This Is the Night by Jonah C. Sirott Read Free Book Online

meant: Order to Report for Induction. Right below was the prime minister’s seal and the sad black type that said it wanted to take him.
    “Everybody calls them greetings now,” Benny said.
    “Oh.” Joe paused. “I read somewhere that the first Tuesday of every month is the biggest induction day.”
    “Right,” Benny said. “First Tuesdays are the worst.” His fingers tapped the uneven table, and a pearl of coffee rolled down the side of his cup.
    “Did you even go to the Unicorn?” Joe asked.
    “Yeah.” Benny sniffed.
    “This morning? I was there for hours.”
    “Yeah?” Benny’s eyes dug holes in his coffee.
    “No one had seen you around.”
    “Laying low, you know?”
    “I thought maybe you got caught up in that thing over in Quadrant Three.”
    “What thing?”
    “You didn’t hear about that? Some car was stuffed with bombs, almost blew up a warehouse?”
    “Why a warehouse?”
    Joe shrugged.
    “Fuckin’ Foreigns.”
    “Well, get this: people are saying it wasn’t Foreigns. The car, the prints on the bombs. They were Homeland citizens.”
    Benny took a deep breath. “Whoa. Sympathizers. That’s new.”
    “No one really knows. Some say angry Homeland Indigenous or something.”
    “In Western City North? Those guys aren’t around here.”
    Joe nodded, but he needed more. He waited without hope to hear what Benny had to say. He didn’t need hope; Benny always had something.
    Leaning toward him, Benny drummed his fingers against the tabletop. “Look, Joe, I heard about this book. It’s hard to track down, but it can help us. It tells you how to beat this thing. It’s for us, exactly for us, is my understanding. All that killing to stop the Foreigns from spreading Ideology Five crap?Not for us. Not anymore. I’ve got this. We’ve got this.”
    “A book?”
    “A special book. Twenty-two years of hidden information.”
    “That’s all you’ve got?”
    “Fuck you.”
    They both smiled, but Joe was devastated. A book? He wanted a plan. I’m not going to let these guys take us, he thought. The Registry can’t do this to us. Take those other guys, those strangers on the street. But not me and Benny. He took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes. “It’s got real info?”
    “Yeah. They say it does.”
    All that sleeping in a closet had made Joe stiff and stale, but he could see it had done something else to Benny. Wherever Benny had slept, it hadn’t killed his fire, and just like always, Joe could sense that he still believed in an out, even when all evidence pointed to the fact that his fierce desire to believe was just that. What’s the name of the book? Joe could have said. How come no one else has figured it out? How come we’re the only ones who can get it? And finally: You think the words in some book are special enough to get us out of this?
    “Don’t look so mad, Joe. We’ve got a plan. We’re not going to let these guys get us.”
    But he was mad. What the two of them had was special. And once the Registry pried it apart, Joe could not see how they would get it back again. Even the Young Savior had said it: What you truly love, you do not let go.
    Above, the lights flickered off, the voltage around them slipping down to nothing. Another rolling blackout.
    Benny got up to go to the bathroom. Joe forced himself not to watch that familiar dragging stride, drew his eyes away from the brush of Benny’s thighs. A man in a fringed vest stood up and followed Benny into the bathroom. Onward yet.
    With Benny in the bathroom, Joe’s mind began its automatic reversion to a more joyful time. The two of them had grown up in the same complex, just a few blocks away from each other. Both their fathers worked in the prison, but Joe’s father wasn’t a guard and neither was Benny’s. At the time, the two boys were sure this made them special. In the mornings before school they would steal the newspapers off their neighbors’ porches and read the comics out loud on the walk over. On