Life on the Preservation, US Edition Read Free

shining in the fluorescent light. He had taken it out of the pink safety razor her mother used to shave her legs. She always shaved in the downstairs bathroom because the light was better. The empty razor now sat on the edge of the sink behind Jim. He stared at Kylie with guilt-stricken eyes and said, “What we do isn’t right . I have to mortify my appetites.” Shocked, Kylie couldn’t look away. That was probably a mistake. Jim seemed to get something out of her looking at him. In moments the superficial little cuts ceased to effectively mortify his ‘appetites’. He pushed her back to the bed and took her, grunting with pain and animal excitement. No, it hadn’t been anything like Lloyd and Diane.
    “Mom says The Judgment unbalanced him,” Kylie said to Billy.
    “Yeah. Unbalanced like Charlie Manson. Don’t forget the dentist.”
    Instead of Dr. Lee she pictured a sign that used to hang in the dentist’s waiting room: A smile is your first hello! Near the end, the man used to stand on the roof of the Ace Hardware store yelling at God. Father Jim hadn’t appreciated that blasphemy. He hadn’t actually chopped Dr. Lee’s head off, but he had whacked it pretty hard with a baseball bat.
    “I doubt that idiot appreciates you living with me.”
    “Who cares what he appreciates,” Kylie said.
    Billy picked up a DVD case. The Dong of Man . There were two naked ‘cave women’ on the cover, also a guy with a thick black mustache wearing a bear pelt, or maybe it was just his own chest. Billy had found the pornos on top of a bookshelf. The two bedroom ranch house had belonged to Billy’s father, a retired history professor and Oakdale’s only resident atheist. Growing up in Oakdale, Billy liked to say, was like growing up a leper in Mayberry. Billy had one of his gloomy quiet days when he found The Dong of Man and the other pornos. He didn’t talk about it, but Kylie guessed the videos made him think of his history prof dad in a way he didn’t like to think of him.
    “It used to be everybody got off once in a while,” Billy said, waving the DVD. “Now it’s only you.”
    “Have another beer,” Kylie said, hoping that yet more alcohol would cheer him up.
    “No. Listen, we have to talk seriously.”
    “What about?” Something was nagging at the back of her mind and had been since she woke to the sound of the generator. Something she had seen. It seemed to her she must have seen it in a dream, this scary thing that she couldn’t quite recall, couldn’t quite bring into focus.
    “Leaving Oakdale,” Billy said.
    She stared at him. “But it’s too dangerous outside of town.”
    “It’s getting too dangerous inside of town. I’ve been planning this since everybody started paying too much attention to that lunatic priest. You said yourself he’s even started mentioning me in his sermons-on-the-Ford.”
    “But where would you go?”
    “Back to the Big Boat.” The Big Boat was what Billy called the USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier stranded in sudden shallows after The Judgment. A small number of survivors lived on the carrier, most of them Navy personnel, though there were also some stragglers like Billy. Billy had been living in Seattle but was visiting a friend in Bremerton, a port town south of Oakdale, when the world ended. “Kylie, I thought you might–”
    “But why would you go there? You said everybody was dying and some of them were crazy. Just like here.”
    “Take it easy–”
    “I don’t want you to go .”
    “Come with me. There’s more to the world even now than this stupid hick town. Don’t you want to see the Dome? It’s pretty close to the Big Boat. At night you can see the glow.”
    Billy had talked about the giant Dome before, how it stood over the place where Seattle had been, but it was so fantastic and Billy was usually so drunk, that she hardly believed him.
    “Come on, Billy. That can’t be real.”
    “It’s real.” Billy looked at her seriously. “It