More Than This by Patrick Ness Read Free Book Online

it’s making him sick.
    Waiting out the stomach cramps is bad enough, but he feels increasingly uneasy out here in the back, with the pile of bandages still coiled on the deck, the unreasonably tall grass, the barbed wire fencing up on the embankment.
    The prison beyond.
    As soon as he’s able, he gets back inside and manages a halfway-decent wash with some solidified dishwashing liquid and cold water from the tap. There’s nothing to dry himself with, so he just waits, wondering what to do
now.
    Here he is. In a dusty old house with no food left in it. With clothes that are a joke. Drinking water that’s probably poisoning him.
    He doesn’t want to be outside, but he can’t stay stuck in here either.
    What’s he supposed to do?
    If only there was someone here to help him. Someone whose opinion he could ask. Someone he could share this weird burden with.
    But there isn’t. There’s only him.
    And he can see the empty kitchen cupboards.
    He can’t stay here, not without food, not in these inadequate clothes.
    He looks up at the ceiling, thinking for a moment that he could explore the rooms above.
    But no. Not that. Not yet.
    He stands there, silently, for a long, long while, as the rising sun farther fills the kitchen.
    “Okay,” he finally says to himself. “Let’s go see what hell looks like.”

As he pulls open the front door, he notices that the switch that keeps it from locking is flipped. He’s been in the house all night with an unlocked door. Even though there’s no sign of anyone else here, this worries him. He can’t let it lock when he leaves, though, or he’ll never be able to get back inside. He steps out into the low sunshine, pulling it closed behind him, hoping it at least
looks
locked.
    The street is the same as yesterday. Or whenever that was, probably yesterday. He waits and watches. Absolutely nothing changes, so he walks down the steps, down the path where he – Where he what? Woke up? Was reborn? Died? He hurries past the spot and reaches the small gate to the sidewalk. He stops there.
    It’s still quiet. Still empty. Still a place stopped in time.
    He tries to remember more of the neighborhood. To his right is the train station, where there was nothing much more than the station building itself. But to his left is the way to the High Street, where there used to be a supermarket. There had been clothes shops there, too, he thinks. Nothing fancy, but better than what he’s wearing.
    Left it is, then.
    Left.
    He doesn’t move. Neither does the world.
    It’s either go left or stay inside and starve,
he thinks.
    For a moment, the second choice seems the more tempting.
    “Screw it,” he says. “You’re already dead. What’s the worst that can happen?”
    He goes left.
    He hunches his shoulders as he walks, shoving his hands into the pockets of the jacket, even though they’re uncomfortably high. Whose jacket
was
this? He doesn’t think he saw his dad ever wear one like this, but then again, who remembers clothes when you’re that young?
    He looks around furtively as he walks, turning often to make sure nothing’s following him. He reaches the street leading up into town. Aside from the huge sinkhole across the middle of it – ablaze with a weed forest of its own – it’s the same as everywhere else. Cars on deflated tires, covered in dust, houses with paint peeling off, and no signs of life anywhere.
    He stops at the edge of the sinkhole. It looks like a water pipe ruptured somewhere and the ground opened up like you saw sometimes on the news, usually with journalists in helicopters hovering over, saying nothing much for very long spaces of time.
    There are no cars down in it and none stopped along the edge either, so it must have happened long after the traffic ceased.
    Unless the traffic never started,
he thinks.
Unless this place didn’t exist until I
–
    “Stop it,” he says. “Just stop it.”
    He has a fleeting, almost casual thought, about how there is so much