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 light golden. Leaves turning. Children playing
soccer. Ruddy faces and grass-stained knees, and I thought of all
the games I watched you play. I can still hear your high-voiced
questions, so many of them, coming from the backseat of our car as
the three of us drove home from somewhere on some night I failed to
appreciate what I had.

When I was a boy, I passed a homeless man,
drunk and begging on a street corner. My father, sensing my
disgust, said something I never forgot, that I think of every time
I see your face on the news or in the paper—“That man was once
someone’s little boy.”

I cannot separate the man you are now from
the boy you were then, and it is killing me.

I wanted everything for you, son.

I still do.

You never experienced the gift of children,
and I hate that for you, because you won’t understand how I can
still love you, how, even though you took everything from me,
you’re still all that I have.

When you were a child, I didn’t tell you
about the evil in the world, all that lay in wait. In the same way,
let’s forget all that’s happened in the past, and let me just be
your Papa for the four and a half hours you have left to live. When
they strap you down, please say your piece to the families of the
victims, but then find my eyes, seek out my face, and if you hold
any shred of love for me, take comfort in my presence.

The night of your birth while your mother
slept I walked you up and down the hospital corridor, your tiny
heart racing against my chest. I sang into your ear, told you that
no matter what happened, I would be your Papa.

Always.

And I stand by that still.

The young man behind the Plexiglas turns over
the last page of the letter and stares into the scuffs in the
table. Through the walls, you can hear metal doors closing, bolts
sliding home, the distant voices of the guards. He doesn’t look
anything like a monster. Rather, an IT guy. Wire-rim glasses.
Scrawny and slight. Five-seven in shoes with generous heels.
Five-six in the prison-issue flip-flops. He’s had a recent
shave.

The old man startles when he reaches up to
unshelve the phone again.

For a long time, they both just breathe into
the receivers, and when he speaks, his voice is soft and southern
and contains a raspy, blown-out quality, as if he spent the last
four years screaming.

“That’s all you got to say to me?”

As his father nods, he can see the long,
blanched line of scarring across the old man’s throat, and he feels
a flicker—not remorse, not regret, just some unidentified emotional
response, alien because it’s rare.

“I heard they had to cut out your
voicebox.”

A nod.

“And you won’t use one of them speech
enhancement devices?”

Shake.

“Hell, I wouldn’t either. I don’t want to
speak for you, but I would think not having to talk to assholes has
a bright side.”

His old man breaks the slightest smile.

“So you aren’t going to ask me? That’s not
why you came?”

A look of recognition passes across his
father’s hazel eyes like the shadow of a cloud, and the old man
shakes his head.

“You just came for me. To be here for
me.”

The young man is quiet for a long while. He
gathers up the pages of the letter and reads them again. When he
finishes, he stares at his father, feels the tremor he’s been
fighting for the last two days sneaking back, and he has to sit on
his right hand to stop it.

“I want to do something for you now. It ain’t
much but it’s all I got to give. You remember the big Magnolia tree
I used to climb in the cemetery? That’s where Mom is. Underneath
it.”

A sheet of tears begins to shimmer across the
surface of his father’s eyes.

“I can’t tell you why I did what I did to
her. To you. So if you came to hear where I put her, now you heard,
and now you can leave and quit pretending and I won’t hold it
against you.”

His father lowers the phone and leans in
toward the scratched-up Plexi.

Mouths,
I’m not going anywhere.

###

BLAKE CROUCH
is the author of DESERT
PLACES, LOCKED DOORS, and ABANDON, which was an IndieBound Notable
Selection last summer, all published by St. Martin's
Press. His newest thriller, SNOWBOUND, also from St. Martin's,
was released in June 2010. His short fiction has appeared in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
,
Alfred Hitchcock's
Mystery Magazine
,
Thriller 2
, and other anthologies,
including the new Shivers anthology from Cemetery Dance. In 2009,
he co-wrote "Serial" with J.A. Konrath, which has been downloaded
over 250,000 times and topped the Kindle bestseller list for 4
weeks. That story and DESERT PLACES have also been optioned for
film. Blake lives in Durango, Colorado. His website is
www.blakecrouch.com
.

Blake Crouch’s Works

Andrew Z. Thomas thrillers

Desert Places

Locked Doors

Break You

Stirred

Other works

Draculas with J.A. Konrath, Jeff Strand and
F. Paul Wilson

Abandon

Snowbound

Famous

Perfect Little Town (horror novella)

Serial Uncut with J.A. Konrath and Jack
Kilborn

Serial with Jack Kilborn

Bad Girl (short story)

Killers

Killers Uncut

Serial Killers Uncut

Four Live Rounds (collected stories)

Shining Rock (short story)

*69 (short story)

On the Good, Red Road (short story)

Remaking (short story)

The Meteorologist (short story)

The Pain of Others (thriller novella)

Six in the Cylinder (collected stories)

Fully Loaded (complete collected
stories)

Visit Blake at www.BlakeCrouch.com