Free The Last American Martyr by Tom Winton

are still others planned later this week for Boston, Detroit, Denver and L.A.
    As always, we will keep you posted on any forthcoming developments in this story.”
    I just stood there, stupefied. I had no idea how people were reacting to our tragedy. Since returning from Sweden, I hadn’t listened to, watched, or read any news at all. What I had just seen and heard stunned me. It gave me the chills. Throngs of goose-bumps tightened the flesh on both my arms. But at the same time, I also felt a warm, benevolent glow inside. Though I’m an interminable doubting Thomas, always having difficulty accepting the life after death thing, I had this uncanny feeling in that truck-stop hallway that Elaina had been standing there also. It was as if she’d been right there alongside me watching that news report.
    I continued toward Florida as if the Winnebago was on auto-pilot. Sure, I braked, steered, and accelerated, but all that was instinctual. There were a host of more pressing thoughts tracking through my head, like countless boxcars on a runaway train. For the most part, they were of Elaina, but a few times that malicious snake—suicide, slithered through the dark recesses of my brain. How to do it? Where to do it? Should I do it? But there was an upside. While driving through the Carolinas and Georgia, that grievous temptation was popping up less and less often than it had during those six days in Asheville. I’m sure part of the reason was that I kept telling myself Elaina, if she could, would have booted me a good one—right in the ass—for entertaining such thoughts.
    While motoring alongside endless stands of lofty green pines on I-95, there were times I wished Elaina had left me. If she had, just like she’d threatened on the way home from Stockholm, she’d still be alive. I still would have been on the run alone, as I was now. But each time that heartbreaking reality jabbed at me, I parried it away. I knew well and good that Elaina never would have left me. She loved me as much as I did her. She stayed with me because I was as big a part of her as she herself was. All she’d have wanted at this point is for me to go on living my life. That and to “be careful,” as she said when she was dying in my arms.
     
     

 
     
    Chapter 8
     
     
     
    For the next three weeks, I bounced all over Florida. Rarely did I stay anywhere for more than one night. The only time I spoke to anyone was when it was absolutely necessary. Whether checking in or out at campgrounds, state parks, stores or gas stations, I was as brief as possible. I felt like a serial-killer on the run, like the scornful target of a nation-wide manhunt. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye unless I had my sunglasses on. And don’t forget, I was deep into one of the darkest states of mourning imaginable. I had to live with the senseless death, possibly murder, of someone who had been everything to me. People often wonder, do I love him or her—I just don’t know for sure. For the sake of anybody in such a quandary, there is only one question you need to ask yourself—would I, unflinchingly, give my life to save theirs? Amen. That’s it. I know what my answer would’ve been had I had the opportunity to save Elaina.
    By the time I rolled into Key West, I was desperate for some human interaction. Beginning to think I’d rather risk being murdered than go on the way I had been, I hailed a cab minutes after checking into a campground. When I climbed into the back of the taxi (a gaudy pink one, by the way), the driver pointed to a small placard mounted on the dashboard. Considering my predicament I thought its message was quite ironic.
     
    So sorry, I cannot hear or speak.
    Please write down your destination.
    Thank you. Francis Drake—Bahamas
     
    The old black man then handed me a pen and paper. I did as the sign said, passed the directions over the front seat, then leaned back and tried to relax.
    It was an early December late afternoon, sunny with