Free The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller by Pierre Ouellette Page A

he reaches home, he climbs the stairs to the fourth story, walks down the dingy hall, and unlocks the door to the single room he shares with his father. The old man dozes in an alcoholic stupor on the bed. He is fully clothed and sprawled on his back. His Adam’s apple bobs from the beneath the stubble on his scrawny neck and mirrors his snoring.
    Zed sits on the cot that has served as his bed for as long as he can remember. The old man is out of work again, fired from his livery-stable job. Each time he’s fired, the intervals between the new jobs grow longer and longer. Zed would have left long ago, but the old man loves him in a crippled sort of way. The only time he raises his voice is when he finds that Zed has been skipping school. Then he raves about how bright the boy’s mother was, and how she never had the chance to finish school, and about how tragic her death was, and the horribleepisode out there on the prairie, and …
    Zed gets up and goes to the room’s only window, which is nearly opaque with grime. He’s home later than usual, so he’ll probably skip school today. No problem. He can miss a week and make it up in a day if he has to, although his teachers won’t admit it. He looks out at the thin morning light and back into the semidarkness of the room. It stinks of cheap booze, stale tobacco, sweaty clothes, and mite-laden dust. He wants out.
    It’s too late to grab any sleep. Soon, the old man will awaken, hack violently, and take his shrinking bladder down the hall to relieve himself. Then he will return and flop back down on the bed to return to his fitful slumber. Zed decides to walk back up to Market Street, buy a roll and some coffee, and watch the city come alive. He will sit on a stool and look north across the trolley tracks to the big buildings, the great strongholds of the rich and powerful. To him, their march up the hill is transcendental in nature, a journey to a mystical plateau of monetary privilege. While he munches on his roll, he will consider the first steps in this journey, the acquisition of enough capital to get him under way.
    He crosses the room, takes one last look at the pathetic figure on the bed, and slips out the door.
    He will never see the old man again. Because when he reaches the sidewalk, the ground beneath him buckles in a jolt of boundless violence.
    Instinctively, he sprints out into the middle of the street, into a narrow zone of safety between the buildings on each side. The force of the quake tries to knock him off his feet and nearly succeeds as it issues a thunderous roar and begins to buckle the pavement all around him.
    Dry wood snaps and splinters. Bricks crash to the ground. Metal ducts screech and rip. A dog howls in horror.
    Then quiet. And dust. A great cloud of devastation sent heavenward into a cruelly neutral sky.
    As the dust clears, Zed sees that his tenement has collapsed into a jagged heap of riven lumber. Four stories are now one. The same is true all up and down the block. He scans the street in both directions for survivors. At the end of the block, a man in striped pajamas kneels quietly, as if in prayer. Nearby, a woman in a nightgown walks delicately around the debris, her long, curly hair falling over her shoulders. She carries an empty birdcage, its bottom missing.
    The fires ignite almost immediately. Shorted wires, overturned stoves, flammable chemicals all join to start a conflagration that will eventually burn out the entire heart of the city. The whole block begins to belch great sheets of flame and smoke, and his own tenement is no exception.
    From beneath the burning wood, the screaming starts.
    The heat tries to clutch his skin and broil it as he runs down the block toward Third,where some of the structures are brick and have yet to catch fire. Ahead, a great geyser of water shoots from a ruptured main.
    Zed turns on Third and jogs back up toward Market. After a few blocks, the blazing monster is behind him, and the streets have