The Starving Years Read Online Free PDF

“He’s coming. He’s right there.”
    This time it was Randy who almost went down, tripping over God-knows-what, maybe even a trampled body. Javier yanked him up.
    “Which one?” demanded the driver.
    “The, ah…Hispanic—”
    “The guy with the eye patch,” Marianne shrieked. At least, Nelson thought, he hadn’t been the one to say it.
    The driver frantically gestured to Nelson to come around the passenger side, and leaned across to unlock the door. “Get in, get in.”
    “Go,” Nelson snapped. He shoved Marianne toward the door, and jogged back into the crowd to wrestle Javier (and, he supposed, Randy) from the pandemonium. He grabbed Javier by the arm and hauled him out of the crowd that was trying to suck him toward a silver compact coupe, where the crowd had swarmed the car like ants around a dropped hunk of coconut-flavored manna. They pounded the windshield with the flats of their hands, and beat the roof and the hood with their fists. When that didn’t result in whatever they’d been trying to achieve, they began rocking the car.  
    A scream pierced the crowd, mostly muffled by the closed windows, but Nelson still heard it. A woman’s scream.  
    The whump of helicopters sounded—overhead, or maybe the noise of the blades was being thrown through the corridor of the tall buildings—when finally Nelson pulled Javier from the throng, and Javier towed Randy out behind him. They sprinted toward the truck and climbed in, one after the other. Randy, who was last, collapsed in the passenger seat, breathing hard. Half his face was swollen and red, and would no doubt bruise green, purple and blue in a few hours. Javier and Nelson ducked into the space between the seats and crammed into the back of the truck, where Marianne had already squeezed herself among a bunch of cardboard boxes as if she was trying to be invisible.
    The driver’s head appeared in the gap, sizing up his passengers. “Javier?” he said.
    “Yes…you’re Tim, right?”
    “Right.” Tim looked Javier up and down, panicky eyed, then looked Nelson up and down, too. “Who are you?”  
    “Nelson Oliver.” As if that explained anything at all, but Nelson owed the guy his name, at least. Tim stared at him for a good, long second, then turned and threw the truck into gear.
    Nelson looked out through the windshield and took in the sight of the crowd rocking the…no way, they’d overturned the silver coupe. Then he navigated through the boxes in the cargo hold and peeked out the tinted back window. “I’d back up and go the other way if I were you,” he shouted as the truck started to move. Tim checked his mirrors, stomped the brake, then did just that: he threw it in reverse. The truck thumped against something—or maybe something thumped against the truck—and Tim went a lot faster and a lot farther in reverse than any sane driver should have.
    What had Tim hit? It sounded suspiciously like a person. Nelson’s stomach lurched, and he assured himself that it wasn’t necessarily a person. It could have been a trash can. Or an A-frame sign with daily specials on it. Or a…a…his brain didn’t seem to be working and he felt like he was going to puke.  
    He pressed his cheek against the rear window and struggled to see if they were mowing anyone down in their hurry to save their own skins. There was a flash—gunfire? He didn’t know. He’d only seen gunfire on TV, and unlike most people, he knew better than to believe everything he saw on the idiot box. Another thump that sounded exactly like a person being hit by a truck, and Nelson saw a planter roll away, spraying soil and beer cans and stunted flowers and cigarette butts. Thank God.
    Thank God.
    More flashes—and it wasn’t gunfire, Nelson realized. It was his own fucking head. Pins and needles, that’s what he’d always called it, because it looked the way your foot feels when you’ve been sitting on it playing video games too long. White flashes. Sparkles. Shapes