The Zero (40 page)

Authors: Jess Walter

Tags: #Fiction, #General

“Okay,” she asked quietly, “Do you want to try to open your eyes now?”

But he squeezed them as tight as he could, waiting for her to come.

Acknowledgments

I AM DEEPLY INDEBTED
to a number of friends, editors, agents and writers who believed in this novel from its first pages and gave it valuable reads: Cal Morgan, Judith Regan, Warren Frazier, Bill Reiss, Dan Butterworth, Jim Lynch, Danny Westneat, Sam Ligon and my lovely wife, Anne Walter.

This book is fiction. To those people whose real pain I witnessed five years ago, I hope there is real peace.

About the Author

JESS WALTER is the author of
Citizen Vince
, a novel named as one of the year’s best by the
Washington Post
, NPR’s Fresh Air, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Milwaukee Sentinel, and others. His novels include Land of the Blind and Over Tumbled Graves, a New York Times Notable Book. Walter lives in Spokane, Washington, with his family.

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ALSO BY JESS WALTER

FICTION

Citizen Vince

Land of the Blind

Over Tumbled Graves

NONFICTION

Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy
of the Randy Weaver Family

(originally released as
Every Knee Shall Bow
)

Credits

Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund

Author photograph by Dan Pelle

Copyright

THE ZERO
. Copyright © 2006 by Jess Walter. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

ePub edition August 2006 ISBN 9780061758041

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walter, Jess, 1965–

The Zero: a novel / Jess Walter.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-06-089865-6 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-06-089865-8 (alk. paper)

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