Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [best historical fiction books of all time txt] 📗

and he knew he was bleeding, could feel it seeping down his arm. Finally, he got his hand onto something, a desiccated, mummified piece of flesh. Davey. Davey’s ribs, like dry stones, cold and thin. He felt up higher, felt for the place where Davey’s arm met his shoulder, and then twisted as hard as he could, until the arm popped free in its socket. He shook his head violently and the pillow slid away.

The room was still dark, and the hot, moist air rushed into his nostrils and mouth as he gasped it in. He heard Davey moving in the dark, and as his eyes adjusted, he saw him unfolding a knife. It was a clasp knife with a broken hasp and it swung open with the sound of a cockroach’s shell crunching underfoot. The blade was rusty.

Alan flung his freed arm across his body and tried to tug himself loose. He was being held down by his own sheets, which had been tacked or stapled to the bed frame. Using all his strength, he rolled over, heaving and bucking, and felt/heard the staples popping free down one side of the bed, just as Davey slashed at where his face had been a moment before. The knife whistled past his ear, then scored deeply along his shoulder. His arm flopped uselessly at his side and now they were both fighting one-armed, though Davey had a knife and Adam was wrapped in a sheet.

His bedroom was singularly lacking in anything that could be improvised into a weapon—he considered trying getting a heavy encyclopedia out to use as a shield, but it was too far a distance and too long a shot.

He scooted back on the bed, trying to untangle the sheet, which was still secured at the foot of the bed and all along one side. He freed his good arm just as Davey slashed at him again, aiming for the meat of his thigh, the big arteries there that could bleed you out in a minute or two. He grabbed for Davey’s shoulder and caught it for an instant, squeezed and twisted, but then the skin he had hold of sloughed away and Davey was free, dancing back.

Then he heard, from downstairs, the sound of rhythmic pounding at the door. He’d been hearing it for some time, but hadn’t registered it until now. A muffled yell from below. Police? Mimi? He screamed out, “Help!” hoping his voice would carry through the door.

Apparently, it did. He heard the sound of the small glass pane over the doorknob shatter, and Davey turned his head to look in the direction of the sound. Alan snatched up the pillow that he’d been smothering under and swung it as hard as he could at Davey’s head, knocking him around, and the door was open now, the summer night air sweeping up the stairs to the second-floor bedroom.

“Alan?” It was Kurt.

“Kurt, up here, he’s got a knife!”

Boots on the stairs, and Davey standing again, cornered, with the knife, slashing at the air toward him and toward the bedroom door, toward the light coming up the stairs, bobbing, Kurt’s maglight, clenched in his teeth, and Davey bolted for the door with the knife held high. The light stopped moving and there was an instant’s tableau, Davey caught in the light, cracked black lips peeled back from sharp teeth, chest heaving, knife bobbing, and then Alan was free, diving for his knees, bringing him down.

Kurt was on them before Davey could struggle up to his good elbow, kicking the knife away, scattering fingerbones like dice.

Davey screeched like a rusty hinge as Kurt twisted his arms up behind his back and Alan took hold of his ankles. He thrashed like a raccoon in a trap, and Alan forced the back of his head down so that his face was mashed against the cool floor, muffling his cries.

Kurt shifted so that his knee and one hand were pinning Davey’s wrists, fished in his pockets, and came out with a bundle of hairy twine. He set it on the floor next to Alan and then shifted his grip back to Davey’s arms.

As soon as Alan released the back of Davey’s head, he jerked it up and snapped his teeth into the top of Kurt’s calf, just above the top of his high, chain-draped boot. Kurt hollered and Adam reached out and took the knife, moving quickly before he could think, and smashed the butt into Davey’s jaw, which cracked audibly. Davey let go of Kurt’s calf and Alan worked quickly to lash his feet together, using half the bundle of twine, heedless of how he cut into the thin, cracking skin. He used the knife to snip the string and then handed the roll to Kurt, who went to work on Danny’s wrists.

Alan got the lights and rolled his brother over, looked into his mad eyes. Dale was trying to scream, but with his jaw hanging limp and his teeth scattered, it came out in a rasp. Alan stood and found that he was naked, his shoulder and bicep dripping blood down his side into a pool on the polished floor.

“We’ll take him to the basement,” he told Kurt, and dug through the laundry hamper at the foot of the bed for jeans. He found a couple of pairs of boxer shorts and tied one around his bicep and the other around his shoulder, using his teeth and chin as a second hand. It took two tries before he had them bound tight enough to still the throb.

The bedroom looked like someone had butchered an animal in it, and the floor was gritty with Darrel’s leavings, teeth and nails and fingerbones. Picking his way carefully through the mess, he hauled the sheet off the bed, popping out the remaining staples, which pinged off the bookcases and danced on the polished wood of the floor. He folded it double and laid it on the floor next to Davey.

“Help me roll him onto it,” he said, and then saw that Kurt was staring down at his shriveled, squirming, hateful brother in horror, wiping his hands over and over again on the thighs of his jeans.

He looked up and his eyes were glazed and wide. “I was passing by and I saw the shadows in the window. I thought you were being attacked—” He hugged himself.

“I was,” Alan said. He dug another T-shirt out of his hamper. “Here, wrap this around your hands.”

They rolled Davey into the sheet and then wrapped him in it. He was surprisingly heavy, dense. Hefting his end of the sheet one-handed, hefting that mysterious weight, he remembered picking up Ed-Fred-Geoff in the cave that first day, remembered the weight of the brother-in-the-brother-in-the-brother, and he had a sudden sickening sense that perhaps Davey was so heavy because he’d eaten them.

Once they had him bound snugly in the sheet, Danny stopped thrashing and became very still. They carried him carefully down the dark stairs, the walnut-shell grit echoing the feel of teeth and flakes of skin on the bare soles of Alan’s feet.

They dumped him unceremoniously on the cool mosaic of tile on the floor. They stared at the unmoving bundle for a moment. “Wait here, I’m going to get a chair,” Alan said.

“Jesus, don’t leave me alone here,” Kurt said. “That kid, the one who saw him—take—your brother? No one’s seen him since.” He looked down at Davey with wide, crazed eyes.

Alan’s shoulder throbbed. “All right,” he said. “You get a chair from the kitchen, the captain’s chair in the corner with the newspaper recycling stacked on it.”

While Kurt was upstairs, Alan unwrapped his brother. Danny’s eyes were closed, his jaw hanging askew, his wrists bound behind him. Alan leaned carefully over him and took his jaw and rotated it gently until it popped back into place.

“Davey?” he said. The eyes were closed, but now there was an attentiveness, an alertness to him. Alan stepped back quickly, feeling foolish at his fear of this pathetic, disjointed bound thing on his floor. No two ways about it, though: Davey gave him the absolutely willies, making his testicles draw up and the hair on the back of his arms prickle.

“Set the chair down there,” Alan said, pointing. He hoisted Davey up by his dry, papery armpits and sat him in the seat. He took some duct tape out of a utility drawer under the basement staircase and used it to gum Danny down in the chair.

“Davey,” he said again. “I know you can hear me. Stop pretending.”

“That’s your brother?” Kurt said. “The one who—”

“That’s him,” Alan said. “I guess you believe me now, huh?”

Davey grinned suddenly, mirthless. “Still making friends and influencing people, brother?” he said. His voice was wet and hiccuping, like he was drowning in snot.

“We’re not going to play any games here, Davey. You’re going to tell me where Edward, Felix, and Griffin are, or I’m going to tear your fingers off and smash them into powder. When I run out of fingers, I’ll switch to teeth.”

Kurt looked at him in alarm. He moaned. “Jesus, Adam—”

Adam whirled on him, something snapping inside. “Don’t, Kurt, just don’t, okay? He tried to kill me tonight. He may already have killed my brothers. This is life or death, and there’s no room for sentiment or humanity. Get a hammer out of the toolbox, on that shelf.” Kurt hesitated. “Do it!” Alan said, pointing at the toolbox.

Kurt shrank back, looking as though he’d been slapped. He moved as if in a dream, opening the toolbox and pawing through it until he came up with a scarred hammer, one claw snapped off.

Davey shook his head. “You don’t scare me, Albert. Not for an instant. I have a large supply of fingers and teeth—all I need. And you—you’re like him. You’re a sentimentalist. Scared of yourself. Scared of me. Scared of everything. That’s why you ran away. That’s why you got rid of me. Scared.”

Alan dug in his pocket for the fingerbones and teeth he’d collected. He found the tip of a pinky with a curled-over nail as thick as an oyster’s shell, crusted with dirt and blood. “Give me the hammer, Kurt,” he said.

Davey’s eyes followed him as he set the fingertip down on the tiles and raised the hammer. He brought it down just to one side of the finger, hard enough to break the tile. Kurt jumped a little, and Alan held the hammer up again.

“Tell me or this time I won’t miss,” he said, looking Davey in the eye.

Davey shrugged in his bonds.

Alan swung the hammer again. It hit the fingertip with a jarring impact that vibrated up his arm and resonated through his hurt shoulder. He raised the hammer again. He’d expected the finger to crush into powder, but instead it fissured into three jagged pieces, like a piece of chert fracturing under a hammer-stone.

Davey’s eyes were squeezed down to slits now. “You’re the scared one. You can’t scare me,” he said, his voice choked with phlegm.

Alan sat on the irregular tile and propped his chin in his palm. “Okay, Davey, you’re right. I’m scared. You’ve kidnapped our brothers, maybe even killed them. You’re terrorizing me. I can’t think, I can’t sleep. So tell me, Danny, why shouldn’t I just kill you again, and get rid of all that fear?”

“I know where the brothers are,” he said instantly. “I know where there are more people like us. All the answers, Albert, every answer you’ve ever looked for. I’ve got them. And I won’t tell you any of them. But so long as I’m walking around and talking, you think that I might.”