Odd Interlude Part Two Read Online Free Page B

When he uses my family to kill me, I want to be able to keep telling them how much I love them, that I don’t blame them, that I’ll pray for them.”

TEN
    This is not one of the easiest things I have ever done: leaving Jolie alone with the mummified remains in the yellow yet nonetheless dreary corridor, which could as likely be the path to Hell or, worse, one of those airport passageways that leads inevitably to a coven of transportation-agency employees eager to strip-search Grandma, anal-probe a nun, and invite one and all to submit to a body scan that will trigger either bone cancer or the growth of a third eye in an inconvenient place. My ghost dog isn’t even here to watch over her.
    On the other hand, she has been alone in this hallway on many previous occasions. She is most likely safer here than anywhere in the Corner. Besides, although she
is
a girl and a child, she has as much hair on her chest, figuratively speaking, as I do.
    With the mini flashlight in one hand and the pistol in the other, I retrace the route along which she led me: through pried-open doors, across two spacious air locks or decontamination chambers. In the stainless-steel walls, holes like the muzzles of rifles take aim at me.
    When I arrive at the concrete culvert that previously we passed through in absolute darkness, I pause to sweep the narrow beam over the walls. I am reminded of a maze of such drains about which I wrote in the second volume of these memoirs; in that place I was almost killed more than once. Of course, I can’t allow myself to be wary of one place merely because it reminds me of another place where I almost died, because just about
every
place reminds me of another place where I almost died, whether it’s a police station or a church, or a monastery, or a casino, or an ice-cream shop. I’ve never almost died in a laundromat or a McDonald’s, or a sushi bar, but then I’m not yet quite twenty-two, and with luck, I’ll have a lot more years in which to almost die in all kinds of venues.
    I start along the inclined drain, recalling the original version of
Invaders from Mars
, 1953, in which evil scheming Martians secretly establish a subterranean fortress under a quiet American town, and actors wearing costumes with visible zippers up the back pretend to be otherworldly monsters, lumbering through tunnels on one nefarious mission or another. In spite of the zippers, it’s an eerie flick, a minor science-fiction classic, but there’s nothing in it as scary as half the people on any Sunday-morning episode of
Meet the Press
.
    Before I’ve gone far, I come to the first tributary drain on the right, which is as Jolie described it: about five feet in diameter, navigable only in a stoop. Because the girl previously explored this branch of the drains and knows that the end is sealed, I have no intention of taking a side trip.
    As I’m passing the opening, however, a noise halts me. Issuing from a distance, echoing along that smaller tunnel, arises a low rumbling-grinding sound as though some heavy metal object is moving across concrete. The flashlight beam doesn’t reach far, and just as I wonder if I’m hearing an immense iron ball rolling toward me, set loose by a malevolent alien with a zipper up its back, the sound stops.
    At once a draft springs up, smelling faintly of aged concrete. This is not the stale air of sluggish circulation through lightless realms. It’s fresh and clean, whispering against my face, ever so slightly stirring my hair, as pleasantly cool as morning air should be on a January day along the central California coast.
    If the upper end of this drain was previously sealed, it is evidently not sealed now. Who opened it and why are of immediate importance, because the timing is unlikely to be coincidental.
    No further noise ensues, no slightest sound of anyone descending.
    Although no one is likely to have seen Jolie and me fleeing to the beach in the moonless dark, though the girl has