Voodoo Heart Read Online Free PDF

sold hot chocolate and apple cider from propped-up cardboard booths. Pres decided he would take Claire here after work. He’d buy her a candied lemon and tell her he was sorry for acting so ridiculously.
    A shadow enveloped the island. Pres looked up and saw a blimp passing overhead, floating in the direction of the baseball field.
    “That’s a pretty one,” Pres said. “Some I’m not fond of, but there’s real beauty to that one.”
    “Pretty until wartime,” said Dex. But Pres could tell that Dex found the blimp attractive too, with its white fins and silver body. He considered leaving early and going to the festival—he knew Claire would take off work and go with her friends—but then he thought better of it. The baseball field would be crowded and loud. The naval officers had recently begun letting people from the audience climb aboard and tour the insides of the blimps. A few celebrations ago they’d invited a group of men and women up to play tennis on the blimp’s fins. At the most recent, they’d even offered to give a few lucky people short rides over the city.
    Pres heard voices from below, and when he glanced down he saw everyone on the ice bridge waving and cheering at the blimp. He turned and waved at it too, until it disappeared behind the trees.

    Pres drove on through Arizona. The heat was terrible, the day a clay oven; he could feel his sense of things evaporating inside the car. The land was ringed with all the colors of sunset and the sky showed a deep green. Though the ground around him seemed static, bleached and splintered towns kept sliding past, one after another, and eventually Pres became quite sure that the car, while anchored in one place, was actually dragging the towns to it, reeling in the land’s fabric with its spinning wheels. But the texture of the land was nothing like fabric, he thought. It was pocked and pitted like a fruit skin, and in his mind he was suddenly an ant crawling across the rind of an enormous blood orange. Then he was a tiny crab scurrying across the ocean floor. On all sides lay tremendous pieces of red coral, and far above, huge white jellyfish gently pumped through the water, dragging tendrils of rain behind them.
    Then he saw it, and everything became clear again. He was in western Arizona. Those were clouds. These were formations of rock, nothing more, and that was the blimp’s silver nose peeking out from behind one of them. He opened his mouth to scream, to laugh, but his throat was too parched. He swung the Ford around toward the stone tower and stomped on the gas. The car gunned forward. Claire’s compact slid off the dash and fell into his lap. He would sneak up on the blimp from behind. He would surprise it! The steering wheel rattled in Pres’s hands as he roared around the back of the rock tower. He could see the blimp clearly now, hovering just above the cracked, red dirt.
    Beneath the blimp’s nose, a small crew of men had just finished drawing water from a stone well. Pres could see some of them winding in the snake-like tube of an electric pump from the well’s mouth, while others carried plump, jiggling sacks of water over their shoulders toward the blimp. Pres did not know whether the water was to be used for ballast or coolant or just for drinking, but he knew it wasn’t going to reach the blimp. He grabbed the gun from the passenger seat and fired it out the window at the line of trudging men. The crack echoed off the rock walls. The men dropped their sacks and ran for the blimp’s folding staircase.
    The blimp was right in front of him now, just yards ahead. He was near enough to see the men’s frightened faces, the gold stripes at the cuff ends of their tan shirts and pants as they rushed up the steps. The last of them disappeared inside the blimp just as Pres skidded to a stop beneath the massive tail fins. He jumped out and ran between the mooring ropes toward the staircase, which was already drawing up into the cabin. The