Metro Read Online Free PDF

cardboard props and nothing better to do.
    Yeah, this is a pretty amazing town.
    Mark hovers just below the surface of it all, knowing that one day he will be immortal, just like all the other starving artists know it. That’s the only reason to live in a town like this if you’re a writer or a filmmaker or a guitar player. The promise of immortality.
    That’s what he’ll tell you if you ask him about it.
    He’ll tell you lots of things.
    Very few of which are actually true.
    But not many people want to know the real Mark Jones anyway. They only know him as the tortured-genius drug dealer hermit of the Kingdom, with his thick chin beard and shaven head, short and pear-shaped, full of secrets in his longing face, genuine love-me-now puppy-dog eyes drooping above a crazed smile that belongs on a lunatic running the asylum. Big arms and muscular legs, always exposed because he wears designer cargo shorts year-round, even in winter. He’s almost a foot shorter than Jollie, but he seems a lot taller when you talk to him. He turned forty almost a year ago and he doesn’t look a day over twenty-seven. His youth lives in his blood and his passion. Not a single wrinkle on his face. And that always turns her on. He’s written six unsold novels, all science fiction with a red-hot poker up its ass— The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets Natural Born Killers . Grungy, greasy, nutty as a mutant fruitcake, sopped through with attitude and a worldview gleaned from a steady diet of classic gangster flicks, books by Harlan Ellison, and experiences he’s not told anyone about—not even Jollie. One of his manuscripts struck home and sold. A book called Countdown to Extinction . (He’s a big Megadeth fan.) It didn’t have to make him rich, just had to keep him moving, keep him in the game. He holds on to the dream, like everyone else. But he holds harder. And he’s searched all his life for a kindred spirit. Someone he can really talk to. Someone who understands things.
    Someone like Jollie, of course.
    He’s fallen in love with her, and that wasn’t supposed to happen. When a guy like him falls in love, it’s bad news.
    Especially in a town like this.
    Mark doesn’t know about what’s been going on lately between Jollie and Andy, but he’s suspected for months.
    That might have been why he finally asked her to come away with him the other night. Why he told her he was getting some long-overdue royalty money from the book he sold years ago ( Countdown has since been reprinted five times, a real underground hit, more or less) . . . and he wanted to make a clean break from the madness of the Kingdom. Maybe head out for California. Start fresh somewhere in a different town of artists and protestors. She asked if Andy should come with them, and he said no. He said that he was done with all this craziness, all the lovers and ladies at all hours, the drug dealers and half-pimps, all those dumbass throwaway super rockers with green hair.
    There’s a place we can start over, Jollie. We can go there together, you and I. Please marry me.
    And he was really serious this time.
    She knew, because he showed her the ring.
    The ring he only told her stories about when they were stoned—the silly little piece of ten-cent plastic he got from a gumball machine when he was sixteen. The childish trinket he’s kept on his Super Cool Stuff Shelf for years, waiting for the right lady to give it to. He gave it to her then, and she’d had no idea what to say. She still doesn’t. She still hasn’t answered him. This wasn’t in the plan. It wasn’t supposed to happen.
    But he can deal with it.
    He still has time.
    There’s blood on his hands, but the blood washes clean.
    He’ll have just a few minutesto make her understand.
    33 minutes and COUNTING . . .
    â€œI can’t do this,” Jollie says, and she pulls away from