All Fall Down Read Online Free PDF

Her daddy rammed me with
that helmet of his, and all the breath whooshed clean out of me. He
drove me down to the ground and hit me again.
    I admit to trying to fight back. I found a
pressure point or two, but all that did was slow him down enough
that he didn't beat me to a pulp. Alien or not, old bones snap when
they're hit hard enough. Once he'd broken a couple of my ribs, all
I could think about was staying alive long enough to make sure
Harley was all right.
    I think I about died when I heard her
scream.
    Not in pain, not my little Harley, and not
in fear.
    Her scream was all about rage.
    Her momma, my Maxine, had a temper on her
and the same sort of fearlessness that let me step into a machine I
knew would scramble my molecules with only a promise that somewhere
down the line, things would get unscrambled again and I'd be put
back together right. Harley inherited that same fire and
fearlessness from both of us, I suspect. It propelled her out of
the mine and at her daddy hard enough that she knocked him off
me.
    "You leave him alone!" she screamed at her
daddy.
    She held a rock in her hands, and before he
could bat her away, she hit him smack on the chin with that rock.
If he had taken his helmet off before he attacked me, she would
have brought the rock down on his head and probably knocked him
out, if not killed him outright. As it was, all the blow to his
chin did was knock him off balance and split his lip.
    Harley tried to scramble away, but her daddy
caught her. He took the rock away from her, then stood up and held
her against him with an arm around her waist. She clawed at the
back of his hand, the only part of him she could reach that wasn't
covered in leather, but he acted like he didn't feel a thing.
    "Well, I'll be damned," he said. He took his
sunglasses of to get a better look at her. "You're holding out on
me, old man. You didn't tell me Maxine had a kid."
    I coughed, spitting up blood. My chest felt
heavy. One of those old broken bones must have done some damage
inside.
    "Didn't ask," I managed to wheeze out.
    He laughed then. "This almost makes up for
selling my bike."
    Harley had gone still in his arms. I thought
for a minute that she'd frozen up, realizing that this man was her
daddy, but then I saw the desert sun glint off something she held
in one hand.
    Her sharp little knife.
    She'd been a good student when I'd taught
her all the close-in fighting techniques I'd been taught as a
grunt. She'd acted like they'd expected her to act, which had been
my first lesson as how to survive as an alien. She'd been the
scared, angry little girl. Now she was the efficient soldier.
    Before her daddy knew what she was doing,
she'd sliced through the tendons of his right hand. His grip on her
slipped, and she turned around and did the same thing to his left
hand.
    The hand that still held the grenade.
    Without control of his hand, the grenade
rolled from her daddy's fingers onto the hard packed desert dirt at
his feet.
    I'd never taught Harley about grenades. Even
through the haze of my pain, I could tell that her daddy had turned
this one on. Pins had given way to pressure points, just like on a
human body. Without the pressure of her daddy's hand, we only had a
few seconds before the grenade went off.
    "Harley, run!" I shouted at her as loud as I
could.
    She pivoted on the balls of her feet. I
thought she'd run, but instead she wrapped two strong little hands
around my wrist and yanked me to my feet.
    "Run, grandpa!" she yelled back at me.
    I tried. She pulled on my arm and I moved my
feet as fast as I could, but my legs didn't want to support me.
    I'd already started to fall when the grenade
went off.
    Rocks and dirt and bits of Harley's daddy
pelted my back and drove me into the ground, but the blast didn't
kill me.
    I looked over my shoulder as the dust
settled. There wasn't much left of Harley's daddy. If I'd have
stayed where I was, if Harley had left me there, there wouldn't
have been much left of me