Send Me by Patrick Ryan

Author:Patrick Ryan [Ryan, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-440-33580-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2006-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

He woke up early the next morning. With careful, quiet movements, he washed his face, brushed his teeth, and pulled on his shoes. He found a pen in Teresa’s purse, and on the back of the brown paper lunch sack in which she’d packed their toiletries, he scribbled a note saying that he’d gone to the island to check on the house and the store. “Back soon,” he wrote, and signed it with an R.

The perimeter of the vinyl curtain was glowing. When he opened the door, the room was flooded with sunlight. He put on his sunglasses, stepped outside, and eased the door shut behind him.

The asphalt was covered in a damp carpet of palmetto fronds and pine needles that slid beneath his shoes. The station wagon had leaves stuck to its roof and sides, and a branch as big as Roy’s arm lay across the long, navy-blue hood. He lifted the branch and threw it aside, wincing at the dent it had made in the dorsal ridge running down the center. With the wipers smearing pine needles across the windshield, he backed out of the parking space, wound his way around the motel, and accelerated onto the highway.

There had been and were always going to be worse things. Someone had died, maybe, in this hurricane, and it lifted his spirits to realize that he earnestly wished no one had. There may have been lootings, burglary, rape; anything was possible because there were always people willing to take advantage of catastrophes. He imagined a lead story in the Today paper about some local shop owner besieged by such villains, and feeling his own disgust at reading such a headline, he felt better about himself. There were some sick people in the world. Men with everyday faces, capable of unimaginable crimes. Child molestation. Cannibalism. Human torture. He veered into the left lane, the right blocked, suddenly, by a mangled roadside marquee, its frame twisted, its red arrow snubbed against the pavement. The car clopped over the train tracks and he drove through the scattered trash of downtown Cocoa, back to the bridge, where, at its summit midway across the river, he saw the island before him, green and silent and abandoned: a floating sliver of calm.

He was the last man standing. He was the Omega Man: torn by circumstance from what he cared about most, piloting his craft through this ruined landscape, resolved and fearless and anxious in the same mile. The electricity was still out here. The neon signs for the Tiki Lounge and the Ping Pong Motel were reduced to dull gray script. The unlit façade of the First National Bank looked tomblike. He turned north onto Courtenay and wove around traffic that was light but moving at an annoyingly slow pace, until at last he reached the parking lot of Driftwood Terrace. Several terracotta roof shingles had been blown off and lay shattered on the asphalt. He drove over this detritus to the end of the row and parked in front of the door to apartment 6.

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