Текст книги "UnSouled"

Автор книги: Neal Shusterman

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

23 • Nelson

J. T. Nelson, formerly of the Ohio Juvenile Authority, but now a free agent, considers himself an honest man making due in a dishonest world. Nelson came by his current van legitimately. He bought it in cash from a used-car dealer in Tucson the day after he was so unceremoniously tranq’d by a fourteen-year-old. The tithe-turned-clapper who left him unconscious by the side of the road to be gnawed on by scavengers and, come morning, to fry in the Arizona sun, hadn’t thought to relieve Nelson of his wallet. Thank heaven for small miracles. It allowed Nelson the luxury of remaining an honest man.

The used-car dealer was, by definition, a swindler and was happy to part Nelson from more money than the ten-year-old blue whale of a van was worth—but Nelson didn’t have time to dicker. All the money he had made from his last two Unwind sales went into the purchase, but stealing a set of wheels was out of the question, for when one is involved in such an illicit business as parts pirateering, it’s best to keep oneself legit in other ways. Crimes will compound. At least now he doesn’t have to look over his shoulder for the highway patrol.

When Nelson saw the picture on the news—the one that Argent Skinner had so obliviously posted—it was treated as a farce. Something to laugh at—because it had already been dismissed by the Juvenile Authority and the FBI as a hoax. Nelson, however, knew that it wasn’t. Not just because he knew Connor was still alive—but because in the picture he was still wearing the same ridiculous blue camouflage pants he had worn at the Graveyard. He did his research on Argent before paying him that fateful visit. A dim bulb with a menial job and a pathetic little criminal record of drunk driving and bar-room brawling. Still, he could be of use to Nelson—and in the shape he’s currently in, Nelson could use someone on his side. Although he tries not to show it, those hours unconscious in the Arizona wild have taken a toll that goes deeper than the painful molting burns on his face. There are the animal bites. Infected, some of them are. And who knows what diseases those animals carried. But he can’t let himself be sidetracked by that now. Not until he has his prize.

24 • Argent

He must be smart. Smarter than anyone gives him credit for. Smarter than even he believes himself to be. He must rise to the occasion . . . because if he doesn’t, he may end up dead.

“Talk to me, Argent,” Nelson says. “Tell me everything Lassiter said while you had him in your basement.”

It’s day one: They’ve just left Heartsdale not half an hour ago, heading north. This man behind the wheel—this parts pirate—is intelligent and knows his business. But there’s something about his eyes that hints that he’s lingering near the edge of the world. Balancing on the brink of sanity. Driven there, perhaps, by Connor Lassiter. If Nelson has truly lost his edge, perhaps he and Argent are on even footing.

“Tell me anything you remember. Even if you think it’s insignificant, I want to know.”

So Argent starts talking and doesn’t stop much. He goes on and on about the things Connor said and a whole lot of things he didn’t say.

“Yeah, we got to be tight,” Argent brags. “He told me all this crap about his life before. Like how his parents changed the locks on him during his last stint at juvey, before they signed the unwind order. Like how he resented his kid brother for being such a goody-goody all the time.” These are things Argent had read about the Akron AWOL long before he turned up to buy sandwiches at Argent’s register. But Nelson doesn’t need to know that.

“You were so tight that he cut up your face, huh?” Nelson says.

Argent touches the stitches on the left side of his face—bare now that the gauze has been removed. They itch something terrible, but they ache only when he touches them too hard. “He’s a mean son of a bitch,” Argent says. “He don’t treat his friends right. Anyway, he had places to go, and I wouldn’t let him unless he promised to take me with him. So he cut me, took my sister hostage, and left.”

“Left where?”

Now comes the part Argent has to sell. “Never talked much about it except, of course, when we were high on tranq.”

Nelson looks over at him. “The two of you smoked tranq?”

“Oh yeah, all the time. It was our favorite thing to do together. And the good stuff too. High grade, prime tranq.”

Nelson eyes him doubtfully, so Argent decides to pull back on his story a little bit. “Well, I mean, as prime as you can get in Heartsdale.”

“So he talked when he was high. What did he say?”

“Ya gotta remember, I was buzzing up there too, so it’s all kind of fuzzy. I mean, it’s still up in my noggin, I’m sure, but I gotta tease it out.”

“Dredge is more like it,” Nelson says.

Argent lets the insult slide. “There was this girl he talked about,” Argent offers. “ ‘Gotta get there; gotta get there,’ he said. She was gonna give him stuff. Not sure what, though.”

“Risa Ward,” Nelson says. “He was talking about Risa Ward.”

“No, not her—I would have known if he was talking about her.” Argent wrinkles his brow. It hurts to do it, but he does it anyway. “It was someone else. Mary, her name was. Yeah, that’s it. Mary, something French. LeBeck. Or LaBerg. LaVeau! That’s it. Mary LaVeau. He was gonna meet with her. Drink themselves some bourbon.”

Nelson is silent after that, and Argent doesn’t give him anything more. Let him chew on that for a while.

•   •   •

Day two: Crack of dawn. Cheapo motel room in North Platte, Nebraska. To be honest, Argent had expected better. Nelson wakes Argent when the sky is still predawn gray.

“Time to go. Get your lazy ass out of bed; we’re turning around.”

Argent yawns. “What’s the rush?”

“Mary LaVeau’s House of Voodoo,” Nelson tells him. He’s been a busy boy doing his research. “Bourbon Street, New Orleans—that’s what Lassiter was talking about. For better or worse, that’s where he’s headed, and he’s got a week-long lead. He’s probably there already.”

Argent shrugs. “If you say so.” He rolls over and presses his face into the pillow, hiding his smile. Nelson has no idea how thoroughly he’s been played.

•   •   •

Day three: Fort Smith, Arkansas. The blue piece-of-crap van breaks down in the afternoon. Nelson is furious.

“Cain’t get parts for that on a weekend,” the mechanic says. “Gotta special order it. Get here Monday, maybe Tuesday.”

The more Nelson blusters, the calmer the mechanic gets, extracting a kind of spiritual joy from Nelson’s misery. Argent knows the type. Hell, he is the type.

“The way to deal with this guy is to beat the crap out of him,” Argent advises Nelson, “and tell him you’ll do the same to his mother if he don’t fix the car.”

But Nelson doesn’t take his sound advice. “We’ll fly,” he says, and he pays the mechanic to drive them to Fort Smith Regional Airport only to find out that the last flight out—a twenty-seat puddle jumper to Dallas—leaves at six, and although there’s four open seats, the airport’s security gate closes at five. TSA officers are still in their office eating corn dogs, but will they open security for two passengers? Not on your life.

Argent suspects Nelson might kill them if they didn’t have weapons of their own.

In the end Nelson uses one of his false IDs to rent a car that they have no intention of returning anytime soon

•   •   •

Day four: Bourbon Street after dark. Argent has never been to New Orleans, but had always wanted to go. Not a place he could take Grace, but Grace isn’t his problem anymore, is she? He strolls down Bourbon Street with a hurricane in his hand and beads around his neck. Raucous catcalls and laughter fill the street. Argent could do this every night. He could live this. Half the hurricane is already swimming in his head. Imagine! Drinking in the street is not only legal, but encouraged. Only in New Orleans!

He and his buds talked about coming here for Mardi Gras, but it was always just talk ’cause none of them had the guts to get out of Heartsdale. But now Argent has a new bud. One who was more than happy to take a road trip to New Orleans, thinking it was his own idea. Argent’s apprenticeship won’t last for long, though, if he doesn’t earn his keep. Prove himself useful. Indispensable.

Argent isn’t sure where Nelson is now. Probably harassing whoever runs Mary LaVeau’s House of Voodoo. He will find no answers there. No leads as to the whereabouts of Connor Lassiter, no matter what methods of information extraction a parts pirate is apt to use. It’s a wild-goose chase if ever there was one. He will be furious and will blame Argent.

“Hey, you’re the one who said go to New Orleans, not me,” will be Argent’s response, but Nelson will still hold him responsible. So Argent needs a peace offering. One that will open Nelson’s eyes to Argent’s true value.

Instead of going back to their Ramada, which smells like disinfectant and burnt hair, Argent looks for trouble. And finds it. And befriends it. And betrays it.

•   •   •

Day five: Nelson sleeps off a binge of the alcohol and painkillers he doused himself in when his search for Connor Lassiter came up short. Argent, out all night, returns to the Ramada at dawn, to wake him.

“I got something for you. Something you’re gonna like. You gotta come now.”

“Get the hell out of here.” Nelson is not cooperative. Argent didn’t expect he would be.

“It won’t keep for long, Jasper,” Argent says. “Trust me on this one.”

Nelson burns him a killer gaze. “Call me that again, and I’ll slit your throat.” He sits up, only slightly successful in his battle with gravity.

“Sorry. What should I call you?”

“Don’t call me anything.”

After pumping a pot of hotel room coffee into the man, Argent brings Nelson to an old burned-out bar in a crumbling neighborhood that looks postapocalyptic. Probably hasn’t been inhabited by legitimate folk since the levies last failed.

Inside are two AWOLs, bound and gagged. A boy and a girl.

“Made friends with them while you were dead to the world,” Argent proudly tells Nelson. “Convinced them I was one of them. Then I used my choke hold on them. Same hold I used on you-know-who.”

The two AWOLs have since regained consciousness. They can’t speak through their gags, but their eyes are a study in terror. “They’re prime,” Argent tells Nelson. “Gotta be worth good money, you think?”

Nelson regards them with hangover-subdued interest. “You captured them yourself?”

“Yep. Coulda got more if I’d found more. Whatever you get for them, keep the money. They’re my gift to you.”

And Nelson says, “Let them go.”

“What?”

“We’re too far from my black-market contact, and I’m not going to haul them all around creation.”

Argent can’t believe it. “I put them right into your lap and you’re just gonna throw good money away?”

Nelson looks at Argent and sighs. “You get an A for effort. It’s good work, but we’re after a bigger catch.” Then Nelson just walks out.

Furious, Argent spews vitriol at the gagged kids, who can’t answer back. “I oughta just leave you here to rot, is what I oughta do.” But he doesn’t. He doesn’t free them either. Instead he makes an anonymous call to the Juvies to come pick them up, giving away his first payday as parts pirate for free. His only consolation is that Nelson was maybe a little bit impressed by the catch.

He heads back to the Ramada, all the while scheming up the next leg of their wild-goose chase and ways to make Nelson think that he’s driving it. There are plenty of places besides New Orleans that Argent would like to go. Plenty of places Nelson will take him, as long as Argent is skillful in dropping bread crumbs.

25 • Connor

He does not want to be on the reservation. He has nothing against the Tashi’ne family; they seem accommodating enough, if somewhat cool toward him—and they genuinely care for Lev—but the rez should have been nothing more than a quick pit stop on the way to their destination. The days here, as slow as they seem to pass, also pass at an alarming speed somehow. Their pit stop has stretched to two weeks. Yes, Lev needed a lot of healing time, but he’s well enough to be on the road now. Just because things on the rez don’t change, that doesn’t mean the rest of the world stops spinning. The harvest camps keep unwinding, Proactive Citizenry continues lobbying for stricter laws against Unwinds. Every day they remain here is another day for things to get worse out there.

The solution, or at least part of it, has to lie with Janson Rheinschild. Trace, Connor’s right-hand man at the Graveyard, was convinced of it, and Trace was right about so many things. Since the moment Connor learned that Rheinschild had been Sonia’s husband, the man sat heavy in Connor’s gut like bad meat. The sooner they get to Sonia, the sooner he can purge it.

“What’s so important about getting to Ohio anyway?” Grace asks him as she snacks on Arápache fry bread. “Argent says it’s nothing but cold and full of fat people.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Connor tells her.

“Why? Because I’m stupid?”

Connor grimaces. He hadn’t meant it that way, but he knows that’s how it came out. “No,” he tells her, “it’s because you’re not an AWOL. You’ve never had to face unwinding and until you have, you’ll never understand why it’s worth risking everything to stop it.”

“I might not be an Unwind, but I’m AWOL, sure enough. AWOL from my brother, who’ll kill me soon as look at me if he ever finds me.”

Connor tries to dismiss that, but can’t entirely. Clearly Argent has hit her quite a lot in the past—beaten her, maybe—but is Argent a killer? Maybe not an intentional one, but Connor can imagine him beating Grace to death in blind fury. And even if he’s not capable of that, it’s a very real threat in Grace’s mind. Like him and Lev, she’s a fugitive, but for a different reason.

“We’ll never let him hurt you again,” Connor tells her.

“Ever?”

Connor nods. “Ever.” Although he knows it’s a promise with no teeth, because he and Lev won’t be in her life forever.

“So who is this guy you’re chasing after?”

Connor considers giving her a “just some guy,” sort of response, but instead decides to give her the kind of respect she’s never gotten before. He tells her what he knows. Or, more accurately, what he doesn’t know.

“Janson Rheinschild developed the neural-grafting technology that made unwinding possible. He founded an organization called Proactive Citizenry.”

“I heard of them,” Grace says. “They save poor children in India and stuff.”

“Yeah, probably so they can harvest their organs. The thing is, Rheinschild didn’t intend his work to be used for unwinding. In fact, he set up Proactive Citizenry as a watchdog organization to prevent any abuse of his technology. But in the end, other people took control, and it became just the opposite. Now it promotes unwinding, it manipulates the media—and there are rumors that it even controls the Juvenile Authority.”

“That sucks,” Grace says with a mouth full of food.

“Right—and what sucks even more is that they vanished Rheinschild off the face of the earth.”

“Killed him?”

“Who knows? All we know is that he’s been deleted from history. We were able to find him only because one article misspelled his name. Anyway, Lev and I figure an organization like that wouldn’t make the man disappear for just speaking out against them. We think he knew something so dangerous, he had to be snuffed. And anything dangerous to Proactive Citizenry is a weapon for us. Which is why we have to get to his wife, Sonia, who’s been living in secret all these years.”

Grace licks grease from her fingers. “I knew a Sonia once back in Heartsdale. She had a mean temper and a thing on her face the size of dog turd. She went in to have it removed, but had a heart attack on the table and died before they could get her a replacement heart. Argent says he was surprised she even had a heart to begin with. Made me sad, though. It’s stupid to die because of a turd growing on your face.”

Connor has to smile. “Truer words were never spoken.” As far as he’s concerned, Proactive Citizenry is like a turd on the face of humanity. But whether or not it can be excised without killing the patient, only time will tell.

“So who’s in charge of Proactive Citizenry now?” Grace asks.

Connor shrugs. “Damned if I know.”

“Well, tell me when you find out. ’Cause that’s someone I’d love to play in Stratego.”

•   •   •

The dynamic between Connor and Lev has changed. Before, they were a team, single-minded in purpose, but now their relationship is strained. Any talk of moving on is met by Lev’s thinly veiled impatience, or a quick exit from the room.

“After all he’s been through, he deserves a little bit of peace,” Una tells him after one such exit. Connor likes Una. She reminds him of Risa—if not in appearance, then in the way she won’t take crap from anyone. Risa, however, would be urging Lev to get on with it rather than planning his vacation.

“We don’t deserve peace until we’ve earned it,” Connor tells her.

She smirks. “Did you read that on a war memorial somewhere?”

He glares at her, but says nothing because, actually, he did. The Heartland War Memorial. Sixth-grade field trip. He knows he’s going to need a better argument than granite-carved clichés if he’s going to stand toe-to-toe with Una.

“From what I understand,” says Una, “he saved your life, and you came pretty close to ending his when you hit him with that cop car. At the very least, you could cut him enough slack to recover from his wounds.”

“He threw himself in front of the car!” says Connor, beginning to lose his temper. “Do you honestly think I meant to hit him?”

“Race headlong and blind, and you’re bound to hit something. Tell me, was nearly killing your only friend the first obstacle in your journey, or were there more?”

Connor pounds the wall with Roland’s hand. He holds a clenched fist, and although he doesn’t release it, he forces the fist down to his side. “Every journey has obstacles.”

“If the universe is telling you to slow down, maybe you should listen instead of putting your head in the ground like an ostrich.”

He snaps his eyes to her, wondering if Lev told her about the ostrich—but nothing in her expression gives away whether she said it intentionally or if it’s only a coincidence. He can’t say anything about it, though, because if he did, she’d probably insist that there are no coincidences.

“He feels safe here,” insists Una. “Protected. He needs that.”

“If you’re his protector,” Connor asks, “where were you when he was turning himself into a bomb?”

Una looks away, and Connor realizes he’s gone too far. “I’m sorry,” he says. “But what we’re doing . . . it’s important.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” says Una, still stinging from his jab. “Your legend might be larger than life, but you’re no bigger than the rest of us.” Then she storms off so quickly, Connor can feel a breeze in her wake.

•   •   •

That night he lay in bed, his thoughts and associations spilling into one another, a product of his exhaustion. The small stone room feels more like a cell, in spite of how comfortable the bed is.

Perhaps it’s just because he’s an outsider, but to Connor, the Arápache live a life of contradiction. Their homes are austere and yet punctuated by pointed opulence. A plush bed in an undecorated room. A simple wood-burning fire pit in the great room that’s not so simple because logs are fed and temperature maintained by an automatic system so that it never goes out. With one hand they rebuke creature comforts, but with the other they embrace it—as if they are in a never-ending battle between spiritualism and materialism. It must have been going on so long, they seem blind to their own ambivalence, as if it’s just become a part of their culture.

It makes Connor think of his own world and its own oxymoronic nature. A polite, genteel society that claims compassion and decency as its watch cry, and yet at the same time embraces unwinding. He could call it hypocrisy, but it’s more complex than that. It’s as if everyone’s made an unspoken pact to overlook it. It’s not that the emperor has no clothes. It’s that everyone’s placed him in their blind spot.

So what will it take to make everyone turn and look?

Connor knows he’s an idiot to think he can do anything to change the massive inertia of a world hurtling off its axis. Una’s right—he’s no bigger than anyone else. Smaller really—so small that the world doesn’t even know he exists anymore, so how can he hope to make a difference? He tried—and where did that get him? The hundreds of kids he’d tried to save at the Graveyard are now in harvest camps being unwound, and Risa, the one good thing in his life, has gone as far off the radar as him.

With the impossible weight of the world on their shoulders, how tempting it must be for Lev to imagine disappearing here. But not for Connor. It’s not in his nature to be one with nature. The sound of a crackling fire doesn’t calm him, only bores him. The serenity of a babbling brook is his version of water torture.

“You’re an excitable boy,” his father used to say when he was little. It was a parent’s euphemism for a kid out of control. A kid uncomfortable in his own skin. Eventually his parents weren’t comfortable keeping him in his skin either and signed the dread unwind order.

He wonders when they truly made the decision to unwind him. When did they stop loving him? Or was lack of love not the issue? Were they conned by the many advertisements that said things like “Unwinding—when you love them enough to let them go,” or “Corporeal division; the kindest thing you can do for a child with disunification disorder.”

That’s what they call it. “Disunification disorder,” a term probably coined by Proactive Citizenry to describe a teen who feels like they want to be anywhere else but where they are and in anyone else’s shoes. But who doesn’t feel like that now and then? Granted, some kids feel it more than others. Connor knows he did. But it’s a feeling you learn to live with, and eventually you harness it into ambition, into drive, and finally into achievement if you’re lucky. Who were his parents to deny him that chance?

Connor shifts positions in his bed and punches his swan-down pillow with his left fist, but switches, realizing it’s far more satisfying when he uses Roland’s hand for punching. Connor has built up his left arm so that it’s almost a match to his right, but when it comes to sheer physical expression, Roland’s arm is the one that makes his brain release endorphins when violently used.

He can’t imagine what it would be like to have an entire body wired to wish damage on everyone and everything around it. Sure, Connor had a little bit of that in him all along, but it only came in fits and starts. Roland, however, was a bashing junkie.

Sometimes, when he knows no one’s watching or listening, Connor will say things to his surgically grafted limb. He calls it “talking to the hand.”

“You’re a basket case, you know that?” he’ll say, when the hand won’t stop clenching. Occasionally he’ll give himself the finger and laugh. He knows the impetus for the gesture is his, but imagining that it’s Roland’s is both satisfying and troublesome at the same time, like an itch that gets worse with each scratch.

Once, at the Graveyard, Hayden had slipped Connor some medicinal chocolate to get him to mellow out a bit. Pharmacologically compounded, genetically engineered cannabis, Connor learned, packs a hallucinogenic wallop much more severe than smoking tranq. The shark on his arm spoke to him that night, and in Roland’s voice, no less. Mostly it spat out strings of cleverly conceived profanities—but it did say a few things of note.

“Make me whole again, so I can beat the crap out of you,” it said, and, “Bust a few noses; it’ll make you feel better,” and “Spank the monkey with your own damn hand.”

But the one that keeps coming back is “Make it mean something, Akron.”

What exactly did the shark mean by “it”? Did it mean Roland’s unwinding? Roland’s life? Connor’s life? The shark was maddeningly vague, as hallucinations often are. Connor never told anyone about it. He never even acknowledged to Hayden that the chocolate had any effect on him. After that, the shark, its jaw fixed in a predatory snarl, never spoke to Connor again, but its enigmatic request for meaning still echoes across the synapses between Roland’s motor neurons and his own.

Roland’s fury at his parents had been far more directed than Connor’s. A nasty triangle of pain there. Roland’s stepfather beat his mother, so Roland pummeled the man senseless for it—and then his mother chose the man who beat her over the son who tried to help her, sending Roland off to be unwound.

Make it mean something . . . .

The fury that Connor feels against his own parents burns like the ever-burning fire pit in the great room, but unlike Roland’s, Connor’s fury is as random as leaping flames in search of purchase. His fire isn’t fueled by their choice to unwind him, but by the unanswered questions surrounding that choice.

Why did they do it?

How did they make the decision?

And most important: What would they say to him now if they knew he was alive . . . and what would he say back?

He’s rushing to Ohio to find Sonia, but in the back of his mind, Connor knows that it also brings him painfully close to home. He wonders if, beneath everything, that’s the real reason he’s making this trip.

So he furiously tosses and turns in a luxurious bed, in a Spartan room, emotionally unwinding himself with his own ambivalence.