J.R. Ward: Rapture

Nada.

Just graves and gaslights that, no matter how much his adrenal gland suggested otherwise, didn’t turn into anything else.

Cursing, he threw himself back into the effort, using the branch as a winch until he had enough space to squeeze through. Getting his sorry ass up off the ground was a production, but once he had his shoulders inside, he let gravity do the rest of the work. The concrete floor he landed on felt as if it had refrigerator coils in it, and he had to take a TO, his breath dragging down his throat, his gut going into a twist as pain sizzled in too many places to count—

Overhead, fluorescent lights flickered in the ceiling, and then glowed steady and sure, blinding him.

Goddamn motion sensors. The upside was that as soon as his eye adjusted, he had a clear shot at all kinds of mowers, weeders, and wheelbarrows. The downside? He was a diamond in a jewelry case, ready for the grabbing.

Over on the wall, hanging from pegs like the skins of dead animals, sets of waterproof overalls were a wardrobe waiting to happen, and he threw a bottom and a top on. The things were built to hang loose, but on him they flapped like boat sails.

Better. Better with the clothes, even though they smelled like fertilizer, and chafing was going to fast become an issue. A baseball hat on the counter had the Boston Red Sox logo on it, and he pulled the thing on to conserve body heat; then he looked around for anything he could use as a cane. The long-handled spades were going to weigh too much to be efficient, and it wasn’t like any of the rakes were going to help.

Screw it. His immediate mission critical was getting away from all the overhead light raining on his gimpy little parade.

He exited the way he’d come in, forcing himself through the open window again and landing hard on the ground. No time to bitch and complain at the impact; he had to get moving.

Before he’d died and gone to Hell, as it were, he’d been the pursuer. Shit, his whole life he’d been the hunter, the one who stalked and cornered and destroyed. Now, as he returned to the darkness of the graves, all the intangibles of the night were dangerous until proven otherwise.

He hoped he was back in Caldwell.

If he was, all he had to do was stay under the radar and gun for New York City, where he had a stash of supplies.

Yeah, he prayed this was Caldwell. Forty-five minutes south on the highway was all it would take, and he’d already broken and entered. Hot-wiring an older-generation car was a skill he could also resurrect.

A lifetime later, or at least it seemed that way, he came up to the wrought-iron fence that rimmed all the RIP acreage. The thing was ten feet high, and top-hatted with spikes that in an earlier life had probably been daggers.

Facing off at the bars that kept him on the side of the dead, he gripped them with his hands and felt the cold of the metal grab back. Looking upward, he focused on the heavens. The stars overhead actually twinkled.

Funny, he’d always thought that was just a saying.

Inhaling, he drew clean, fresh air into his lungs, and realized he’d grown used to the stench in Hell. In the beginning, it had been what he’d hated most, that nauseating, rotten-egg stink in the sinuses that invaded the back of his throat and traveled down to poison his gut: More than a bad smell, it had been an infection that had entered his nose and taken over from there, turning everything that he was into territory it owned.

But he had become inured to it.

Over time, and in the midst of suffering, he had acclimatized to the horror, the despair, the pain.

His bad eye, the one he couldn’t see out of, watered up.

He was never going to make it up there to the stars.

And this respite was probably just a way to heighten the torture. After all, there was nothing like a period of relief to revitalize a nightmare: When you returned to the shithole, the contrast sharpened everything up, wiping clean the acclimatization, the illusory Ctrl-Alt-Del resetting things to the initial shock he’d felt.

They would be coming again for him. It was, after all, exactly what he’d earned.

But for however long he had, he was going to fight the inevitable—not with hope of evasion, not for the possibility of a reprieve, but simply as an autonomic function of his hard wiring.

He fought for the same reason he’d done evil.

It was just what he did.

Pulling himself up off the ground, he wedged the better of his two feet into the bars and shoved his weight higher. Again. Again. The top seemed miles away, and its distance just made him focus more tightly on his goal.

After a lifetime, his palm locked on one of the spikes and then he linked his arm around the vicious point.

Blood was drawn a moment later as he swung his leg up and over the fence’s head and shoulders, one of those sharp-and-pointies biting into his calf and taking a hunk out of it.

There was no going back, though. He’d committed himself, and one way or the other gravity was going to win and take him down to earth—so better it be on the outside than the inside.

As he went into a free fall, he focused on the stars. Even reached a hand up to them.

The fact that they just got farther and farther away seemed apt.

Mels Carmichael was alone in the newsroom. Again.

Nine o’clock at night and the Caldwell Courier Journal ’s maze of cubicles was all office equipment, no people, tomorrow’s issue put to bed from a reporting standpoint, the printers now doing their work on the far side of the great wall behind her.

As she leaned back in her chair, the hinges let out a squeak, and she turned the thing into an instrument, playing a happy little ditty she’d composed after too many nights like this. The title was “Going Nowhere Fast,” and she whistled the soprano part.

“Still here, Carmichael?”

Mels straightened up and crossed her arms over her chest. “Hey, Dick.”

As her boss oiled his way into what little space she had, his overcoat was draped across his arm, and his tie was loose at his fleshy neck from yet another postgame wrap-up at Charlie’s.

“Working late again?” His eyes went to the buttons down the front of her shirt, like he was hoping the whiskey he’d sucked back had given him telekinetic powers. “I gotta tell you, you’re too pretty for this. Don’t you have a boyfriend?”

“You know me, all about the job.”

“Well…I could give you something to work on.”

Mels stared up at him, nice and steady. “Thanks, but I’m busy right now. Doing research on the prevalence of sexual harassment in previously male-dominated industries such as the airlines, sports…newspapers.”

Dick frowned as if his ears hadn’t heard what they’d been hoping for. Which was nuts. Her response to this act had been the same since day one.

Well over two years of shutting him down. God, had it been that long already?

“It’s illuminating.” She reached forward and gave her mouse a push, clearing the screen saver. “Lots of statistics. Could be my first national story. Gender issues in postfeminist America are a hot topic—course, I could just put it on my blog. Maybe you’d give me a quote for it?”

Dick shifted his raincoat around. “I didn’t assign that to you.”

“I’m a self-starter.”

His head lifted as if he were looking for someone else to harass. “I only read what I assign.”

“You might find it valuable.”

The guy went to loosen his tie like he needed some air, but surprise! It was already open. “You’re wasting your time, Carmichael. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

As he walked off, he pulled on that Walter Cronkite raincoat of his, the one with the seventies lapels, and the belt that hung loose from loops like part of his intestine was not where it should be. He’d probably had the thing since the decade of Watergate, the work of Woodward and Bernstein inspiring his twenty-year-old self to his own paper chase…that had culminated at the top of a medium city’s masthead.