The Lonely Dead by Michael Marshall Read Free Book Online

Sue, the woman from The Cambridge.
    'You asshole,' she said.
    'Big man, are you?' This voice came from behind my right ear, and I wrenched my neck around to see it was her husband.
    'What the fuck?' I saw a couple people from the bar were standing around me. 'He was watching me in the bar,' I said. 'He was standing out here waiting for me.'
    The woman straightened up. 'Ricky's gay,' she said.
    I was panting, my face burning hot. 'What?'
    Her husband let go my arm. 'You think you'd teach him a lesson? You got a problem with people like Rick?' He stepped away from me as if I was contagious.
    'Listen,' I said, but they weren't going to. The frizzy-haired singers had helped the boy to his feet and were leading him back to the bar. The woman shot me one more look, started to say something and then just shook her head instead. No one I hadn't slept with had ever made me feel so small. She went back to the bar with the others, one hand protectively on the boy's back, and I realized way too late that Ricky was her son.
    Then I was alone with her husband.
    'I didn't know,' I said.
    'Could have asked him.'
    'You have no idea what my life is like.'
    'No.' He shook his head. 'I don't. Don't want to know. Don't know where you're staying, either. But you should move on. You're not welcome here.'
    He walked back to the bar. As he opened the door, he turned. 'I'd be surprised if you're welcome anywhere.'
    The sound of the door shutting behind him left just the rain.
    —«»—«»—«»—
    Nietzsche said that men and women of character have typical experiences, patterns of events they seem destined to undergo time and again: things of which you have to say, 'Yes, I'm like that.' I think it was him, anyway: it could have been Homer Simpson. Whichever, they probably had something more positive in mind than fights in places no one had ever heard of, taking paranoia out on people who didn't deserve it. I'd done the same thing the night of my parents' funeral, unbelievably, pulling a gun in a hotel bar and scaring a bunch of corporate types and also myself.
    Relent finally showed me this was no way to live. As a girl had told me three months before — a girl who had first-hand experience of what the Upright Man was capable of — there was only one person for the job I had to do. I had to stop running. I had to turn around, and chase.
    By four o'clock the next day I was in San Francisco, and by the end of the evening I finally had a trail.

3
    Dawn found Tom crouched at the bottom of a tree, wild-eyed and frozen solid. It found him and tried to put him back, but he was awake and couldn't be returned. He wasn't going to be denied a morning now, even if this was a day he hadn't expected to see.
    When he'd woken in the night everything happened fast. His back brain found the flight pedal and stamped with all its weight. It didn't allow for rampant malfunction in all other quarters, and Tom was sprawling before he was even on his feet. With awareness came a terrible understanding of how badly messed up he was, but then the smell cut through again and the naming part of his mind woke up like a siren — BEAR! BEAR! BEAR! — and he was moving.
    At first he was on hands and knees more than his feet, but claw-fear got him upright fast. He ricocheted off the sides of the gully until it came up to reach the forest floor, and then scrambled up over the muddy lip and was good to go. He went.
    Not looking back was easy. He didn't want to see. Reports came in from distant outposts — head messed up, ankle screaming, don't have the flashlight — but he over-rode them and went twisting into the darkness. All pains and disappointments were as nothing to what it would be like to be caught by the BEAR, and he ran in a way that short-circuited everything his species had learned since the ice age before last. He ran like an animal, driven by pure body magic. He ran like a fit. He ran like diarrhoea. He pinballed through bushes and over logs, tripping and