of days I wonder how I got through it all with my sanity intact. Especially after what I’d done—or thought I’d done—to Gerald. And possibly Dana too. Trust me, there were some terrible thoughts going through my head as I left my house that evening. Of course, the drugs were helping. The Valium and the Prozac were doing their job keeping me wrapped up tight in a snug little blanket of emotional security. And there was the sheer overwhelming unreality of the situation in which I had so unexpectedly found myself. It was all too easy during the worst of what was happening to tell myself that none of it was real, that it was all just a dream. Or that I was experiencing some sort of mental breakdown, a psychotic break that had allowed the inventions of my imagination to take on a frightening believability, so much so that they had overridden the truth of what my senses normally told me about the world I lived in. The latter explanation had its own frightening implications—what could have led to such a break with reality and, while in such a state, what might I be capable of doing? And if nothing around me was real then where, in actuality, was I? A mental hospital? I recoiled from the idea that I had succumbed to madness. My life had been going along pretty well, all things considered. Could the stress and the anxiety for which I’d been seeking treatment have suddenly bloomed into full fledged insanity? And if so, what could have triggered that sort of breakdown? Short of the unexpected deaths of my wife and children, I couldn’t think of anything. Is that what had happened, had Julia and the kids been killed—car accident maybe?—and as a result I’d constructed this nightmare scenario as a distraction from what had happened? Farfetched, I knew, but just about any explanation I could come up with—and there were a limited number of them, to be sure—was equally as farfetched.
    All I knew that night when I left my house was that I had to get away. Far away. Since there were no answers, and no promise of aid to be found in the town where I’d lived for the past eleven years, then I’d just have to leave town and seek help elsewhere. Surely there was someone out there who knew what was going on, who was taking the proper steps to fix the situation. It wasn’t much of a plan but at least it was a plan, one that I could hang my hopes on for the time being.
    Unfortunately, I would soon discover, hope does not always spring eternal, sometimes it withers and dies in practically no time at all …
     
    *
     
    Even in his current situation, Thomas was still amazed by how much the town had grown since he and Julia had moved there. Five years back they’d put a mall in over by the interstate. After that, coinciding with the local housing boom, neighborhoods and apartment complexes started going up on what seemed like every available piece of property. And the people started pouring in. Now, where there had once been trees and cow fields there were strip malls and banks and fitness clubs. State Road 60, which ran through the center of town, was still in the process of being widened from four lanes to eight. Considering what had happened, Thomas figured that the construction there might never be finished. And might never be needed, either.
    After pulling out of his subdivision, Thomas had followed Providence Road up to 60. He took it slow even though the weather was good and the only other cars he encountered were parked haphazardly in the middle of the roadway or off near the sides. All of the traffic signals were out but the streetlamps seemed to be working fine as they started to illuminate the way ahead of him in the fading daylight. At the intersection of Providence and 60 he took a left, away from the center of town, out toward the mall about a half mile away and the