Biting the Bullet Read Online Free PDF Page A

to themselves. It reminded me a little bit of a busy New York sidewalk, except everyone was looking down, watching the rocks.
    Then I began focusing on the individuals and the sense of community dropped away. Right in front of us a woman continuously combed her fingers through her long blond hair. When she got to the tips she yanked hard enough to jerk her head sideways. Every few seconds she took the hair she’d pulled out of her skull and stuffed it into her mouth.
    “Why’s she doing that?” I whispered to Raoul.
    He shrugged.
    “Don’t you know?”
    “It’s not like their sins are tattooed on their foreheads.”
    “Look at her. She’s crazed. They all are.” To our right a thin, black-bearded man bent down, picked up a rock, and began shredding his shirt with it. When the material fell from his shoulders in tatters he began again, this time on his skin. I tried to swallow, but nothing went down.
    My eyes moved to another man, the first I’d seen who’d paused in his forward motion. He looked straight ahead. For half a second his eyes cleared.
    Everyone within a hundred yards stopped. Crouched. Let out a collective groan that knifed straight into my gut and twisted.
    Flames shot from the sky, engulfing the man. As soon as he began screaming, the fire spread to the people surrounding him, as if a large demonic fist had reached down with a red plastic can and sprayed them all with kerosene.
    I’ve seen more horror than I care to remember in my twenty-five years. But nothing had ever come close to this. Maybe I could’ve stood just the screaming. Or just the sight of fifty people burning. But not — “Raoul, the smell . . . ” He reached into a pack at his waist and pulled out two white ovular tabs that resembled smelling salts. “Stick these in your nose.”
    I did, and they helped. I wondered what else Raoul had packed in his Let’s Go to Hell kit. Better not to ask.
    Around the burning people, everyone else continued with their business.
    A woman bit steadily on her middle finger. I noticed she’d already chewed her thumb and forefinger off at the first joint.
    A man fell to his knees every few steps, leaving a bloody trail on the rocks behind him.
    Two teens, identical twins, took turns lashing each other with branches they’d torn off one of those not-so-innocent trees.
    Though I’d just come from a bath, I wanted to go home and shower. And watch Pollyanna . And cuddle with my infant niece. Anything to be reminded that good still existed somewhere in my world.
    “I knew hell was like this,” I told Raoul bitterly. “Insanity’s last stop. Where there’s no help. No relief. Just unrelenting madness.”
    “For you and these people, yes. For others, it’s something entirely different.”
    “But everybody’s in physical form here?”
    “It’s part of the punishment,” Raoul replied.
    As Vayl had mentioned, I’d traveled outside my body a few times. What a rush. But once I’d stayed away a little too long.
    Nearly all my ties to the physical world had faded. I remembered how hard it was to rejoin my flesh, how constrained I’d felt, almost trapped. I could see how, having once broken all earthly boundaries, being forced back into a body could make it seem like a prison. Even holding tight to my Get Out of Jail Free card, I was ready to leave.
    “Can you tell me what we have to do here?”
    “Our scouts have reported rumors of a conclave to be held there, beneath that guard tower.” He pointed at the nearest hanging tree. Wait a minute.
    “Raoul, what is hell to you? What are you seeing?”
    Things I never wanted to witness again, his eyes told me as they met mine. “A POW camp,” he told me hoarsely. “Torture, starvation, and deprivation all the way to the horizon.”
    Big reaction from Dave’s people. Not surprise though. Maybe they’d suspected it all along. I searched their faces as I spoke.
    “I wondered if that was how he’d died. But I hadn’t known him long enough to