Read The New Dead for Free Online Page B

was sure that drinking too much would put me right to sleep. But somehow I didn’t stop. The game on TV was exciting, and one shot followed the next with an unremarked ferocity. Come eleven o’clock, I was good and drunk.
     
    Come one o’clock, it seemed to me like a crime against humanity that there was no ice cream in the house, like the UN Office on Desserts was going to come gunning for me if I didn’t take care of things. I understood that I was drunk, very drunk, and that driving under those conditions was somewhere between ill-advised and fucking moronic. I also understood that there was a convenience store not half a mile from my house. A straight shot out of my driveway, past four stop signs, and there you are. No need even to turn the wheel. I might have walked. The air would have done me good, but since the idea didn’t occur to me, it saved me the trouble of deciding I was too lazy to walk. Something else never occurred to me - turning on my headlights.
     
    That was bad enough, but running that second stop sign was worse. I wasn’t fiddling with the radio or distracted by anything. I just didn’t see it, and I didn’t remember it. With no headlights to reflect against it, the sign was invisible. I had a vague sense that I ought to be slowing down somewhere around there, which was when I felt my car hit something. Sometime thereafter, I knew I had to stop, and after spending a little bit of time trying to find the brake pedal, I did in fact stop. I was a drunk moron, no doubt about it, and I realized I ought to have turned on my headlights before, but I knew enough not to turn on my headlights now.
     
    I grabbed the emergency flashlight from the glove compartment, spent a little while trying to remember how to turn it on, but soon enough everything was under control. I got out of the car and stumbled the hundred or so feet since I hit the thing. My worst fear, I swear it, was that I had hit a garbage can, maybe a dog or cat, but when I approached the stop sign I saw her lying on the side of the road, her eyes open, blood pooling out of her mouth. There was a terrible rattling in her breath, and her upper body twitched violently. And then I saw the damage to her skull. I saw blood and hair and exposed brain. She raised one limp hand in my direction and parted her lips as if to speak. I looked away.
     
    You never know who they are until you are tested. I’d always thought of myself as the guy who does the right thing, but it turned out I wasn’t that guy at all. In that moment I understood that I was drunk, I’d been driving without headlights, and this girl was going to die. I could see her brain, and I could hear her death rattle. Nothing I was going to do could save her, and that was a good thing too, because if I’d thought I could save her, I can’t say for sure I would have. Even so, I ought to have called 911 - I had my cell phone on me - but if I had, my life would have been over. I would have been looking at jail and disgrace. Everything I was and wanted to be would have been done.
     
    All around me it was dark. No lights were on. No dogs barked. No one knew I was there. In an instant both clear and decisive, I got back into the car, turned around, drove past the girl I had broken, and managed to navigate my way into the garage. Amazingly, I could find no sign of damage on the car. I was drunk as hell, and I knew it, which meant I could not trust my judgment, but to my foggy eyes, everything looked good. So with nothing else to think about, I went upstairs, got undressed, made a vague gesture toward brushing my teeth, and went to bed.
     
    In the morning, hungover and panicked, I went out and looked at my car. Nothing. No blood, no scratches, no dents. To be certain, I took my car to an automated car wash. Then I began to relax.
     
    The murder, as they called it, of Maisie Harper was a big story for about a day, but then there was that category 4 hurricane that started heading our way, and