The Fading Read Online Free PDF Page A

for the surprise of his short goddamn li—
    There was a boy standing in the middle of the road. A little bitty pecker no more than four. And he didn’t come runnin’ and
     he didn’t pop out from behind a parked car. There was no before and after, no lost baseball of a warning, no movement on the
     kid’s part. It was like someone had spliced a single extra frame into a film strip. The road was empty and then faster than
     a blink (and by bloody shitting Christ Poppa S knew he
hadn’t
blinked, his eyes were too busy bulging out of their sockets with erect violence) the kid was standing in the middle of it,
     whole, all at once, perfectly still and staring right through the windshield at Poppa S with no expression at all.
    In the split-split-second before he stood on the Caddy’s brakes, Poppa S’s eyes locked with the kid’s. They held each other
     across no more than twenty feet of asphalt and morning sunlight, and Poppa S saw the kid wasn’t one bit afraid. He looked,
     Poppa S thought, like he had nothing to worry about because this wasn’t real, it was an illusion, and what was about to happencouldn’t hurt him at all. And maybe that was true. Maybe this wasn’t really happening, maybe by Holy Fucking Christ I’m Going
     to Kill A Little Baby Boy it was a freak hallucination.
    But to be sure, Poppa S, whose real name was Anthony Sobretti II, yanked the wheel anyway. Yanked it just about as hard as
     any old greaseball could.
    Becky couldn’t see the street beyond Mrs Fryeberger’s hedge and she couldn’t make her feet go one step more. The tires shrieked
     for a horribly drawn out moment – in which she closed her eyes – and then the shrieking became a heavy sliding sound, the
     sound of rubber being ground down dully against the road. A big double whump … another eternity of silence … and then a horrendous
     crunch and shattering sounds as the big car collided with something of equal or greater mass but which, to her ears, stood
     only thirty-nine inches and weighed just thirty-four pounds.
    In the ringing silence, Becky wailed and went careening into the street. Noel’s trike was lying on its side, in the gutter
     not fifty feet from her. He was not there with it. He was not on the sidewalk or in the other yards.
    He was half a block down, standing in the middle of the street. In his yellow striped shirt and knee shorts and tiny sneakers.
     He was turned in profile to her, his thin body as haloed as an angel glowing on the mantle, staring numbly at the big brown
     car that was now an accordion of metal and vinyl and glass pressed into the fully mature weeping willow at the center of theElkinsons’ front lawn. Two parallel strips of clean dirt lay exposed where the tires had peeled sod from the earth. Steam
     rose from inside the lacy sagging branches while dozens of blade-shaped leaves dipped and spun lazily to the ground.
    ‘Nooooooooel!’ she screamed deep from her stomach.
    He turned slowly and stared at her with a numb no-look on his face.
    Unharmed, her boy was unharmed. She knew this but kept running and screaming to him anyway. She scooped him from the road
     and she was full of rage, not at her son but at the driver. The nasty sonofabitch who had come blowing down her street hell
     bent for—
    ‘It’s okay, sweetie, it’s okay, Mommy’s got you,’ she said into his ear, clutching him against her breast as she danced back
     onto the sidewalk. Noel was shivering, face buried in her neck and hair.
    The old woman, Mrs Fryeberger, emerged from her house, slippers flapping under her sensible blue polyester pants as she trampled
     out parallel to her hedge, hands on her hips, some kind of hideous pink and green kerchief tied around the clouds of her blue
     hair. Alice Fryeberger was the last woman on the block Becky would call a friend, but she became one now with the first words
     out of her mouth.
    ‘Reckless endangerment! That was Tony-Anthony’s boy and I guarantee you he’s