Read Online A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain by Adrianne Harun - Free Book Online Page A

straight.
    â€œWe have nothing,” he told her. “You want some of that?”
    Still it was Madeline who set Ursie up at the P&P. Madeline who Bryan would come to blame for Keven Seven.
    His shirt was sticking to his back, and the truck seat was burning beneath him. Bryan felt on fire as he drove up the dirt road that paralleled the train tracks. The coil of desire that had begun at the refuse station that morning twisted in his gut and made him want to cry the way he hadn’t managed after his mother died, after his father left. He had nailed Jackie’s longing, but hardly knew it was his own, too. That bone-white girl with the Indian hair.
Who are you, Bryan?
Just once that morning, her eyes had met his. She’d touched his arm with the marten blood, and she’d poured right into him as if passing along a set of instructions, but all she had said was,
Just do it, Bryan.
And the weird thing was that he knew exactly was she was proposing. He’d driven away feeling as if he had made a promise, as if he were a heroic soul, not just another lusting asshole, nearly as half-starved and lonely and trapped as the Magnuson kids. And the thought pierced him, pierced and burrowed until he could think of nothing else: why shouldn’t he be brave and bold and do the world this favor?
    He was nearing the highway intersection about then, and with his usual stellar timing, he arrived as Mitchell Flacker’s patrol car was taking the last curve. Gerald’s cousin, his “protection,” usually took account of the slightest peripheral movement, trained eyes spotting a truck even when it was slowly emerging from a byroad, half-covered in dust. Mitchell Flacker would raise two fingers off his steering wheel, a country wave that let them know they were under observation. Today, Bryan managed a quick swerve into brush, and Gerald’s cousin didn’t seem to see the truck at all. He had someone in his backseat—a girl, Bryan thought. On any other day, he would have begun fretting, wondering what was up with Mitchell Flacker ferrying around a girl. Creepy bastard. Gerald probably had that strung-out tweaker Cassie Magnuson out on loan with Mitchell doing the dirty work, which would have meant the Magnuson kids had been left out there alone. Upon reflection, that did not seem like such a bad thing. A blessing, wouldn’t it be for those Magnuson kids, if Flacker and their mother just outright disappeared, like the girls up off the highway? Hana Swann claimed his thoughts again, and Bryan imagined a wide pit opening, a whoosh like the gas flares his father had once described, Flacker’s world engulfed, and Bryan and that bone-white girl strolling majestically alongside the tainted highway. She would be a cool comfort beside him as each of them chaperoned a Magnuson kid to safety.
    As he put the truck into gear and began easing out of the brush, the back tires slipped, and Bryan realized he’d put the truck inches away from a precipice. Sweat crept along his scalp and down his neck, and his hands could barely hold on to the shuddering steering wheel until, with gentle lurches, he regained the gravel road. Full minutes passed before he hauled the truck back onto the dirt track, then the highway, headed back into town, the usual sights yet everything seeming altered. The truck’s shocks were shot, its suspension barely holding together, and somewhere in the fire and rumble and sweat, in the pure pressure of bouncing along in that hot truck cab with stinging desire filling his hollow gut, the idea finally jarred loose in Bryan, the beginnings of a plan to rid the world of Gerald Flacker. He would kill Flacker. A simple accident. Hell, why hadn’t he thought of that before? He’d need some help, sure, but he knew just where to go for that. Didn’t he have the brainiest kid he knew as his best friend? As he came into town, he leaned forward and wrestled the wheel onto Fuller, not