Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

That was his smell, the smell of Davey long dead
and back from the grave.

Alan walked deeper into the tunnels, following his nose.

#

Davey dropped down onto his shoulders from a ledge in an opening where
the ceiling stretched far over their heads. He was so light, at first
Alan thought someone had thrown a blanket over his shoulders.

Then the fingers dug into his eyes. Then the fingers fishhooked the
corner of his mouth.

Then the screech, thick as a desiccated tongue, dry as the dust of a
golem, like no sound and like all the sounds at once.

The smell of corruption was everywhere, filling his nostrils like his
face has been ground into a pile of rotten meat. He tugged at the dry,
thin hands tangled in his face, and found them strong as iron bands, and
then he screamed.

Then they were both screeching and rolling on the ground, and he had
Danny's thumb in his hand, bending it back painfully, until *snap*, it
came off clean with a sound like dry wood cracking.

Doug was off him then, crawling off toward the shadows. Alan got to his
knees, still holding the thumb, and made ready to charge him, holding
his sore face with one hand, when he heard the slap of running footfalls
behind him and then Bill was streaking past him, baseball bat at ready,
and he swung it like a polo-mallet and connected with a hollow crunch of
aluminum on chitinous leathery skin.

The sound shocked Alan to his feet, wet sick rising in his gorge. Benny
was winding up for a second blow, aiming for Darren's head this time, an
out-of-the park *smack* that would have knocked that shrunken head off
the skinny, blackened neck, and Alan shouted, "NO!" and roared at Benny
and leapt for him. As he sailed through the air, he thought he was
saving *Benny* from the feeling he'd carried with him for a decade, but
as he connected with Benny, he felt a biting-down feeling, clean and
hard, and he knew he was defending *Drew*, saving him for once instead
of hurting him.

He was still holding on to the thumb, and Davey was inches from his
face, and he was atop Benny, and they breathed together, chests
heaving. Alan wobbled slowly to his feet and dropped the thumb onto
Drew's chest, then he helped Billy to his feet and they limped off to
their beds. Behind them, they heard the dry sounds of Davey getting to
his feet, coughing and hacking with a crunch of thin, cracked ribs.

#

He was sitting on their mother the next morning. He was naked and
unsexed by desiccation -- all the brothers, even little George, had
ceased going about in the nude when they'd passed through puberty --
sullen and silent atop the white, chipped finish of her enamel top, so
worn and ground down that it resembled a collection of beach-China. It
had been a long time since any of them had sought solace in their
mother's gentle rocking, since, indeed, they had spared her a thought
beyond filling her belly with clothes and emptying her out an hour
later.

The little ones woke first and saw him, taking cover behind a
stalagmite, peering around, each holding a sharp, flat rock, each with
his pockets full of more. Danny looked at each in turn with eyes gone
yellow and congealed, and bared his mouthful of broken and blackened
teeth in a rictus that was equal parts humor and threat.

Bradley was the next to wake, his bat in his hand and his eyelids
fluttering open as he sprang to his feet, and then Alan was up as well,
a hand on his shoulder.

He crouched down and walked slowly to Davey. He had the knife, handle
wound with cord, once-keen edge gone back to rust and still reddened
with ten-year-old blood, but its sharpness mattered less than its
history.

"Welcome me home," Davey rasped as Alan drew closer. "Welcome me home,
mother*fucker*. Welcome me home, *brother*."

"You're welcome in this home," Alan said, but Davey wasn't welcome. Just
last week, Alan had seen a nice-looking bedroom set that he suspected he
could afford -- the golems had left him a goodly supply of gold flake,
though with the golems gone he supposed that the sacks were the end of
the family's no-longer-bottomless fortune. But with the bedroom set
would come a kitchen table, and then a bookcase, and a cooker and a
fridge, and when they were ready, he could send each brother on his way
with the skills and socialization necessary to survive in the wide
world, to find women and love and raise families of their own. Then he
could go and find himself a skinny redheaded girl with a Scots accent,
and in due time her belly would swell up and there would be a child.

It was all planned out, practically preordained, but now here they were,
with the embodied shame sitting on their mother, his torn thumb gleaming
with the wire he'd used to attach it back to his hand.

"That's very generous, *brother*," Danny said. "You're a prince among
*men*."

"Let's go," Alan said. "Breakfast in town. I'm buying."

They filed out and Alan spared Davey a look over his shoulder as they
slipped away, head down on his knees, rocking in time with their mother.

#

Krishna grinned at him from the front porch as he staggered home from
Kurt's storefront. He was dressed in a hoodie and huge, outsized raver
pants that dangled with straps and reflectors meant to add kinetic
reflections on the dance floor.

"Hello, neighbor," he said as Alan came up the walkway. "Good evening?"

Alan stopped and put his hands on his hips, straightened his head out on
his neck so that he was standing tall. "I understand what he gets out of
*you*," Alan said. "I understand that perfectly well. Who couldn't use a
little servant and errand boy?

"But what I don't understand, what I can't understand, what I'd like to
understand is: What can you get out of the arrangement?"

Krishna shrugged elaborately. "I have no idea what you're talking
about."

"We had gold, in the old days. Is that what's bought you? Maybe you
should ask me for a counteroffer. I'm not poor."

"I'd never take a penny that *you* offered -- voluntarily." Krishna lit
a nonchalant cig and flicked the match toward his dry, xeroscaped
lawn. There were little burnt patches among the wild grasses there, from
other thrown matches, and that was one mystery-let solved, then, wasn't
it?

"You think I'm a monster," Alan said.

Krishna nodded. "Yup. Not a scary monster, but a monster still."

Alan nodded. "Probably," he said. "Probably I am. Not a human, maybe not
a person. Not a real person. But if I'm bad, he's a thousand times
worse, you know. He's a scary monster."

Krishna dragged at his cigarette.

"You know a lot of monsters, don't you?" Alan said. He jerked his head
toward the house. "You share a bed with one."

Krishna narrowed his eyes. "She's not scary, either."

"You cut off her wings, but it doesn't make her any less monstrous.

"One thing I can tell you, you're pretty special: Most real people never
see us. You saw me right off. It's like *Dracula*, where most of the
humans couldn't tell that there was a vampire in their midst."

"Van Helsing could tell," Krishna said. "He hunted Dracula. You can't
hunt what you can't see," he said. "So your kind has been getting a safe
free ride for God-knows-how-long. Centuries. Living off of us. Passing
among us. Passing for us."

"Van Helsing got killed," Alan said. "Didn't he? And besides that, there
was someone else who could see the vampires: Renfield. The pathetic pet
and errand boy. Remember Renfield in his cage in the asylum, eating
flies? Trying to be a monster? Von Helsing recognized the monster, but
so did Renfield."

"I'm no one's Renfield," Krishna said, and spat onto Alan's lawn. First
fire, then water. He was leaving his mark on Alan's land, that was
certain.

"You're no Van Helsing, either," Alan said. "What's the difference
between you and a racist, Krishna? You call me a monster, why shouldn't
I call you a paki?"

He stiffened at the slur, and so did Alan. He'd never used the word
before, but it had sprung readily from his lips, as though it had lurked
there all along, waiting to be uttered.

"Racists say that there's such a thing as 'races' within the human race,
that blacks and whites and Chinese and Indians are all members of
different 'races,'" Krishna said. "Which is bullshit. On the other hand,
you --"

He broke off, left the thought to hang. He didn't need to finish
it. Alan's hand went to his smooth belly, the spot where real people had
navels, old scarred remnants of their connections to real, human
mothers.

"So you hate monsters, Krishna, all except for the ones you sleep with
and the ones you work for?"

"I don't work for anyone," he said. "Except me."

Alan said, "I'm going to pour myself a glass of wine. Would you like
one?"

Krishna grinned hard and mirthless. "Sure, neighbor, that sounds
lovely."

Alan went inside and took out two glasses, got a bottle of something
cheap and serviceable from Niagara wine country out of the fridge,
worked the corkscrew, all on automatic. His hands shook a little, so he
held them under the cold tap. Stuck to the wall over his work surface
was a magnetic bar, and stuck to it was a set of very sharp chef's
knives that were each forged from a single piece of steel. He reached
for one and felt its comfort in his hand, seductive and glinting.

It was approximately the same size as the one he'd used on Davey, a
knife that he'd held again and again, reached for in the night and
carried to breakfast for months. He was once robbed at knifepoint,
taking the deposit to the bank after Christmas rush, thousands of
dollars in cash in a brown paper sack in his bag, and the mugger -- a
soft-spoken, middle-aged man in a good suit -- knew exactly what he was
carrying and where, must have been casing him for days.

The soft-spoken man had had a knife about this size, and when Alan had
seen it pointed at him, it had been like an old friend, one whose orbit
had escaped his gravity years before, so long ago that he'd forgotten
about their tender camaraderie. It was all he could do not to reach out
and take the knife from the man, say hello again and renew the
friendship.

He moved the knife back to the magnet bar and let the field tug it out
of his fingers and *snap* it back to the wall, picked up the wine
glasses, and stepped back out onto the porch. Krishna appeared not to
have stirred except to light a fresh cigarette.

"You spit in mine?" Krishna said.

Though their porches adjoined, Alan walked down his steps and crossed
over the lawn next door, held the glass out to Krishna. He took it and
their hands brushed each other, the way his hand had brushed the
soft-spoken man's hand when he'd handed over the sack of money. The
touch connected him to something human in a way that made him ashamed of
his desperation.

"I don't normally drink before noon," Adam said.

"I don't much care when I drink,"