Unconditional by Blake Crouch

 
UNCONDITIONAL
    by
    Blake Crouch
     
    SMASHWORDS EDITION
     
    * * * * *
     
    PUBLISHED BY:
    Blake Crouch on Smashwords
     
    Copyright 2011 by Blake Crouch
    Cover art copyright 2011 by Jeroen ten
Berge
    All rights reserved.
     
    PRAISE FOR BLAKE CROUCH
     
    Crouch quite simply is a marvel. Highest
possible recommendation.
    BOOKREPORTER
     
    Blake Crouch is the most exciting new
thriller writer I've read in years.
    DAVID MORRELL
     
     
    UNCONDITIONAL is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
     
    For more information about the author, please
visit www.blakecrouch.com.
    For more information about the artist, please
visit www.jeroentenberge.com.
     
    Smashwords Edition License Notes
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respecting the author's work.
     
     
    * * * * *
     
     
    unconditional
     
    “I’m not scared of what’s coming. Almost
looking forward, you know? Like Christmas morning when you’re a kid
and you been thinking about it so long, when it finally comes, it
don’t feel real? Probably be like that.
    “Way I figure, if it’s nothing? Great. If
it’s better than this? Hell yeah. And there’s no conceivable way
things can get any worse than what I lived. It’s like ever since I
was fifteen, I been shot up with anesthetic. A heart pumped full of
it.
    “Not feeling nothing will drive you to do
strange and evil things. This ain’t excuses. Just the way it
is.
    “You’re looking older, but I guess I am too,
right? You missed it. I had a beard yesterday that I’d been growing
for years. Looked like some demon prophet. But I figured I should
have it cut. See my face one last time. Look, this is more than I
talked to anybody in years, and still, it’s about all I got to say,
so…
    “What?
    “Want me to read this now? While you
watch?
    “You’re just like all of ’em, you know that?
Want to bleed me for something, and I can already guess what it
is.
    “Ain’t I right?

    “No?
    “Yeah. I am. And if you think you’re going to
leave here knowing, I got some news for you.”
     
    My son do you remember the backpacking trip
we made into the Ozarks when you were eight years old? I still have
a photograph of us squatting by a campfire, you looking cross in
the cold with your arms wrapped ’round yourself in that green
fleece jacket which last week I took down out of the attic for the
first time in ages. Sat alone at the kitchen table late into the
night fingering the cinder burns our campfire had made, the
polyester melted into circles of plastic. The fleece still carries
your scent, or at least some smell my brain has been
long-programmed to associate with you.
    In my bedroom hanging above the chest of
drawers is a drawing you made for me twenty-seven years ago one
morning when I was rushing out the door to work. Black Sharpie on
orange construction paper—a tall house with too many windows. A
tree. Flock of birds in the sky and in the wobbly scrawl of a
five-year-old: “I love you, Papa.” I know what it does to me to
look at the drawing and the photograph. I wonder what it would do
to you? Are you capable of being moved by anything?
    I remember teaching you how to tie a fly. How
to cast. The joy in your face as you lifted your first rainbow from
the current—exhilaration and pride. The other day I drove past the
playing field beside the Episcopal church. A perfect October
afternoon. The