Текст книги "UnSouled"

Автор книги: Neal Shusterman

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

“I want to be your first,” she says. She presses closer to him, the fabric of her dress hissing on the fine weave of his tuxedo.

“You seem like a girl who gets what she wants.”

“Always,” she tells him.

Cam didn’t come here looking for this. He could turn her away, but why? Why refuse this when it’s offered to him so freely? Besides, he finds that the mention of Risa has made him defiant. It’s made him want even more to be here in the moment with this girl whose name he’s already forgotten.

He kisses her again, matching her building aggression.

That’s when the door swings open.

Cam freezes. The girl steps away from him, but it’s too late. Standing in the doorway is a distinguished man looking even more intimidating in his tuxedo than Cam looks in his.

“Get your hands off my daughter!”

As his hands are already off the man’s daughter, there’s not much more he can do but stand there and let this play out.

“Daddy, please! You’re embarrassing me!”

Now others arrive, curious at the building drama. The man’s glare never falters, as if he’s practiced it professionally. “Miranda, get your coat. We’re leaving.”

“Daddy, you’re overreacting. You always overreact!”

“You heard me.”

Now waterworks abound. “Why do you always have to ruin everything!” Miranda wails, then stomps out in tears, wearing her humiliation like a war wound.

Cam is not sure how to respond to all this, so he doesn’t. He slips his hands into his pockets, lest he still be accused of having them all over Miranda as she races down the hall, and he keeps a resolute poker face. The furious man looks like he might spontaneously combust.

Roberta arrives, hesitates, and asks, “What’s going on here?” She sounds uncharacteristically weak and powerless, which means this must be even worse than Cam thinks it is.

“I’ll tell you what’s going on,” growls the man. “Your . . . thing . . . was trying to have its way with my daughter.”

“Actually, she was trying to have her way with me,” Cam says. “And she was succeeding.”

That brings forth muted laughter from several in attendance.

“Do you expect me to believe that?” He stalks forward, and Cam pulls his hands out of his pockets, ready to defend himself if necessary.

Roberta tries to come between them. “Senator Marshall, if you’ll just—”

But he pushes her aside and wags a finger in Cam’s face. Part of Cam wants to reach up and break that finger. Part of him wants to bite it. Another part wants to turn and run, and yet another part wants to laugh. Cam reins in all those conflicting impulses and holds his ground without flinching as the senator says:

“If you come anywhere near my daughter, I will see to it that you are taken apart piece by bloody piece. Do I make myself clear?”

“Any clearer,” says Cam, “and you’d be invisible.”

The senator backs off and turns his rage to Roberta. “Don’t come looking for my support for your little ‘project,’ ” he hisses, “because you won’t get it.” Then he storms out, leaving an air of oppressive silence in his wake.

Roberta speechlessly looks to Cam with helpless disbelief. Why? Those eyes say. Why have you spat on all I’ve tried to give you? You’re ruined, Cam. We’re ruined. I’m ruined.

And then in the silence one man begins to applaud. He’s slightly older and larger around the middle than Senator Marshall. His heavy hands let loose a frightful peal as he brings them together. Clappers must envy him.

“Well done, son!” says the large man with a heavy Southern drawl. “I’ve been trying to get under Marshall’s skin for years, and you’ve managed to do it in a single evening. Kudos to you!” Then he lets loose a grand guffaw, and the tension bursts like a soap bubble.

One woman in a shimmering gold gown and a champagne glass in hand puts her arm around Cam and speaks with a slight alcoholic slur. “Trust me. You’re not the first boy Miranda Marshall has tried to devour whole. The girl is an anaconda!”

That makes Cam giggle. “Well, she did try to wrap herself around me.”

Laughter from all those gathered. The large man shakes his hand. “But we haven’t properly met, Mr. Comprix. I’m Barton Cobb, senior senator from Georgia.” Then he turns to Roberta, who looks as if she’s just stepped off a roller coaster. “You have my unconditional support for your project, Miss Griswold, and if Marshall doesn’t like it he can stick it where the sun don’t shine ’cept Tuesday.” He guffaws again, and as Cam looks around, it seems as if the entire party has moved into the library. Introductions are made—even people he’s already shaken hands with step forward to introduce themselves again.

Cam had arrived at the party as a novelty—a decorative mascot to add some flavor—but now he’s the very center of everyone’s attention. That’s a role he’s much more at home with, and so the more attention he gets, the more relaxed he becomes. The more spotlights, the fewer shadows.

Roberta is also at her best when he’s the center of attention. A tiger moth beating about his light. He wonders if she has the slightest clue how much he despises everything she stands for. And the odd thing of it is, he doesn’t even know what she really stands for, which makes him despise it even more.

“Cam,” she says, gently taking his elbow and manipulating him toward a man in uniform who clearly doesn’t move for anyone. “This, Cam, is General Edward Bodeker.”

Cam shakes the man’s hand and gives a polite obligatory bow. “An honor, sir.”

“Mutual,” says the general. “I was just asking Miss Griswold if you’ve considered a future in the military.”

“I don’t rule out anything, sir,” Cam tells him. It’s his favorite nonanswer.

“Good. We could put a young man like you to good use.”

“Well, sir, the only problem with that is that there are no ‘young men like me.’ ”

And the general laughs warmly, clapping a fatherly hand on his shoulder.

The tension from just a few minutes ago is completely forgotten. Apparently he’s made the right enemy, because now he has many, many friends.

4 • Night Manager

It’s a disease, plain and simple, rotting out the world from the inside out. Clappers! Goddamn clappers. Everywhere. A disease.

The night manager of the 7-Eleven on Palm Desert Drive has nothing much to do for most of his nights but mull over the state of his middle-aged life, the modern-age world, and the tabloids, which, aside from alien and dead celebrity sightings, just love to report on clapper carnage. Blood and gore at a fifth-grade reading level for your entertainment and pleasure. An office building taken out here, a restaurant blown sky-high. The latest clapper attack was at a freaking fitness club, for God’s sake. They just walked into the gym without as much as a hello-how’dya-do, and boom! Poor bastards working out didn’t stand a chance. Not much you can do to escape lead weights flying like shrapnel.

At 2:15 a.m. a customer shuffles in and buys a ToXin Energy drink and a pack of gum. Shady-looking guy. But then, anyone who shows up at a roadside 7-Eleven at this time of night looks questionable and has got a story you don’t want to hear.

The man notices the tabloid the night manager is reading. “Crazy, huh? Clappers. Where do they come from, right?”

“I know where they go,” says the night manager. “They oughta take all the clappers and AWOLs and ferals, put ’em on a plane and crash it.”

He had thought he’d found a sympathetic ear, but the customer looks at him with shock. “All of ’em, huh? Didn’t a planeload of AWOLs go down in the Salton Sea a couple of weeks ago?”

“Good riddance. I wish I’d been close enough to see it.” There’s an awkward silence between them. “That’ll be $5.65.”

The customer pays, but makes a point of making chilly eye contact with the night manager as he drops all of his change in the charity box for Runaway Rescue, which helps straighten out feral teens before someone can shove an unwind order up their worthless asses. It’s a cause the night manager despises, but keeping that charity box there is company policy.

The customer leaves, and the night manager has something else to grumble to himself about. Bleeding hearts. Way too many people are not willing to take a hard line on the unwindable. Sure there are ballot measures up the wazoo this year. Shall we set aside X billion to construct new harvest camps? Yes or no? Shall we allow for partial unwinding and slow sequential division? Yes or no? Even the constitutionality of the Cap-17 law is being challenged.

But with the population evenly divided in their support of unwinding, it all comes down to that huge 30 percent who either don’t have an opinion or are afraid to voice it. “The wishy-washy masses,” the night manager calls them, too weak to take a stand. If the glacier huggers and feral forgivers start to outnumber sensible folk, all the hard-line unwinding legislation could fail, and then what?

At 2:29 a woman with more baggage under her eyes than stuffed in her cluttered car buys chips and flashes a medical tobacco license for a pack of Camels.

“Have a good one,” he says as she leaves.

“Too late for that.”

Her rust bucket of a Volkswagen drives off with a backfire and spews thick blue smoke that the night manager can smell inside. Some people oughta be unwound just to protect the environment. It makes him chuckle. Protect the environment—who’s the glacier hugger now?

The night becomes unusually quiet. Nothing but crickets and the occasional rumble of a passing car. Usually he enjoys an empty shop, but tonight there’s an air of tension about that silence. Intuition being a night manager’s most useful tool, he checks beneath the counter to make sure that his sawed-off shotgun is there. He’s not supposed to have one, but a man’s gotta protect himself.

At 3:02 the ferals descend on the 7-Eleven out of nowhere, pouring in through the door. Dozens and dozens of them, swarming like a cloud of locusts as they grab things from the aisles. The night manager reaches for the shotgun, but before he can grab it, there’s a gun aimed at his face, and another, and another. The three kids hold their aim steady.

“Hands where I can see them,” one of them says. It’s a tall girl with short hair and man shoulders. She definitely looks tough enough to blow his brains out without a second thought. Still he says, “Go to hell!”

It makes her smile. “Be a good little lowlife and do as you’re told, and you might live to sell more chips tomorrow.”

Reluctantly, he puts his hands up and watches as kids flood in and out, filling trash bags with everything they can get their hands on. All the drinks from the coolers, the snacks from the aisles, even the toiletries. Then suddenly he realizes who these kids must be. These must be the survivors from that plane that went down in the Salton!

A kid saunters in wearing an unpleasant musk of superiority. Clearly he’s the one in charge. He’s not tall, but he’s muscular, with a mop of red hair with much darker roots. There’s also something about his left hand. It’s bandaged with layer after layer of gauze, as if he had slammed it in a car door, or worse. He comes up to the counter, and offers the night manager a smile.

“Don’t mind us,” he says jovially. “We’ll be on our way in a minute. Your convenience store was just too convenient to pass up.”

The cashier would spit in his face if he thought it wouldn’t get him killed.

“Now comes the moment where I ask you to open the register and you point to the sign that says ‘Cashier Does Not Have More Than Twenty Dollars in Change,’ but I make you open it anyway.”

The night manager opens the cash drawer to reveal the sign is true to its word. “See? All the money goes into the cash box, and I don’t have a key, scumbag.”

The kid is unfazed. “Your attitude reminds me of our pilot. If you’d like to visit him, he’s at the bottom of the Salton Sea.”

“We could send you there too,” says the girl, still holding her gun on him.

The kid in charge reaches over to the cash drawer and grabs a dime. Then he grabs a few lotto scratchers, lays them on the counter, and with his good hand, he uses the coin to scratch away the silver boxes. All the while, the three other kids keep their guns aimed at the night manager’s face, and the swarm of kids behind them continue their relentless ransack, carrying everything off in their greedy little arms.

“Look at that!” says the kid in charge. “I won five bucks!” Then he flicks the winning scratcher card at the cashier. “Keep it,” he says. “My gift to you. Buy yourself something nice.”

Then he leaves, followed by the rest of his brood. Only the girl with the gun remains until everyone else is gone; then she backs out, keeping the gun trained on the night manager until she’s out the front door. The second she leaves, he goes for the rifle and hurries out after them. He fires into the dark at the retreating shapes, but no one goes down. He wasn’t fast enough. He screams after them, curses, swears he’ll get them, but knows he won’t and that just angers him even more.

He turns to go back into the store and just stares. There’s virtually nothing left. The store hasn’t just been robbed. It’s been gutted of everything not nailed down. They chewed through the place like piranhas.

There on the floor, having fallen behind the counter, is the Runaway Rescue box. To hell with it—the night manager reaches in and pockets whatever money it has. The ferals it tries to save don’t deserve that money any more than these AWOLs do, and he’ll be damned if he’ll let them get any of it. Lock ’em up, cut ’em up. Let them serve society in pieces rather than tear it down whole.

Shall we give more power to the Juvenile Authority? Yes or no? There’s no question where the night manager’s vote is going.

5 • Lev

He should never have agreed to let Connor go off alone to get them a car. He wasn’t back by the afternoon, or by the evening, or during the night. Now it’s dawn of the following day. Connor’s been gone for twenty-four hours, and Lev’s anxiety grows, as well as his aggravation at both himself and at Connor. A better plan would have been to tail Connor at a distance so that if something did go wrong, at least Lev would see it and would know. Now it’s the uncertainty that’s killing him. He gets out his frustration by kicking the side of a rusty old industrial dryer lying half-buried in the weeds. He has to stop because the thing rings out like a bell with each kick, and he knows people can probably hear it for miles. He sits down in the shade of the dryer, trying to figure out what to do now. He has very few choices. If Connor doesn’t show up soon, he’s going to have to go on alone to Ohio, to find an antique store where he’s never been, to speak to an old woman he doesn’t know about a man who disappeared before Lev was born.

“Sonia could be the key to everything,” Connor had told Lev. Connor explained how the old woman—a key player in the Anti-Divisional Resistance—ran a safe house for AWOL Unwinds, getting them off the street. She had given shelter to Connor and Risa during those early days on the run. What Connor hadn’t known at the time was that her husband was Janson Rheinschild—the scientist whose advances in medical science made unwinding possible . . . and a man who was meticulously and systematically erased from history by the very organization he founded to prevent the misuse of his technology.

“If she knows something worth knowing,” Lev had asked Connor on their long drive from Arizona, “why didn’t Proactive Citizenry make her disappear as well?”

“Maybe they don’t see her as a threat,” Connor had answered. “Or maybe they don’t know she’s alive any more than they know I’m alive.”

Proactive Citizenry isn’t exactly a household name to Lev. He’s heard of them, though. Everyone’s heard of them, but no one pays much attention. They’re just one of many charitable organizations you hear about but have no idea what they actually do. Or how powerful they really are.

No matter how powerful Proactive Citizenry is, though, one thing is certain: They’re afraid of Janson Rheinschild. The question is, why?

“If you want to mess with things,” Connor had said, “that’s where we start.”

But as far as Lev is concerned, he’s messed—and has been messed with—enough. He had turned himself into a bomb but chose not to detonate. He had been the target of a clapper vengeance attack. He had been coddled and sequestered and treated like a god by a mansion full of tithes saved from their unwindings. And he had entered a battle zone to save a kid whom he considered to be his truest, and maybe only, friend.

With all that behind him, what Lev wants more than anything else is normality. His dreams aren’t of greatness or of power, wealth, or fame. He’s had all of those things at one time or another. No, what he wants is to be a kid in high school, with no more worries than what teachers he’ll get stuck with and whether or not he’ll make the baseball team.

Sometimes his fantasies of the simple life include Miracolina, the tithe who was so determined to be unwound, she despised him and everything he stood for. At least at first. His current fantasies put them at the same suburban school—it doesn’t matter which suburb. They do class projects together. Go to the movies. Make out on the couch when her parents aren’t home. She cheers for him at his baseball games, but not so loudly that she’s heard above the crowd, because she’s not that type.

He has no idea where she is now, or if she’s even alive. And now he’s facing the same uncertainty with Connor. Lev has come to realize that he’s strong, but there’s only so much he can take.

Lev resolves to wait one more hour before heading out alone. Unlike Connor, he doesn’t know how to hot-wire a car. Technically, he doesn’t know how to drive either, although he’s done it before with marginal success. His best bet for getting to Ohio would be to stow away, which means going into town and finding a truck, bus, or train headed in the right direction. No matter what, though, it would put him at serious risk. He broke the terms of his parole, so he’s a fugitive. If he’s caught, there’s no telling what will happen to him.

Lev is still hemming and hawing, building up the fortitude it will take to leave Connor behind, when a visitor arrives. Lev does not have the option of hiding—he’s spotted the second the car pulls up and the woman steps out. Rather than running, Lev calmly goes inside the old trailer and looks through the drawers until he finds a knife large enough to do damage but small enough to conceal.

Lev has never stabbed anyone. He had once, in a moment of sheer fury, threatened to beat a man and woman with a baseball bat. They had unwound their son—and a part of their son’s brain had come back in another kid’s body, begging their forgiveness.

This is different though, Lev tells himself. This isn’t about righteous rage; it’s about survival. He resolves he will use the knife only in self-defense.

Lev comes out of the trailer but stands on the lip of the doorway because he knows it makes him look taller. His visitor stands ten feet away, shifting weight from one leg to the other and back again. She’s in her early twenties by the look of it. Tall and just a little pudgy. Her face is reddened from the sun, probably from driving around in the convertible—a T-Bird in a condition too poor for the car to be considered classic. There’s an off-center bruise on her forehead.

“This is private property,” Lev says with as much authority as he can muster.

“Not yours, though,” says his visitor. “It’s Woody Beeman’s—but Woody’s been dead for two years now.”

Lev pulls a fiction out of thin air. “I’m his cousin. We inherited the place. Right now my dad’s in town renting a forklift to get rid of all this junk and clean the place up.”

But then the visitor says: “Connor didn’t tell me it would be you. He just said a friend was here. He shoulda told me it was you.”

All of Lev’s spontaneous lies evaporate. “Connor sent you? Where is he? What’s happened?”

“Connor says he wants you to go on without him. He’s staying with us here in Heartsdale. I won’t tell no one you were here. So you can go.”

The fact that Connor has managed to get Lev a message gives Lev a wave of intense relief. But the message itself makes no sense. Clearly it’s a distress signal. Connor is in trouble.

“Who’s ‘us’?” Lev asks.

The visitor shakes her head and kicks the ground almost like a child might. “Can’t tell you that.” She looks at Lev and squints against the rising sun. “Can you still blow up?” she asks.

“No.”

The woman shrugs. “Right. Anyway, I promised I’d tell you what I told you, and I did. Now I gotta go before my brother finds out I’m gone. Nice to meet you, Lev. It is Lev, right? Lev Calder?”

“Garrity. I changed my name.”

She nods approvingly. “Figures. Guess you wanted no part of a family that would raise you to want your own unwinding.” Then she turns and lumbers back to the car.

Lev considers going after her—telling her he wants to stay in Heartsdale too—but even if she falls for it, getting in that car would be a bad idea. Whatever trouble Connor is in, it would be folly to volunteer for more of the same.

Instead Lev hurries to the old crumbling school bus and climbs to the hood and then to the roof, avoiding patches that have rusted all the way through. From his high vantage point, he watches the T-Bird kick up dust on the dirt road until it turns left onto a paved road. Lev tracks it as long as he can until it disappears into Heartsdale. Now that he knows the general direction the T-Bird has gone, he can wander the streets until he finds it again.

Maybe Connor wants Lev to go on without him, but Connor knows Lev better than that.

FOLLOWING IS A PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT

“My Grandma won’t talk about it, but she remembers a time when cars burned in the street and bars on windows weren’t enough to keep the danger out. She remembers when feral teens terrorized our neighborhood and no one felt safe.

“Well, it’s happening again. The Cap-17 law let thousands of seventeen-year-old incorrigibles back into the streets and severely limits the age for which parents can choose unwinding.

“Last week a boy on my block was stabbed by one of them on his way to school, and I’m afraid I’ll be next.

“Call or write your congressperson today. Tell them you want the Cap-17 law repealed. Let’s make the streets safe again for kids like me!”

–Sponsored by Mothers Against Bad Behavior

Lev heads out into the scorching day on his reconnaissance mission. He keeps his head low but his eyes wide open. The T-Bird, Lev had observed, was dirty enough to suggest it was left out in the elements instead of in a garage—but Heartsdale is a rat’s warren rather than a grid, and a systematic search of the streets proves difficult.

By two in the afternoon, he’s desperate enough to risk contact with the citizens of the town. He prepares himself by buying a Chevron baseball cap at a gas station and a pack of gum. He wears the cap to further hide his face and chews several sticks of gum until the sugar is blanched out. Then he spreads half of the gum wad in his upper gums above his front teeth and the other half in his lower gums. It’s just enough to change the shape of his mouth without making him look too weird. Maybe his paranoia that he will be recognized is a little extreme, but as AWOL Unwinds are fond of saying, “Better safe than severed.”

There’s a Sonic that he had passed that morning, where pretty servers on roller skates bring food to parked cars, as they have done since the beginning of recorded fast-food history. If anyone knows the cars of this town, it will be the Sonic servers.

Lev goes to the walk-up window and orders a burger and a slushy, faking an accent that sounds way too deep-South drawly to be from Kansas, but it’s the best he can do.

After he gets his food, he sits at one of the outdoor tables and zeroes in on one of the roller girls who sits at the next table, texting between orders.

“Hey,” says Lev.

“Hey,” she says back. “Hot enough for ya?”

“Five more degrees, you can fry an egg on my forearm.”

That makes her smile and look over at him. He can practically read her mind in her facial expressions. He’s not a regular. He’s cute. He’s too young. Back to texting.

“Maybe you can help me,” Lev says. “There was this car with a ‘for sale’ sign parked by the side of the road the other day, but now I can’t find it.”

“Maybe it sold,” she suggests.

“Hope not. See, I’m gettin’ my license in a couple of months. I was really hoping for that T-Bird. It’s a green convertible. Do you know it?”

She continues texting for a moment, then says, “Only green convertible around here belongs to Argent Skinner. If he’s selling it, he must be having a harder time than usual.”

“Or maybe he’s buying somethin’ better.”

She gives a dubious chuckle, and Lev gives her a winning smile with slightly puffy lips. She takes a moment to reassess, decides even with a driver’s license he’s still too young for her attention, and says, “He’s on Saguaro Street, two blocks up from the Dairy Queen.”

Lev thanks her and heads off with his burger and slushy. If he appears overeager, it’ll just play into his cover story.

Having passed the DQ earlier that morning, he knows exactly where to go—but as he reaches the corner, he hears something that sounds out of place in a town like Heartsdale. The rhythmic chop of an approaching helicopter.

Even before it arrives, a series of police cars pull onto the street. Their sirens are off, but their speed speaks of urgency. There are more than a dozen vehicles. There are Juvey squad cars, black-and-whites, and unmarked cars as well. The helicopter, now overhead, begins to circle the neighborhood, and Lev gets a sick feeling deep in the pit of his gut.

Rather than following the cars, he comes at the scene from an adjacent street, cutting through a few backyards, so as not to be seen. Finally he finds himself peering through the slats of a wooden fence at an unkempt ranch-style house that is in the process of being surrounded.

A house with a green convertible T-Bird parked on the driveway.