One Door Away From Heaven Read Free Page A

because it exists only in his mind, that regardless of how long or how fast he runs, he’ll never arrive at a destination, but will race perpetually through alternating stretches of moon-dazzled meadow and bristling blind-dark forest.
    In fact, he has no idea where he’s going. He’s not familiar with this land. Civilization might lie within reach, but more likely than not, he’s plunging deeper into a vast wilderness.
    In his peripheral vision, he repeatedly glimpses movement: ghostly stalkers flanking him. Each time that he looks more directly, he sees only tall grass trembling in the breeze. Yet these phantom outrunners frighten him, and breath by ragged breath, he becomes increasingly convinced that he won’t live to reach the next growth of trees.
    At the mere thought of survival, guilt churns a bitter butter in his blood. He has no right to live when everyone else perished.
    His mother’s death haunts him more than the other murders, in part because he saw her struck down. He heard the screams of the others, but by the time he found them, they were dead, and their steaming remains were so grisly that he could not make an emotional connection between the loved ones he had known and those hideous cadavers.
    Now, from moonlight into darkling forest once more. The meadow behind him. The tangled maze of brush and bramble ahead.
    Against all odds, he’s still alive.
    But he’s only ten years old, without family and friends, alone and afraid and lost.

Chapter 3
    NOAH FARREL WAS SITTING in his parked Chevy, minding someone else’s business, when the windshield imploded.
    Noshing on a cream-filled snack cake, contentedly plastering a fresh coat of fat on his artery walls, he suddenly found himself holding a half-eaten treat rendered crunchier but inedible by sprinkles of gummy-prickly safety glass.
    Even as Noah dropped the ruined cake, the front passenger’s-side window shattered under the impact of a tire iron.
    He bolted from the car through the driver’s door, looked across the roof, and confronted a man mountain with a shaved head and a nose ring. The Chevy stood in an open space midway between massive Indian laurels, and though it wasn’t shaded by the trees, it was sixty or eighty feet from the nearest streetlamp and thus in gloom; however, the glow of the Chevy’s interior lights allowed Noah to see the window-basher. The guy grinned and winked.
    Movement to Noah’s left drew his attention. A few feet away, another demolition expert swung a sledgehammer at a headlight.
    This steroid-inflated gentleman wore sneakers, pink workout pants with a drawstring waist, and a black T-shirt. The impressive mass of bone in his brow surely weighed more than the five-pound sledge that he swung, and his upper lip was nearly as long as his ponytail.
    Even as the last of the cracked plastic and the shattered glass from the headlamp rang and rattled against the pavement, the human Good Plenty slammed the hammer against the hood of the car.
    Simultaneously, the guy with the polished head and the decorated nostril used the lug-wrench end of the tire iron to break out the rear window on the passenger’s side, perhaps because he’d been offended by his reflection.
    The noise grew hellish. Prone to headaches these days, Noah wanted nothing more than quiet and a pair of aspirin.
    “Excuse me,” he said to the bargain-basement Thor as the hammer arced high over the hood again, and he leaned into the car through the open door to pluck the key from the ignition.
    His house key was on the same ring. When he finally got home, by whatever means, he didn’t want to discover that these behemoths were hosting a World Wrestling Federation beer party in his bungalow.
    On the passenger’s seat lay the digital camera that contained photos of the philandering husband entering the house across the street and being greeted at the door by his lover. If Noah reached for the camera, he’d no doubt be left with a hand full of bones as shattered