Disintegration Read Online Free

awakening.
    "I want to see her. Where is she?" he screamed at Renee. He didn't care if she lied. He just needed an answer, any answer, or the hard concrete in his chest would let no more air pass.
    Renee stopped at the door, hunched and shivering. She cupped her hands and leaned against the wall, slowly sliding down its surface like the victim of a firing squad.
    "Mr. Wells," the doctor said, pulling him against the pillow. "Don't make me have to call for assistance."
    "Fuck you," Jacob said, yanking free and pulling himself onto the rail. He caught a fleeting glimpse of himself in the mirror, a wild-eyed lab animal breaking free of a cruel experiment, its flesh mottled red. Then he went over. The respirator tube must have become disconnected, because oxygen escaped with a snakelike hiss. The loose tube protruded from Jacob's mouth as his torso struck the floor, one leg tangled in the bed rails, the other twisted in the sheets. He kicked free, ignoring the pain that chopped him with its hundred dull axes.
    He scrabbled across the floor like a paraplegic crab, Dr. Masutu in a hurry somewhere across the room, Renee shaking. The tiles were cool against his skin, and the thin hospital gown had come undone. The strings dangled down the backs of his legs, lit firecracker fuses. His whole body was heating up, swollen dynamite, a bilious volcano about to erupt.
    He reached Renee and pulled her hands from her face. Her green eyes were drowned with red, her face twenty years older than he remembered it. She was a stranger, he was a stranger, and neither belonged to this world. Not where things like this happened.
    Jacob grabbed the respirator tube with one hand and pulled it from his throat. A piece of skin broke free from his lip and clung to the clear plastic. If only he could tear himself away a piece at a time, like a jigsaw puzzle in reverse, and undo his own existence. But even if he vanished, Joshua would still be there, and then Joshua would have everything.
    "
Tell
... me...," he said. "
Where
?"
    She turned away and sobbed some words against the white surface of the wall.
    He touched her hair, fought an urge to clamp his fingers around the strands and slam the truth out of her.
    Her words were invisible bullets: "You said it wouldn't happen again."
    Dr. Masutu moved somewhere above them, and someone else had entered the room. They may as well have been shadows on the wall, for all Jacob noticed or cared. Dr. Masutu shouted some sort of command, but Jacob obeyed only one master now and that was his naked need to know.
    "Where is she?" He grabbed Renee's chin, forced her to face him. Hands grabbed at him, plowing new furrows of agony on his shoulders.
    "Where do you think?" Renee's lips trembled, bitten through in spots, cheeks shiny with tears. She appeared to have escaped the fire without injury. At least any visible, physical hurt.
    "She's in the hospital, isn't she?"
    "You said nothing would ever happen to her."
    "Please, Mr. Wells," came Dr. Masutu's voice as if from another land, one where reason prevailed and patients were expected to will themselves back to health.
    Jacob elbowed the doctor away and climbed onto Renee, his left leg skewed limp and useless. Half of him wanted to crawl inside her and hide, to seek those soft places that had always offered him sanctuary. The other half wanted her to bleed, to suffer, to choke on her words. And that half was taking over.
    He drew back his hand to slap her. Dr. Masutu tried to grab his wrist, but he squirmed free, losing another piece of skin in the process. He swept his hand toward her face and her eyes locked on his, not blinking against the blow. Inviting him. Daring him.
    And he stopped.
    She couldn't win. Not like this.
    He collapsed into a fetal position, the ointment sticky against the tiles. The floor smelled of pine cleanser and bleach. Dr. Masutu gave directions to the nurse, and someone was mopping up fluid. Dr. Masutu knelt and took Jacob's arm. This time, Jacob