Bad Blood

Начало книги

Pain beyond words, he thinks. Now I know what it is.

Learn for life, he thinks, and his gallows-humor laugh is silent. Learn for death, he thinks, and instead of laughter: yet another mute, infernal scream.

As the pain mounts its next attack, he knows with a kind of crystal-clear certainty that he has laughed his last laugh.

The pain is no longer deepening. With what he can still make out as a mixture of satisfaction and terror, he feels that its intensity has reached its peak, and he understands just what process is now under way.

The downward slope.

The graph of pain is no longer rising; it is leveling out, and beyond it he can glimpse the steep incline that will, with the inevitability of a playground slide, end in nothingness. Or-and he fights the thought-with God.

The pores of his body are wide open, small gaping mouths roaring the great Why that he can’t roar himself.

The images start to come to him; he knew they would. They come even as the pain increases to levels he couldn’t have imagined even in his wildest fantasies. He is surprised at the possibilities that have lain hidden within him all these years.

Читать дальше →