Bullets of Rain Read Online Free PDF Page A

a single-percentage-point drop in something or other. Children were starving to death in India and 70 percent of the people in Africa, it appeared, were HIV positive. A hot-air balloonist had crashed and drowned somewhere between Art's home and Hawaii. In Los Angeles, the heat was on to make random weapon sweeps of private homes legal; Art thought of the Hitler Channel. San Franciscans were advised to button up for a big, wet storm over the weekend. Art's porch barometer was dropping steadily.
        The satellite dish feed offered five hundred channels of nothing. Art picked up the novel he had begun… what, weeks, months ago? Yesterday? He was only fifty pages in.
        Lorelle's bailiwick had been fiction, for which Art had little time among the temptations of research and tech journals. Occasionally he made a stab at reading for entertainment and was usually disappointed, feeling he had to process too much to gain not enough. Make-believe just did not grab him, although he presently made sorties into the novels Lorelle had left behind, as if preserving one of her favorite pastimes would help her endure in memory.
        His habit was to read at night, before dozing off, but he sensed oncoming defeat, and… sure enough. He lasted through a few more chapters of the overwrought bestseller about a made-up serial killer, and knew he would read no further. There; a decision had been made and it was still early in the day. Art found invented fiends far less interesting than genuine killers, although he could argue persuasively that Jack the Ripper was probably the most infamous "invented'' serial murderer in all history. Few candidates held a candle to H. H. Holmes, the guy who had constructed his " Murder Castle " in Chicago just in time to prey upon the throngs that came to experience the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Far fewer tomes had been written about Holmes than saucy Jack. Art had accumulated a respectable short shelf of true crime, and had done a great deal more reading since Lorelle's death.
        The telling of stories was fundamental to human nature, an expression of the anthropological need for the species to constantly arrange things into cogent groupings, which trait was supposedly its most salient distinction from the lower orders. Humankind organized thoughts, wants, needs, and dreams into a coding called language, expressed via spoken words, then put that conveniently opposable thumb to the task of ordering that language into graphic symbols. All human interaction was based on storytelling, one individual or group relating a story to another. You got together with your friends and swapped stories, or voiced opinion on topical events called news. Everybody decided what political or religious stories spoke to their condition, and new stories were fomented much in the manner of a spreading virus. Art, already a compulsive arranger, was aware that he had begun absorbing stories from pages and screens and displays as an alternate form of human contact. Not many actual humans were loitering around his life, at the moment, to listen while he told his own story, which he felt was cunningly one-note… right now, anyway.
        In the bathroom he spoke to himself again in the mirror. "Your ballroom days are over, baby."
        
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        By noon it was time to "do shots." Blitz understood what that meant in purely selfish dog-terms; it meant he would be permitted to sortie downbeach a certain distance and then return, since he did not care for the loud noises made by his Person.
        In the back of Art's master bedroom closet was a fireproof Corsair gun safe, half-stocked with maximal security lockboxes that guarded certificates, a few bits of jewelry, and petty cash. These were stacked atop a disused shortwave radio with its own power supply. The rest of the space stored his gun collection, including several collector's items that could technically be defined as illegal. He drew