Where by Kit Reed Read Free Book Online Page B

but without electronics, with no way to send for help or plead our case, we’re stranded here, wherever here is. We can’t search. Worse. We can’t get a message out. Shaken, we turn on Father: Look what you did, we rage, terrified and livid . In the name of God , shut up, but as if nothing just happened he goes on shouting, “Explain!”
    At which point all the scared, infuriated people Father mistook for followers converge on him, throwing whatever they happened to be holding when unseen forces yanked our lives out from under us— shoes, books, useless smartphones. Friends and neighbors close in on him, lawyers, probation officers and perps Father had put away while he was still a judge, women who hit on him after Mother left, ordinary people we thought we knew run at him in a rage, ready to bring him down.
    Father is too enflamed to notice. Demagogue, on a tear. I know that fierce, contorted grin: my people are angry — his people!— the arrogant fuck. He spreads his palm on Delroy Root’s face and hoists himself even higher, shouting, “Tell them, people. Louder. Make them hear it. Crack the skies. Explain! ” Father rails on, shouting orders at the wind as the Dawson boys lunge and his voice cracks: “Order, order!”
    He doesn’t get it, but Delroy does. He sets Father down and backs away. The old man’s mouth is still moving in the seconds before whatever civility we’d maintained so far shatters. Islanders fall on him, shouting, pounding, and I watch with OK, forgive me, a rush of vindictive joy. Whatever they do, it serves you right.
    Then Ray smashes the empty bin against the flagpole, CRACK! The clang silences the mob and they fall back. Without speaking, he cuts through the crowd to help my father the yowling idiot who just made things worse. Ray picks him up by the armpits, sets him on his feet and steadies him with both hands. Knowing Father, I flinch, waiting for him to lash out. He shakes off his rescuer and stands straight, bunched to fight. Then he blinks. It’s Ray. An extraordinary thing happens.
    I see my father break in two.
    He reels, shaken. His ugly mouth blooms in a beginning wail.
    As it does, the giant speakers at four corners of the square come back to life, ending it.
    ANNOUNCEMENT, ANNOUNCEMENT, ANNOUNCEMENT
    We’re so eager for news that everyone in the plaza falls still. We are standing at attention, but Ray has Delroy, Marlon Weisbuch and the Dawson brothers form a protective cadre around Father, just in case.
    A hundred of us silenced. Docile for once, we fall back and wait to be told.
    The next voice we hear is CG: an unseen animatronic group leader calls the shots. Chapter. Verse, a list of Things to Do by the numbers: One. Two. Three. We listen gratefully and line up to locate our quarters, designated on a map incised in the blank side of the main building.
    First, we’re to find our houses and move in. In that instant, the air in the plaza cools. As though something in the system changed it— sedative being pumped in? Too soon to tell. It could be the rush of relief that comes when you have places to go and something to do. Subdued, obedient for once, we study the map incised in the blank side of the main building. Anything to get away from the others, out of this square! Funny, how relieved we are to have certainties: marching orders in this mysterious, suffocating place. Scared and, OK, glad, to get out of that enclosure, we turn to go.
    Ray stops us with a shout. “Wait!”
    Even on Kraven, where we’re relaxed and aggressively down-home, Ray gets what he wants. His people were in Kraventown long before the Civil War; the Powell plantation took up half the island before his great-greats got enlightened and sold off everything but Azalea House and the grounds leading down to Powell’s dock. He creates silence with a single word. “Friends!”
    Heads turn. They always do. That’s