The Army of the Republic by Stuart Archer Cohen

Author:Stuart Archer Cohen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Thrillers, General, Political, Dystopian, Fiction
ISBN: 9780312383770
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2008-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

When I woke up the next morning, he’d thrown a flannel bathrobe on and was sitting beside the bed with a blue ceramic teapot. Almost like a real boyfriend. “Good morning, beautiful. What do you want for breakfast? I’ve got eggs, yogurt, toast, oatmeal.”

“That all sounds wonderful.”

“One of everything. I’ll be right back.”

I propped myself up on the bed and sipped the tea. The usual winter haze had lifted, and a skewed rectangle of white sunshine reached across the wall beside the back window. I could see the branches outside were covered with a crust of snow, and I felt a little thrill of happiness. During the night Lando had thrown a burgundy-colored afghan over the bed, and I felt for a moment like I was in one of those perfect country homes from a housewares catalog, a never-ending morning of snowy sheets and steaming mugs, where the dog is somewhere downstairs and the fireplace is magically burning and no one will come to your door or call you on the phone to trample your peace. I held the cup below my nose and basked in the lemony vapor. We could just stay here for a while. All day. A couple of days. It was a weekend now. Maybe it would snow again. I had a right to disappear beneath the snow. Even the earth itself did that sometimes.

I felt a light winter chill on my shoulders and breasts, and I started searching the floor around the bed for the T-shirt I’d pulled off the night before. I came across something hard and angular, and glanced over the edge. It was a pistol. I’d never held a gun before. I picked it up carefully.

It was so dense and black, while the room was so airy and pale. Something dark and heavy seemed to billow out from it. I remembered how callous Lando had been when he’d talked about John Polling’s assassination. I heard his footsteps on the stairs; then he was standing at the top of the stairs with a tray in his hands, looking at me.

“A gun and a Bible,” he said, “the two things every real American has at his bedside.”

“Do you really know how to use this thing?”

“Of course. It’s an HK thirty-two. Eight in the clip, one in the chamber. You squeeze the grip and it’s cocked. But don’t.”

My question came from out of nowhere, a joke that wasn’t a joke. “Did you kill John Polling with this?”

A shadow passed across his face; then he gave me a look of good-natured condescension. “John Polling was killed by a .308 Winchester. That’s a hunting rifle. What you’re holding is a semiautomatic pistol that’s not accurate beyond about fifty feet. Twenty feet if I’m shooting it.”

“Why do you keep it by your bed?”

He answered with a tentative lilt at the end of his sentences, as if he were speaking a foreign language and trying to get the grammar right. “Because there’re people who would kind of like to

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