Dead Of Winter (The Rift Book II) Read Free

pressed shut while his brain kicked into overdrive. Everything that needed sorting out would run through his mind in those moments, from term papers that needed sprucing up to ideas for novels he wanted to flesh out to the myriad ways one could interpret the finer points of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock . Never once would he think of the coming exercise in athletic competition. That part of life, the physicality, was easy. To William, only what rested above his shoulders mattered.
    We’ve been given the gift of intelligence , Arthur Sweetney had been wont to say, and the only evil there is in the world are the men who don’t use that gift.
    Billy’s lips dropped into a frown. I am spending time in a prison, he mused, surrounded by nothing but rotting corpses, snow, and trees. What in the world is keeping me here? Is it uncertainty? Is it the comfort of the established? Is it fear? Yes, that was it. Fear.
    He kicked his body off the wall, went to his cell, his home for more than a decade, picked up his burlap sack and the binder that contained his life’s work, and took off as fast as his forty-six-year-old legs could carry him. Up the stairs he flew, feet skillfully weaving through the scattered carnage, and entered the mess hall. As usual, he ignored the butchery in the wide-open space, which was ten times worse than anywhere else in the building, and, when he reached the cafeteria serving line, leapt over the counter. He dropped to his knees behind the stainless-steel barricade of hotplates and storage cabinets and rummaged through his stash of non-perishables. He dropped cans of baked beans, split peas, and cream corn into his sack. Then he twirled on his heels and turned the dial on the lockbox behind him. Three twists later, the safe sprung open, and he removed the nine-millimeter pistol stored within. He checked to make sure the safety was still locked. Satisfied in its security, he wrapped the gun in a kitchen towel and dropped that in the bag, as well. The next order of business was the flashlight from under the rear sink and two signal flares from over the dry supply breakfront. He smiled. These items were packed away for a reason , he thought.
    Fear. Billy’s mind repeated the word over and over while he darted toward the prison’s front entrance. He threw open the front door and jumped into knee-high piles of snow. His head lifted to the sky. It was a complete whiteout. The storm dropped pellet-sized flakes with such intensity that he couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of him. He didn’t care. He knew he had to go to the place where he first gained his impenetrable inner strength, where he first realized the uselessness of letting his phobias rule his life.
    Philadelphia . Home.
     
    *     *     *
     
    After two days of trudging through the stifling white mess in seemingly eternal darkness, Billy realized that a three-hundred-mile journey through a blizzard, on foot no less, was a pipe dream. The optimistic part of him had hoped that the outside world would be a picture of normalcy compared to SCI Greensburg, that the conditions in the prison were the result of an isolated incident, for some reason unchecked by the local government. The empty streets, devoid of life, showed him how wrong he’d been. So he turned back towards Greensburg proper, steering for the town this time and not the prison, though he found it difficult to hold back eleven years of hard-formed habit.
    When the weather breaks I will start up again , he reasoned. His extremities burned from cold, which was bitingly indifferent to his efforts to stay warm. Even with four pairs of socks on his feet and his hands wrapped with towels beneath heavy-duty mittens, nature’s anger won out. Frostbite would overtake him if he didn’t find shelter soon.
    He trudged down the highway exit ramp and turned the corner into the center of town. A strong gust of bitter wind forced the tumbling flakes to fall sideways. Ice had formed on his