Where (9 page)

Boom.

“Dynamite.” He snaps back into himself. “They're sounding the lake.”

Earl says, “To see what floats up…”

Davy doesn't want to finish it for him, but he does. “Because they're fixing to drag.”

“For bodies.”

“Fuck.”

“Good news, asshole.”

“How is that good?”

“It's almost dark. They're all over to the lake with their grappling hooks and shit, so nobody cares which way you come in or how you come in and they sure as hell won't mess with me, cool Gullah-man, wants him some pike. Keep low in the boat, you hear? Roll over and roll out when I tell you, and you'll end up at Powell's Inlet, halfway to Powell's dock.”

They're so easy with each other that they go along in silence until it's time. Earl says, “I'll wait on you. Come back when you're done.”

With one leg over the edge of the boat, Davy says, “Too dark. It's not like you'll know. Shit, I don't even know when I'll be done.”

“Dude, how you're gonna get back?”

“Anybody's car.” He eases himself over the side. “It's not like anybody needs it. They're all gone.”

“Every shitass with a rifle's up there guarding the road.”

“Anybody's boat,” he says, and drops.

 

11

Ned

Anywhen

I had a whole world, and now it's just me and Father, Father and me, and it's awful. He locked me in! It's been forever. Like days. More like weeks, but in this white hell where I'm stuck with him, who knows?

I'm trapped in here with nothing to do but wonder what's going on back in the real world, i.e., the game.

Are they OK? Are they pissed at me?

What if they think I croaked at my machine, or that, I got, like,
booted
for some heinous act I did that they don't know about? I was fucking
disconnected.
Did they even notice when I went POOF? Shit. What if they picked up another eighth, like, that Secaucus Serpent guy from the Kendo Kadre that's always trying to get in with us and played on through. They could be storming Chinyatsu Yo right now, like there never was a Hydra Destroyer.

Like there never was a me.

There kind of isn't, now. Just Ned fading into the woodwork, one more white thing in a place with white everything: no rugs on the bleached-sand floor, if you go barefoot you can pretend it's the beach but shit, there's no curtains or pictures on the nubbly white walls and if they were, they would be white. It's like color's not allowed— not even a fucking picture puzzle to take your mind off it, whatever
it
is, like thinking will corrupt your soul. What are we supposed to,
meditate?
Plus, nothing to write on and nothing to write or draw with except your own blood and one other thing that it's too disgusting to try and if I tried it Patrice would have a cow, except she wasn't with us when we got took. Where is she anyway? Poor Patrice said Whatever to Father the other week and he smacked her so hard that he had to buy her a ticket up to her mama's house in Charleston to make up for it, so when it grabbed us, unlike me, Patrice got Left Behind.

Father's gone back inside himself and he won't come out. His fringe is turning into a great big Moses beard, like he's doing it to
match.
One more day like this we'll seize up like a Civil War monument. Gazillion years from now archaeologists will find us: Ned and Father alone in this white house in the bone-white silence, turned to stone.

He sits at that table all day and half the night in his white outfit with his white face buried in his white, white beard, all broody and stone silent, but I try. 'Od damn I try. I start a conversation between us every night, the problem being that the only one talking is me.

When the food comes, I start, “How was your day, Father?” but Father just chews.

Then I move around to the chair on his side and put on that deep, preachy voice, going, “Fine, son. How about yourself?”

My voice: “It's fucking bored out, Father.” That's me doing what Father used to call “dropping the F bomb” so he'll get up and hit me like he does back home, but his fists don't clench. He doesn't even scowl.

I go back around to his side. “Language, Edward.”

Me: “Don't call me Edward, I hate Edward.”

I do a pretty good Father: “It's your grandfather's name and I will damn well use it.”

“Don't be an asshole, Dad. You can fucking call me Ned.”

Like Father ever answered to the name Dad. I thought two insults consecutive plus the “Dad” would bring him out. No, he gives me the bleakest look, but never mind.

I have a plan.

I've been working on this wall, behind the dumbwaiter? Stuff goes in and out through a hatch in the back, and I've been chipping away at the plaster every chance I get. So, what if there are zero jackets and shit in here, just the white scrubs, like we're patients in some ginormous hospital? I'm hoarding dirty scrubs. Tonight I put them all on, make some kind of hoodie out of the pillowcases. I'd rather freeze than fry, plus if they have guards or something, I'll be harder to see: white on white on white. Tonight, I break out.

I'm bailing just as soon as he sinks down in a heap at that table and starts to snore, but shit, I have to give him one last chance.

We eat. I talk for both of us. Then I do what I have to. I go: “Why did Mother leave us anyway?”

That stone face turns to marble, dead white. Then he breaks the Vow of Silence or whatever. It's like an iceberg cracking. “Go to bed.”

So I do, but only until I hear him stomp away and crash on his bed so hard that it bashes the wall between our rooms. Then I open the kitchen dumbwaiter and break out the back and into the freezing desert night.

Back home on Kraven I used to run through the neighborhood reading other people's windows like comic books: the fight in one, the love scene, the bad little kids getting drunk, the beating in another, another and another, and everybody and everything in the houses I looked into was a different color, all blazing and busy like frames in a comic or the best animation you ever saw! The never-ending story occupied me on those empty nights before I found
Gaijin Samurai
and I logged on and had a life, but there's nothing here in this nothing place that we don't know what it is. Everything down in the great white toilet where we landed is still and quiet and white, white, white. White shutters on every window closed tight. The blank of the white buildings around the empty plaza are white, and the grainy white sidewalks lead out to white, white houses laid out like blocks on a Monopoly board with no colors and no printing and no squares so you can tell whether you're moving, just the bleached streets spreading out to the cement rim surrounding, as white and regular as a ring of false teeth without the gums or the grooves between. Even the barrier dune beyond is smooth and perfect, like a giant potter threw a porcelain bowl to put us in and the wheel stopped.

Nothing, not even the shadow of a footprint, touches the sand. It comes sifting down in the night wind and stops cold at the rim, so in spite of the breeze, everything inside it lies still.

That's weird, and this is weird.

There's almost no sound. Like it's one of those sensory deprivation tanks? Or it's some kind of prison, i.e., we are trapped, but there are no guards that I can see, no towers where armed guards could hide, nothing set up to keep anything out or any of us in, not like they need it, I'm the only person out tonight. Skittering like an ant trapped under a dome.

Alone. It's so
weird.

So, what are they, locked inside against their will, like Father and me except he is, like, zombified, or are they all scared to go out?

It's cold as fuck out here, and darker than fuck, but! Free. I should be happy and excited, but I'm alone out in the open, and it's cold and creepy as hell. The silence is the worst. Like all the houses are soundproofed, unless nobody else is talking to each other either, same as Father and me.

There are no TVs in these houses, only one or two cracks of light showing around drawn shutters and nothing moving, as far as I can tell. Except for the breeze brushing the sand circle, there's nothing to hear.

Maybe it's like this in
Gaijin Samurai,
i.e., on Level 300 you lose your team, you lose your bearings, you end up with nobody to rely on and nothing to fight with except yourself and the great mess of
stuff
you know about, useless facts rattling around inside your head.

Is this place where we landed even
real life,
or is this the first level of a new, harder game I might not win? Yes, I am weirded out. And freezing. In another minute parts of me will start to break off like ice chunks in an avalanche. I can't stay out but I don't want to go in.

I just want this to be over, OK?

If I was ever Hydra Destroyer, that's done. I'm nobody but me, stupid Ned Poulnot, unarmed and unaided out here in the enormousness, shivering in my pathetic layers of scrubs, alone.

And then I'm not.

Alone. I mean.

There's a guy! He comes sliding down the inside of the barrier dune like a cross-country skier, easy on his feet and bone upright. He lands at the tippy end of the access road and gets up smiling and 'od damn, he walks toward me like the Thief that used to turn up in the old Xbox games and steal all your treasures while you were slaying the Avenger or recharging your Vector Belt, except he's half-whistling through his teeth the way you do— what is that tune? I hear him coming and this, at least, is kind of great. I saw him first. I know the tune!

I think it goes, “I'm just a lonesome traveler…” It stops.

Should I be scared? Hell if I know. He doesn't come on like one of us, from Kraven island, but I almost know who he is. He walks tall, not all cold and hunched over like me. As if he found a way to ditch the scrubs and get a real outfit, unless.

I don't know unless what, all I know is: tall guy walking fast, wrapped up in, is that a cape? Shuh, it's just a tarp that he ripped off something, but it's black. So are the jeans and thick hoodie— black boots, and that's cool, but it's also disturbing. How is he not shivering in the white scrubs like the rest of us?

“Fuck,” he says, but not from close enough to scare me or near enough that I can make out his face. “What are you doing out here?”

“Who are you?”

He sort of laughs. “Me, scouting the perimeter like I was dead alone out here.”

“See anything?”

“Nothing that would help.”

“Who are you?”

“Friend of the family.”

“Yeah, right.” I like him, I hate him, I don't know how I feel except frustrated because he isn't saying, and even more pissed because I can't figure him out. “Really. Who
are
you?”

“Well, hell, who the fuck are you?”

“None of your business.” By then I have him in my sights. If I was Hydra right now, I would … but I'm not, he's six foot something and I'm only almost fourteen. I show all my teeth like Father does when he's pissed off. “What are you doing here?”

He goes inside himself and comes back out with my answer, not his. “Oh. You're the Poulnot kid.”

“Who says?”

“Little bird.”

“Fuck that shit.”

He just laughs. I'm meeting up with my first friend in this off-world new world and he sounds like all those smartass TV people up there making television in New York. “Hello, Ned Poulnot, pleased to meet you.” He sticks out his hand.

Like I'm about to shake. “Hello, whatever the hell your name is.”

“Steele. Rawson Steele.”

Ohmygod. Oh. My. God. Everything I heard, all the ugly stuff people said about him back in Kraventown. Did he bring down the attack of the Big Whatever that yanked us out of our lives? Bad shit from deep inside backs up in my throat and like to strangles me.
You!
That guy, stalking our personal property like a prospector, did they erase us so he could get what he wants?

“What were you…” I want to say,
doing on Kraven island?
but I can't. I go, “What are you doing here?”

He sees the big question simmering, I'm like to explode and he puts up his hand real fast, to stop it, “It's not what you think!”

And then all the poison in me hits the top and blows the lid off. I lunge at him banging with both fists, and stuff comes spewing out of me but it's not exactly words, I am fucking sobbing, God, it is embarrassing. “You did it. You did this to us, you dumped us in this big white hell so you can go back to Kraven and take our houses and all our stuff…”

“Dude, I don't want your damn stuff.”

“Well, you can have it, you can have our whole fucking island. Just get me out of here!”

“I only want what's mine.”

“Mother
fucker
!” I'm shaking with it, where we are and how I was about to beat the game when this happened, and I bang my head into his chest like that will hurt him more and it finally comes out, “This is all your fault, it's your snot-blowing shit-licking assaholic fault.”

I'm all acking and sobbing, I can't help it, can't stop it, until,
wham,
he rams a fist into my chest and knocks all the hate out of me.

Then he holds me off from him, waiting for me to settle, and when I quit struggling he lifts me up off the ground by about a foot and holds me in place until I finally get my breath back and sob it all out, and quit even trying to kick.

He holds me off a minute longer and when it's clear I've vomited out all the
angry
backed up inside of me, he sets me down and we stand there looking at each other until I start shivering because losing it warms you up, but not in a good way, and not for long. “Oh, kid.” He rips off his tarp and wraps it around me and I let him. “Be sure and hide this when you get home.”