Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (best thriller novels of all time .txt) 📗
- Author: Cory Doctorow
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Mimi looked down at him. “Ugly sumbitch, whoever he was.”
“My brother,” Alan said.
“Oh,” she said. She went back around the bed and sat on the edge, facing the wall. “Sorry.” She crossed her leg and jiggled her foot, making the springs squeak.
Alan wasn’t listening. He knelt down and touched George’s cheek. The skin was soft and spongy, porous and saturated. Cold. His fingertips came away with shed white flakes of translucent skin clinging to them.
“Davey?” Alan said. “Are you in here?”
Mimi’s foot stilled. They both listened intently. There were night-time sounds in the motel, distant muffled TVs and car engines and fucking, but no sound of papery skin thudding on ground-down carpet.
“He must have come up through the drain,” Alan said. “In the bathroom.” The broad pale moon of George’s belly was abraded in long grey stripes.
He stood and, wiping his hand on his bare thigh, reached for the bathroom doorknob. The door swung open, revealing the sanitized-for-your-protection brightness of the bathroom, the water sloshed on the floor by Mimi earlier, the heaps of damp towels.
“How’d he find us here?”
Mimi, in her outsized blazer and track pants, touched him on his bare shoulder. He suddenly felt terribly naked. He backed out of the bathroom, shoving Mimi aside, and numbly pulled on his jeans and a shapeless sweatshirt that smelled of Mimi and had long curly hairs lurking in the fabric that stuck to his face like cobwebs. He jammed his feet into his sneakers.
He realized that he’d had to step over his brother’s body six times to do this.
He looked at his brother again. He couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. The abraded belly. The rictus. His balls, shrunk to an albino walnut, his cock shriveled up to unrecognizability. The hair, curly, matted all over his body, patchily rubbed away.
He paced in the little run beside the bed, the only pacing room he had that didn’t require stepping over George’s body, back and forth, two paces, turn, two paces, turn.
“I’m going to cover him up,” Mimi said.
“Good, fine,” Alan said.
“Are you going to be okay?”
“Yes, fine,” Alan said.
“Are you freaking out?”
Alan didn’t say anything.
George looked an awful lot like Davey had, the day they killed him.
Mimi found a spare blanket in the closet, reeking of mothballs and scarred with a few curdled cigarette burns, and she spread it out on the floor and helped him lift Grant’s body onto it and wind it tightly around him.
“What now?” she said.
He looked down at the wound sheet, the lump within it. He sat down heavily on the bed. His chest was tight, and his breath came in short hups.
She sat beside him and put an arm around his shoulder, tried to pull his head down to her bosom, but he stiffened his neck.
“I knew this was coming,” he said. “When we killed Darren, I knew.”
She stood and lit a cigarette. “This is your family business,” she said, “why we’re driving up north?”
He nodded, not trusting his voice, seeing the outlines of Grad’s face, outlined in moth-eaten blanket.
“So,” she said. “Let’s get up north, then. Take an end.”
The night was cold, and they staggered under the weight of the body wound in the blanket and laid him out in the trunk of the car, shifting luggage and picnic supplies to the back seat. At two a.m., the motel lights were out and the road was dark and silent but for the soughing of wind and the distant sounds of night animals.
“Are you okay to drive?” she said, as she piled their clothes indiscriminately into the suitcases.
“What?” he said. The cool air on his face was waking him up a little, but he was still in a dream-universe. The air was spicy and outdoors and it reminded him powerfully of home and simpler times.
He looked at Mimi without really seeing her.
“Are you okay to drive?”
The keys were in his hands, the car smelling of the detailing-in-a-can mist that the rental agency sprayed on the upholstery to get rid of the discount traveler farts between rentals.
“I can drive,” he said. Home, and the mountain, and the washing machine, and the nook where he’d slept for 18 years, and the golems, and the cradle they’d hewn for him. Another ten or twelve hours’ driving and they’d be at the foot of the trail where the grass grew to waist-high.
“Well, then, drive.” She got in the car and slammed her door.
He climbed in, started the engine, and put the hertzmobile into reverse.
Two hours later, he realized that he was going to nod off. The thumps of the body sliding in the trunk and the suitcases rattling around in the back seat had lost their power to keep him awake.
The body’s thumping had hardly had the power to begin with. Once the initial shock had passed, the body became an object only, a thing, a payload he had to deliver. Alan wondered if he was capable of feeling the loss.
“You were eleven then,” he said. It was suddenly as though no time had past since they’d sat on the bed and she’d told him about Auntie.
“Yes,” she said. “It was as though no time had passed.”
A shiver went up his back.
He was wide awake.
“No time had passed.”
“Yes. I was living with a nice family in Oakville who were sending me to a nice girls’ school where we wore blazers over our tunics, and I had a permanent note excusing me from gym classes. In a building full of four hundred girls going through puberty, one more fat shy girl who wouldn’t take her top off was hardly noteworthy.”
“The family, they were nice. WASPy. They called me Cheryl. With a Why. When I asked them where I’d been before, about ‘Auntie,’ they looked sad and hurt and worried for me, and I learned to stop. They hugged me and touched my wings and never said anything—and never wiped their hands on their pants after touching them. They gave me a room with a computer and a CD player and a little TV of my own, and asked me to bring home my friends.
“I had none.
“But they found other girls who would come to my ‘birthday’ parties, on May 1, which was exactly two months after their son’s birthday and two months before their daughter’s birthday.
“I can’t remember any of their names.
“But they made me birthday cards and they made me breakfast and dinner and they made me welcome. I could watch them grilling burgers in the back yard by the above ground pool in the summer from my bedroom window. I could watch them building forts or freezing skating rinks in the winter. I could listen to them eating dinner together while I did my homework in my bedroom. There was a place for me at the dinner-table, but I couldn’t sit there, though I can’t remember why.”
“Wait a second,” Alan said. “You don’t remember?”
She made a sad noise in her throat. “I was told I was welcome, but I knew I wasn’t. I know that sounds paranoid—crazy. Maybe I was just a teenager. There was a reason, though, I just don’t know what it was. I knew then. They knew it, too—no one blamed me. They loved me, I guess.”
“You stayed with them until you went to school?”
“Almost. Their daughter went to Waterloo, then the next year, their son went to McGill in Montreal, and then it was just me and them. I had two more years of high school, but it just got unbearable. With their children gone, they tried to take an interest in me. Tried to make me eat with them. Take me out to meet their friends. Every day felt worse, more wrong. One night, I went to a late movie by myself downtown and then got to walking around near the clubs and looking at the club kids and feeling this terrible feeling of loneliness, and when I was finally ready to go home, the last train had already gone. I just spent the night out, wandering around, sitting in a back booth at Sneaky Dee’s and drinking Cokes, watching the sun come up from the top of Christie Pitts overlooking the baseball diamond. I was a 17-year-old girl from the suburbs wearing a big coat and staring at her shoelaces, but no one bugged me.
“When I came home the next morning, no one seemed particularly bothered that I’d been away all night. If anything, the parental people might have been a little distraught that I came home. ‘I think I’ll get my own place,’ I said. They agreed, and agreed to put the lease in their name to make things easier. I got a crummy little basement in what the landlord called Cabbagetown but what was really Regent Park, and I switched out to a huge, anonymous high school to finish school. Worked in a restaurant at nights and on weekends to pay the bills.”
The night highway rushed past them, quiet. She lit a cigarette and rolled down her window, letting in the white-noise crash of the wind and the smell of the smoke mixed with the pine-and-summer reek of the roadside.
“Give me one of those,” Alan said.
She lit another and put it between his lips, damp with her saliva. His skin came up in goosepimples.
“Who knows about your wings?” he said.
“Krishna knows,” she said. “And you.” She looked out into the night. “The family in Oakville. If I could remember where they lived, I’d look them up and ask them about it. Can’t. Can’t remember their names or their faces. I remember the pool, though, and the barbecue.”
“No one else knows?”
“There was no one else before Krishna. No one that I remember, anyway.”
“I have a brother,” he said, then swallowed hard. “I have a brother named Brad. He can see the future.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He pawed around for an ashtray and discovered that it had been removed, along with the lighter, from the rental car’s dashboard. Cursing, he pinched off the coal of the cigarette and flicked it to the roadside, hoping that it would burn out quickly, then he tossed the butt over his shoulder at the back seat. As he did, the body in the trunk rolled while he navigated a curve in the road and he braked hard, getting the car stopped in time for him to open the door and pitch a rush of vomit onto the roadway.
“You okay to drive?”
“Yeah. I am.” He sat up and put the car into gear and inched to the shoulder, then put it in park and set his blinkers. The car smelled of sour food and sharp cigarettes and God, it smelled of the body in the trunk.
“It’s not easy to be precognizant,” Alan said, and pulled back onto the road, signaling even though there were no taillights or headlights for as far as the eye could see.
“I believe it,” she said.
“He stopped telling us things after a while. It just got him into trouble. I’d be studying for an exam and he’d look at me and shake his head, slowly, sadly. Then I’d flunk out, and I’d be convinced that it was him psyching me out. Or he’d get picked for kickball and he’d say. ‘What’s the point, this team’s gonna lose,’ and wander off, and they’d lose, and everyone would hate him. He couldn’t tell the difference between what he knew and what everyone else knew. Didn’t know the difference between the past and the future, sometimes. So he stopped telling us, and when we figured out how to read it in his eyes, he stopped looking at us.
“Then
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