Risen Read Online Free Page B

motorcycle, a used Honda he'd bought to dispel his egghead image and to keep from having to share a ride with Galen, Darren or Buzzy. Motorcycles were dangerous, but riding with any of his friends was pure suicide.
    Car talk dominated the boys' conversation. Sex came in a close second. Everything else squeaked in around the edges.
    Sitting on the fender, Darren blew a fart that rattled the sheet metal and prompted a lot of arm waving. Kent commented that it was lucky they weren't still smoking or they'd all have gone up in flames.
    "That really happens to some people," Buzzy said. "They just go on fire for no reason."
    "Bullshit," Galen said.
    "No, it's true. They call it something."
    "Spontaneous human combustion," Tom said.
    "Bullshit. People don't just explode."
    "Tell him about it, Tom," Buzzy said. "You know this shit."
    All eyes turned to Tom, the former honors student. He sighed. It seemed like he was always playing Mr. Wizard for his friends.
    "The human body's a controlled chemical reaction. We burn calories for fuel. That's why we have a temperature...ninety-eight point six, more or less. Only some people's thermostat goes haywire and their temperature goes up and up and doesn't stop. Eventually they literally burst into flame."
    Galen stared at Tom. He cast his gaze around the group of boys, fixing each one for a moment before returning to Tom. "You're shittin' me," he said.
    Tom shook his head. "It's the truth."
    Galen considered for a moment, then he raised his beer can high and grinned. "To spontaneous human fucking combustion!" he yelled. The boys clinked their cans together and drank.
    Galen sidled up next to Tom, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Just one thing," he said.
    Galen's arm whipped out and locked around Tom's neck. He bent Tom double and squeezed hard enough to show he wasn't kidding around. The other boys stiffened, but they didn't intervene. They'd learned better.
    "If I find out you were shittin' me," Galen hissed through clenched teeth, "I'll break your fucking neck, you get me?" He squeezed harder, and Tom protested.
    "I wasn't shitting you!"
    Galen let Tom go. Tom backed away, saying, "Jesus, Galen!"
    Galen took several animal steps around the small group, glaring a warning to each of them in turn, breathing hard through his nose. "And that goes for the rest of you, too," he said. The boys studied the ground intently.
    The night grew quiet. You never knew what would set Galen off. These rages would just come over him and there was nothing to do but ride it out. Galen drained his Coors and threw the can in the water.
    "Let's wake some people up," he said.
    Darren and Buzzy got into Darren's Satellite, Galen and Kent rode in Galen's Charger. The engines roared to life and the cars peeled out, spraying dirt.
    Tom, still smarting from his humiliation, kick-started the Honda and followed, wondering what in the hell he was doing but, at this moment in time, not really giving a good goddamn.
    ***
    Annie Culler, five years old, lay in the hospital bed. Her eyes were closed as if she were asleep. They had been closed for eight months. Her face had become gaunt, her eye sockets sunken and gray.
    The exuberant, teasing, giggling, willful little girl she had been was gone, and only the shell that had contained her spirit remained. But still the body lived. Doc Milford called it a "persistent vegetative state," but even that term couldn't capture the languor of her being. A vegetable was aware of the sun and the earth and the water and air. A plant could turn its face to the sunlight, could reach out limbs to gather the bounty of life, could seek and aspire and attain.
    Annie did none of these things. She had not done them for eight months and was not likely to ever do them again.
    The nurse's aide wadded Annie's old, soiled linen into a ball. She muttered to the orderly she glimpsed standing in the doorway.
    "Hopeless," she said. "Waste of hospital resources. Ought to just pull the plug and be