Read Online The Ferryman by Christopher Golden - Free Book Online

I ‘don’t have visual,’ you moron. I just told you, I don’t see anything. If he came out this way, I think he’s gone. I’m going to look around a bit, and—”
    â€œWalk the perimeter,” Noah instructed. “Report back if you find anything.”
    With a snicker, Shane thumbed the button on the radio again. “Yeah. I’ll do that.”
    He clipped it to his belt, then glanced around the lot, shaking his head. “Walk the fucking perimeter,” he whispered to himself. “Look, Ma, I’m in Platoon .”
    By random choice, he turned left. Thirty feet along was an enormous blue Dumpster with BFD stenciled on the side in letters two feet high. Shane’s hand rested comfortably on the haft of his nightstick again, though only by instinct. He was curious about the missing patient, but also amused. It was going to make a hell of a story to tell.
    As he passed the Dumpster, he glanced behind it.
    The corpse lay sprawled in the sickly yellow lamplight, arms and legs jutting at impossible angles, almost covering one another. Blood had splashed the side of the Dumpster and the pavement all around, and the hospital johnny the patient had worn was drenched crimson and ripped to tatters, pieces of it hanging from the body.
    â€œHoly shit,” Shane muttered breathlessly.
    The guy had been a patient, and he knew it was probably safe to assume this was their runaway, but he needed to take a closer look. He narrowed his eyes and peered into the semidarkness at the face.
    The two faces.
    Or more accurately, the two halves of the man’s head. Shane blinked, holding his breath as he realized with mounting horror that the corpse before him was not sprawled out, or radically twisted. The dead man had been ripped in half from head to toe: torn right down the middle. His internal organs had spilled out, intestines landing in a wet coil, piled with the halves of the corpse.
    Something moved in the dark mass of flesh and viscera, twitched beneath the raw, bloody flesh.
    It poked its nose out and its eyes glowed yellow in the low light. A rat. And from the way the dead man’s guts began almost to undulate, Shane knew there were many more rats where that came from.
    He turned quickly away, fell to his knees, and violently puked his dinner onto the pavement.

CHAPTER 3
    T he weather the day of Ralph Weiss’s funeral was blasphemous. Funerals, David had always believed, were meant to be accompanied by gray skies on the verge of weeping. But that Saturday morning was perhaps the most gloriously beautiful day the spring had proffered thus far. The sky was crystal blue and utterly cloudless. The sun shone down brightly, but softly, without the vigor and even brutality it would adopt when summer blazed in. The lawn at Oak Grove Cemetery was freshly mowed, and the flowers and trees, newly budding, laced the light breeze with sweet, warm scents that made David think of childhood.
    As he did so often, that morning he felt like a man comprised of two beings, two David Bairstows. One was the child he had been: the young man lingering into adulthood with the certainty that growing up, becoming adult, was nothing but a myth told to children, no more real than the bogeyman. The other was the David of now: older, forcibly grown wiser by the specter of death and the knowledge of his own imperfections. His attitude toward Ralph Weiss, for one. His inability to make things work with Janine, for another.
    The unfortunate truth was that people did, eventually, grow up. Though he knew the process had enriched him, had made him more fully human and more fully aware of the world outside that which his selfish childhood mind had created, he was never quite certain if he was relieved to be quit of that foolish child, or if what he felt was an endless, aching grief.
    A snatch of song came into his head. An old one, from his own school days, it was a Bob Seger song. “Against the Wind.”