Forever Never Ends Read Online Free PDF Page A

squirrel hunting. And DeWalt, even though he had a shiny four-wheel drive, didn't like getting his two-hundred- dollar boots muddy. DeWalt liked to keep his things just the way they looked in the catalog.
    "About time for a little liquid lunch, Boomer," Chester said. Boomer looked up, thumped his tail a couple of times, and farted.
    "You're entitled to your opinion," Chester said.
    The rain began falling in thick silver sheets, and Chester could barely see across the yard. But at the edge of the forest, about two miles up the slope, that weird green stuff was still glowing. Sure as hell wasn't foxfire, the glow-in-the-dark fungus that freaked out city folk. The glow had been there a couple of days now, but Chester hadn't yet mustered the energy to walk out and check on it.
    In all those damned stories Chester had to listen to growing up, sitting on the plank edge of Grandpappy's knee, he'd never heard anything about shiny green stuff. Sure, the old lady with the lamp that haunted the Brushy Fork bridge, the scarecrow boy in the barn, the panther that screamed like a woman while it followed the wagon in from the fields, he'd heard all those. But nothing about no green stuff.
    Of course, they didn't pass on stories like they used to. Chester’s dad had tried to get him to carry on the oral tradition, but Chester didn't see the point. They had picture shows in Windshake and now almost everybody in these parts had a television. Who wanted to sit around and listen to a toothless old geezer flapping his jowls?
    Chester stretched and his spine popped. His joints were tightening up on him for sure. He forgot all about the shiny green stuff. It was time for some good old Southern self-medication.
    He lifted the jar and toasted the clouds, whatever color they wanted to be.

***
    The alien stretched its tendrils into the soil, edging its way deeper into the cave. It found a quiet, moist place between two large rocks. Its slick effluence coated the granite surrounding it, and its cells mutated to mimic those of the humus and loam that coated the skin of this new world. Since emerging from its seed, the alien had probed the exotic chemical soup around it, drawing nourishment, assimilating the structural order of the strange biosystem, fulfilling the necessities of survival.
    A native life form slid from a crevice, this one far more complex than the bacteria that had provided the alien sustenance in the wake of its impact. The life form was as cool as the air, sluggish, and emanated a primitive intelligence. The life form slithered into contact with one of the alien’s tendrils, exhaling in pain as its nervous system fused with that of the alien’s. The life form writhed as its metabolism slowed, then it fell still and its warmth faded.
    The alien tried to comprehend the sound that had fallen from the life form’s forked tongue.
    Shhh.
    Shu-shaaa .
    A symbol.
    A sound, a fluctuation in air pressure, a varying system of vibrations. The alien tried the symbol again, experimenting, seeking to give it meaning.
    Shu-shaaa .

***
    Nettie Hartbarger glanced up from the Bible, sneaking a peek at the handsome man across the table.
    "Will you read some more scripture for me?" Bill Lemly asked in his deep, quiet voice. "It makes more sense when you say it. It sounds like poetry."
    Bill clutched a Sprite in his big-knuckled hands. He looked at Nettie with his soft brown eyes and smiled. She was in the middle of St. Luke, Chapter Four. Maybe that wasn't the best verse of choice for spinning a web of seduction.
    She read: "And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the spirit into the desert for the space of forty days, and was tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing in those days, and when they were ended, he was hungry."
    She looked up again, and Bill was nodding gently as if transfixed by the rhythm of the scriptures. Or maybe he had been listening to the rain bouncing off her apartment roof.
    Nettie