Run for Your Life Read Online Free PDF

the White Knight appear out of nowhere and save her, but some old bag lady had seen him. His fingers itched to grab her and throw her under the still–moving train.
    But with the danger past, other heads were turning toward him. He put on his best charming smile and tapped his temple with his forefinger.
    “She’s crazy,” he said, edging backward. “Wacko.” Instead of boarding the subway car, he turned and walked away casually. People still watched him, but no one was going to challenge a man who looked like him, on the word of a woman who looked like her.
    But when he got to the stairs, he went up them fast and kept a watch for pursuers, just to be sure. Unbelievable, he thought, shaking his head. Whatever happened to good old–fashioned New York apathy? What a pain in my ass!
    Still, there was always something to be learned from experiments. He knew now never to veer from the Plan, no matter how tempting.
    He blinked as he stepped out into the different world aboveground. The light–and–shadow–striped gully of Seventh Avenue was crammed with people — thousands, tens of thousands of them.
    Good morning, class, he said silently, as he pointed himself toward the geyser of lights in Times Square.
     
    Chapter 7
     
    Getting my kids cleaned up, hydrated, medicated, and back into their beds took me over an hour. I wasn’t able to tuck myself in until after four A.M. Outside my bedroom window, the sky was actually beginning to lighten above the East Side.
    Hadn’t pulling an all–nighter once been fun? was my last thought before I fell unconscious.
    It seemed like just a finger snap later when my eyes shot open again. The sonata of coughing, sneezing, and wailing that had awakened me continued at full pitch through my open bedroom door. Who needed an alarm clock?
    Being a single parent was tough in a lot of ways, but as I lay there staring up at the ceiling, I decided on the absolute worst one: there was nobody beside me to nudge with an elbow and to mumble, “Your turn.”
    Somehow I managed to get to my feet. Two more of the kids were down: Jane and Fiona in the bathroom, taking turns at the Bennett vomitorium. A dizzy, pleasant fantasy suddenly occurred to me — maybe I was just having a nightmare.
    But it lasted only a couple of nanoseconds before I heard my six–year–old, Trent, moan from his bedroom. Then he uttered a chilling premonition, another thing that fell into the worst–possible category for parents.
    “I think I’m going to be sick,” his little voice quavered.
    My bathrobe wafted out behind me like Batman’s cape as I hightailed it to the kitchen. I ripped the garbage bag out of the pail, sprinted back to Trent’s room with the empty barrel — and threw open his door just in time to watch him lose it from the top bunk.
    Trent’s guess had been right, and then some. I stood there helplessly, wondering which was worse. That the thick rope of his projectile vomit had demolished his pajamas, his sheets, and the carpet. Or that I’d been forced to witness another scene straight out of The Exorcist.
    I gingerly picked him up under his arms and lifted him out of bed, shaking the excess vomit off him into the mess on the floor. Then I carried him, crying, toward my shower. At that point, I was seriously considering taking up crying myself. It wouldn’t help, but if I wailed along with everybody else, maybe at least I wouldn’t feel so alone.
    For the next half hour, while dispensing children’s Tylenol, ginger ale, and puke buckets, I wondered what the procedure was for getting a national disaster declared. I knew it usually applied to geographical areas, but my family’s population was almost up there with Rhode Island’s.
    I’d been checking on our baby, Chrissy, every few minutes. She was still giving off more heat than the radiator. That was good, wasn’t it? The body was fighting the virus or something? Or was it the other way around — the higher the fever got, the more you