Tomorrow We Die Read Online Free Page A

angle.
    The day had kept me moving, doing, talking. As the high waned from the scholarship news, the inevitable quiet of evening crept in. It made it impossible to ignore the shadowy plane of hurt that lay just beneath the surface of my consciousness, ever present and waiting for me to slow down. The memory of that day . . . the long lingering wound that refused to mend.
    Was I fooling myself? Was I foolish to think that med school and becoming an ER physician would make things any different, that it would somehow enable me to overcome the pain?
    To outwit death?
    The rain from that day didn’t stop, nor did the images of that shattered windshield.
    I traced a finger over the small scar at my hairline.
    My father ambled in wearing boxers and a collared button-up shirt. “Hey, Jonner.” He held an empty gin glass that he took to the kitchen.
    He rarely drank in front of me. As though that would somehow cross a line. It would actually admit that he was doing it. That he was an alcoholic. And it would set a bad example for his son. Didn’t matter that I was twenty-six and doing more of the caring and providing for him than the other way around. Only God knew how he’d fare if I left him alone.
    But I would leave him – in a month’s time. “Hey, Dad.”
    Tap water echoed in his glass. “How was the day?” He said the words as if they were lyrics to a song. I knew by then that he wasn’t inquiring so much as delivering a requisite greeting, like saying the pledge of allegiance.
    I counted the stars in Orion’s Belt. The moonlight iced blue the peaks of Mount Rose.
    I took a deep breath. “I got the call today. I made it. A full-ride scholarship to UNR Med School.”
    Red lights from an airplane diminished as it ascended from the valley. The bare limbs of our oak shook with a sudden breeze.
    I turned. The kitchen was empty. The flickers of my father’s television illuminated the hallway.
    The thin façade of normalcy fell away, and the dark ocean of pain churned inside of me.
    I grimaced and pushed my lips together.
    “Good night, Dad.”

CHAPTER 05
    I jolted awake with my alarm clock at 5:20 Saturday morning . I opened the blinds and stared at the sliver of dawn over the eastern hills. In the kitchen I flicked on my iPod at its docking station. Charlie Parker bebopped from the speakers as I brought the paper in from the front doorstep.
    I used to be in the habit of reading a chapter from the Bible each morning. A “quiet time.” Silence, however, had become increasingly unpalatable, and subsequently, minutes that should have been spent conversing with God were now filled with distractions and noise, the modern panacea for a troubled soul.
    I stared into the pantry. A box of Alpha-Bits remained the last cereal selection. Yeah, Alpha-Bits. Shopping when I was hungry was always a bad idea. I’d go to buy the staples and come home with Fruity Pebbles and beef jerky.
    I sat with my bowl and glanced down the hallway. The door to my dad’s room hung ajar, his snoring rhythmic and hard to ignore. My head felt cloudy and unfocused. I was about to take a bite of cereal when a grouping of letters in the milk caught my attention.
    REPA
    I used my spoon to move the A to the front and guided an O to the end.
    AREPO
    “Arepo . . .”
    “Arepo the Sower holds the wheels at work . . .”
    I brought my hands away from the bowl, as though it had become a crystal ball. I took a glance at the ingredients on the side of the cereal box.
    I need coffee.
    After a quick shower, I changed into my medic uniform and threw a lunch into a collapsible cooler. I was out the door before six and arrived at the ambulance headquarters fifteen minutes before shift, meeting up with Bones in the ambulance bay.
    Sitting in the back of Medic Two, he ran his fingers over medication vials bedded in foam inside a plastic drug container.
    He looked up. “Greetings, visitor from planet Sleep. How goes your journey to the land of waking?”
    I stowed my