Read Upon A Pale Horse for Free Online

peppering the stream. Although he kept drifting back to the image of his brother dropping from the sky, he forced himself to respond to everyone, welcoming any diversion from his nightmarish replay.
    A flock of starlings winged by overhead as the car took the airport off-ramp, the sun now out in force, glistening off their ebony feathers as they defied gravity. The driver was mercifully silent, having lost any enthusiasm for interaction, and contented himself with a dissonant tape of atonal music that most closely resembled a phalanx of car horns honking arrhythmically while a woman yowled over the din.
    A sea of brake lights greeted them as they rounded a long curve, and they stopped at a hastily erected checkpoint manned by highway patrolmen with long faces and nervous dispositions – no doubt in response to the accident that had taken Keith’s life, which struck Jeffrey as simultaneously typical and depressing. Never in the history of air travel had any terrorist event been foiled by police staring into cars and randomly pulling people over to search them, and yet that was unhesitatingly one of the useless responses any state of alert was met with. Because those chartered with protecting the population had to appear to be doing something, even if it was wholly pointless.
    Eventually they reached the terminal. Jeffrey pushed a wad of dollars through the Plexiglas receptacle and eased out of the taxi, pulling his bag with him. Inside, a pronounced armed presence announced itself as officers with bomb-sniffing dogs moved through the lines of passengers waiting to check in. A particularly exhausted-looking beagle brushed by him, and for a moment Jeffrey and the animal locked eyes, the dog’s baleful gaze resigned to a thankless shift sniffing for something it would likely never find. The sense of futility was palpable, and then the beast was past, moving to the next line, its heavily armed minder scanning the throng like he could spot trouble on looks alone.
    Jeffrey swiped his credit card at the automated ticket machine, selected a seat, and collected his boarding pass, and then moved to the counter to have his ID checked. The ticket agent was courteous but mechanical as she tapped at her terminal with the warmth of an animatronic figure at an amusement park, and Jeffrey wondered whether she despised her job or was merely heavily medicated. He had watched her process the person in front of him, the transaction as impersonal as feeding change into a parking machine, and he was struck by how many interactions he had with that same dynamic. What was it that drove people to take jobs they disliked so profoundly that their only recourse was to treat their charges like objects, a subtle but unmistakable slight that was obvious yet completely deniable?
    The woman handed back his ID and over-enunciated a gate number, pointing to where it was printed on the pass, lest remembering the number thirty-two overload his cognitive abilities and doom him to wandering the airport aimlessly in search of a flight that had left without him.
    Why so negative and judgmental? he wondered to himself, and realized that it was his brain’s way of dodging the image of his brother’s final moments, combined with a healthy dose of self-loathing for not having tried harder, not having spent more time with him or called more often.
    There’s no rewind in life . That had been one of his brother’s pet sayings, and it sprang to mind as he followed the crowd to the TSA checkpoint on the way to the gates. Indeed not. The problem with reality was that it was for keeps. As his brother knew.
    The line was moving at a snail’s pace, the passengers coagulated in a clump where a humorless security worker checked ID and boarding passes before the travelers sent their bags, jackets, and shoes through the X-ray machine and waited their turn to be irradiated by scanning systems that a child could defeat. Jeffrey watched as a rotund officer stood by observing one