Where by Kit Reed Read Free Book Online Page A

class. All our abandoned toothbrushes, empty shoes and rumpled beds taunt us, everything we’ve lost and everything we care about …
    That, I could have handled, but the agency behind our— what?— removal — wants more out of us. We are packed in tight, belly to butt, flank to flank, scared and flatulent and rank with morning breath, all Kraven island jammed in the plaza with no logic to it, local knowns and unknowns in uniform white scrubs, nobody any better or different from anybody else. We’re all here except the one soul I thought I knew by heart. I used to think I knew. I whirl, yelling to fix what’s broken, calling out again and again, and loud enough for my old life to hear and come back: “Up here Dave Ribault, I’m here!”
    Then Ray Powell plants both hands on my shoulders to bring me down. “Merrill, shut up,” he says, not unkindly. With the white hair and that big square jaw, he looks like a Roman centurion marching out. Immaculate Ray. When he speaks, you listen, but the day has changed him; I’m not sure how. He turns me to face the screen. As I turn with him, I see what Ray can’t: Father, free for now, shoving people aside, hitting when he has to, anything to clear his way to open space.
    I nudge Ray. “Father alert.”
    But Ray’s fixed on the moving images above. “Shut up and watch. Help me figure this out.”
    If you think you want to know what happened to us, slouched in front of your TV or watching our story play out in your favorite bar or listening as your smartphone directs you through the streets of a strange city, I’ll tell you who wants to know.
    We do!
    Sucked into the moving history, I lift my arms and jump high enough for Davy to see me in the crowd. I thought I knew you. I don’t even know if they are watching on their screens back home, and it is bitter. I don’t know you at all. Dave Ribault, I  …
    I’ll never know what the I was because Ray snags my arm. “Don’t!” I point to the cameras posted at all four corners of the plaza. “Please!”
    â€œRight.” We’re on camera and too fried to wonder whether it’s surveillcam or we’re on TV. Ray boosts me higher, while Father bulldozes his way to the front. I should warn Ray, but I wave for the cameras with both hands, reaching. Praying, I think.
    Ray puts me down. “Enough! Nothing we do will make any difference.”
    Looking into his bleak face, I see. I open my mouth and grief comes out in a groan. Around me, a hundred others let go too, and all our pain and confusion spills out in the plaza all at once. The sound is huge. Whatever we had been— blindsided by the experience, stunned, scared or mystified— turns into rage.
    Electrified, Father climbs Delroy Root like preacher climbing into a pulpit and shakes his fist at the elements. His voice gets so big that it drowns us out. “Explain!”
    He’ll be blamed, but he’s only the first. Like Father, Ray raises his fist. He turns to the camera, and shouts in a voice so commanding there’s no mistaking who’s the real leader here: “Explain.”
    In seconds it’s a communal roar, a hundred Kraven islanders shaking their fists at The Power … if there are Powers, shouting: “Explain.”
    â€œAnswers.” Father goes on, at top volume. “We want answers!”
    Well, he gets one. The TV feed stops.
    And— like that — all telecommunications cease. In that second, we have made ourselves heard.
    At that moment, we understood. Every television, cell phone, PDA and netbook in the compound is dead. We are mute, essentially deaf, blind and ignorant, cut off from life as we knew it, the struggling, imperfect, noisy real world. I flash on Neddy with his eyes rolled back in a blank face, replaying that stupid game inside his head, and for that half-second, I think: Good.
    Good for Ned, sure,