Where Page 6

  “I know.”

  He says, “We can’t leave it like that.”

  “Why not? You saw what they were like.” In this new life, people we thought we knew turned into something else. Howling with rage, they took on like werewolves in the middle of the change, vicious and out of control.

  In fact, by the time he and I sneak out hours later, with one exception every bench in the meeting hall is back in place, every white surface exactly as we found it when we filed in.

  Shivering in the desert night, I ask. “What are we going to do?” My voice is a lot smaller than the space. I’m not scared, exactly, although there’s that. I am struck by the enormity.

  That we really are cut off from life as we knew it, alone in the dark in strange terrain, stranded in the great unknown.

  That we have to find our way back to where we were— shit, to who we were— before it’s too late, and they’ve forgotten us. Or everybody we’ve left behind has changed.

  That we’re being watched, probably recorded.

  Jerking his head at the camera, Ray mutters, “We have to meet.”

  “We have…”

  Ray grips my arm: shhh. He forms the words: “To figure it out.”

  It makes me shudder. Not another meeting. But this is Ray, so I mouth, “When?”

  When he speaks his voice is so low that I can just hear it: “I’ll be in touch.” Then he says aloud, as though none of this had happened, “Are you tired? I’m bushed.”

  This, I don’t have to fake. “Me too.”

  He makes a broad grin for the unseen, all-seeing world, addressing the cameras like a third-rate actor. “Best money says, go home and get settled in.”

  “You got it.” Big smile for the audience. “Night, Ray.”

  “Night.”

  We exit in tandem, two practiced hoofers leaving the stage. In the plaza we part company like two strangers and leave on two of the diagonal streets leading to the four corners of the camp, compound, whatever this is. It isn’t hard to find my way back to the designated house. The ground plan is a lot like the one on Kraven island. As though the intelligence behind this— removal— mysteriously learned us, our patterns and our habits, mapping our small town down to the floor plans of our houses, before we came here.

  We’re not a random sample, no way. We were pre-selected for this … This disruption without a name.

  9

  Ned

  Another night

  Back home Father was The Power, but last week or ten days ago— whenever the real power came down and dumped us here, his power reared up and bit him in the ass, and dammit to fuck, I don’t know when that was!

  This place is so weird that I don’t even know when this is. No clocks. I tried marking the days on my closet door but in the morning the marks are gone. OK, so. If that’s how it is …

  Patrice would love this place. It’s, like, weirdly neat and anal-retentive clean. Necessaries like food and utensils come in by kitchen dumbwaiter as needed, and dirty dishes go out the same way. We get fresh scrubs every morning in the bathroom hatch. At least I’d have somebody here to talk to, you know?

  The hell of it is, there are no books, no magazines, nothing in this terrible flat, white place to take your mind off it, no calendars, no clocks to watch. Our electronics are all broken and to make awful even worse, there’s no TV!

  And it’s all Father’s fault. This. Me, stuck in here with him. When Mr. Powell broke up the riot back on our first day, everybody from Kraven was like, Damn you, Hampton Poulnot, with your big mouth and your Explain, like the only person in this universe is you.

  OK, when it started I thought somebody would come out and explain and that would be the end of it. Yeah, right.

  After the great Whatever killed our electronics, it broke up Father’s riot with a blast of white sound like one of those whistles only dogs can hear, except this one exploded deep inside my head. Then one of those CG voices boomed orders from all the speakers: What to do. Who did what. Which ones went to which houses. Where. And wherever they put you, you weren’t allowed to move. Your hand print is your door key. You’ll find the site map on that wall. They all ran like ants holing up in an ant farm, a hole for every ant, everybody into their hole.

  I followed Mer over to scope the map and shit, it put me in this rotten house with Him. Mr. Powell and them dragged him here to this street. House just like all the other houses, deep-freeze white, tombstone front door. So the Dawsons grabbed Father’s elbows and shoved him in quick, before the sun hit the top of the sky and roasted us to death and ’od damn if Merrill didn’t pull me inside too, I don’t care if she cried while she was explaining, if I never forgive her, it serves her right.

  At least she came back that night, but only the once and I miss her, the bitch. She was all, “Are you OK?”

  No fucking electronics, no explanation, fuck. ’Od damn I was pissed at her, sucked out of my avatar back home just when we were fixing to crack the Eternal Gates, I was more pissed at her than I was scared of anything. Usually I like Merrill, but I went all Hydra Destroyer on her, “You tell me if we’re all right!”

  “I can’t.” Then my big sister’s face went eight ways to Sunday and I was like, oh shit, Mer, don’t cry, but Merrill sucked it up. She stood on the no-rug in our nothing living room and stared into her dead phone and shook it and stared into it some more. Like it would ever ring and it would be her boyfriend on the line. Shit, he’s my friend too, so where is he when I need him, right? She said, “I have to go to this meeting,” but she rushed out like she thought she would find Davy in the night, well, good luck with that.

  I wanted to go but she was all, you have to stay back.

  Meanwhile, Our Father stared into the blank white tabletop, and it’s not like he was looking for answers there. He didn’t turn a hair. I grabbed the beard and shook hard, thinking to piss him off, and I went, “Well, Moses,” like that would get him moving. “Are you supposed to preach at this meeting or what?” and if I thought they would snatch him bald-headed, well, fine.

  I waited for his twitch that turns into a roar but nothing moved, not even the tight, white muscles around his mouth.

  “If you don’t go they’ll sacrifice Merrill or start blaspheming and worshiping the Golden Calf or some damn thing.”

  That didn’t get him. Nothing did. Either it’s shock or that white noise thing fried his brain, he hadn’t said shit since he ripped the sky with the big, “Explain!” and the screens went dark. It was kind of great, he was so convinced that for a second, everybody believed.

  Then, BLAM! God, I was pissed at him. Everybody was. “So what are you, Father, afraid?”

  He didn’t even twitch.

  “Well, I’m going.” I opened the front door. By that time I was yelling. “And you can stay here and fuck yourself.”

  Noise came out of him then all right, it was bigger than the loudest “explain” but it wasn’t exactly words, it was more like his guts were self-destructing and overflowing him like blood or tar, black sound. He surged up out of that chair like a shark jumping and flang himself on the door. He shoved me aside and shot the bolt. Then he fell across the threshold like a log and stayed there all night.

  It’s been days. I could go out to the rim and look for Merrill, except our windows are sealed tight and Father drops like a dead tree on that doorsill if he even thinks I’m fixing to leave, which he doesn’t explain, but won’t allow. It’s not like Merrill comes over. Nobody does except Ray, he’s all, I promised your sister I’d check. Then I go, Well, why can’t I go see her, and he cuts me down with his eyes. Because we don’t know what’s out there. So, what? Does everybody have a petrified Father blocking the door?

  Is it too hot out there, or too dangerous or what?

  Well fuck me, locked in this white hell for ten days or whatever with nobody to talk to and nothing to but do replay Level 299 on Gaijin Samurai inside my head and wonder what’s going on at Level 300, whether the Koro Ishi figured out
how to crash the Eternal Gates without me or if they’re milling around all helpless and discommoded, waiting for me at the top of the Eleven Bloody Steps.

  This blows!

  10

  Davy

  Thursday, late afternoon

  When you’ve lived in these parts all your life except for the six years you spent at school in New Haven, you know everybody in Charlton and everybody on Kraven and practically everybody in between, and in the way of things in the low country, most of them are friends.

  Then there are boon buddies, like Earl. Sucks that it took him half a day to figure out that he should have started here and the rest of the day making it back to Pinckney Creek and Earl’s house, but he’s here now.

  Davy pulls his car into the woods, backs around, parking deep in the brush. If they find the car, they won’t know which way he was heading or where he went. He ties his sneakers around his neck and rolls up his pants, thinking if the Poyntertown P.D. sends out Sidney and them in the Jeep to patrol the shore road, they won’t know he’s anywhere near the Pinckney place. Sweeping his footprints out of the dry sand behind him as he goes down to the water, he walks the rest of the way to Earl’s house in the swash.

  The look of the sand, the sky, the vegetation in the swash around the Pinckneys’ dock take him back to Saturdays when he was a kid, pedaling out here on his bike to go crabbing with Earl. If they weren’t best friends they were as good as, and that hasn’t changed. Armed with a bucket of chicken necks, the string, the weights and the net, they used to wade into the shallows and scoop up enough blue crabs to guilt Earl’s mother into making her amazing crabmeat thing. She made it with eggs and cream and a whole mess of cheese laced with enough port to get them pleasantly drunk. He remembers him and Earl taking the half-empty bottle out on the water afterward, two kids in a flat-bottomed boat, staring at the sky while they dreamed those dreams and talked that talk. In the years between they’ve been lucky enough to end up doing exactly what they wanted to do when they grew up.

  Until today.

  When things are going right, Davy’s dreams turn into clean designs, houses, schools, comforting public spaces that satisfy his eye, and Earl, Earl splits his time between days out on the water and nights making music in his studio in the low-slung barn Gaillard Pinckney built back in the day— renovation designed by D.A. Ribault Inc. “I wonder what old Gilyard would think,” Davy said when it was done.

  Earl grinned. “He’d freak.”

  Now Earl hails him from the dock. “Dude!”

  “Yo, Earl.”

  “You OK?” He waves in the general direction of Kraven island. “There’s some big shit going down out there.”

  “I know.” The weathered wood warms his feet. He smacks the heel of his hand into his old friend’s shoulder, he’s that glad to see him. “What the fuck, Earl? What the fuck?”

  “’Od damn if I know. It flared up green.”

  “You saw it?”

  “Mom did. She, like, wanders in the night?”

  He knows that face. “Right.”

  “She saw it, but it’s not like she can tell you what she saw. Whatever it was, it set off instruments from here to east Jesus, starting with the surveill stuff over at the base. Time I got out in the boat everybody in God’s creation was here: cops, troops, you name it.”

  “I saw.”

  “At least I pulled in this pike.” Easy in a Market Street Crab T-shirt and cutoffs, Earl gestures at the filleted fish laid out on the dock at his feet. “Ma says it was on the TV before it crapped out, but it’s not like she remembers.”

  It’s not like she even knows if she did. “Is she OK?”

  Earl grins. “About like you’d think. There are good days and bad days, but, dude. Did you not turn on your car radio?”

  “Signal’s all messed up. What’s going on?”

  “You live out there, asshole. You tell me.”

  “Wasn’t home, can’t get back.”

  “Oh, crap.”

  “It’s not like I didn’t try. Roadblocks, guards everywhere, all feisty and armed and dangerous. Your old bud Jack Stankey’s holding ’em off at the pass.”

  “Shuh, that ain’t the half of it,” Earl says, slipping right back into it, talking the way they did, touch of this, touch of that, a little bit of Gullah in the overtones, just enough to signify that they know who they are and who their people are, two twelve-year-olds out in the boat, belching crabmeat and leftover port, same as it ever was. Except it’s not. “Nobody gets on Kraven and nobody comes off of it. There’s some kind of quarantine or embargo or some damn thing. It’s all over the radio.”

  “Not mine.”

  “CB, dude, coastal band. I’m o’ tell you, you can’t get there from here.”

  Davy looks at the skies. Helicopters circle like angry bees feinting at the heart of Kraven island. “It don’t stop them.”

  “Unelse they try to land.”

  “I need your boat, Earl, I’ll keep care of it.”

  “Coast Guard’s out there, so forget it, police boats circling low and vicious, like sharks.”

  “Not if I go around and come in from the ocean.”

  “Open water? They’ll pick you right off.”

  “If I anchor on the far side of the sandbar, bodysurf in, they won’t even know I’m there.”

  “Unelse you get caught in the rip.”

  “Riptide? Man, everybody knows how to get shut of that. Drop in at the right place and I can ride it until it spits me out pretty much where I need to be. You got an anchor in that thing?”

  “Shut up, I’ll carry you. Get in.”

  “Dude!” Davy strips down to his briefs and hesitates, passing his phone and his wallet from hand to hand.

  “Put your particulars in here, you’ll need ’em when you get stopped.”

  Davy’s teeth clash and lock tight. “Nobody stops me.”

  Earl throws him the waterproof pouch. “Yeah, right.”

  “You drop me and take off instanter, right?”

  “Fuck that shit.” Earl hands down his tackle box and the bait bucket and jumps in. “Bluefish are running. Might as well drop a line while I cover you.”

  They’re out on the water just like always, easy together, like nothing else is going on. For the moment it’s so peaceful that when the sound of a remote explosion rocks Davy’s head back on his neck, it picks him up and puts him down in a new place. He flashes on that classic scene in old movies— the party, the dance, the picnic where everyone’s so happy that you know something awful is about to come down: the last good time.

  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

  Any
when

  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.