Lupi 09 - Mortal Ties Read Online Free PDF

reason
     he stayed on the job. So he could piss on it.
    The job had killed Sarah, and he’d wanted revenge on it, too. Only he hadn’t known
     that’s what he was doing, not until a month or so after he died, when he’d done what
     he’d told Yu was impossible. He left.
    Getting himself fully, properly dead turned out to be harder than he’d thought.
    Not that he’d seen extinction as the only possibility, but he’d been pretty sure that’s
     what would happen. His world—the only world left to him—was about two hundred yards
     in diameter. Get three hundred feet away from Yu in any direction and everything turned
     fuzzy. Keep going and it got…not dark. Darkness was a lack of light, and out there
     in the gray it was like vision itself didn’t exist. Out there was
nothing
.
    Nothing had sounded like a damn good place to end up. He’d expected to become nothing,
     too, when he left Yu, though he’d conceded it was possible he’d get that white light
     people yammered about, the one that hadn’t shown up when Big Thumbs pulled the trigger.
     Or maybe…
    He hadn’t really let himself think about that “maybe.” He didn’t deserve it. But it
     was like a rope—there were two ends to it, and if the end he held was grimy and black
     with guilt, the other end was as shiny and right as any of the angels he didn’t believe
     in.
    Mostly, though, he’d expected to die for good. Drummond hadn’t believed in God for
     years, much less an afterlife…though Sarah used to tell him he wasn’t a true unbeliever,
     just too mad at the deity to give Him the time of day. She’d been at least somewhat
     right. He figured that any God who let the sort of shit happen that he’d seen over
     and over wasn’t worth much. Sure, you could blame it on free will and people being
     assholes, but if so, God had done a pisspoor job of creating when it came to man,
     hadn’t He?
    So he’d left, walking off into the gray. Pushed aheadeven when he didn’t have any sense of a body, when there was nothing left of darkness
     or light, no whisper of sensation, barely the memory of it. Slogged on until he couldn’t
     tell if he was moving anymore, until even the blasted whatever-it-was that tied him
     to Yu grew so faint he couldn’t find it.
    Maybe he’d stopped then. Maybe he’d kept going. He had no way of knowing. But still
     moving or just plain still, he’d waited. And waited.
    At some point—it had seemed like hours, but might have been weeks or minutes, given
     how little time meant in the gray—he’d known he’d been wrong about that “maybe.” Wrong
     that it might be even a little bit possible. Wrong, too, about how desperately he’d
     wanted it to happen anyway.
    If Sarah had had any way of coming to him, she would have come then.
    He’d broken down then, broken apart. Sobbed like a baby, and if he hadn’t had eyes
     and a body to sob with, that made it worse. There was no Sarah. There would never
     be a Sarah for him again.
    There was no anything…but him.
    People think they know what
alone
means. Shit, he’d thought he did, thought he was more loner than not. He hadn’t had
     the least damn clue. Broken, bereft of bones, breath, sight, hearing, touch, he’d
     known that the gray was hell, and he’d waited for hell to eat him.
    It hadn’t.
    Not that he knew what had happened. Maybe, like he told Yu, he’d slept. At some point
     he’d drifted back to himself, wisping around like a bit of fluff so insubstantial
     that gravity was a lesser force than the eddies of air he floated on. He’d come back
     soft and slow and gentle, and found himself lying on a bed in one of the guest rooms
     in Yu’s D.C. house. He’d come back knowing two things.
    While he was away or asleep or whatever, someone had talked to him. Not Sarah, and
     he didn’t think it was God, but someone. And he had to help Lily Yu.
    However little either of them liked it.
    What I want to hear,
she’d said,
is that you’ve changed