The Dead Boy Read Online Free PDF

heartbeat
settled back. The man who spoke had a weak, half-arsed ginger-looking beard.
                Am
I? she wondered. Am I OK?
                Maybe
this is what nutters feel like all the time.
                'She's
dead.' She tried to find the words to explain further, but she couldn't.
                The
guy took Francis' arm and helped steady her.
                'Some
weird night,' he said, letting go of her arm.
                She
nodded, looked back at the man and saw he was pulling his belt free of his
trousers, and that what she took for a weak beard wasn't. A thin sheen of blood
covered the man's lower cheeks. He scratched compulsively with the nails on one
hand even while he undid his trousers with the other hand. He seemed entirely
unaware he did either thing.
                'Never
taken a shit on a pensioner before. You?'
                She
stumbled, walking backward.
                A
kid of six or seven years kicked an adult in the shins. Probably the child's
mother. The woman completely ignored the child and stared at the receipt for
her shopping. She seemed to be absorbed in muttering the numbers on the print
out.
                'What
in fuck's name?'
                The
man squatted down. 'What?' he said, like he was just buying a coffee or smoking
a cigarette.
                Some
people, like her, were horrified. The man with the bloody cheeks desperately
strained as he hovered above the dead old woman.
                Everyone's
nuts.
                The
old woman's dentures were still stuck in her sleeve.
                Someone
screamed, and it wasn't her. Francis still walked backward. She couldn't risk
looking away. A few people tried to help others who didn't look like they could
be helped. A woman with one of those burlap looking shopping bags threw herself
face first into a thick metal pole, bounced back with a mashed nose and split
lips, then tried again. Whatever she was attempting to do to her face obviously
wasn't successful.
                Run .
                Francis
Drew Sutton was a long way from perfect, but she'd never been stupid.
                Other
people, sane people, like her, decided on the same course of action when half a
woman appeared at the entrance. She wasn't alive, like the old lady, Francis
realised. A security guard from the store was pushing the broken thing toward
the entrance. The remains left a slug-trail of blood and viscera in her wake. The
security guard made train noises as he pushed.
                'Choo-choo,'
he was saying. Didn't matter at all to Francis. By then, she had a good head of
steam going herself, headed wherever everyone else wasn't.
                Twenty
yards free of the insanity she still clearly heard someone say, 'Mind, you're
on my foot.'
                Francis
felt that laugh bubbling up again. She bit down on it.
                She
dismissed the idea of getting away in her car because she could see the
motorway was jammed. She thought about her husband, maybe calling him, and
dismissed that, too.
                Ahead,
though, there were plenty of blue lights. Where there were blue lights, there
would be police, and order, and sanity.
                She
ran at an angle toward the embankment, aiming to skirt the fires. The
embankment led up to the road, but to get clear of the heat of the fire, and to
the safety of those blue lights, she had to get through a narrow strip of
trees. Saplings mostly, but some of the larger branches on the mature trees -
poplars, she thought - snatched at her clothing and whipped at her face or caught
her hair.
                Even
below the inferno the heat was immense, uncomfortable.
                It
was dark down there, thrown into deep shadow by the light of the fire and the
sweeping