Hope to Die Read Free Page A

my ninety-something grandmother, Nana Mama. As Ali wound down his victory run, we all clapped and crowded through the front door of our home on Fifth in Southeast Washington, DC.
    It had been construction time at the Cross household the past few weeks; we were remodeling the kitchen and adding a great room and a new master bedroom suite upstairs. When we left for the game, the project was exactly as the construction crew had left it on Good Friday—exterior walls framed and up, windows in, and the roof on, an empty, dusty shell separated from the main house by plastic sheeting.
    But when Nana Mama left the front hallway and looked deeper into our house, she stopped in her tracks and screamed, “Alex!”
    I rushed forward, expecting some domestic catastrophe, but my grandmother was beaming with joy. She said, “How did you ever manage it?”
    I looked over her shoulder and saw that the addition and the kitchen remodel were done—as in, completely done. The cabinets were up. The Italian tile floor was in. So was the fire-engine-red six-burner industrial stove and the matching fridge and the dishwasher. I could see, beyond the kitchen, that the great room had been filled with new furniture; it looked like some gauzy picture in the Pottery Barn catalog.
    “How is this possible, Alex?” Bree asked.
    I was as shocked as the rest of my family. It was as if a genie in a lamp had given us a hundred wishes, and they’d all come true. The kids ran through the kitchen and into the great room to test out the couches and the overstuffed chairs while Nana Mama and Bree admired the black granite countertops, stainless-steel sinks, and pewter light fixtures.
    My attention, however, was drawn to a piece of legal-size paper that magnets held horizontally to the refrigerator door. At first, I figured it was a letter from our contractors saying they hoped we were pleased with the finished product.
    But then I saw that the paper showed copies of five photographs laid side by side. The images were difficult to make out until I stepped right up and took them all in with one slow, horrifying scan.
    In each picture there was a member of my family lying on a cement floor, head haloed with blood, blank face and eyes twisted dully toward the camera. Above each left ear and slightly back, there was a wound, an ugly one, the kind that only a close-range shot creates.
    Somewhere in the distance, a siren began to wail.
    “No!” I screamed.
    But when I spun around to assure myself the pictures weren’t real, my children, my wife, and my grandmother were gone. Vanished into thin air. All that was left of them were those sickening photographs on the refrigerator.
    I am alone
, I thought.
    Alone.
    Pain knifed through my head. Terrified that I was going to have a stroke or a heart attack, I sank to my knees, bowed my head, and raised my hands toward heaven.
    “Why, Mulch?” I screamed. “Why?”

CHAPTER
4
     
    I JERKED AWAKE IN the predawn light, felt the dull pounding in my head again. At first I had no idea where I was, but gradually I came to recognize my bedroom in shadows. I was in bed, still dressed for work and soaked through with sweat. Instinctively, I reached over to feel for my wife’s sleeping form.
    Bree wasn’t there, and in one gut-wrenching instant, I knew that I had woken once more into a reality worse than any nightmare.
    My wife was gone. They were all gone.
    And a madman named Thierry Mulch had them.
    Determined not to succumb to his insanity, I rolled over in bed and pressed my face into my wife’s pillow, trying to find Bree’s smell. I needed it to keep me strong, to renew my faith and hope. I caught a trace of her but desperately wanted more. I got up, went to her closet, and, strange as it sounds, buried my face in her clothes.
    For several minutes, Bree’s perfect scent intoxicated my brain so thoroughly that my headache was gone and she was right there with me, this beautiful, smart, laughing woman who danced just