Fear Read Free

here as anywhere in the FAYZ.
    Astrid flopped into her nylon sling chair, propped her weary feet up on a second chair, and opened a book. Life now was an almost constant search for food, and without any lamp she had only an hour of light at sunset to read.
    It was a beautiful location atop a sheer bluff by the ocean. But she turned to the setting sun to catch the red rays on the page of her book.
    The book was Heart of Darkness .
    I tried to break the spell—the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness—that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions. This alone, I was convinced, had driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations .
    Astrid looked up at the trees. Her camp was in a small clearing, but the trees pressed close on two sides. They weren’t as towering here close to the shore as they were farther inland. These seemed friendlier trees than the ones deeper into the forest.
    “‘The heavy, mute spell of the wilderness,’” Astrid read aloud.
    For her the spell was about forgetfulness. The harsh life she now lived was less harsh than the reality she had left behind in Perdido Beach. That was the true wilderness. But there she had awakened forgotten and brutal instincts.
    Here it was only nature trying to starve her, break her bones, cut and poison her. Nature was relentless but it was free of malice. Nature did not hate her.
    It was not nature that had driven her to sacrifice her brother’s life.
    Astrid closed her eyes and then the book and tried to calm the rush of emotion inside her. Guilt was a fascinating thing: it seemed not to weaken over time. If anything it grew stronger as the circumstances faded from memory, as the fear and the necessity became abstract. And only her own actions stood out with crystal clarity.
    She had hurled her sick, strange little brother to the huge, appalling creatures that threatened her and threatened every human in the FAYZ.
    Her brother had disappeared.
    So had the creatures.
    The sacrifice had worked.
    Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac ,
    whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah .
    Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one
    of the mountains I will tell you about .”
    Only no loving God, seeing her faith, had intervened to stop the killing.
    For the excellent reason that there was no loving God.
    That it had taken her so long to realize this was an embarrassment to her. She was Astrid the Genius, after all. The name she had carried for years. And yet Sam, with his shoulder-shrugging indifference to all matters religious, had been so much closer to the truth.
    What kind of a fool looked at the world as it was—and this terrible world of the FAYZ especially—and believed in God? A God actually paying attention, let alone caring about his creations?
    She had murdered Little Pete.
    Murdered. She didn’t want to dress it up with any nice word. She wanted it harsh. She wanted the word to be sandpaper dragged across her raw conscience. She wanted to use that awful word to obliterate whatever was left of Astrid the Genius.
    It was a good thing to have decided there was no God, because if there were then she would be damned to eternal hell.
    Astrid’s hands shook. She laid the book flat on her lap. From her backpack she retrieved the bag of pot. She rationalized the drug on the grounds that it was the only way she could fall asleep. If this were the normal world, she might have a prescription for a sleeping pill. And that wouldn’t be wrong, would it?
    Well, she needed to sleep. Hunting and fishing were early morning activities and she needed to sleep.
    She flicked the lighter and brought it to the bowl of the pipe. Two hits: that was her rule. Just two.
    Then she hesitated. A memory