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  “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 n
ow 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…”

  Drumbeat. As if to scare us into submission, the amplifiers blare. “Signs of violence.”

  To keep our attention, the banner running along underneath the feed expands to fill the screen— block letters, so there’s no mistaking it: SIGNS OF VIOLENCE. It does the job.

  Then everything rolls in on us all at once. The sun is a white hole in the white sky. The breeze has died and there are no shadows left. Stay here and we’ll fry like marbles in a punch bowl, while above us, everything we’ve lost flashes by in a hasty reprise: our sweet waterfront, our abandoned houses, our empty rooms, our most intimate places laid open and magnified like specimens in a high school science class. All our abandoned toothbrushes, empty shoes and rumpled beds taunt us, everything we’ve lost and everything we care about …

  That, I could have handled, but the agency behind our— what?— removal— wants more out of us. We are packed in tight, belly to butt, flank to flank, scared and flatulent and rank with morning breath, all Kraven island jammed in the plaza with no logic to it, local knowns and unknowns in uniform white scrubs, nobody any better or different from anybody else. We’re all here except the one soul I thought I knew by heart. I used to think I knew. I whirl, yelling to fix what’s broken, calling out again and again, and loud enough for my old life to hear and come back: “Up here Dave Ribault, I’m here!”

  Then Ray Powell plants both hands on my shoulders to bring me down. “Merrill, shut up,” he says, not unkindly. With the white hair and that big square jaw, he looks like a Roman centurion marching out. Immaculate Ray. When he speaks, you listen, but the day has changed him; I’m not sure how. He turns me to face the screen. As I turn with him, I see what Ray can’t: Father, free for now, shoving people aside, hitting when he has to, anything to clear his way to open space.

  I nudge Ray. “Father alert.”

  But Ray’s fixed on the moving images above. “Shut up and watch. Help me figure this out.”

  If you think you want to know what happened to us, slouched in front of your TV or watching our story play out in your favorite bar or listening as your smartphone directs you through the streets of a strange city, I’ll tell you who wants to know.

  We do!

  Sucked into the moving history, I lift my arms and jump high enough for Davy to see me in the crowd. I thought I knew you. I don’t even know if they are watching on their screens back home, and it is bitter. I don’t know you at all. Dave Ribault, I …

  I’ll never know what the I was because Ray snags my arm. “Don’t!” I point to the cameras posted at all four corners of the plaza. “Please!”

  “Right.” We’re on camera and too fried to wonder whether it’s surveillcam or we’re on TV. Ray boosts me higher, while Father bulldozes his way to the front. I should warn Ray, but I wave for the cameras with both hands, reaching. Praying, I think.

  Ray puts me down. “Enough! Nothing we do will make any difference.”

  Looking into his bleak face, I see. I open my mouth and grief comes out in a groan. Around me, a hundred others let go too, and all our pain and confusion spills out in the plaza all at once. The sound is huge. Whatever we had been— blindsided by the experience, stunned, scared or mystified— turns into rage.

  Electrified, Father climbs Delroy Root like preacher climbing into a pulpit and shakes his fist at the elements. His voice gets so big that it drowns us out. “Explain!”

  He’ll be blamed, but he’s only the first. Like Father, Ray raises his fist. He turns to the camera, and shouts in a voice so commanding there’s no mistaking who’s the real leader here: “Explain.”

  In seconds it’s a communal roar, a hundred Kraven islanders shaking their fists at The Power … if there are Powers, shouting: “Explain.”

  “Answers.” Father goes on, at top volume. “We want answers!”

  Well, he gets one. The TV feed stops.

  And— like that— all telecommunications cease. In that second, we have made ourselves heard.

  At that moment, we understood. Every television, cell phone, PDA and netbook in the compound is dead. We are mute, essentially deaf, blind and ignorant, cut off from life as we knew it, the struggling, imperfect, noisy real world. I flash on Neddy with his eyes rolled back in a blank face, replaying that stupid game inside his head, and for that half-second, I think: Good.

  Good for Ned, sure, but without electronics, with no way to send for help or plead our case, we’re stranded here, wherever here is. We can’t search. Worse. We can’t get a message out. Shaken, we turn on Father: Look what you did, we rage, terrified and livid. In the name of God, shut up, but as if nothing just happened he goes on shouting, “Explain!”

  At which point all the scared, infuriated people Father mistook for followers converge on him, throwing whatever they happened to be holding when unseen forces yanked our lives out from under us— shoes, books, useless smartphones. Friends and neighbors close in on him, lawyers, probation officers and perps Father had put away while he was still a judge, women who hit on him after Mother left, ordinary people we thought we knew run at him in a rage, ready to bring him down.

  Father is too enflamed to notice. Demagogue, on a tear. I know that fierce, contorted grin: my people are angry— his people!— the arrogant fuck. He spreads his palm on Delroy Root’s face and hoists himself even higher, shouting, “Tell them, people. Louder. Make them hear it. Crack the skies. Explain!” Father rails on, shouting orders at the wind as the Dawson boys lunge and his voice cracks: “Order, order!”

  He doesn’t get it, but Delroy does. He sets Father down and backs away. The old man’s mouth is still moving in the seconds before whatever civility we’d maintained so far shatters. Islanders fall on him, shouting, pounding, and I watch with OK, forgive me, a rush of vindictive joy. Whatever they do, it serves you right.

  Then Ray smashes the empty bin against the flagpole, CRACK! The clang silences the mob and they fall back. Without speaking, he cuts through the crowd to help my father the yowling idiot who just made things worse. Ray picks him up by the armpits, sets him on his feet and steadies him with both hands. Knowing Father, I flinch, waiting for him to lash out. He shakes off his rescuer and stands straight, bunched to fight. Then he blinks. It’s Ray. An extraordinary thing happens.

  I see my father break in two.

  He reels, shaken. His ugly mouth blooms in a beginning
wail.

  As it does, the giant speakers at four corners of the square come back to life, ending it.

  ANNOUNCEMENT, ANNOUNCEMENT, ANNOUNCEMENT

  We’re so eager for news that everyone in the plaza falls still. We are standing at attention, but Ray has Delroy, Marlon Weisbuch and the Dawson brothers form a protective cadre around Father, just in case.

  A hundred of us silenced. Docile for once, we fall back and wait to be told.

  The next voice we hear is CG: an unseen animatronic group leader calls the shots. Chapter. Verse, a list of Things to Do by the numbers: One. Two. Three. We listen gratefully and line up to locate our quarters, designated on a map incised in the blank side of the main building.

  First, we’re to find our houses and move in. In that instant, the air in the plaza cools. As though something in the system changed it— sedative being pumped in? Too soon to tell. It could be the rush of relief that comes when you have places to go and something to do. Subdued, obedient for once, we study the map incised in the blank side of the main building. Anything to get away from the others, out of this square! Funny, how relieved we are to have certainties: marching orders in this mysterious, suffocating place. Scared and, OK, glad, to get out of that enclosure, we turn to go.

  Ray stops us with a shout. “Wait!”

  Even on Kraven, where we’re relaxed and aggressively down-home, Ray gets what he wants. His people were in Kraventown long before the Civil War; the Powell plantation took up half the island before his great-greats got enlightened and sold off everything but Azalea House and the grounds leading down to Powell’s dock. He creates silence with a single word. “Friends!”

  Heads turn. They always do. That’s Ray.

  “I won’t keep you, but we need to talk.” He puts his hand on Father’s shoulder, making clear what we have to talk about. “Figure out how to make things right.”