Fallen Land Read Online Free PDF

fails, he will spend his days in the woods, hunting and fishing, descending into his burrow at night, living in darkness, eating and sleeping as a creature beyond light, a demon kept safe by the earth.
    If I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.
    He worries about exits, believes that perhaps he should puncture the walls of the bunker in other places, create new tunnels, extend the parameters of the space beyond the confines of its impregnable structure. One night he painted the outline of half a dozen doors into his kidney-red walls, imagining the places where other tunnels might branch off, burrowing deeper into the earth.
    His fingers find their way along the three-and-a-half-foot length of rifle, from the stock to the trigger and scope, sliding across the tapering blued barrel. When the moment comes, he will be ready. He retreated here only a few weeks ago, more than a year since Amanda had taken the boys, most of the furniture, and the whole of their life off to Florida. At first he tried to be rational: he knew he had lost the game; it would be sensible to pack up what remained after the estate sale, file for bankruptcy, and move to Miami. He had lost the lawsuits brought by his neighbors and that was the deathblow, the end of his limited solvency. Spending one night after another underground, often sleeping with all the lights on, Paul began to realize he could never abandon his house, not even after the foreclosure sale. Necessity forced him to conceal himself beneath the earth, in the den of his nightmares, where all he can do is plot his return. There is no reason anyone should ever discover his presence if he is careful. No one but Amanda knows about the bunker—not even the boys. He will wait in silence, bide his time, do whatever it takes to reclaim his house, and once it is back in his possession, his family will return. They will have to return: he will give them no other choice.
    “Do you like it, babe?” he asked Amanda, when the structural work on the house was finished and only decorating remained to be done.
    Saying nothing, she smiled as she walked from room to room, climbing up one staircase to the top of the house and down the other to the basement. She went outside and around the back, came inside and put her hands on the banister in the foyer. When he asked again if she liked it, fearing he might have disappointed her, she cried through her nodding smile.
    “This is a wonderful house, Paul. You’ve done a great thing,” she said, stretching up to kiss him. He’d picked her up then, carried her outside onto the front porch and then back inside, to make it official. She laughed and jumped out of his arms. “You said you’d build me a dream home. I like a man who keeps his promises.”
    If only she had always been like that, so susceptible, so easily pleased, not so focused on her own career. After a good beginning between them, it wasn’t long before things had changed.
    Listening to the rotors of the machine moving in the sky above, littering the land with clippings of clouds or the feathers of birds whose wings got caught up in its blades, Paul tries to lie as still as possible, willing his body temperature to drop, hoping that whatever technology the police possess cannot penetrate the layers of concrete and lead enclosing the bunker—or, if it does, that his attempts at psychological control of the body will be enough to camouflage him, diffusing the outline of his form, turning a panicked, hot-hearted biped into a mass of low-level thermal radiation. His father once tried to teach him how to cool the surface of his skin without ever breaking a sweat. “War is psychology,” his father explained, voice always calm, patient with him. “If you win the psychological war you win the physical one as well.” Paul tried to concentrate but when his father measured Paul’s heart rate and temperature he shook his head: “You’re a good kid but you’re mentally undisciplined,