Frightened Boy - Scott Kelly (ebook reader with android os .txt) 📗

though I was intruding on something forbidden at every turn. I became aware that no matter where I walked, Whisper was in eyesight.

I stepped outside into the night. Smelled like tire fires. Everything around me was covered in boards or bars and wrapped in fences, as though this was an invading army that’d set up hurried defenses. An abandoned highway intersection wrapped up into the sky, covered in garbage and lifeless cars, collapsing under its own weight.

Everywhere there was cryptic graffiti in excited spurts of bright colors. I didn’t understand it at all, but it was beautiful in a strange sort of way. I could not fathom how people had reached the tops of buildings and sides of highways without scaffolding or lifts or even ropes and ladders.

“Someone holds their feet,” Whisper said, soft voice coming from behind me. “There are two people involved with graffiti. Someone paints the tag, and someone else holds them over the ledge. Do people do that sort of thing where you live?”

I stood in silence.

“Clark!” I heard Erika’s familiar voice behind me, and relief gushed through me. She was practically running at me with a hand waving in the air. She looked unharmed, and a short, fat, angry man was trying to follow her, cursing as he waddled.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Of course, my Lord.” She smiled. “I used to live in an Orange Zone many years ago. I’m used to this sort of thing.”

I realized then that I hardly knew anything about Erika’s past.

“Clark, meet Grundel.”

“Pleasure,” I said to the sweaty, fat figure before me.

The balding, rotund man only grunted. He wiped a meaty hand off on his torn jeans and offered it to me. It felt like gripping a spoiled ham. “I heard what Escher said about this kid. Frightened Boy. Hah!”

“His name is Clark,” Erika said defensively. “’Frightened Boy’ is a mean name.”

“The fuck it is. He is what Escher says he is,” Grundel frowned at me. “I’m supposed to keep an eye on you two until you cough up whatever it is Escher wants from you. You don’t exactly fit in around here, so don’t think you can just slip away. You’re live bait in this part of town.”

I found myself unconsciously stepping backwards as Grundel spoke. Globs of pink spit flew from his mouth and felt cold and gross on my face.

“I don’t have what Escher wants,” I tried to explain.

“Then you better find it fast. No one here is going to tell the Red King he’s wrong on this one—not when we can just watch you die and have it over with instead.”

“Well what the hell am I supposed to do?”

“I’m not sayin’ you two are totally screwed, kid,” Grundel said. “She’s pretty. He might keep her around…so there’s hope. But you, you’re fucked.”

Erika frowned. “Fuck off,” she commanded the equally pudgy, podgy, and dumpy man. “We’ll be fine. Escher isn’t going to kill us. He’ll understand, and Clark will get us out of this.”

“Mouthy bitch,” he mumbled. “Believe in whatever gets you through the day.” Now Grundel looked dismissively off into the distance at a fight between two dogs.

There was a pause as I searched Erika’s face for signs of the dread I was feeling. She looked excited rather than terrified, though, like this was some theme park ride and things were well under my control.

As for myself, I’d switched into a sort of macabre resignation and was only dreading the moment in which I’d be killed. I hoped I’d be shot in the head without warning, or at least something that didn’t require pain or cringing.

“Come on. My place is just a block over.” Grundel pointed toward an abandoned convenience store. Looked like it just needed a hard kick and it’d collapse. “You two can sleep there.”

I was eager to get away from the Strangers and be with Erika. My entire world felt out of place, and Erika was the closest thing to comfort that I could cling to.

*

In the background, an old radio played white noise at high volume. Words floated around in the static mess, but nothing intelligible surfaced. Grundel leaned forward and listened to the radio with great focus, though, nodding his head at the sounds of the static as though it spoke to him in a language only he understood.

I’d hoped for something romantic—I could have used romantic. It was Grundel’s radio, though, and it was his home, so I didn’t dare ask him to turn it off or change the channel.

“I knew there was something strange about you,” Erika said. Her breath tickled my shoulder as she looked into the side of my neck. “I just knew I had picked someone special.”

As often seemed the case with Erika, I didn't know how to respond to what she’d said. I pretended, though, because she’d been at this act for a while, and I was getting comfortable with playing along.

“Everything will be fine,” I told her. “There is a larger plan at work here. I know exactly what is going to happen.”

“Am I safe in you?” Erika asked.

“You’re safe in me. I will protect you.”

God lies. There was no plan, and I had no idea what I was going to do. She believed in me, so I echoed that. Isn’t that God’s line anyway? "Just stick with me long enough, and I promise that everything will start to make sense in the end."

Today I’m scared I had let Erika Bronton down.


7. Gravity

I woke up to the smell of meat cooking over an open fire. It smelled savory until I peeked out my window and realized it was feral dog being roasted over a metal industrial bin.

I rose to my feet and approached the main room of the hut, but heard voices and froze. Whisper and Erika were speaking.

“So, tell me about Escher,” Erika asked.

“He’s the leader,” Whisper said. “That’s all you really need to know. He founded everything you see, and he’s in charge of the Strangers.”

Her voice sounded the least bit excited for the first time since I’d met her. I idly wondered what her role here was. Was she Escher’s girlfriend? I imagined sex with her would be like going at it with a bag of ice—all sharp edges and cold, forbidding places.

“Where did Escher come from, then?” Erika asked.

I wished Erika wouldn’t be so curious about him. I was, too, but it made me feel inferior. It made me think maybe God felt this way about airplanes and the Internet.

“I heard he used to be rich,” Grundel said, “and gave up his life of luxury for this. But Whisper has known him longer than just about anyone.”

Whisper only nodded her head. It was clear she wasn’t going to divulge the story.

“Well, if she won’t talk,” Grundel continued, “I only know—”

“Shut up, Grundel,” Whisper said calmly, almost kindly. He immediately quieted himself.

“He organized this…this society?” I asked from the doorway between the two rooms.

“Some of us used to have jobs like you, and all of us are rather disenchanted with the system. All of our homes and property fell to the Orange Zone and eventually went Red. Do you know how many people were left out in the cold, in the anarchy? Let me tell you a secret about anarchy,” Grundel said. “It’s only anarchy for about five minutes. Then, the biggest guy realizes he’s King—or at least until two guys band together and think they are. Escher? Well, he’s about 1,000 guys. Escher with a few thousand guys? That’s not just tribal warfare anymore—that's a fuckin' army,” Grundel said. Then he looked at Whisper and stopped talking.

“Escher is a force of his own nature,” a high-pitched, nasally voice said from a corner of Grundel’s makeshift home. I hadn’t noticed him before, of course.

“Sneak,” Grundel uttered sarcastically. “I hate you, Sam.”

I saw Erika’s green eyes refocus fuzzily as she realized that a fifth person had been in the room for some time.

“Nice to see you again, Clark,” Sam said, taking a step forward and shaking my hand. As soon as I touched him, his presence solidified in my mind.

“I’ve seen you before,” I said vacantly. “In Tasumec Tower.”

“Yeah, and I told you this was going to happen…and it did. You shouldn’t try to keep things from Escher.”

I nodded.

“Why don’t you take a walk with me, Clark?”

Erika began to protest, but Whisper laid a hand quietly on hers, letting her know she had no choice in the matter.

The morning light played strange tricks on the Orange Zone. Where it had seemed alive the night before with campfires and small gatherings on every corner, it was now completely empty and seemed deserted. It was easy to imagine how the police had a hard time tracking the Secret Society of Strangers; half the suburbs in America looked like this.

“How do you do it?” I asked, looking to my left and right, then to my left again, and finally finding Sam.

“Disappear?” he asked, smiling.

“Yeah. Pretty amazing.”

“I bet you’d be pretty good at it yourself…well, I mean if you had the proper tools.”

“Why do you say that? And what do you mean by 'tools'?”

Sam pulled a rusty, ruined watch from a chain on his belt. The brass had long ago faded to green and brown, and the glass was smashed across the face. “This helps,” he said, “but there's more to it than that, of course.”

“How does that help?”

“If Escher ever wants you to know, he’ll explain it,” he said.

“So how do you know I’d be good at it?” I asked as we stepped past Strangers attending to their morning duties.

“Just your look. And hell, you noticed me, and most people never do.”

“I’m very conscious of people watching me,” I said.

“I’ll have to be extra careful around you then,” Sam grinned.

“So how did you meet Escher?” I asked as we walked slowly down the street. “Are you some sort of spy?”

“Better.” He smiled. “I’m shy.”

“What?”

“It’s as much about not noticing other people as it is about not being noticed yourself.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Probably not. Have you ever felt someone looking at you?”

“All the time,” I said.

“We naturally sense each other out. It's sort of a mental check we subconsciously make before we have contact with someone. It’s hard-wired into us, and it shapes how we act around everyone we see. It’s why we feel comfortable walking up to some people but feel the opposite way with someone else.”

“I don’t really feel comfortable walking up to anyone,” I said.

“Anyway, I skip that. I never send out that feeler, never initiate contact. Thanks to my tools, I am able to just not send out those unconscious signals that other people respond to—sort of like how dreading being singled out always gets you singled out.”

“That sounds too easy to work,” I said.