The Immortalists Read Online Free PDF

something really important.”
    “What’s that?”
    “She’s here now.”
    He closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the chair, trying unsuccessfully to blank his mind, to keep it from exploring the implications of his wife’s words.
    They’d met when he was getting his master’s. She was studying at a culinary school down the street from his apartment and spent a fair amount of time digging around the grocery store where he shopped. By the end of the semester, he’d written a computer program that calculated the probability of her being in the store at any given time, and he lived his life around those carefully printed schedules and an endless supply of phony grocery lists.
    Despite a long history of success in attracting—if not keeping—women, he’d found it impossible to find the courage to talk to her. She, on the other hand, hadn’t suffered the same paralysis. It had been near the artichokes that she’d finally stepped in front of him, blocking his path to a shelf of summer squash. He could still remember her first words to him: “You shop a lot, don’t you?”
    Richard tilted his head forward again, resting his chin on the top of her head. “She’s going to be here tomorrow too, Carly.”
    “But what if you’re not?”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “You could be driving home from the lab a few days from now, and a drunk driver could cross the center line. I doubt the last thought that would go through your head would be that you spent too much time with your daughter.”
    “Thanks for the vivid preview of my death. I usually don’t think about it with that kind of detail.”
    “My pleasure.”
    He reached into a drawer and retrieved a couple of glasses, splashing some scotch into them before handing one to her. She turned and put her feet on the desk, pressing her back into his chest.
    They didn’t sit and drink together enough anymore. The wild, passionate adventure they’d started together had slowly devolved into something squeezed in between Susie, the restaurant, the lab, and the bills.
    “Sometimes when I think about our past it seems more like a movie I once watched than something I did,” he said. “I can see us getting drunk in bars and driving piece-of-shit rental cars through third world countries. I remember us trying to have sex in that little bed with the mosquito net in Namibia. It was a hundred and three degrees, and every time one of us bumped up against the net, the bugs attacked.”
    “I know it really happened because I still have a mark on my butt where those things were chewing on me,” she said.
    He smiled, and they sat there for a few minutes sipping their drinks. “I have to save her, Carly.”
    She nodded slowly but didn’t turn to look at him. “I know.”

Northern Pennsylvania
April 12
     
    Richard double-checked the map he’d printed and rolled to a stop in front of an iron gate that was a bit more imposing than he’d anticipated. There was an intercom bolted to a stone pillar, and he leaned out the window to activate it.
    The machine-gun-toting guard he half expected didn’t materialize, and instead a lightly accented female voice greeted him over the speaker.
    “Yes? Can I help you?”
    “Hi, this is Richard Draman. I spoke with Dr. Mason yesterday. We have an appointment.”
    “Of course, Dr. Draman. Welcome.”
    The gate swung open, and he drove through, starting up a winding private road cut from the trees.
    The nervousness that had been growing ever since he left his house quickly transformed into full-grown butterflies tearing around his stomach. And why not? August Mason was both the most gifted and most enigmatic biologist of the last century. His contributions to the field still had people shaking their heads, as did his disappearance shortly after accepting what everyone thought would be only the first of his Nobel Prizes. He’d been gone for more than twenty-five years before suddenly reappearing and buying this property a few