Psychlone Read Free

as it lay on the ripped easy chair. “Take that, you son of a bitch,” he would shout melodramatically in the dreams. As a teenager he had read a book about Greek gods—he had read quite a few books as a kid—and now he looked upon himself as Prometheus, and booze was his eagle, eating his liver each day.
    All because he had brought fire down to earth. He couldn't remember doing it, but he must have. It fit the story.
    Kevin Land was in his shack when the wind started to rise. It came from a clear, cold late-morning sky. He heard it dimly and worried when it began to shake the shack.
    “Life and death,” he muttered, pulling the blanket up over his head. “Matter of."
    Jim Townsend was eating a lunch of turkey and dressing left over from Thanksgiving, two days before. He was carving the last of the bird and handing it around to his wife and younger son. The meat was like gold. He was out of work. Barrett's service station, where he had been a mechanic for thirteen years, had closed down after John Barrett died of a stroke. Barrett's son had sold the property to another oil company and, preparatory to rebuilding the office and garage and installing a whole new crew from out of town, the oil company had fired Townsend. His family's only income now was from the six pieces of property they owned around town. It had always been Townsend's wish to rent the properties to needy people at bare minimum rates, as long as he was making a good living and his family got along comfortably. Soon that would have to change.
    Lorobu serviced several mines operating in the area, and every winter did a spotty business with tourists. But mining operations had been halted recently because of conservationist lobbies in Washington and Sacramento, and the local businesses reported sharply reduced tourist spending for the past year. Lorobu was not in an up period, Townsend knew, and the properties weren't going to rent for much more than he was charging now.
    It was a bleak prospect. He worried most when he looked at his wife. Georgette, who was still bright and perky and loyal after twenty-five years of marriage. His younger son, Tim, was eleven and doing well in school. The boy seemed interested in working with his hands—he was a whiz at plastic model kits—but Townsend didn't want him to follow in his father's footsteps. Tim was too bright and capable to spend the rest of his life repairing cars. Their older son, Rick, had married a Mormon girl and moved to Salt Lake City. They seldom heard from him. That hurt Georgette, but she didn't blame the Mormons as much as Jim did. Their middle child, a girl, had been killed in a motorcycle accident two years before. Townsend knew she had been reckless. He had loved her most of all, but his memories of her seemed to stop at her twelfth birthday.
    He cut the turkey leg and apportioned it between his plate and Tim's.
    “It's blowing harder, Dad,” Tim said. Townsend broke his reverie and looked out the window at the scrub lot next to their house. The dry weeds were rustling and the tree beside Norman Blake's workshed was twisting this way and that, like a dancer warming up.
    Michael Barrett had just finished making love to his girl friend, twenty-year-old Cynthia Furness, who was a hellion in bed but sometimes a pain outside of it. She was a Jesus freak. Michael never could put the two sides of her together and had finally given up, telling her one night, philosophically, “I guess it's just like being hungry. When you're hungry, you eat, Jesus or no, and when you're horny you screw.” Cynthia wouldn't be very pretty in ten or fifteen years—she was already a touch too plump—so he had no plans for marrying her. She probably thought he did. He probably should, they'd been getting it on together long enough. But Michael had been feeling very well off since his father had died, leaving thirty-five years of savings—over fifty thousand dollars. He was sure marriage didn't fit into his plans. He