Where (5 page)

Color blazes. On the biggest fa
ç
ade in the plaza, a great screen blooms like a tropical flower. We're on TV! As though the Power, whatever it is, whatever they are— as though some mysterious entity heard my old man howling and flipped a switch.

We stop what we were saying, doing, thinking, and face the screen like recruits lined up for the orientation film:

Welcome to Wherever This Is.

Wedged into the square like illegals waiting to be deported, we watch, waiting for the emcee, director, instructor, captors, the power behind our
removal
to step out and explain.

Instead, the show begins.
Island Inhabitants Vanish.
Long shot of Kraven island. A banner zips across the bottom of the screen on a loop:
Weekly World News
. My heart lifts.
We're on the news. This means they'll find us soon.

But there's a problem. The travelogue-perfect montage is too detailed to be shot and edited in a day, the interviews so slick that questions stir in my gut, gnawing their way out. No power could have processed all that material in the short time we've been gone, but like everybody else watching, I was mesmerized. Changed. For that moment, in the aftermath of our— disruption and
removal,
I bought it. We all did.

Even Father goes quiet, fixed on the screen, but I know what he is thinking, standing there with his hands spread and his angry mouth ajar: civic leader, waiting for his cameo, while I speed-read the images; if Davy isn't here, I'll find him up there on the screen and find a way to let him know I'm here.

Cameras pan the route from Charlton to Poynter's island to our island. God, they've barricaded the causeway! It's so weird, all those driverless cars stalled on the road out of Kraventown; I don't see Davy's, so,
where!
Bay Street is so
still
that even Ray groans. Buildings we go into every day stand empty; shops and guest houses, even the police station, clinic, the banks. All our favorite and our private places are laid open like corpses waiting to be autopsied, doors sagging like empty mouths and all our secret orifices gaping.

On streets where we used to play, nothing moves but a stray cat slinking across the road with its ass tucked under in shame. Although we have audio there's no sound on Kraven, really, except for Wade Tanner's watchdogs snarling as the camera passes his jewelry store. It's so quiet that even at that great, unspecified distance, I hear marsh beetles crackling in the sawgrass off Ray Powell's dock. Then a news anchor reaches into one of the abandoned cars on the causeway and honks the horn, and all our dogs begin barking at once.

In case we thought we were deluded or dreaming, a great late-breaking news banner replaces
World News
. Racing along below the feed, our situation in pr
é
cis:

THE KRAVEN ISLAND MYSTERY

Authorities Baffled— A Hundred Gone

Information comes thick and fast: news clips of baffled authorities' press conferences, interviews with mystified friends and strangers from the mainland and the outer islands, some of them in tears—
they're out there looking. Davy too?

Then parents and friends and lovers of the missing— us!— plead with kidnappers, in case—
wait! is this a ransom situation?
— offering millions if whoever has us lets us go. In extreme closeup, the governor of South Carolina reports that the military, state police, local cops, supernumeraries, firefighters from three counties are blanketing the area. With an election coming up, he weeps. “And the sickening thing about this is that we've scoured the town and surrounding farmland, walked the perimeter of the island and dredged the channel and no living person is left behind on Kraven island to tell the tale.”
Drama queen.

“Our men found food cooking on the stove in some of those houses. Their pillows were still warm!”

Cut to Miss Edna Massingale, Crocker County historian. “It's as if they vanished from the face of the earth.”

In the minutes— days?

This is when I begin to wonder.

In the weeks?

In the unspecified
time
since our mysterious disappearance, our houses look the same: no broken glass or shattered doorframes, no excavations or bullet holes, no signs of violence like bodies or crude barricades, nothing to suggest that we'd made a valiant last stand before we vanished or fled or were forcibly removed.

How long have we been here?

The mayor of Charlton has the nerve to wonder if we were seized by mass hysteria, running ahead of natural disaster, or plague? He looks concerned, but, God!

Viewers! What if there really is an epidemic? What if it threatened you, out there watching in your safe houses, snug among your pillows and panting for more? Bent on reassuring you, he blathers on, when all we want to know is that you're looking for us.

Worse. On our first day in this unknown, unknowable location, nobody knows, but everybody has a theory. Experts speculate at length, talking heads, huge and impotent, blathering on. Geologists, anthropologists, sociologists, show up on the giant screen; historians with graphs, sociologists with pie charts have opinions; officials and bounty hunters, mercenaries and earnest mainlanders air their views. A furious merchant claims we ran out on thousands in bad debts.

Asshole, we were
stolen.

Meanwhile, even though Ray's holding him down, Father— my father!— comes to a boil. I should have seen it coming but I'm crazy with looking for Davy down here in the plaza and up there on the screen, and Davy isn't anywhere.

Cameras compound our grief by picking up details specific to us. They've been inside our houses— Father's cluttered kitchen, filthy dishes in the sink and in his bedroom, dirty clothes strewn on the floor. Close shot of his bedside table, that tin can with the fork standing upright in the baked beans.
What happened, Neddy. What happened to Patrice?
Shock cuts take us from Ray's sprawling, beautiful Azalea House to Kara Maxwell's cottage to the shack where Betsy Till and I played every day, wait, is this a documentary? Then …

My teeth lock. Close shot of the bed where I growled goodnight to Davy, not knowing it was goodbye. The bastard, bastards dished out a long closeup of our bedroom, where my lover got up in the dark and without an explanation, left.

It's all up close and so personal that it reams me out, and I'm not the only one, people all around me struggle, anxious and twitching with distress. It's all wrong, looking into the past we were yanked out of … how long ago?

Back when we had lives, and that's the issue.

Nobody could collect and edit that much data on a whole town in half a day. You couldn't video our island, interiors or exteriors, without somebody walking into the shot, so when did they …

Ray shouts, “What? What is this?” I turn to him for reassurance, the way you do, but something is off. I have to look again. Fully dressed as he is— khakis, nice shirt, starched explorer's vest with many pockets, he would have showered and shaved when he got up just like he did every morning, but. Some time today, while I was distracted and crazy with dislocation, Ray's freshly ironed clothes went to hell; my nails were white above the cuticles and we who shower every morning smell rank and unwashed, so the question isn't, where are we?

It's:

When?

 

5

Ned Poulnot

'Od damn, 'od damn, 'od damndamndammit, I'm deep into Level 299 of
Gaijin Samurai,
we are close to the top when the unexpected
awful
comes, and it's all been awful ever since. Like a shit bomb exploded my life, like, zot! No warning, no Take That, to let you know the looming nasty is coming, not even a threatening shadow or a flash of yellow eyes. It just smashes all over you in a great white wave, and what do I know? Zip.

All I know is this. We were storming the Eternal Gates of Chinatsu Yo, the rest of the Koro Ishi and me. We were on a roll, fighting back to back to back all eight of us, and then. Wham! I got disconnected. Snatched up and yanked out of
Gaijin Samurai
just when I was
this close
to the top.

Like, this ginormous Whatever yanked me out of the game and dumped me in this white brick oven with Father raving like an asshole and no way to tell my team why I left or where I went. My fucking phone is dead.

Dammit, we were on a roll. We were at the top of the Eleven Bloody Steps, me and the killer seven, my Koro Ishi. We trained together in the dojo and man, we're good. We slashed and burned our way to the Eternal Gates of the castle at Chinatsu Yo, we were
this close
when, shit! I, Hydra Destroyer, got sucked out of my avatar like a soul out of its skin without a second to explain. Now I'm marooned or whatever in white hell with a mess of townies I never liked, trapped in this freaking soup bowl with no way back.

Before it came down, me and best friends that I never met were fighting back to back— the Koro Ishi: Zorn and Takeda and Hajii, Xaos33, Exx, Marble, Eleanor and me, which, son of a bitch! We've played together for so long and fought so hard that we're, like,
fused,
me and them. It doesn't matter where we lived in the world or how long it's been since we did whatever we were supposed to be doing on what continent, we were connected in the game and we were
winning
. On the Eleventh Bloody Step, fixing to crash the Eternal Gates. We'd been playing all day and all night, it was intense. Once you're inside
Gaijin Samurai,
that's all there is. Players in the Koro Ishi know this: when you're winning, you'll blow off school or the day job, factory, office, wherever the other samurai from our dojo go in their pathetic shadow lives off-line.

This is all that matters. This.

I had the Dread Kobyashi backed up on the top step of the next-to-last level, one more blast and he fucking explodes. Hydra Destroyer, a.k.a. me, was fixing to flame Kobyashi and the Gaijinaut he rode in on into a thousand bloody bits, blazing fire from my seven mouths, I was magnificent. I had to kill him three times, and I was on number two. When I'm done and he vaporizes, I get to morph into Able Blacksmith with enough firepower to melt the lock on the Eternal Gates and we'll be in! Then and, like, only then, the Koro Ishi enters the three hundreth level in
Gaijin Samurai,
and believe me, we'll triumph in the Courtyard of Chinatsu Yo. Would have.

We were all, like, fuck sleep, this is too big. We're almost there.

Man, we were
this close
. When I got disconnected, Hydra Destroyer went out like a light and now. Oh. My. God.

 

6

Merrill

What is this, news or docudrama or something we don't know about?
I'm not the only one strung taut, jittery and uncertain here. Exhausted by standing in one place, we fix on the screen, wondering,
Is it real?
Next to me, someone hisses, “Is this a movie?” while above us, the show goes on.

Here's Billy Maxwell in full uniform filling the screen, grinning like he expected to come back from Syria alive, although that photo is all Kara has left of him, and somewhere in the plaza, Kara Maxwell wails in pain— my best friend, and I can't get to her. Stacked like cordwood, stupefied by the heat, we hear experts expound on the great mystery. As though they've been studying our disappearance for weeks.

Wait. We just got here! Parched, dizzy and uncertain, I go a little crazy, trying to make it all make sense. Then Ned finds me in the forest of bodies. He socks my arm and I hug him in spite of himself. “Neddy, thank God!”

“Your phone!” He pounds until I let go. “I need your phone!”

I snap back with, “It's not like I sleep with my phone,” ordinary Merrill for once, in an ordinary fight.

Tears pile up in his eyes. “I have to get back!”

I grab his wrist. “Look at me, Edward LaMar Poulnot. Were you up all night with that stupid game?”

Yesterday's manga T-shirt on him: Dark Warrior. Busted! Tears pile up in his eyes. “I was
right there,
and now I'm not anywhere!”

Right. Chinyatsu Yo.
I'm furious. “Is that all you care about? That stupid game? Neddy, look around!”
Oh, please don't cry.

“I was so close!”

If you cry, I'll cry
. “It's just a game, OK?”

“Shit no, it's my life!”

“Not now. It isn't even real.” This is good for us both, getting mad at the same old thing. “This…” I grab his wrist and flick my nail at the long scab on his clenched fist.

“Don't!” He flinches. You'd think the wound was fresh.

Gently, I lift it. “This is real.”

He snatches his hand away; the scab's so old that it hangs until he rips it off and bites down on it. Realization crosses his face in stages. The skin underneath is dead white. “Oh!”

Father pushed him against the stove and gouged that cut in him way back— when? Before. This is happening now. “See?”

“Oh, shit.”

Oh shit.
It's in the air, a hundred of us brought up short by the stone fact of it.
Oh, shit!
How could a thing like this happen to people like us? Nobody knows.
When
did it happen? Not sure. So this is when it hits me amidships. In this dead-white arena, time is elastic. Nothing is fixed.

On the screen above us, the show goes on, but we've had enough. When our questions and complaints get loud enough to mess up the audio, some intelligence cuts back to the channel islands montage, with wallpaper music swelling to calm us down. Then the pink nerf ball of a microphone pops up in front of the governor. He's speaking, but this is not his voice: “State troopers continue to scour Kraven island for survivors or…”