Dead Town Read Online Free Page A

Sometimes you could almost like him.
    Nummy was never angry. He was too dumb to be angry. That was one of the best things about being really dumb, so dumb they didn’t even make you go to school: You just couldn’t think about anything hard enough to get angry over it.
    He and Mr. Lyss were an odd couple, like odd couples in some movies that Nummy had seen. In those kind of movies, the odd-couple guys were always cops, one of them calm and nice, the other one crazy and funny. Nummy and Mr. Lyss weren’t cops at all, but they were really different from each other. Mr. Lysswas the crazy and funny one, except that he wasn’t that funny.
    Nummy was thirty, but Mr. Lyss must be older than anyone else who was still alive. Nummy was pudgy and round-faced and freckled, but Mr. Lyss seemed to be made mostly of bone and gristle and thick skin with a million creases in it like some beat-up old leather jacket.
    Sometimes Mr. Lyss was so interesting you couldn’t stop looking at him, kind of like in a movie when the little red numbers were counting down on the bomb clock. But at other times, staring at him too much could wear you out, and you had to turn away to give your eyes a rest. The snow was soft and cool to look at, floating down through the dark like tiny angels all in white.
    “The snow’s real pretty,” Nummy said. “It’s a pretty night.”
    “Oh, yeah,” Mr. Lyss said, “it’s a magical night, breathtaking beauty everywhere you look, prettier than all the prettiness in all the pretty Christmas cards ever made—except for the ravenous monster Martians all over town
eating people faster than a wood-chipper could chew up a damn potato
!”
    “I didn’t forget them Martians,” Nummy said, “if that’s what they are. But the night’s pretty anyway. So what do you want to do, you want to drive out to the end of town, maybe see are the cops and the roadblock still there?”
    “They’re not cops, boy. They’re monsters pretendingto be cops, and they’ll be there till they’ve eaten everyone in town.”
    Although Mr. Lyss drove slowly, sometimes the back end of the car fishtailed or it slid toward one curb or the other. He always got control again before they hit anything, but already they needed a car with tire chains or winter tires.
    If Mr. Lyss stole another car, one with tire chains, and if Nummy went with him, knowing from the start it was stealing, he would probably be a thief himself. Grandmama raised him, so the bad things he did would bring shame on her in front of God, where she was now.
    Nummy said, “You don’t really know the monster cops are still there till you go look.”
    “I know, all right.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because I’m a freaking genius,” Mr. Lyss said, spraying spit, gripping the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles looked as sharp as knives. “I just
know
things, my brain is so damn big. Back there in jail this morning, we hadn’t known each other two minutes till I knew you were a dummy, didn’t I?”
    “That’s true,” Nummy admitted.
    On the cross street ahead of them, a police car passed south to north, and Mr. Lyss said, “This is no good. We’ll never get out of town in a car. We’ve got to find another way.”
    “Maybe we could go out the same way you come in. I always wanted to take me a ride on a train.”
    “A cold, empty boxcar isn’t the glamorous fun it sounds like. Anyway, they’ll have the train yard covered.”
    “Well, we can’t fly.”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Lyss said. “If your skull is as hollow as it seems to be, I could tie a basket to your feet, blow hot air up your nose, and ride you out of here like you were a big old balloon.”
    For a block or so, Nummy thought about that as the old man switched on the defroster and as the windshield, which had started to cloud at the edges, became clear once more. Then he said, “That don’t make no sense unless it was just you being mean.”
    “You may be right.”
    “I