Read Online Ante Mortem by ed. Jodi Lee - Free Book Online

was.
    Back to him, hair dyed shocking red, but undeniably his Lacey, staring intently at a TV above the bar with her knuckles pressed against her lips. He was afraid to come any closer, to make himself known. So he watched the TV with her. A passenger plane had gone down in Texas. In his last transmission, the pilot had reportedly told the tower that “kids” were trying to storm the cockpit.
    Brautigan and Lacey both nearly jumped out of their snakeskin boots as two cars collided right outside. She spun, and saw him. “Dad.”
    He stepped into the light separating them. She recoiled at his appearance, then said, “What happened?”
    “ Fucking shuttle drove right into… Pearce is dead. I don’t even know about the others. I just came here. It’s happening everywhere, Lacey.”
    “ I know.” She took a tentative step toward him, hazel eyes flashing. “Why are you here?”
    “ Came to see you.”
    She sighed. “Because of what’s happening?”
    “ No, it was planned...”
    She turned slowly to the pair behind the bar, two men with their arms linked. They looked from the television to her. “He called me last week,” one of them said to her. “It was a surprise.”
    “ Surprise.” She laughed bitterly. “Dad— Seth —I’ve got enough to deal with right now. My best friend OD’d this morning. And don’t try to play Father Knows Best and lecture me, you know I stay away from users. She’d never touched the shit before.”
    “ Young people are killing themselves,” Brautigan said.
    “ It’s people between fourteen and twenty-four so far,” Lacey replied. “Like my friend. I’m twenty-six.” She said it as if he might not know.
    “ So terrible,” one of the men whispered. Another breaking item appeared on the TV, this one about the streets; streets worldwide turning into a gory spectacle by suicidal drivers. A scene in Atlanta, an intersection in flames. First responders simply throwing themselves onto the pyre.
    Lacey started toward the exit. Brautigan caught her arm. “You’re safer here than out there.”
    “ Let go of me,” she snapped, and wrenched herself free. He nearly fell over.
    “ Lacey!”
    She looked back. “You need to get to a hospital.”
    “ Won’t be safe there either,” he said. “The panic’s going to be worse than the catalyst. We’ll just stay here.”
    A gunshot rang out in the street. “Please!” Brautigan cried. “Don’t be stubborn now.”
    “ You should get out of the city,” one of the club owners called. “We have to stay,” said the other. “But you better get the hell out of here.”
    Lacey nodded. To her father, she said, “You can stay, or you can come.”
    Every bit of logic, every scrap of instinct, told him it was wrong. But she’d just extended an olive branch, thin and brittle as it was, and he took it.
     
    Her car was parked in the back. Brautigan stared at her as she fished through the pockets of her jeans for the keys. “What?” she demanded.
    “ Can’t use the roads,” he said. “The only way out is on foot.”
    She swore softly. “You’re right.” At the sound of another gunshot, she glanced worriedly at Brautigan, and for a moment she was the little girl he’d walked out on. God, it was that same face, that same exact face, silently begging him to make it better.
    “ We ought to stick to the back streets,” he advised. She nodded, and they began their slow, uncertain jog. Glimpses of the main thoroughfares yielded only sheets of flame. The city’s arteries were clogged with the ruin of smashed cars and mangled bodies. There was the occasional gunshot, and a recurrent thump that might have been distant explosions. Other than that, it was oddly silent. No sirens, no choppers, no chatter. How quickly it had all happened.
    “ We have to cross 35th to reach the expressway,” Lacey told him. “Then it’s not far to the suburbs. I know people there.”
    People my age, Brautigan hoped, and wondered why this epidemic of