The Nervous System Read Online Free

dumbwaiter, stick it in, and send it downstairs. Press the button to open the bottom of the lift, dump the box, recall the dumbwaiter, and jam the thing by removing the control faceplate, and the buttons with it. This I stash with the rest of my gear. Close the door to the cubby, a wood contraption with fake book spines. I’ve gotten a lot more careful of late, used to just leave my things out in the open.
    Kill the power to the building and grab my flashlight next to the fuse box. Purell TM up, pull on a fresh pair of gloves, and raise my mask. Settle in with a copy of Experiencing Totalitarianism , in the original Latvian. Happy with how my Latvian is coming together. I must have absorbed some along the way during this recent period of action.
    See, I can read and speak an unknown number of languages. Not cause I’m some kind of linguistic genius. It’s cause the government stuck something in my head that allows me to do this. Sound batshit crazy? Indeed it might be.
    But dig it, as this is a solid fact: I am constantly surprising myself with a total command of new and unexpected languages. Languages I’ve never heard of. I don’t know the extent of it, this “gift,” this unearned ability.
    But apparently Latvian wasn’t written into the master code, cause I’m struggling with it a tad.
    Get hung up on the sentence, “As the Fourth Panzer division crossed the border …” Not sure of the Latvian word for “division,” perhaps they mean “battalion” or “regiment,” trying to recall the difference in terminology, this thought-stutter like a skip in an old LP record, and gradually sleep takes me.

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    A loud crack jerks me out of the only goddamn dream I ever have. The one where somebody who looks and feels a lot like me murders my wife and child.
    I roll sideways, pop open my camouflaged cubbyhole, and root around in there for a couple seconds. Withdraw my guns and come to a squatting position. Wide awake now. Listening to my blood. Listening to the dark.
    Another snap, down the hall. And a third.
    My pistachio shells. Laid out on the stairwell. Somebody tramping on ’em. Means visiting hours start now, like it or not.
    I raise the Beretta and the Sig.
    Can’t see shit. I hear my flashlight, which fell off my chest as I popped up, rolling toward the back of the room. Somewhere amongst my gear I have those night-vision goggles, but I can’t go foraging for them now.
    I have that CZ-99 as well, it occurs to me, but I’ve never fired it, so best to stick to the known.
    There, in the hallway, thin shafts of light. Getting steadily brighter, less diffuse.
    The lights round the corner into my room, four slivers dancing vertically, making jerky sweeps. Just under these, moving in tandem with the light, red lasers cast pinpricks on bookshelves, tabletops.
    Tactical weaponry. Customized, expensive. I experience something like envy, but just for a sec. Mostly cause for all my lone-wolf posturing, I do miss being part of a posse. Pack animals, after all.
    I grin, nasty. No problem. Aim just north of the beams, take two of them out, one of the remaining two will panic and do something stupid. Positively no sweat.
    Cock both guns.
    And a metal object is pressed into the back of my head.
    â€œDrop ’em, shitbird.” Scratchy-voiced male behind my right ear.
    Hell, I do it. If these people were skilled enough to get in here, get behind me, me sleeping like a baby lamb? Strictly pro shit, and I do not want to play cute.
    â€œOn your stomach, go.”
    A boot in my back and the floor meets my face. Thinking: goddamn. Mental flab. Going soft. Events should not be rolling out in this manner.
    â€œSubject is disarmed. Repeat, subject is disarmed and secured, over.” Calm and cool, like, all biz.
    Heavy boot on my neck now. I’ll be goddamned.
    There’s a crackling of radios, somebody talking about “fuse box,