Blue Light Read Free Page A

The oak outside the window was full of leaves. The sky above the highest limb was a dark blue.
    Late afternoon. The thought blew through Horace’s mind, something he still knew between the cancer cells that crowded his brain. When the sun goes down, he remembered, when the night comes and all the pretty girls put perfume on they necks and thighs. He thought of bees then and the stinging pain. He smiled because there soon wouldn’t be any pain for him to fear.
    A drum was beating and he wondered if what Jimmie T had said in Attica were true; was Africa in him? Was this drum some long, long ago memory in the back of his mind? Would he awake on some vast savanna where the first men walked and made life?
    But the beating was just the fast tempo of his heart, the rhythm of life pumping quickly in his veins, trying to outrun death one last time — the final act of a wasted life.
    He felt the falling again. The cascading leaf now slicing the air with a downward dip. Then there came a racing toward the ground. A quick downdraft, and suddenly Horace was dead — his eyes still open but no longer seeing the tree in the window.
    Human time stopped in the tiny room. The clock lost its meaning but still checked off the moments that once might have been. Horace was gone.
    And then that quick shaft of blue light — a commuter minutes too late for his train — shone its full radiance into the dead stare.
    Horace was gone, but the urgency of the blue light on the cells still living in his eyes coursed through his body like a seismic eruption. Life leaping from one dead synapse to another, demanding one last act. The deep breath of the corpse and his lurching leap from the bed caused a racket.
    Gregory jumped out of his TV chair down below and hurried up the stairs.
    The corpse that was Horace dragged itself to the lamp on the table across from his bed. He ripped the cord from the pink ceramic vase and shoved the bare wire into his mouth.
    Fat Gregory took three steps with his first stride. Three hundred pounds dragging on his heart as he went.
    Electricity combined with the equations of light and played through every cell in the dead man’s body. The cancer withered, and the cool resolve of life engaged the lungs and bones and breath of this once-man. His skinny, naked body pocked with sores. His hair matted, eyes yellow. His forgotten cock just a lump of sagging skin.
    Gregory made it to Horace’s door but had to stop to catch his breath. He looked at the door and listened. All he could hear was the theme song of The Wild Wild West from the television two floors below. Night was close at hand, and Gregory felt a twinge of fear. He decided to go back downstairs. He decided to let Elza come home and find her brother dead in there. Gregory was sure that Horace was dead. If he wasn’t dead before he fell, then the fall must have killed him.
    But if Elza found him on the floor and he was cold then she would blame him. And what kind of woman could he find if she left him? He was fat and unemployed. All it would take was a quick look and then a call to the hospital.
    Gregory opened the door.
    The blue glare hovered over the zombie in an electric arc. Yellow eyes glowed from the brown skull as black lips sucked on the lamp cord.
    Horace looked up, moving the cord to the side of his mouth like it was the stem of a water pipe.
    “Run, Gregory,” the corpse said in a voice that was like Horace but, then again, was not.
    “What you say, Horace LaFontaine?”
    “Run, Gregory. Run now. Enjoy your last days as a man on this rock. Run.”
    Gregory took a step toward his brother-in-law. He wasn’t afraid, not really afraid. The man had just gone crazy with the disease. Gregory reached out to take the wire from Horace’s lips, and the blue/electric shock hit him. All three hundred pounds of unemployed dockworker went flying backward, through the doorway and down the top flight of stairs.
    Gregory kept going. He ran down Laramie Street. Not