Hell and Gone Read Online Free PDF Page A

so, fine, let’s have it out, yell at me, do something… don’t ignore me.
    But at the time, Hardie believed himself too weak for an argument. He merely asked if she’d call his doctor to find out whether he would up his pain meds a little. She did, and the doctor said no, he should try to cycle down, in fact. Kendra Hardie didn’t like her men sick.
     
    The next time Hardie woke up he was staring at a bright light, listening to the murmured conversations around him. For a moment he thought it was three years ago, that he was at Jenkintown Hospital, fighting for his miserable life, and that his recent limbo-style existence was just a fever dream. He blinked. The light was fiercely bright, ridiculously bright. Like the shining gleam off a tooth in God’s own pearly smile. The voices kept murmuring, which was rude. Didn’t they know he was dying over here?
    “…seen anything like this, have you?”
    “Hmm.”
    “Don’t you wonder?”
    “Wonder what?”
    “Where he’ll end up.”
    “Does it matter?”
    “I’ve been hearing stories.”
    “Oh, boy.”
    “No, seriously, I hear that these near-death cases we get, we end up patching them up just good enough so they can be transported to, like, Kosovo or Thailand, only to be pulled apart again a piece at a time, packed in ice, and—”
    “Hand me a suture, will you? Anyway, I recognize him. We’ve got a minor celebrity here.”
    “So who is he?”
    “If you don’t know, you don’t want to know.”
    “Give me a hint.”
    “I did, actually, and no, I will not give you another.”
    “Dick.”
    “What time is it?” Hardie asked, his voice dry and weak and cracked.
    “The hell?”
    “Was that…?”
    Hardie tried to blink, as if that would help his eyes adjust.
    “Christ on a cracker. Our guy’s awake.”
    “You’re the anesthesiologist. What did you give him?”
    “Not enough, apparently.”
    “What time is it?” Hardie asked.
    “Take care of it. He’s fucking open, man!”
    Hardie’s eyes rolled around in his head. He couldn’t feel his body, not really, but he had the sense that it was still there, that he wasn’t some disembodied spirit rushing up toward the immaculate light. No. That would be too easy. He’d been given something. The guy in the ambulance was going on about cc’s.
    A man’s face appeared in Hardie’s vision. A white mask covered its lower half. Fuzzy caterpillars clung to the man’s brow line.
    “Shh,” he said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
    Hardie was not put at ease. He knew “everything’s going to be all right” was code for “everything’s fucked up beyond all recognition, and it’s not going to get any better.”
    “What time is it?”
    “Let me give you something.”
    Really, he wanted to know what time it was. Was that such a hard question to answer? Not knowing where he was, or what condition he was in—Hardie could deal with that. But time meant everything, and it bugged him to the point of insanity that he couldn’t connect the dots on the time line in his brain. Had an hour passed since he was in the Hunters’ living room, getting blown away? Two hours? Or had it been a day? Hardie didn’t know which answer he’d prefer, to be honest. A day would imply he was out of the woods, that he was stubbornly clinging to life. An hour could mean he was on his way out, and it just seemed like this whole death thing was taking forever.
    “Just relax,” the masked man said.
    No.
    Hardie would not relax.
    In fact—fuck this shit.
    He needed to move his hands. Where were his hands?
    But before he could find them the man was pumping something else into his veins and he felt the horrible cool rush all over his body, not a reassuring peaceful rush, but the rush of icy death, your body’s way of saying “fatal system error,” warning you that this shit was real, you may not come back from this…
    And as he went under he thought of his wife and his son and Deke, praying once again that Deke