Read Frankenstorm: Category 8 for Free Online

that, he remained still.
    Ram came to Andy, stepping over the bodies on the floor. His left arm swung at his side, sending the flashlight’s beam sliding wildly across the floor and onto the walls.
    “Did I lose track of time?” he said. “I do that sometimes.”
    “Whuh-what, uh . . . what are you doing?”
    Ram frowned. “Doing? What I told you I was going to do. Set things straight. Make sure you got custody of your son.” He sounded defensive and a little offended. The he added, with a smile, “And hey, I did the world a few favors in the process. These people? Scum. All of them. Your ex-wife was hanging out with some bad people, Andy, bad people. Drug dealers, pimps. Niggers! And she was exposing your son to all of it.”
    “Where . . . where is she?”
    He lifted the flashlight at his side and pointed it at the couch.
    The beam fell on Jodi, who lay with her upper body on the couch, legs hanging off to the side, feet resting on Vic’s head. Jodi’s cheek rested on her right arm, which was extended across the cushion. Her eyes were open and seemed to bulge from their sockets. A strip of glistening red started at her nostrils and covered most of her mouth, chin, and right cheek. There was a black hole nearly centered in her forehead.
    Andy’s lungs turned to ice and he could not inhale or exhale. He could not move his limbs. Even his eyes would not move from Jodi’s corpse.
    She’d served him corned beef and hash the first time they met. She had cried when she’d confessed to him that she was a drug addict, fully expecting that to be the end of their relationship. She’d cried and laughed at the same time when he’d asked her to marry him. She’d wailed in agony and delight as he watched Donny come out of her. He’d seen her at her best and worst and everything in between, and during the years she’d managed to stay away from drugs, she’d been the best wife anybody could hope for, the best lover and mother and friend.
    Now her dead eyes stared at him in the beam of a flashlight because he had sent Ram to kill her.
    But he hadn’t! He never would have gone along with it if he’d known Ram’s intentions. How could he have known the man would turn it into a mass killing? How could he have known?
    Hey, mommy’s boy!
    Then his lungs of ice shattered and he gasped for air as he rushed to the couch, arms outstretched, saying in a high wail, “Jesus Christ , what did you do ?” He dropped to his knees beside Jodi, reached both hands out to touch her, but he couldn’t do it. His trembling hands stopped a fraction of an inch from her body, then pulled away. He turned to find Ram towering over him, the light on his face.
    “You changed your mind about her, did you?” Ram said. “Since we last spoke? Huh?”
    “Changed my—”
    “Because you came to me, remember. You came to me with that story about how your wife was endangering your son. Isn’t that right? Am I misremembering that?”
    “No, no, you’re not, buh-but I-I-I didn’t want to—”
    Ram hunkered down and leaned his forearms on his spread knees, hands dangling between them, the flashlight’s glow coming up from the floor. He leaned close to Andy and whispered, “You can’t let the cunts get away with that. You just can’t, Andy, because if you do, they’ll just keep it up. And in the process, they fuck up the kids. I see it again and again.”
    Andy felt like he was sinking. Like the floor—even the earth under the floor—was dissolving and he was sinking down into the kind of nightmare from which it is impossible to wake up.
    “But the whole world’s against you, Andy. The laws, the courts—everything’s against you. Because this country’s turned into one big, fat, stinking vagina.”
    Andy thought of all the times he’d seen Ram with his family—a lovely, plump, blond wife, two blond kids, a boy and a girl—in town shopping, or sitting in a restaurant, or coming out of their church on Sunday as Andy drove by. While