Iron Mike Read Online Free PDF Page B

moved into the kitchen to fix herself something to eat. She chewed the tasteless bologna sandwich, her mind processing options in an analytical way that would make Dad proud. She was about forty minutes from the front gates of Knox. She would take Malik’s jeep, since he had picked her up for the party, and her hybrid was still sitting in her driveway twenty miles from here. She would gather survival supplies, because Dad would be pissed if she didn’t, and she would change into jeans and her hiking boots. She glanced back at the television, running the same coverage on a seemingly-infinite loop. She needed to make time for a shower, at the very least. Kari glanced across the kitchen, seeing her reflection in the patio glass doors. Yeah, she looked like shit and smelled like she’d been crawling among dead people – a shower was definitely on top of her list.
    Kari moved back into Malik’s bedroom, keeping her eyes off the bed where his body lay and stepping over Delronda’s body to get to the large master bathroom. Her makeup and perfume were stored in the linen closet, as were several changes of clothing. Her jeans and t-shirt were in Malik's bedroom, and she knew her heavy coat was somewhere in the living room.
    Kari emptied her pockets, setting the Sig on the toilet tank, just a hand’s reach from the shower stall, and she set the packets of drugs onto the counter top. She opened them, dumping their contents one-by-one into the toilet. The last baggie was the one with the eight blue tablets. Kari stared at it a long moment. Malik, along with most of his friends and connections, was dead. Thousands of people in Louisville, hundreds of thousands in America, were dead. It was overwhelmingly probable that her father was dead – he was healthy, overall, but still in his mid-sixties.
    Kari glanced at the Sig and looked away immediately, horrified at her own split second of cowardice. Oh, hell no! No way would she take the easy way out by eating a gun! She would find her father, and he would tell her how bad the situation was. He would give her some good suggestions, as he always did, and she would probably ignore them, as she always did. Still, she would find her own path and make her way through this just the same as she did everything else.
    Kari’s hand tipped, and she watched the little blue pills roll from the bag and plop into the toilet water. One … three … five. She suddenly gripped the bag tightly, not allowing the last three pills to fall. One last time , she thought, dropping the three pills into her hand and tossing the baggie in the trash. Just one last time of feeling good … just for a few hours.
    She swallowed the pills with a handful of water, and then stepped into the shower as she waited for them to kick in.

 
    Hershey
     
    At first, his human didn’t know anything was wrong. She lived alone, except for him, and she thought it peculiar so many jets broke the sound barrier at the same time. She was used to jet noise, though. She remembered the three days after 9/11 when none of the jets flew, and how frightening it was to all of the people who complained about the jet noise. She even had a bumper sticker, faded now, that said, “I heart jet noise!” Hershey couldn’t read the bumper sticker, of course, and he wasn’t quite sure what a jet was, but his human talked to him constantly, and he always listened to what she said. He loved the sound of her voice. She always spoke to him with kindness and affection, even when she used words he didn’t understand.
    He knew something terrible happened before his human even had the first suspicion. He understood, down in the marrow of his bones, the loud noises were not jets. They were something Bad, as in, 'Bad dog!' bad. Hershey’s tail stayed tucked beneath his legs as he followed his human from room to room while she did her morning things. He followed her so closely she bumped into him a few times, and once she even scolded him, although her