Read Online Mad Dogs by James Grady - Free Book Online Page A

against the unlatched door: the exploding white air bag shoved me out of the car.
    Time stopped. Sound stopped. My life became something I watched in a movie. Oh, look : there I am, floating through the night above a river silvered with a sheen of ice. My arms and legs flail like useless wings. Plummeting ahead of me is a dented silver car. Busted boards flutter near me like confetti. Up there, in front of my face, falling further and further away stretches a bridge with a gap blasted in its guardrails. Tendrils of red lights flick across the dark sky.
    A crashing ton of metal car shattered the river’s sheen. I gulped a frantic breath as a wall of liquid swallowed me into a brutal dark swirl.
    Every inch of my skin screamed in pain from the burn of the cold river. I forced my eyes open. Saw blackness. I tumbled in dark water and felt it soak my clothes to pull me down, keep me down.
    Easy, so easy to just let air out and suck in death.
    But something in the deep fought me to the surface. I popped up under the bridge. A white-haired, white bearded giant pulled me to the shore through the frigid water. Sirens screamed closer. Cop cars skidded to a halt on the bridge, their headlights revealing the hole punched in the ice by the fugitive car that sped out of control. Car doors opened and slammed. Cops rushed to the busted guardrail and shone flashlights to the river below. Zane muscled me through the brush, through trees to the family Jeep that minutes before, we’d hot-wired away from a country house where everyone seemed asleep and thus for hours wouldn’t report their vehicle as missing, presumed stolen.
    My crew stripped me naked. Wiped me down with our spare clothes as fast as they could, Zane stripping and drying off, too. They stretched me out in the Jeep’s folded-down-rear-seat cargo bay. Naked Zane piled in beside me. Eric and Hailey surrounded us with their clad bodies, pulled a scavenged canvas dropcloth over our prone huddle and the scent of old paint told me I was still truly alive.
    Russell drove the Jeep onto the bridge where cops shone flashlights on the icy water below. He slowed the Jeep to a crawl. A quick glance showed a flashlight-waving cop only one man in the vehicle as Russell leaned out the driver’s window and yelled: “Hey, officer! What’s going on? You need help?”
    â€œKeep moving!” answered the state trooper, who like his partners had broken their roadblock to chase the suspicious silver car that had veered out of control and smashed through the bridge railings. As our classic Decoy & Divert tactic planned, the black hole in the river’s ice claimed all the troopers’ attention. “Clear the area!”
    Russell obeyed. Sped the Jeep on into darkness.
    Naked under the paint-stained canvas, I couldn’t stop shivering.
    â€œYou’ll be OK,” said Hailey as she held me. “I don’t have any open sores.”
    Eric said: “Zane, you OK?”
    Zane told us: “Sure. Cold works for me.”

15
    Zane fell from sanity through the cold stars of Halloween, 1968.
    Trick or treat , he thought before his fall as he rode in the B-52 bomber re-fitted from its globe-busting role in the Dr. Strangelove movie that Zane had sneaked out of the orphanage to see. Now only stadium-busting ‘conventional’ bombs hung in racks below the vibrating ledge he sat on as the warplane flew over North Vietnam.
    He turned his fishbowl helmet to see the five pressure-suited men on his team.
    Intercom static crackled as Jodrey’s voice said: “You and your crazy ideas.”
    Zane crackled back: “Better a crazy idea than no idea.”
    Like he always did, Jodrey said: “’Xactly.”
    Zane was a Wyoming orphan raised by penguin nuns to fear the fires of Hell, carry the weight of his sins, and never, no never, cry. He turned 21 while getting shelled at Da Nang. Inspiration seized him from the blue sky outside a Studies &