Arrow's Rest by Joel Scott (best books to read all time .TXT) 📗

more a case of bulling ahead and overcoming obstacles in his path regardless, and then seeing what followed on from the wreckage. But now this. Who could have predicted it? About one in fifty thousand people, they said. Up until this happened, he had considered himself one of the favoured in life. Bad shit happened to other people.

He brought his hands up in front of his face and inspected them closely. They looked perfectly normal, apart from the fact that they were no longer reliable and subject to failure at delicate tasks. Case in point, trying to fasten the bloody tie he planned on wearing to dinner. What should have taken less than a minute had taken five times as long and almost required another shower on completion.

ALS. Lou Gehrig’s disease. Average lifespan after diagnosis three years, prognosis fatal. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am! He was fucked. That was one short year ago, and now here he was. Up shit creek, or, to be more specific, Toba Inlet. But same difference. He could still appreciate irony.

He reached over and cranked up the stereo and Wagner pounded out into the room. It was all he listened to since he’d embarked on his own personal Götterdämerung three months earlier. He’d read the story, apocryphal no doubt, but it should have been true, about Hitler in his bunker at the end lying motionless on his cot for hours while the stirring triumphal music blared from speakers around him.

Albright suddenly swept his hair down over his brow, put his finger crosswise under his nose, screamed “Sieg Heil,” and shot his clenched fist out at the image before him, and the mirror cracked and shattered. The off-kilter man in the shards grinned back at him in bits and pieces, some eyes lower than others, the teeth scattered every which way, and he wondered if he was going insane. The thought didn’t disturb him as under the circumstances it might be argued it would have been mad not to, at least a little bit once in a while. The man in the mirror agreed with him, nodding brokenly along with his logic. Everything was relative, now more than ever.

He almost felt bad about Clint and Travis, who had always stood by him and served him so well for such a long time and were now caught up in his end-of-life maelstrom. But needs must when the devil drives, as his daddy, that hypocritical old bastard, used to tell him. He needed them, so they got to share in his final act. All in all he felt that he’d done reasonably well so far in settling scores and evening things up before his departure from the world. Newcombe, the accountant, and then the lawyer, not quite done yet, but ready and waiting down below for the last round. That part was disappointing, he’d hoped for a grander finale from Sullivan. After listening to the lawyer’s boasts for all those years, you’d have thought he would have performed better. Oh well, he’d given him a few chuckles with his fancy footwork and bobbing and weaving. What was it Tyson had said? Something about everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. Now there was a man he would have loved to go up against. Could have learned a few things there for sure. And maybe he could have taught Tyson a few things too.

Albright grinned at the thought. Speaking of women, that skinny bitch Cat who’d snubbed him, and her weedy boyfriend were all that remained to him now, and that was certainly disappointing. He’d hoped for so much more. But he was sure that if he thought about it long enough, he could still make it interesting. Some combination in the ring perhaps, he was still up to that. He hadn’t lost much strength yet, his workouts had helped there for sure, regardless of what the doctors had told him. They knew nothing about him, he wasn’t like the rest of them. But his coordination was beginning to go. He had tripped on the stairs going down to the engine room on his last visit to check up on Sullivan before managing to catch himself on the handrail. Clint had given him a sharp look but hadn’t said anything. He wondered if the brothers suspected anything. He thought they might. They had been a little chirpier than usual with him during the last few weeks, and dead set against this current junket involving Jared and Cat.

It wasn’t what he had hoped for. His preferred exit plan would have been to hold a splashy party conference on board the Harp complete with special guests, reporters, and TV cameras and then just blow up everything in a spectacular Endkampf Blitzkrieg. Unfortunately, since his diagnosis and his sometimes erratic behaviour in the months that followed, he no longer had the clout to get the bigwigs aboard. The fuckers all had that acute political knack of sniffing out the first drops of blood in the water (to be fair, he had thrown a few buckets overboard with some of his recent actions), and they were quickly peeling away from him. Although the hypocrites were still more than happy for him to go out on the money trail and earn some dollars for the party with his spellbinders.

It was annoying, but he supposed you couldn’t really blame them. In their place he probably would have done the same. So he’d taken what he could get. Sullivan, and Cat and her boyfriend. He would have loved to have gotten hold of that superior little shit Ivery as well, but that hadn’t worked out. To think that at one time he’d almost felt sorry for him, stuck in his wheelchair with the ape-man pushing him around. And now look where the two of them had ended up. Ivery would carry on and maybe even improve his life a smidge, whereas he — superior in every respect by any measure —