Read Just After Sunset for Free Online

awful thing like that?” Ruth Lander asked David, and what killed him (so to speak) wasn’t the reproach in her voice but the look in her eyes before she pressed her face against the shoulder of Henry’s corduroy jacket. Because she knew too.
    “Ruth,” he said, “I’m not telling you this to upset you—”
    “Then stop!” she cried, her voice muffled.
    David saw that all of them but Helen Palmer were looking at him with anger and hostility. Helen was nodding and muttering between her husband and the Rhinehart woman, whose first name was probably Sally. They were standing under the fluorescents in little groups…only when he blinked, the fluorescents were gone. Then the stranded passengers were just dim figures standing in the shattered moonlight that managed to find its way in through the boarded-up windows. The Landers weren’t sitting on a bench; they were sitting on a dusty floor near a little cluster of empty crack vials—yes, it seemed that crack had managed to find its way even out here to John Ford country—and there was a faded circle on one wall not far from the corner where Helen Palmer squatted and muttered. Then David blinked again and the fluorescents were back. So was the big clock, hiding that faded circle.
    Henry Lander said, “Think you better go along now, David.”
    “Listen a minute, Henry,” Willa said.
    Henry switched his gaze to her, and David had no trouble reading the distaste that was there. Any liking Henry might once have had for Willa Stuart was gone now.
    “I don’t want to listen,” Henry said. “You’re upsetting my wife.”
    “Yeah,” a fat young man in a Seattle Mariners cap said. David thought his name was O’Casey. Something Irish with an apostrophe in it, anyway. “Zip it, baby girl!”
    Willa bent toward Henry, and Henry recoiled from her slightly, as if her breath were bad. “The only reason I let David drag me back here is because they are going to demolish this place! Can you say wrecking ball, Henry? Surely you’re bright enough to get your head around that concept.”
    “Make her stop!” Ruth cried, her voice muffled.
    Willa leaned even closer, eyes bright in her narrow, pretty face. “And when the wrecking ball leaves and the dump trucks haul away the crap that used to be this railway station—this old railway station—where will you be?”
    “Leave us alone, please,” Henry said.
    “Henry—as the chorus girl said to the archbishop, denial is not a river in Egypt.”
    Ursula Davis, who had disliked Willa from the first, stepped forward, leading with her chin. “Fuck off, you troublesome bitch.”
    Willa swung around. “Don’t any of you get it? You’re dead, we’re all dead, and the longer you stay in one place, the harder it’s going to be to ever go anywhere else!”
    “She’s right,” David said.
    “Yeah, and if she said the moon was cheese, you’d say provolone,” Ursula said. She was a tall, forbiddingly handsome woman of about forty. “Pardon my French, but she’s got you so pussy-whipped it isn’t funny.”
    Dudley let out that startling donkey bray again, and the Rhinehart woman began to sniffle.
    “You’re upsetting the passengers, you two.” This was Rattner, the little conductor with the apologetic face. He hardly ever spoke. David blinked, the station lensed dark and moonlit again for another moment, and he saw that half of Rattner’s head was gone. The rest of his face had been burned black.
    “They’re going to demolish this place and you’ll have nowhere to go!” Willa cried. “Fucking…nowhere!” She dashed angry tears from her cheeks with both fists. “Why don’t you come to town with us? We’ll show you the way. At least there are people…and lights…and music.”
    “Mumma, I want to hear some music,” Pammy Andreeson said.
    “Hush,” her mother said.
    “If we were dead, we’d know it,” Biggers said.
    “He’s got you there, son,” Dudley said, and dropped David a wink. “What happened