The Reborn (The Day Eight Series Part 1) Read Online Free Page B

wasn’t going to fit over the white line. Before the bus driver could turn her away, Trevor squeezed past and jumped out. “She can have my fare,”  he called back to the driver, who gave Trevor a two-finger salute and pulled away.
    Trevor continued on foot. Slowly, he began to notice that traffic jammed the streets and people were steadily streaming out of the commercial buildings.
    What’s going on?
    There was a supermarket just ahead, and he needed to pick up a few things. It always felt like he needed to pick up a few things.
    Something he loved about New York were the little delis, pharmacies, mom-and-pop grocers, hardware retailers, smoke shops, and take-out restaurants peppered everywhere. Many open all hours, and close enough that he could run out in his bathrobe at 3:00 am if he felt like it. Sometimes he felt safer that way. Nobody ever robs a guy in a bathrobe.
    He found the supermarket entrance locked with a Closed sign taped to the glass. Trevor pressed his forehead to the cold window and stared in. Nobody was shopping. There were just lines at the registers.
    He could see the check-out clerks writing on pads of paper and a few of them on phones, holding up credit cards, punching digits on keypads.
    This was definitely not normal. The uneasy feeling crept back into Trevor’s stomach.
     
    ~
     
    Trevor Leighton’s apartment was a one bedroom with a kitchenette so small he had to stand to the side of the stove to open the oven door. But the upside was that it was a corner unit that caught extra light from grand windows.
    A framed childhood photo of him and his sister, Amy, warmed up the windowsill. She sat on his shoulders with her arms out like a plane, and he smiled up at her with a half-painful grimace. He remembered that moment, barely being able to hold her up, their parents looking on with concern, but he loved how much fun she’d been having. That was when he was nine years old, and she was six, just a year before she died. Trevor smiled from the bottom of his heart, then cursed God with the whole of it.
    He tossed his keys on the coffee table next to his brittle bonsai tree and frowned. They were impossible to keep alive. Maybe they were committing tree suicide from depression in his lonely apartment.
    Trevor flopped onto his blue couch and wondered how to spend his day off. A poster on the wall behind him read, “What would Einstein do?” with a picture of Albert Einstein shrugging.
    Einstein would listen to music. Trevor queued up some MP3s and decided to change the ones on his memory stick for work. When he connected it he was surprised to find all his music gone. In its place sat text files… lots of text files. He scrolled down. There were tens of thousands, all with the same nonsensical name suffixed with a number:
     
ciioodllnrsw_000000.txt
ciioodllnrsw_000001.txt
ciioodllnrsw_000002.txt
ciioodllnrsw_000003.txt
…
     
    He double-clicked a few random ones to open them. Nothing inside but garbled data.
    Trevor scrolled quickly to the bottom of the list and shuddered.
     
…
ciioodllnrsw_078556.txt
ciioodllnrsw_078557.txt
helpme.txt
     
    Trevor looked over his shoulder; he wasn’t sure why he did this; he hadn’t expected to see someone there. He was just creeped out.
    He opened the “helpme.txt” file and read it.
     
Is anyone out there? I’m not sure if this will work. I’m trapped and they won’t let me leave. The men in white coats won’t listen to me. There are times when I can’t feel anything. I’m scared.
     
Oscar said he would try to send this for me, he’s the only one that understands. I don’t know what to do. My daddy... he’s kept me here for so long... weeks, months. He says I can’t go, but I want to leave. I want to be free again.
     
If anyone can hear me, my address is NIC2114B70057763095426, Eileithyia.
     
My name is Allison Winters.
     
    Trevor read it, then read it again. Then he read it two more times, slowly. He glanced over his shoulder