Read Online Thrust by Tom Piccirilli - Free Book Online

seat, past a waiter down on one knee crooning Sea of Love .  
    With the leaves drifting in heavy patterns like snowfall, the end came on an autumn night.
    The bottle, that time, was scotch.   Chase sat in the school lot, his car idling a little too high, with the heater blasting out against his knees.   He'd been set off again, but at least he could trace it to a small reason.  
    He'd gotten between two jocks fighting over a girl with limp frowzy hair and sorrowful eyes, thin wrists and no bra.  
    She turned to Chase in the hall and whispered, "Stop them, please stop them," and he immediately moved in between the boys.  
    It was stupid.   He took a shot to the ribs from one guy, a roundhouse to the chin from the other.   His head snapped back.   Blood splashed against his teeth.  
    Both boys quit instantly, watching him, waiting for repercussions.   Chase said, "Beat it before a teacher comes."  
    Forgetting that he was one.   Supposed to be one.
    He searched the hallways the rest of the afternoon looking for the girl.   He still tasted blood at the end of the day, and the spot under his heart hurt.  
    She found him after the last bell as he moved down the staircase towards the gym, where he parked.   He was wary—he still had enough of his senses to be careful in moments like these—but she only stood there staring at him.   This could be ominous.
    A dozen lines of poetry flashed through his mind and she turned the other way and disappeared down the hall.  
    That night he drove along the back roads behind the shopping centers that had gone out of business, passing dimly-hit homes of former classmates who were too scared to turn up the heat because of gas bills.  
    He'd failed somehow and didn't even know at what.   He had more white hair than his father'd had in his casket.
    Around nine p.m., with the traffic thinning and the kids tucked in, middle America comfortably settled on the couch to watch sit-coms.   Chase was still thinking about the girl.   The ache in his chin had dulled into a slight warmth that warmed his whole jaw the way caresses had once done.   It still threw him.
    He passed Garden Falls again, whispering along to slow songs on the Oldies station.   He saw only the rows of darkened cube windows of the hospital, but could imagine faces peering down at him.  
    Clawed fingers tapping at the glass and dusty mouths saying his name, dried lips cracking.  
    Chase sang louder trying to press back the images and he reached for the bottle of scotch between his legs.   It was empty.  
    The music changed to another era and he felt himself rising through time.  
    He took the exit a little too fast, coming back through the wide lawns and perfectly shaped hedges of the Falls, as the curve brought him around to the entrance ramp of the parkway.  
    A viciously bright white light swept over and engulfed him.   At the edges, in the distance, weaker gleams of red and blue flashed.   The brilliant high beams immersed the car as he jerked the wheel hard to the right.  
    The liquor had shaved a second off his reflexes and kept him from stomping on the brake in time.   The explosive sound of sirens swallowed him whole—why hadn't he heard them before?—and the blaring of a single enraged truck horn cut through everything else.   
    My God, Chase thought, looking over.  
    It was a pickup on a deadly angle not even ten feet away, and then only five, then two.   Christ, that fucker is—
    The thunderous noise of metal smashing metal was like nothing that had ever existed before.  
    He felt—he knew—that for an instant he had somehow ceased to exist, as the pain erupted across him all at once.   His neck, shoulders, and legs burned in agony even while his hands were doing magnificent things without him.  
    He didn't understand it and simply watched while he wrenched the wheel and tried to ride out the mad careening spin.
    Plumes of dirt spit up across the hood and brush toppled before the