Where We Live and Die by Brian Keene Read Free Book Online Page A

certainly do now, in hindsight.
    Example 1: The baby has this toy locomotive. It’s big. He can push it along and walk behind it, or sit atop it and scoot along with his feet. It has all kinds of buttons and little animal figures that pop out of the side. Every time it moves or you press a button, the train sings (loudly) “Chugga chugga, choo choo, spin around. Every letter has a sound.” Annoying, yes. Thank God it only plays the song once. If the baby wants to hear it again, he has to push it or press another button.
    One afternoon, while the baby was at his grandparent’s house, Cassi and I went grocery shopping. When we came home, the locomotive was playing the song, over and over and over again. There was nobody home at the time. The dog was cowering on the couch, staring at it, and the cat was hiding in the bedroom. We had to take the batteries out to get it to stop. I didn’t chalk it up to the girl on the glider. I attributed it to “the dog or the cat must have bumped it and the song got stuck and just kept repeating.” When we put new batteries in it, the locomotive operated normally again.
    “Chugga chugga, choo choo, spin around. Every letter has a sound.”
    I can’t stand that fucking train.
    Example 2: In late May, I was working out in my office one night. I can’t remember if I mentioned this before or not (and I’m too lazy to go back and check) but my office is separate from the house. If someone were to walk down my driveway, they would pass by my office before they reached the house. Anyway, I’m sitting there writing something (I can’t remember what) and Max, who was curled up on my lap, suddenly jumps down, runs over to the wall, arches his back and hisses. Had someone been on the other side of that wall, they would have been standing in my driveway. Max hissed again and when I went to him, I found that he was inconsolable. I grabbed my Taurus .357 and hurried outside, expecting to find a coyote or another stray cat or maybe some crazed fan standing in my driveway.
    But there was nothing.
    There are a lot more of these examples, but it’s late and I’m tired and I don’t have time tonight to put them all down on paper. Suffice to say, it was a weird few months.
    Was I scared? Well, of course I was fucking scared. You would be, too. Either our house was haunted or I was losing my goddamn mind, and since I wasn’t the type to believe in ghosts, and since Cassi or my friends or my neighbor hadn’t reported hearing anything weird or seeing anything unusual, option number two was looking more and more likely every day.
    In early June, I decided that I’d been hallucinating all this time. I became convinced that I had a brain tumor, and that was what was causing the hallucinations. It seemed plausible enough. Tumors had popped up elsewhere on my body that summer. If spring is the growing season, then my body had a bumper crop. There were a total of nineteen, all of which had quite literally sprung up in just a couple of weeks. They were scattered throughout my body—arms, chest, abdomen, thighs, and elsewhere. The smallest was about the size of a marble. The biggest was like a ping pong ball.
    Needless to say, I was scared—scared in ways that a self-rocking glider and phantom cell phone tones couldn’t begin to touch. Obviously, I had cancer. I mean, what else could the tumors be? I wondered how I’d gotten them. My dad’s exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, perhaps? Or maybe it was the fact that I’ve used tobacco since I was twelve and I drink like a fucking fish? Eventually, I decided it didn’t really matter how I’d gotten cancer. The how wasn’t important. What mattered was what happened next.
    It was a strange summer. I felt like I’d become one of my own characters. I was Tommy O’Brien from Terminal or Harold Newton from “Marriage Causes Cancer In Rats.” I was meant to be working on novels and novellas and short stories and comic books for a variety of small press