Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [best books for 20 year olds .TXT] 📗

which was carpeted with a humus of moldering cardboard, leaves, and road turds blown or washed there. He kicked it aside as best he could, then crouched down to examine the sewer grating beneath. The greenish brass screws that anchored it to the ground had sharp cuts in their old grooves where they had been recently removed. He rattled the grating, which was about half a meter square, then slipped his multitool out of his belt holster. He flipped out the Phillips driver and went to work on the screws, unconsciously putting Kurt's flashlight in his mouth, his front teeth finding purchase in the dents that Kurt's own had left there.

He realized with a brief shudder that Kurt probably used this flashlight while nipple-deep in dumpsters, had an image of Kurt transferring it from his gloved hands to his mouth and back again as he dug through bags of kitchen and toilet waste, looking for discarded technology. But the metal was cool and clean against his teeth and so he bit down and worked the four screws loose, worked his fingers into the mossy slots in the grate, lifted it out, and set it to one side.

He shone the light down the hole and found another fingerbone, the tip of a thumb, desiccated to the size of a large raisin, and he pocketed that, too. There was a lot of blood here, a little puddle that was still wet in the crusted middle. Frederick's blood.

He stepped over the grating and shone the light back down the hole, inviting Kurt to have a look.

"That's where they went," he said as Kurt bent down.

"That hole?"

"That hole," he said.

"Is that blood?"

"That's blood. It's not easy to fit someone my brother's size down a hole like that." He set the grate back, screwed it into place, and passed the torch back to Kurt. "Let's get out of here," he said.

On the street, Alan looked at his blood and moss-grimed palms. Kurt pushed back his floppy, frizzed-out, bleach-white mohawk and scratched vigorously at the downy brown fuzz growing in on the sides of his skull.

"You think I'm a nut," Alan said. "It's okay, that's natural."

Kurt smiled sheepishly. "If it's any consolation, I think you're a harmless nut, okay? I like you."

"You don't have to believe me, so long as you don't get in my way," Alan said. "But it's easier if you believe me."

"Easier to do what?"

"Oh, to get along," Alan said.

Davey leapt down from a rock outcropping as Alan made his way home that night, landing on his back. Alan stumbled and dropped his school bag. He grabbed at the choking arm around his neck, then dropped to his knees as Davey bounced a fist-sized stone off his head, right over his ear.

He slammed himself back, pinning Davey between himself and the sharp stones on the walkway up to the cave entrance, then mashed backward with his elbows, his head ringing like a gong from the stone's blow. His left elbow connected with Davey's solar plexus and the arm around his throat went slack.

He climbed to his knees and looked Davey in the face. He was blue and gasping, but Alan couldn't work up a lot of sympathy for him as he reached up to the side of his head and felt the goose egg welling there. His fingertips came back with a few strands of hair blood-glued to them.

He'd been in a few schoolyard scraps and this was always the moment when a teacher intervened -- one combatant pinned, the other atop him. What could you do after this? Was he going to take the rock from Davey's hand and smash him in the face with it, knocking out his teeth, breaking his nose, blacking his eyes? Could he get off of Davey without getting back into the fight?

He pinned Davey's shoulders under his knees and took him by the chin with one hand. "You can't do this, Danny," he said, looking into his hazel eyes, which had gone green as they did when he was angry.

"Do what?"

"Spy on me. Try to hurt me. Try to hurt my friends. Tease me all the time. You can't do it, okay?"

"I'll stab you in your sleep, Andy. I'll break your fingers with a brick. I'll poke your eyes out with a fork." He was fizzling like a baking-soda volcano, saliva slicking his cheeks and nostrils and chin, his eyes rolling.

Alan felt helplessness settle on him, weighing down his limbs. How could he let him go? What else could he do? Was he going to have to sit on Davey's shoulders until they were both old men?

"Please, Davey. I'm sorry about what I said. I just can't bring her home, you understand," he said.

"Pervert. She's a slut and you're a pervert. I'll tear her titties off."

"Don't, Danny, please. Stop, okay?"

Darren bared his teeth and growled, jerking his head forward and snapping at Alan's crotch, heedless of the painful thuds his head made when it hit the ground after each lunge.

Alan waited to see if he would tire himself out, but when it was clear that he would not tire, Alan waited for his head to thud to the ground and then, abruptly, he popped him in the chin, leapt off of him turned him on his belly, and wrenched him to his knees, twisting one arm behind his back and pulling his head back by the hair. He brought Davey to his feet, under his control, before he he'd recovered from the punch.

"I'm telling Dad," he said in Davey's ear, and began to frog-march him through to the cave mouth and down into the lake in the middle of the mountain. He didn't even slow down when they reached the smooth shore of the lake, just pushed on, sloshing in up to his chest, Davey's head barely above the water.

"He won't stop," Alan said, to the winds, to the water, to the vaulted ceiling, to the scurrying retreat of the goblin. "I think he'll kill me if he goes on. He's torturing me. You've seen it. Look at him!"

Davey was thrashing in the water, his face swollen and bloody, his eyes rattling like dried peas in a maraca. Alan's fingers, still buried in Davey's shiny blond hair, kept brushing up against the swollen bruises there, getting bigger by the moment. "I'll fucking kill you!" Davey howled, screaming inchoate into the echo that came back from his call.

"Shhh," Alan said into his ear. "Shhh. Listen, Davey, please, shhh."

Davey's roar did not abate. Alan thought he could hear the whispers and groans of their father in the wind, but he couldn't make it out. "Please, shhh," he said, gathering Davey in a hug that pinned his arms to his sides, putting his lips up against Davey's ear, holding him still.

"Shhh," he said, and Davey stopped twitching against him, stopped his terrible roar, and they listened.

At first the sound was barely audible, a soughing through the tunnels, but gradually the echoes chased each other round the great cavern and across the still, dark surface of the lake, and then a voice, illusive as a face in the clouds.

"My boys," the voice said, their father said. "My sons. David, Alan. You must not fight like this."

"He --!" Davey began, the echoes of his outburst scattering their father's voice.

"Shhh," Alan said again.

"Daniel, you must love your brother. He loves you. I love you. Trust him. He won't hurt you. I won't let you come to any harm. I love you, son."

Alan felt Danny tremble in his arms, and he was trembling, too, from the icy cold of the lake and from the voice and the words and the love that echoed from every surface.

"Adam, my son. Keep your brother safe. You need each other. Don't be impatient or angry with him. Give him love."

"I will," Alan said, and he relaxed his arms so that he was holding Danny in a hug and not a pinion. Danny relaxed back into him. "I love you, Dad," he said, and they trudged out of the water, out into the last warmth of the day's sun, to dry out on the slope of the mountainside, green grass under their bodies and wispy clouds in the sky that they watched until the sun went out.

Marci followed him home a week before Christmas break. He didn't notice her at first. She was cunning, and followed his boot prints in the snow. A blizzard had blown up halfway through the school day, and by the time class let out, there was fresh knee-deep powder and he had to lift each foot high to hike through it, the shush of his snow pants and the huff of his breath the only sounds in the icy winter evening.

She followed the deep prints of his boots on the fresh snow, stalking him like he stalked rabbits in the woods. When he happened to turn around at the cave mouth, he spotted her in her yellow snow-suit, struggling up the mountainside, barely visible in the twilight.

He'd never seen an intruder on the mountain. The dirt trail that led up to the cave branched off a side road on the edge of town, and it was too rocky even for the dirt-bike kids. He stood at the cave-mouth, torn by indecision. He wanted to keep walking, head away farther uphill, away from the family's den, but now she'd seen him, had waved to him. His cold-numb face drained of blood and his bladder hammered insistently at him. He hiked down the mountain and met her.

"Why are you here?" he said, once he was close enough to see her pale, freckled face.

"Why do you think?" she said. "I followed you home. Where do you live, Alan? Why can't I even see where you live?"

He felt tears prick at his eyes. "You just can't! I can't bring you home!"

"You hate me, don't you?" she said, hands balling up into mittened fists. "That's it."

"I don't hate you, Marci. I -- I love you," he said, surprising himself.

She punched him hard in the arm. "Shut up." She kissed his cheek with her cold, dry lips and the huff of her breath thawed his skin, making it tingle.

"Where do you live, Alan?"

He sucked air so cold it burned his lungs. "Come with me." He took her mittened hand in his and trudged up to the cave mouth.

They entered the summer cave, where the family spent its time in the warm months, now mostly empty, save for some straw and a few scattered bits of clothing and toys. He led her through the cave, his eyes adjusting to the gloom, back to the right-angle bend behind a stalactite baffle, toward the sulfur reek of the hot spring on whose shores the family spent its winters.

"It gets dark," he said. "I'll get you a light once we're inside."

Her hand squeezed his tighter and she said nothing.

It grew darker and darker as he pushed into the cave, helping her up the gentle incline of the cave floor. He saw well in the dark -- the whole family did -- but he understood that for her this was a blind voyage.

They stepped out into the sulfur-spring cavern, the acoustics of their breathing changed by the long, flat hollow. In the dark, he saw Edward-Frederick-George playing with his matchbox cars in one corner; Davey leaned up against their mother, sucking his thumb. Billy was nowhere in sight, probably hiding out in his room -- he would, of course, have foreseen this visit.

He put her hand against the cave wall, then said, "Wait here." He let go