Where by Kit Reed Read Free Book Online

Destroyer went out like a light and now. Oh. My. God.

 
    6
    Merrill
    What is this, news or docudrama or something we don’t know about? I’m not the only one strung taut, jittery and uncertain here. Exhausted by standing in one place, we fix on the screen, wondering, Is it real? Next to me, someone hisses, “Is this a movie?” while above us, the show goes on.
    Here’s Billy Maxwell in full uniform filling the screen, grinning like he expected to come back from Syria alive, although that photo is all Kara has left of him, and somewhere in the plaza, Kara Maxwell wails in pain— my best friend, and I can’t get to her. Stacked like cordwood, stupefied by the heat, we hear experts expound on the great mystery. As though they’ve been studying our disappearance for weeks.
    Wait. We just got here! Parched, dizzy and uncertain, I go a little crazy, trying to make it all make sense. Then Ned finds me in the forest of bodies. He socks my arm and I hug him in spite of himself. “Neddy, thank God!”
    â€œYour phone!” He pounds until I let go. “I need your phone!”
    I snap back with, “It’s not like I sleep with my phone,” ordinary Merrill for once, in an ordinary fight.
    Tears pile up in his eyes. “I have to get back!”
    I grab his wrist. “Look at me, Edward LaMar Poulnot. Were you up all night with that stupid game?”
    Yesterday’s manga T-shirt on him: Dark Warrior. Busted! Tears pile up in his eyes. “I was right there, and now I’m not anywhere!”
    Right. Chinyatsu Yo. I’m furious. “Is that all you care about? That stupid game? Neddy, look around!” Oh, please don’t cry.
    â€œI was so close!”
    If you cry, I’ll cry . “It’s just a game, OK?”
    â€œShit no, it’s my life!”
    â€œNot now. It isn’t even real.” This is good for us both, getting mad at the same old thing. “This…” I grab his wrist and flick my nail at the long scab on his clenched fist.
    â€œDon’t!” He flinches. You’d think the wound was fresh.
    Gently, I lift it. “This is real.”
    He snatches his hand away; the scab’s so old that it hangs until he rips it off and bites down on it. Realization crosses his face in stages. The skin underneath is dead white. “Oh!”
    Father pushed him against the stove and gouged that cut in him way back— when? Before. This is happening now. “See?”
    â€œOh, shit.”
    Oh shit. It’s in the air, a hundred of us brought up short by the stone fact of it. Oh, shit! How could a thing like this happen to people like us? Nobody knows. When did it happen? Not sure. So this is when it hits me amidships. In this dead-white arena, time is elastic. Nothing is fixed.
    On the screen above us, the show goes on, but we’ve had enough. When our questions and complaints get loud enough to mess up the audio, some intelligence cuts back to the channel islands montage, with wallpaper music swelling to calm us down. Then the pink nerf ball of a microphone pops up in front of the governor. He’s speaking, but this is not his voice: “State troopers continue to scour Kraven island for survivors or…”
    Drumbeat. As if to scare us into submission, the amplifiers blare. “Signs of violence.”
    To keep our attention, the banner running along underneath the feed expands to fill the screen— block letters, so there’s no mistaking it: SIGNS OF VIOLENCE . It does the job.
    Then everything rolls in on us all at once. The sun is a white hole in the white sky. The breeze has died and there are no shadows left. Stay here and we’ll fry like marbles in a punch bowl, while above us, everything we’ve lost flashes by in a hasty reprise: our sweet waterfront, our abandoned houses, our empty rooms, our most intimate places laid open and magnified like specimens in a high school science