Where Read online

  “Right.”

  “Now, shove off and let me do this, OK?” He will go to ground and pass the day somehow, blind and ignorant and uncertain, gearing up for whatever comes next. He has no idea what he is waiting for, only that it’s something he has to do.

  “Do what?”

  “Whatever.” The rest comes, but he doesn’t say it. I have to wait. He says, “Now get the fuck out of here.”

  “OK then, but if you get busted…”

  Oh dude. Oh, dude! Right. Part on the laugh line. “No prob, Pinckney. I just tell ’em I have a colored friend.”

  23

  Merrill

  Now

  She can’t even guess how long she’s been waiting here at the bottom of the ladder with Rawson Steele holding her in place, unless he’s holding her up. She doesn’t like leaning against anyone for support, but they’re stalled here until the last of the crowd milling overhead moves on and the last shout dies, and in their dank prison, she is grateful for the warmth. Knowing Steele— which she doesn’t, really— she thinks he’ll make her wait even longer, and she can’t tell whether he’s holding her here to prove he’s in control or to keep her safe.

  Without her here, would he wait? Would he even have to wait? He could still scramble up and abandon her, but he waits. For all she knows, he is one of them, keeping her in place until it’s time. Question being, time for what?

  Who were those people running along overhead?

  In stasis, she thinks, too many questions, but she can’t stop them coming. Does the hatch in the roof open on the glistening white compound she remembers, or will they come out on the broad, empty desert beyond the rim? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what country the desert is in, or whether there is in fact a fixed location or whether she’s been abducted and abandoned in a state of mind. Time, facts, truth— everything is in flux.

  She tugs, thinking to separate herself so she can think. “Let go.”

  “Sorry, I can’t.”

  She wants to separate; she doesn’t want to separate. “I said, let go of me!”

  “Shh. Not yet.”

  Together, they stand, linked until the last sound above them fades away and he releases her.

  Merrill turns on him. “What was that?” This is the question that troubles her on so many levels that she can’t number them.

  “I needed to be sure.”

  “That isn’t an answer.” She starts up the ladder.

  He is abrupt, protective, kind. “No!”

  She makes other false starts but each time he draws her back and oddly, this seems right. The last time she tries, something Steele hears or thinks he hears: a shout, footsteps returning, the clang of metal on cement— cement!— makes him yank her back so sharply that she turns on him, bristling like a terrier. “Stop that!”

  “Shut up or you’ll bring them down on us.” He puts her aside like a chair accidentally set in his way.

  “When?”

  He turns as though she hasn’t spoken and stalks the length of the rack of forgotten clothes.

  She’s too distracted to stay angry. Cement. Is there a road up there? The rim? What?

  Steele drags an armful of overcoats off their hangers and drops them at her feet. “Sit down, OK? We’ll go when it’s time.”

  “I don’t even know what time it is!” Merrill is anxious, hungry, pissed off, hungry, God is she hungry! In ordinary, more or less predictable life; in stories, where outcomes can be controlled, there would be mints in one of these coat pockets, ossified chocolates in the nearest handbag or K rations in a helmet from some old war or compressed food packs shelved with the astronaut gear. In the real world this rangy Northerner, her protector or captor or whatever he is to her, would rummage until he found her something to eat. As it is, they are adrift in an unpredictable world where time ebbs and flows and nothing is certain, neither where she is nor how she got here while Steele paces, thinking whatever he thinks.

  Neatly folding an army parka that could have seen duty in Siberia where so many were lost, he drops it on the floor and sits so they are facing. Like a trained hostage negotiator he asks in an easy, patient way, “Are you OK?”

  Startled, she lets it all out. “I’m fucking starving!”

  “Don’t sweat it.”

  “It’s been hours.”

  “Hang in, it won’t be much longer.” Either the artificial LED light has changed or he has.

  “How the hell do you know?”

  For the first time she can see him clearly: kind enough and worried, trying to gentle her. Saying with unexpected warmth, “This will end.”

  “Sure. Sure it will.”

  “It will.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  The next words come out in a groan. “Everything does.”

  This is so bleak that she finds herself rushing to reassure him. “Not everything.”

  “Stories,” he says. “Lives. What else is left at the end?”

  “The questions.” There it is. The challenge.

  “No.” An almost smile. “The mystery.”

  Underground in a place she doesn’t know, in territory she doesn’t know with a man she understands she’ll never really know, Merrill gives up on answers. He’s here. He’s done his best to calm her and protect her; she’s grateful, so she does as he says. She sits for so long that she forgets why she’s sitting there, looks up to orient herself and finds herself looking directly into that changeable green gaze.

  You, she thinks, drawn. Yes, drawn. You, in this terrible place.

  This is when Rawson Steele surprises her. His voice comes up from someplace so deep that it’s painful, just listening. It’s been so long since they last spoke that she forgets what she said when the conversation died, but it’s clear that he hasn’t.

  “Questions,” he says as if they’d just left off. Then, as if this is a textbook quiz with the answers neatly filed in the Appendix, he says, “You mean, ‘why are we here,’ ‘why this,’ ‘why us’ kind of thing?”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s not like they’re lined up waiting to tell you.”

  She snaps to attention. They. “OK, Rawson. Who?”

  Shrug: “Anybody.”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “Would it change anything if you knew?”

  “Oh, don’t!”

  But he does. “Knowing won’t change the end game.” He is taking her somewhere she doesn’t want to go. Like a tour guide, he puts her down and leaves her staring over the edge. Pats her in place with: “Nothing does. The only question is how well we play the game. Whatever it is.”

  “Oh, don’t!” She wants to lunge across the few feet between them, grapple him to a safer place. “Don’t be that person. Dammit, look at me!”

  He is looking into his hands. After too long he opens his palms: that magician, fresh out of tricks: Nothing to see here, nothing up my sleeves. Quickly, he compresses them to fists so she won’t notice that he’s shaking. He is struggling with something. It takes him a while to get the words out. “There are things out there that we’ll never know about.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true.”

  “We still have to ask!”

  “Oh, lady, forget it.” Steele stands so abruptly that she rises with him. His gesture takes in their prison, the compound, the world and everything beyond. “Enjoy what you can and don’t worry the big questions because nobody knows the answers. Really. Lady, let it go.”

  “I can’t!”

  Surprise: Steele nods. Patiently, he lays it out for her. “OK. There’s a curtain between the natural and the supernatural. You know, there are things we can see and know, and things we’ll never know. Every once in a while it twitches, just a little bit, so you’ll know there’s something going on back there.”

  “Rawson, make sense!”

  “It’s Archbold.” Then he turns her around to face the ranks of costumes with a bright, astounding grin. �
��And this?”

  It lands on her with the weight of the universe. The lost colonies, the unknown history, the fate of the legions of missing, which in the name of God she is right now, the missing who are never forgotten because nobody knows where they are or what became of them, the …

  Realization overturns her. Missing. Like me. “What, Archbold. What is this?”

  With a gesture wide enough to take in the known world, he says, “It’s just whatever’s behind that curtain,” he says, grinning as though none of this just happened. “Moving, to remind us it’s still there.”

  The weight is crushing her. She jumps up and runs for the ladder. “Oh God, I have to get out!”

  “Wait!”

  “I’m sick of waiting!” She grabs the sides and takes hold. The bottom rung is set too far above the floor for a woman her size to hoist herself up and get a foothold, but she tries again, falls back and runs at it a third time.

  This time she is astonished by reassuring pressure on her elbows, the warmth of Rawson Steele’s hands as he raises her up. She turns to thank him as she reaches the top, and the look they exchange then staggers her. Stunned, she hesitates, waiting for whatever comes next.

  In the next second, he swarms past her on the ladder, “Wait here, on the ledge until I tell you it’s safe. Look at me and promise.”

  She nods and he reaches down to brush her cheek, reassuring her with his touch. As he does so, his collar falls wide. Then he cracks the lid to the hatch, and the sliver of fresh sunlight strikes gold. She can see Rawson Steele clearly now, the concern in his face as he waits for her promise, two gold rings on a thong in the hollow of his throat.

  He repeats. “Promise?”

  “Promise.” She would do anything for him.

  24

  Ned

  Now

  OMG, where is this thing going?

  Wait. What is it?

  All Father had to do was wave those awful scrubs. He grabbed the hoodie off me and used his bloody shirt for a flag. Everybody came out. Let one hundred people loose after weeks locked up in their crap white houses, piss them off and you turn them into something else. We aren’t any of us who we were back on Kraven island; I’m not who I was yesterday. Shit, we are legion. Warning: Look out for me … It’s wild! A solid hundred of us go charging along screaming, fit to break down the walls of this strange, dead city.

  Tearing along like this, thud-thudding along the cement with people I thought I knew, I step out of Ned Poulnot like crap pajamas and leave that kid behind. I am the machine, packed in so tight with the others that we fill the street, ranks and ranks of us running along side by side by side and if I fuck up it won’t slow this thing down. If I stumble, they’ll catch me; if I black out they’ll move in closer to hold me up without breaking ranks, until I come to; if there’s a problem they’ve got my back and my front. The fast ones make the machine go faster and the big ones keep the little ones in step. Get out of our way or we’ll march right over you and mash you flat. If somebody stumbles, even if one of the old, weak marchers drops dead we won’t know it because we are a machine, and the machine rolls on. With the living holding up the dead there’s no falling and no changing your mind. There’s no getting off this thing and no stopping it so get out of our way! God, it’s wonderful.

  This is better than the game.

  Fuck, it’s nothing like the game. In the game I have power but when I disconnect I’m only me until I can get another connection. I can lay waste and pillage and kill people and eat a sandwich at the same time and never get hurt. If I get killed it’s no problem, in the game players regenerate, so nobody really dies; if I get bored or hungry or too pissed off to play I just close my laptop and walk away, it’s no big deal.

  Behind all that slashing and killing, it’s only a million bored or lonely people, typing. This machine we made is real. Father. Ray’s blood on that shirt, his flag. Us. Locked in this thing together, until the end.

  God, it’s scary.

  Father rises up on big old Delroy like a king steering his warrior stallion, trumpeting, “Kill him,” and “Get Steele, get Steele,” and here’s the thing.

  This machine he made of us is out to get Rawson Steele for what he did to Ray Powell whether or not he did it. We’re out to get him for that and get even, string him up, shoot him dead, rip his head off, stone him into a bloody smear, after all he killed Ray, didn’t he, the bastard stole our land and dumped us here, right? Unless he didn’t. They’re all angry, angry as fuck.

  I’m not so sure.

  I was there when Father came out of Ray’s house all bloody and howling “Revenge,” but he wouldn’t let me see inside, so, truth? I don’t know who killed Ray Powell. Father came out screaming Steele did it, but I was the only one on Ray’s front walk today and this is what I saw. Bloody handprints on Father’s pants leg.

  Like Ray grabbed his leg, and Father kicked him off. So, Rawson Steele? I’m pissed at Merrill and him for ditching me last night, but I don’t think he did it.

  I think Father did.

  I dig in my heels, going, “Wait!” but nobody does.

  It’s not like they hear. The liberation express roars on. There’s a mess of cartons in the path ahead; the machine flattens them without dropping a beat, thud-thudding on, on to the outer limits of this cracked soup bowl like nothing can stop us. Fuck knows I can’t even slow it down.

  Then Delroy stumbles and the whole parade misses a beat, you know, that thing where your heart kicks in with an extra thud and you go uh because your breath just stopped? It’s kind of like fate went Wuoow.

  While the machine slows down to catch that breath you lost I lunge to the right, slip-sliding between the rumps of frustrated marchers and the fronts of pissed-off people in my row, sidling sideways, always sideways in spite of their mean, sharp elbows and bashing fists, until I’m almost free.

  When Wayland Archambault scoops up Father before he can fall off Delroy altogether, I get my chance. He’s riding high again, and his nightmare train can damn well leave without me. While Father cusses out Delroy for faltering, Wayland does the shouting for him. It sounds like a wild boar mauling a bear, arrgh, “Kill him,” and they’re off again, everybody but me, for I have popped out of the ranks like pus out of a boil. I go flat in a doorway as they go by, ordinary people Father turned into a hundred righteous assassins hup-hupping with glazed, flaming eyes and dragon-breath, screaming in a spray of snot and acid spit. Kill him. It’s monstrous.

  My guy Rawson Steele is Marked for Death and I’m too weak and stupid to let go of this doorframe right now because the truth just hit and sank to the bottom of my gut.

  You were that.

  Then I’m like, shit! Who doused the lights? Father started this thing around noon, like, an hour ago? It took time to bring everybody out and longer to get them moving; I wasn’t running with them for all that long, but two seconds ago it got dark again and the streetlights went on. Weird. So weird. It’s dead night here in the desert where your breath frosts over the minute the sun drops, but we were running so hard that I’m not cold.

  Everything is dark and quiet now that Father and them are gone, like God or my sensei or the game designers or space aliens or foreign power that yanked us out of our lives and dumped us here want it dark for whatever comes next. From here I can hear that thud-thudding as father’s engine roars on.

  Then the moon comes up all quick and mechanical, like it’s making a path to wherever I’m supposed to go.

  That way. Down this road that leads out of the compound all the way to the rim.

  Holy fuck, this is huge. Holy fuck!

  After all the running and the pointless searching I’m at the edge of creation, with nothing but a belt of sand between me and the rim, and, wow! Out there the sand shifts and starts moving, even though there’s no wind. Like it’s sifting down into cracks in the shape of a …

  Square. It’s a trap door, and bingo bongo, the sun comes out like a spotlight on a stage set
and I see …

  Oh shit, Rawson Steele, coming up from underground. He looks around and hoists himself out to scope the horizon, making sure it’s safe. He stands out like a panther in a kid’s sandbox in those black sweats, even at this distance. I’m all, Get down, stupid, they’re after you! but I’m so far away that he doesn’t see. He’s taking his damn time. From where he’s standing, there’s nothing to see yet, nothing to hear. He might not hear it, but there’s a beginning vibration in the road, it’s coming up through the cement, into the soles of my feet.

  They’re coming.

  I have to warn him: Get down, get down! But if I yell, it will bring them. If he already knows they’re close, he doesn’t show it. Either that or he doesn’t care.

  If he knows they’re out to get him, which is just about to happen, it’s like, this is nothing to him. I jump up and down and wave my arms to warn him but he just stands there scoping the area between him and the rim. I strip off my shirt and start across the sand, waving it. Like anything will head him off. He bends double over the hatch, reaching down for— right. My big sister comes out blinking. Fucking Merrill, deer, headlights, that thing.

  The breeze picks up and the sound of a hundred people yowling blows our way. I yell, “Get down, get down!”

  Is he deaf?

  Does he not feel the thunder in the sand?

  Shit, maybe he does. Merrill rises up into his arms like a living statue and I love them for being here and being alive and looking so great together in the sunlight, but I hate them for being linked like lovers and exposing themselves just now; I have to warn them, I’m running, running hard with all hell coming up my heels and, yow!

  They’re here! The machine is here and it’s too late for anything to happen except what Father wants, which is where this has been heading the whole time.

  I am running flat-out, screaming, “Dammit, Rawson, fuck!”

  Until the front ranks smash into me and knock me flat and rage on, fixing to get Ray’s killer and rip his head off and, on the way to the execution, stomp me into the sand.