Chicago Fell First: A Zombie Novel Read Online Free PDF

with buildings; but it spread in Doug’s brain and he began, not intentionally, to apply it to other things. He would sit in the passenger seat of his parents’ station wagon as his mother or father drove and he would watch the cars passing them and he knew that those things, too, were miracles of ingenuity and intentional design, wheels and gears and wires and steel put together expertly to make something wonderful and useful and greater than the sum of its parts. Douglas could have been an architect or an engineer or a miracle worker of a mechanic.
    His childhood was filled with moments when his imagination caught fire with images of how all things connected and operated. He was an intelligent child and could have grown up to be a genius in any mechanical field had that latent talent been spotted and honed. That may have been the case if the potential within Douglas Clancy had not been tainted by an unforeseen imbalance, a complication that was triggered at his entrance into adolescence.
    The hormones of puberty slammed into Doug’s brain like a sledgehammer and everything changed. He could still find joy in imagining the workings of the parts of an automobile or a house or the arcade games he often wasted hours playing, but the teen years brought something else into the equation, added a dimension to his fascination with composition, function and design.
    He was at the mall when it happened, walking out of the arcade. He had spent his last quarter and was headed home to finish a project for school. He was fourteen years old. He watched a girl walk by. She was a year or two older than Doug, and she was beautiful. She had a smile on her face and as she passed it occurred to Doug how many little muscles in her face were working at that moment to make that smile happen. His head began to spin and he had to sit down. The muscles around her mouth—his mind screamed to him what he already knew but had never thought about before—were connected to the rest of the face and the face was the front display of a head which contained a brain that sent electrical impulses to all the other components of that artfully constructed entity. Doug saw it all in one big flash of realization. The old cliché about a man undressing a woman with his eyes was intensified a thousand times in that moment, for he did not just undress the young woman with his eyes; he dissected her.
    The jolt of revelation shot through his brain and the erection sprang up in his pants and he grew dizzy and flew into the nearest public restroom and simultaneously vomited and ejaculated and felt a fascination and joy far superior to anything a car or an office building or a toaster had ever induced in his mind. He had found the ultimate construct, the most perfect machine he had ever laid eyes on. It was the one design for which he suddenly felt such awe that it almost overwhelmed him.
    Such an experience, for other men, might have caused religion to take root, as credit for the beauty of a woman was given to God. For others, the joy brought on by the sudden knowledge of the body’s intricacies may have led to a desire to spend a life in the service of science, perhaps medicine. But Douglas Clancy was not those other men. He was an aberration. He did not want to understand that body by learning about it through diagrams in books. He did not want to heal human bodies or learn new things about them to further any branch of human endeavor.
    What he wanted was to take them apart and see the things that made them what they were, touch the parts with his own hands, arrange the components on the table like pieces of a reversed puzzle, exploring segment by segment, layer by layer, and dimension by dimension until he had seen everything. It was not the girl that fascinated him. It was the design, the machine.
    He never spoke of this experience. High school went by and then a partial college education, but he never completed college and his potential for genius was never