Nightmare Country Read Online Free PDF Page B

they’re very hungry when they return from research trips and they like eggs and peanut butter and they raise chickens.”
    â€œAnd goats.” Vinnie moved the Easter basket away from the fence, where the little goat was trying to eat it through the wires. “His name’s Alice.”
    â€œOf course.” Tamara turned back to the duplex. “I mean … why not?”
    Adrian awoke in the strange bed, remembering the dream she’d just had of a skinny bird, black with a streak of white along its throat and chest, a long tapering tail. It had glided above her in slow-wheeling silence, seeming never to move spread wings. The wings had a batlike arch about halfway along their incredible length.
    She tried to hold on to the musty feeling of sleep, but reality intruded. Thoughts of Iron Mountain seemed to seep through the cracks in the corners of the godawful aqua room. Adrian knew she would die of boredom in a place like this. She would soon know everyone in a community so small. She couldn’t for a moment escape to a place where there were strangers who wouldn’t mind that she was fat because they wouldn’t know her.
    Rolling over to face the wall, she pictured a white room and a bed with bars at the sides, bottles with tubes hanging upside down. Herself in the bed, thin, emaciated, cheeks hollow, eyes sunk in dark shadows.
    â€œAdrian, hang on, baby. Dad’s here. Things are going to be all right now.” Gil Whelan leaned over the bars to hold a limp bony hand. He looked up at Adrian’s mother on the other side of the bed, his cheeks wet. “Oh, God, Tam, what have we done to her?”
    Adrian let herself cry until she heard a door slam. Her mother had probably been out running. Adrian hated to exercise and hated all those superior asses who made such a big deal of doing it. She’d have liked to lie in bed and dream some more, but she was hungry. And breakfast was one of the few times in the day Tamara would let her eat.
    Warmed sweet rolls with thick frosting and melting butter, like her grandma made, and foamy hot chocolate would have made Adrian much less depressed, but old goody-two-shoes, small, trim, firm-muscled, old perfect-mother-Whelan would probably serve her an apple and a glass of juice. And a thin slice of birdseed bread, dark and hard, because it was healthy. Adrian wanted to cry some more, but her mother appeared in the doorway.
    â€œHi, honey. Get dressed and make your bed. I’ll fix you some breakfast. And don’t flush the toilet. There isn’t any water.”
    Adrian dressed and did not make her bed. The soft-boiled egg, seedy toast, and juice didn’t touch bottom. Her stomach still growled when she flopped onto the couch and picked up the book on the coffee table. The only book in the crummy place.
    American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language . Not much of a read to help her escape Iron Mountain and make dragging time go away. Bookmarks lodged in various parts of the dictionary, and she absently opened it to the first. It was an F page, and at the bottom of the right-hand margin was a picture of the bird in her dream. But this one had more white on its chest. “Frigate bird, Fregata minor ,” the caption read. Had the previous tenant marked this page because of the bird, or some other word?
    Frigate bird. Any of various tropical sea birds of the genus Fregata , having long, powerful wings and dark plumage, and characteristically snatching food from other birds in flight. Also called “man-o’-war bird.”
    â€œHey, Mom, do you know anything about frigate birds? I had a dream about one, and there’s a bookmark in this … Mom?”
    Her mother stood with her face and clenched fists against the refrigerator, as if she were going to beat on it. Adrian put down the dictionary and went to her. That niggling anxiety: what does a twelve-year-old do if the one parent present is disabled somehow?