Soul Survivor Read Online Free

matter how mad it made Daddy.

    Almost two months after the nightmares began, James was still thrashing and shrieking, but this time Andrea set out to try
     to discover what he was saying. His cries, she realized, were not just incomprehensible sounds—there were also words. Once
     she’d deciphered some of them, she came quickly back down the hallway and shook her husband awake.
    “Bruce, you need to hear what he’s saying.”
    Bruce was groggy. “What do you mean?”
    “Bruce,
you need to hear what he’s saying.
” Bruce was annoyed, but he pulled himself out of bed, muttering, “What the hell is going on here!”
    Then, as he stood in his son’s doorway, he also began to pick out the words, and his resentment faded.
    He was lying there on his back, kicking and clawing at the covers… like he was trying to kick his way out of a coffin. I thought,
     this looks like
The Exorcist
—I half expected his head to spin around like that little girl in the movie. I even thought I might have to go and get a priest.
     But then I heard what James was saying…
    “Airplane crash! Plane on fire! Little man can’t get out!”
    Those were the very words, the actual text of James’s outcries. The child flung his head back and forth and screamed the same
     thing over and over and over: “Airplane crash! Plane on fire! Little man can’t get out! Airplane crash! Plane on fire! Little
     man can’t get out!”
    Now, it was not long after James’s second birthday; he was just learning to speak in complex sentences, just finding a language
     to fit his thoughts. And yet, what he was screaming as he thrashed around his bed that spring were words so rich in detail,
     so plausibly offered, so unchildlike in their desperation, that Bruce Leininger was struck silent. In all his life, he’d been
     the problem solver, the go-to guy, the man who could make things right because he understood the nature of almost any problem,
     grasped its geography, and managed to find a solution. But standing in that doorway of his child’s bedroom, he was paralyzed—and
     a little frightened. These panicked phrases could not have come out of nowhere; on that point he was certain.

CHAPTER TWO
    T HERE WERE PLENTY of tantalizing clues about what was happening to young James Leininger. If Bruce and Andrea hadn’t been so
     busy skidding around their own high dramas—a killing workload and yet another domestic realignment—they might have guessed
     earlier that it had something to do with airplanes.
    But there were too many distractions that kept them from following the trail—an oversight that they would more than make up
     for in the coming months. Foremost was getting settled into their new hometown of Lafayette, Louisiana.
    The start of the new millennium had been grueling. First, there was the dread of a Y2K meltdown, which, thankfully, didn’t
     happen, though it nevertheless spiked everyone’s nerves. Then there was the actual physical move from Dallas to Lafayette—a
     hectic, hysterical, complicated repositioning of hearth and home.
    The logistics alone were bumpy. But for Andrea there was an added bit of sadness; it was the emotional wrench of leaving her
     sisters and her mother four hundred miles away. Nevertheless, she was a good soldier and understood that her husband’s working
     life was at a critical juncture and that her job was to support him. And so, on Thursday, March 1, 2000, Bruce and Andrea
     closed the deal on their seventy-year-old Acadian house in the leafy upscale subdivision of White Oak.
    But even as she tried to get herself into the right spirit, (it was an early spring, and the azaleas were in full bloom—the
     town was a heart-catching watercolor of pink and white and red), she was blindsided by a cold bolt of reality. Before they
     could move into their charming house on West St. Mary Boulevard, the Leiningers would have to spend a long weekend in a seedy
     little room four miles away on Edie Ann Drive, in the