The Last Child Read Online Free PDF

the way he rolled—his path, his choices, and no looking back.
    He studied the pictures of his father: one behind the wheel of a pickup, sunglasses on and smiling; one standing lightly at the peak of a roof, tool belt angled low on one side. He looked strong: the jaw, the shoulders, the heavy whiskers. Johnny looked for some hint of his own features, but he was too delicate, too fair-skinned. Johnny didn’t look strong, but that was just the surface.
    He was strong.
    He said it to himself:
I will be strong
.
    The rest was harder to admit, so he did not. He ignored the small voice in the back of his mind, the child’s voice. He clenched his jaw and touched the pictures one last time; then he closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the emotion was gone.
    He was not lonesome.
    Inside the case were all of the things Alyssa would miss the most, the things she’d want when she came home. He began lifting them out: her diary, unread; two stuffed animals she’d had forever; three photo albums; her school yearbooks; favorite CDs; a small chest of notes she’d passed in school and collected like treasure.
    More than once, his mother had asked about the things in the case, but Johnny knew better than to tell her. If she mixed the wrong pills anything could happen. She’d throw things out or burn them in the yard, standing like a zombie or screaming about how much it hurt to remember. That’s what happened to the other photos of his father, and to the small, sacred things that once filled his sister’s room. They faded away in the night or were consumed by the storms that boiled from his mother.
    On the bottom of the case was a green file folder. Inside the folder was a thin stack of maps and an eight-by-ten photo of Alyssa. Johnny laid the photo aside and spread out the maps. One was large scale and showed the county where it nestled into eastern North Carolina, not quite in the sand hills, not quite in the piedmont or the flood plains; two hours from Raleigh, maybe an hour from the coast. The northern part of the county was rough country: forest and swamp and a thirty-mile jut of granite where they used to tunnel for gold. The river came down from the north and bisected the county, passing within a few miles of town. To the west was dark soil, perfect for vineyards and farms, and to the east were the sand hills, which boasted a crescent of high-end golf courses, and, beyond that, a long string of small, poor towns that barely managed to survive. Johnny had been through some of them, and remembered weeds that grew from the gutters, shuttered plants and package stores, staved-in men who sat in the shade and drank from bottles in brown paper bags. Fifty miles past the last of the failed towns, you hit Wilmington and the Atlantic Ocean. South Carolina was a foreign country beyond the edge of the paper.
    Johnny tucked the big map back into the folder. The rest of the maps detailed the streets in town. Red ink marked a number of streets, small X marks over individual addresses. Notes in his handwriting lined the margins. Some neighborhoods were still untouched; a few were crossed off completely. He looked at the western side of town, wondering what part of it Jack had been talking about. He’d have to ask him. Later.
    Johnny studied the map for a few more seconds, then folded it and set it aside. Alyssa’s things went back into the case and the case back under the bed. He picked up the large photo and slipped a red pen into his back pocket.
    He was through the front door and about to lock it when the van turned into his driveway. Paint peeled from the hood in uneven patches; the right front fender was banged up and rusted. It slewed into the driveway with a shudder, and Johnny felt something like dismay. He turned his back, rolled up the map, and shoved it into the pocket that held the pen. He kept the photo in his hand so that it would not get wrinkled. When the van stopped, Johnny saw a flash of blue through the glass; then the