Where (13 page)

He tosses a stinking bundle at me. Yesterday's scrubs. “Dress.”

“Wait. Who's calling who?”

“Now.” His glare strips the Hydra Destroyer off me like flaking paint.

And like plain old ordinary Ned Poulnot, dumb baby following orders because Father says, I put them on, but I'm all, “OK, how are you gonna take a call or make one or even text anybody in this dead bone place?” I can't stop jabbering. “Even the pagers died.”

His eyes rake me raw. “Don't ask.”

So I don't. I just stand there wishing Father would come— what am I thinking?
Wait.
I don't wish Father would come, I wish Father would … I don't know what I wish. I wish Rawson Steele wasn't so much bigger than me, I wish he wasn't so ripped and tough and driven, and I wish he'd …

I wish I didn't feel so short and stupid and useless standing here in paper shoes and yesterday's dirty scrubs.

Then he truly scares the crap out of me. It's the cold, dead lead in his voice. That death-row stare. Like he really is the player that runs Kobyashi in the game and this is a new level that I don't know about. He waves me out of the room. “Move!”

“Gaijin Samurai,”
I say anyway. He's either my friend or my enemy and I kind of need to know.

He doesn't blink. “Are you coming or not?”

“Are you with me or against me?” I toss it out there, to make sure he's only pretending we aren't in the game. “Like, at Chinyatsu Yo?”

Something makes me look again: Takeda? Did the player behind Takeda step out of the game to help me escape? I ask, to make sure. “Do you care?”

“Not really.” That grin. It's something about the grin.

“So, what. Are we in this thing together?”

Then he really grins.

It's Takeda! It has to be. I go, “So, we're in this together?”

Shit, we can change whatever's going down in this weird white place, him and me, fighting back to back no matter what.

He doesn't rightly say. He just says, “OK then. Let's go.”

Truth? I would follow him anywhere, but I want him to think I'm too sharp to move just because he says so. “Where to?”

“Where do you think, stupid? Your sister's house.”

“She took your phone?”

“That guy Powell did. I saw him hand it off to her on their way out to the rim.”

“The rim?” He might as well be talking about another planet.

“Take these.” He throws another bundle at me. Wow, a black hoodie so I can streak around and vanish into the night like Rawson Steele. Black sweats, where does he get these things? “It's cold out, and farther than you think.”

I slide into my disguise and follow him out into the hall. He doesn't need to tell me to be quiet, we are, oh my God, we're heading for the front door, with Father planted at the table like a stone idol of himself, propping up that big head with his fists. He's been stuck in that position, rooted in one place for so long that his elbows have turned black. The beard is so white that you can see the skin showing through, and his chin is all black and blue, like all the blood in him sank to the bottom and my father is morphing into a gigantic bruise. It spooks the crap out of me and I accidentally bump the corner of his table just when I'm trying so hard to sneak. “Shit!”
Oh, shit.

Oh, holy crap.

No problem. He doesn't move. Only the head comes to life. He raises it like a sea monster, waking up, with long white hair streaming over his eyes and that beard streaming down onto his chest like he just surfaced, with the whole ocean dripping down his face. His mouth opens wide under all that hair, as if he's trying to say something important but can't get it out because he's drowning in time and, fuck! I really don't care.

Then it all comes in on me: what Father is like, what it's been like with him, all of it, the parts in my soul that hurt all the time and the outside parts that he hurt but never so you'd see a scar or a broken bone or anything to prove it.
Hampton fucking Poulnot, I am done with you,
so I look him dead in the eyes, or where I think his eyes are under all that hair.

He might be trying to speak.

Like I even care. I shrug him off and tramp on by and out of his house here and on Kraven island and anywhere else in the universe. I'm gone from this place and out of his life in this or any other kingdom, I am done with Father for good and all.

I'm with Takeda now, although that may not be who he really is. Me and Rawson Steele are joining together to fight our way out of this dead hole and back to freedom, wherever that turns out to be, but still, but still …

It's weird.

Our front door is standing wide open to the night, which makes me feel both better and worse about how Rawson Steele got in, so that's Thing One.

Did he pick the locks or does this mean that he is secretly one of Them and They let him in Father's house to, like, do Their bidding, whoever
They
are?

That's Thing Two, and this is Thing Three: at this point, nobody from Kraven even knows whether there is a
They.
There's no way of telling how many more Things I have to keep track of, or whether I'll ever run out of Things that creep me out.

Thing Four is another
whether.

I don't know how long it's been since we got dumped in this awful place, but fuck, I'm sick of not doing anything and not going anywhere, all trapped inside with the man …

OK, the man I hate most in this or any other universe.

Just then Father raises his arms to me; he could even be pleading, and that does it. I'm out of here. Takeda or Rawson Steele or tool of the dead white city, I could care less who I'm following into the freezing night.

My main man came and cracked me out, like, a minute and a half before I totally lost it and murdered Father and the Power went
Zot
or whatever and I turned to stone. Scientists would dig us up a million years from now, Hydra Destroyer like a marble chess piece and his stony father propped up at that table forever, monuments to some unknown thing that nobody cares about.

The cold air zaps me in the face. It's so cold out that everything I was thinking, including all the
whethers,
blows clean out of my head. It's like being unshelled, turned loose in the universe without a clue. Fuck Rawson Steele! He doesn't treat me like we're in this together. Not now that we're outside. He doesn't say X or Y to me, you know, instructions; he doesn't, like, send up flags, you know:
this way,
to make me think he actually gives a crap if I follow or not. He just takes off and I light out after him. We're on the run!

I squeeze out “Wait up,” but it's too little and too late for him to hear. He's running along so far ahead that I have to drop into a crouch and go tearing after him, following him by ear, that fucking song that he's whistling through his teeth.

Together we cross the white city, me and the night stalker, leaning into the wind. The two of us run along like rats, streaking between the rows of Monopoly-board houses and down the creepy alleyways that take us along behind, avoiding the checkerboard spots where blinding streetlights mark off squares of night. We rush across the blank face of Wherever This Is under that totally fake full moon, tearing along like Steele knows where he's going, and I wonder if we'll ever get to Merrill's house or if we are going to someplace better or different or, OK, worse.

We run until a stitch stabs me in the ribs. I yelp and bend double but he doesn't look back and I don't know how to get home from where we are. No way am I stopping now. I just follow the tune, sticking close enough to see which turn he'll take next, but every time I make a corner, cramping like to die, shit! He heads around the next. Then just when I see a chance to catch up, he pulls a hard right.

I want to yell loud enough to bring Them down on us,
Wait
!

But he trusts me— I think.

He needs me, right? I rear up on my hind legs like a crippled centipede and follow, so crazy with keeping up that when he finally stops, I run up his heels like the biggest, dumbest kid in Special Ed.

“Ow!” He whirls with his teeth bared and his eyes blazing. “Watch it!”

My face goes to pieces, like, down around my neck.
I thought we were friends.
“Sorry.”

“OK then.” He slams my shoulders with the heel of his hand and spins me around like this is urgent and I should know.

We are standing in front of another blank white house.

Shit, he marches me up the walk like a lead soldier, his right foot and left foot shoving mine,
right, left, right. March. Hup. Two
— what was he before we got dumped in this desert, Special Ops?

I dig in. Like, What is this? Where are we, and why me?
Anything
could be behind that door. “What's this about?”

“You'll see.” He's like steel, marching me the distance that I don't want to go.
Reep. Fo.
We stop just short of the pool of light on the front stoop. He points.

Except for the peephole, the front door looks just like Father's, like all the other front doors out here.
“What do you want me to do?”

He bends, harshing into my ear. “When she comes to the peephole, smile.” Then he shoves me into the light.

It's kind of awful. It's so bright, the door is so just like every other door that I don't get what I'm supposed to know. Where this is. Why I'm here. My friend Rawson and me, we ran all the way across the floor of crazy Wherever to get to this dead white house that I don't know whose it is or whether he's still my friend or why this is so important.

“This is where I owe you a big one.” He's all, like,
man to man.
Then he grins. “She'll open up for you.”

“Oh,” I say. I get it. “Oh.”

I'm stopped stone dead and shivering outside my sister's house. The phone. We're here about his stupid phone and I'm scared shit that after all this, like it's the wrong house and we get busted, or else it's the right one, but she isn't home. Or she won't let me in. Unless it's a trap. They'll come to the door all right, but it won't be her, it's the devil or the Merganauts from
Gaijin Samurai,
fixing to drag me and Steele or Takeda and my whole team Koro Ishi straight to hell.

“Be cool,” he says. “I've got your back.”

I push the buzzer and nothing happens. I knock and nobody comes. I lean down and whistle two notes into the keyhole, like Mom used to whistle when it was OK for us to come out of our rooms for supper, never mind what Father just did to her. That should bring her. If that won't do it, nothing will. Next to me, hanging in the shadows just outside the halogen glare, Rawson Steele waits it out, all intense and jittering.

I call in the lowest tone you can use and actually call to a person. “Merrill, are you in there?” What if she is? What if she's not? If I bang on the door and yell and that doesn't get to her, then maybe at least It or They will come out and grab us so this can end.

That would be something, right?

Right?

I ball up my fists and bang hard enough to bring out the dead or bring down the walls of Wherever This Is, and I hate that the fucking place doesn't even have a fucking name. “I know you're in there, Merrill Poulnot. Open the door, Mer. Answer the fucking door, I'm your fucking brother. Hurry up, Merrill Laneuville Poulnot. It's me.”

And she opens it so fast and whips me inside so slickly and slams it so hard that without Rawson Steele's knife— his knife!— laid in the crack it would have locked, but my big sister is hugging me so hard that she doesn't even know it hurts. She's all sobby and going, “Are you OK? What were you thinking, Ned Poulnot, you could have died running around out there in the cold, you could get hurt, or killed, oh God, Neddy, I'm so sorry I had to leave you behind,” she says, and I don't know if she means now or back then when she was eighteen, but I know she gets it; she gets me, and she's sorry as all hell.

“The thing is, I had to, we had to … And we're stuck in the houses where they put us, so it's you and Father all over again, but he's too far gone to hurt anybody now. Listen, when we get home…” She hugs me again. “Hey, I'm working on it. Ray and I have…” This is not making sense. Then it is. “It's just taking too long!”

And, fuck, we don't either of us know if it's been days or weeks.

“We're trying,” my sister says, “and we still don't know. We don't know anything!” Then she buries my face in her belly and starts hugging and rocking, and whether or not she knows that Rawson Steele has blown into the room like a spirit on the wind, she's crying to break my heart, “Oh, Neddy, I missed you so much!”

 

15

Hampton Poulnot

When I die, reduce me to ash

dig out the gold, it's worth hard cash

kick the rest out the door, baptize it with pee

I know what you think of me

Damn you, Dorcas Lanieuville, I wrote verse to please you, and now look. I loved you to hell, and you threw out generations of history like yesterday's dead fish. You were bent on tearing down the family tree, so you called our daughter Merrill, ridiculous made-up name. I tried to forgive you, I did. “It means bright as the sea,” you said, putting your stamp on my baby like a curse. We tried, but you vanished from my life like a spirit on the wind, and that, I will never forgive. Now your righteous daughter and uptight Ray Powell— well, God damn you all.

On Kraven, I was a leader! Ray Powell was my
friend.
Time passed. I drank and you ran and forgive me, I drank. I drank and worse things happened. I lost my temper all over again. Ray Powell turned my people against me; he did it with that smile, extorting promises I couldn't keep, so he took me off the bench.
For your own good,
he said when he brought me down, but that's not what he meant.
He stole my power,
but now.