Dark Advent Read Free

to wear had picked today to come out of the woodwork.
    A half-hour ago, Jason had left work after a day of pushing casual and dress on a steady trickle of customers at Kelly’s Men’s Wear. He’d walked the three blocks to his apartment in brain-searing heat, giving himself a quiet but efficient cursing for not having driven. He spent the blocks scanning the streets for familiar cars and familiar faces, and found none. Kind of evocative of the way his whole summer was going.
    Jason Hart hated admitting it, even to himself, but the town he’d called home for twenty-one years was turning alien on him. Small hometowns seemed prone to do that sometimes, the faces changing as the familiar ones disappeared in search of greener pastures. As they left behind those who wondered, and watched, and waited. Human nature, he guessed. Why should the southern Illinois town of Mt. Vernon be any different?
    He finished stretching in the grass by the city park’s largest asphalt lot, pulling calves, thighs, hamstrings, Achilles tendons. He tied a bandanna around his head to keep his hair from slapping his eyes. A few deep breaths and he was moving, setting a steady rhythm of arms, legs, and lungs.
    Alien…
    What should have been one hell of a summer was going down the tubes. A few weeks before, mid-May had seen him wrap up his spring semester at the University of Illinois. All he had to do was enjoy the summer as much as humanly possible, then return for his senior year, graduation, and diploma…that grail-like ticket to the Real World.
    But the only person who really gave a damn that he was back was John Kelly, and Jason turned to him only after it looked like there wasn’t going to be much else to do. He didn’t need the job, but a guy could only take so much beer and cable TV. Jason took his old on-again, off-again summer job back at Kelly’s Men’s Wear, settling into a summer of complacency and routine, wondering if middle age hadn’t crept up a whole lot sooner than it should’ve.
    His friends were gone, the group fragmented as far as Arizona, and regardless of anyone’s best intentions, nobody kept in touch as much as they’d promised. Letters take time, phone calls mean money. Promises are cheap. The cost lies in keeping them.
    Jason picked up the pace a little; streams of sweat became rivers.
    He’d spent most of the summer thus far by himself, a solitary figure going through the motions of what he’d done in an earlier time. He went to movies, and went swimming at the lakes, and sometimes just drove aimlessly, a six- or twelve-pack of beer in the other seat for company. He often caught himself watching girls he knew had to still be in high school, walking that narrow limbo between adolescence and womanhood that he found incredibly appealing.
    And then there was the apartment, a summer sublet that seemed bigger with every passing day. It was more than he needed, with a small bar, walnut paneling, a balcony, all the appliances, within walking distance of the downtown area…but what the hell. It wasn’t like he couldn’t afford it now.
    Jason circled the park’s pond, high-stepping over the roots of trees that brooded over the water like sentinels. Ducks and a few geese paddled in lazy paths across the water, toward the shore or the little islands where they nested.
    It was here that he’d first taken up running, years ago. He’d grown up here, and remembered it from a time when the trees seemed a lot taller and the pond seemed a lot wider. The days of innocence, before the future loomed ahead like a vengeful god. Before he found out that death was real, and final.
    Seven years…that’s how long he figured this steady diet of running had lasted. Jason let it slide only in cases of sickness and the occasional hangover that was too awful to combat anywhere else but in bed. It had kept him in good shape; he was still boyishly lean, almost too much so for his height. He had a thin face, too, with a thin mouth, but his