The Midnight Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

dog was just sitting there and wouldn’t leave. Flynn didn’t know what that meant, but it felt like there was a great weight to it, a huge significance.
    He twisted his neck as far as he could to see what was going on, watching in the rearview as Nuddin and Kelly crept over the splitting ice back toward the pier. He saw lights there now. Figures silhouetted.
    He kept yanking at the belt. The Charger shifted again. The front bumper dipped underwater and just kept going.
    “Christ,” he whispered. The fear he’d been holding back so desperately catapulted through him as the ice continued to break. It sounded like an avalanche. The car lurched forward and dropped, the front end looping around as it sliced into the water. Flynn felt like he was somersaulting in midair as the car jerked loose and started to descend. The dog flopped backwards into his face. Ninety-five seconds left.
    The freezing water raged in, and with it came the intolerable cold and the crushing pressure of a darkness he had always known but had never had to endure before. Every nerve burned and schizzed out at once, and then there was only an insane numbness. The overwhelming terror soon swelled into something like comfort. He had only an instant to take a last breath and wondered why he should bother. Zero looked him in the eye as the water rose and covered its face, bubbles bursting from its nose. The dog let out a noise that was more growl than whine, as if to say,
Ah fuck all, we’re gonna snuff it. We’re dead.
    Flynn watched the midnight road open beneath him and he cut loose with a screwy giggle under the water, burning up the last of his oxygen, seeing his brother Danny far below smiling at him with a cigarette hanging off his bottom lip. Flynn was thinking, Christ, I am. I really am. I’m about to—
    Time.

TWO
    The potential for breath.
    An option to flow.
    A crack in the black.
    A warm light pulsing, way out of reach.
    Awakening was pure hell without thought or reason, without identity or even definition. All that remained was human emotion spread out like an oil slick across the width of the midnight road.
    Maybe it was fear. Maybe hate or remorse or guilt. It was so pure it couldn’t be distinguished.
    Slowly it took on value and made itself known. Flynn didn’t exist anymore, but his futile and wretched hope remained. It straddled spheres. It was everything left after his heart had stopped.
    He began to drive back up the road to his former self. His foot was hammered down on the gas as he broke from the depths of his own death and took his first breath in nearly half an hour.
    Twenty-eight minutes pretty much on the nose before his body came back up through the hole in the ice—a one-in-a-million shot right there—and they got him out of the water and jabbed him with adrenaline directly into his busted heart and got him wired up and burned him back to life.
    Somebody’s eyes searching.
    They were his own. They didn’t remember yet how to blink. He couldn’t shut the world out. The noise of it made him scream. A rush of memory encompassed him, and he knew his name but not his purpose.
    He saw a round, eager face that he took for God. Thinking God looked a lot like a puffy-faced bald guy who smelled like Hamburger Helper and Tabasco sauce.
    God stared at him with a gap-toothed smile and said, “You’re the luckiest son of a bitch I’ve ever heard about. You got angels watching over you they never taught us about in St. Vincent’s, let me tell you.”
    It surprised Flynn that God didn’t have a more civil tongue, but maybe it was a holdover from the whole Philistine thing, slaughtering heathens and smashing the Egyptians. Flynn turned his head and saw that he was in the back of an ambulance. He had an IV in his arm. Flashing red and blue lights flared behind him, stoic cops standing around staring in his direction.
    God turned out to be a paramedic. He was still grinning as he toyed with a plastic tube snaking into Flynn’s