The Last Mile Read Online Free PDF Page B

front door.
    From the living room, Lindsey called out, “Dad?”
    Dan wanted to answer her, but his voice wouldn’t come. He kept hearing Caroline’s words echoing through his head, the horrid whispering of the television serving as an eerie background chorus.
    Outside. The Masters…wish it. Help us. Help…ME!
    Dan reached for the deadbolt, turned it. Unhooked the chain. Gripped the doorknob. Started to turn it.
    He heard Lindsey running toward him, shouting, “No, Daddy! Don’t do it! Don’t leave me!”
    He watched, little more than a passenger in his body, as he turned the knob all the way and shoved the door open. He heard Lindsey’s bare feet slapping on the foyer’s tile as she ran toward him, undoubtedly intending to stop him, but without hesitation he stepped onto the porch.
    The nightmarish conglomeration that had been standing on his lawn in front of his picture window now stood at the end of his porch. Impossibly, its exposed jaw grinned as it reared up on its hind legs. The udder-head looked at him, smiled, and said, “Moo.”
    And then she opened her upside-down mouth wide and vomited forth a stream of greenish yellow milk that struck Dan full in the face.
    * * *
    You CAN’T get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant, she thought, for the simple reason that there wasn’t much left. She sat at one of the Pasta Pavilion’s back booths, leaning forward, arms and hands flat on the table, fingers interlocked, chin resting on the point where her two middle fingers connected. She’d sat in the same position for hours, and her lower back hurt like a bitch, but she didn’t care. What did it matter anymore? What did anything matter?
    After what everyone was calling the Arrival—though how they’d all come to agree on that term or even exactly what it meant, she had no idea—Alice had managed to get inside the restaurant, which was a damn lucky thing because it seemed as if half the fucking town had the same idea. So many people had wanted in, wanted to escape the dying birds and the horrible scrutiny of all those goddamned eyes that Jordan, one of the managers, had finally locked the doors, locking everyone else out. Unfortunately, the flip side was true as well: he’d locked them all in .
    Sometimes she wondered how her parents and younger brother were doing. She’d tried calling them on her cell not long after Jordan had locked the doors, but the phone was dead—just like her family probably was, too. She knew she should grieve for them, but then again, she didn’t know for sure that they were dead, did she? Besides, it wasn’t as if she really liked them all that much. They were pains in the asses, mostly, her brother especially. The only good thing about the Arrival happening when it did was that she hadn’t ended up stuck at home with them.
    There was no electricity in the restaurant, probably none anywhere, she figured. What light there was came from the windows. Jordan had put the blinds down, but the slats were angled partially open to allow some illumination in. There’d been some argument about that initially. The others who made it inside before Jordan locked the doors—Alice didn’t think of them as customers, since she sure as shit wasn’t going to serve any of them—were uncomfortable with leaving the blinds open even a bit. One man, a fat middle-aged guy with thinning red hair who’d been gorging himself regularly at the Pasta Pavilion ever since Alice had started working there, summed up the group’s feelings quite succinctly: We don’t want to let everyone else know we’re in here, do we? And by everyone else it was clear he really meant all those fucking THINGS out there!
    And then Fatty had put his fleshy hands on the rolls of flab insulating his hips as if to say, What do you have to say to that, Mr. Man?
    Jordan had looked at Fatty as if he’d like nothing better than to sink his fingers into the doughy skin of the man’s neck, feel around until he finally got hold