Frightened Boy by Scott Kelly (easy books to read in english txt) 📕

Guts instructed. “Or something that looks like a bomb. We need something electronic.”

“Electronic? Like what? This is a convenience store.”

“Is there a phone in the back?”

I pushed my way through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, fear of the Strangers overcoming my usual anxieties about doing things that signs say not to do. A small beige service telephone hung from the wall.

The Voice meeped weakly from my pocket, and I ignored it. Guts was right. I yanked the convenience store phone from the wall and placed it in the backpack, making sure the bundle of cord and wires were visible.

Guts followed me with two 2-liter bottles of soda in his hands—one red and the other, green. The labels had been stripped back. He stuffed the bottles into the backpack then left the wires strung loosely over them, and left the backpack half open. It looked like I imagined a homemade bomb would, having only seen them on TV. I reasoned that since most people had ever seen one either, it would probably look pretty convincing.

“Now what?” I asked Guts.

Guts nodded. “The subway,” he said. “It moves, it’s crowded, and the Strangers won’t want to be trapped there with the police waiting for them at the next stop.”

“Right,” I said. “The subway, good idea. I can get out of the city, I guess, or hide somewhere. Shit.”

Not a hard decision to make when you don’t have any choice. Besides, I didn’t know if I could go back to a home without Erika.

Guts looked at the fake bomb on my back and then at my pale, bloodless face. . “C’mon…we’re about to get shot.”

The twin barrels of a shotgun pointed in my general direction, gripped in the white knuckles of a trembling shopkeeper. Rather than try to explain to him that I wasn’t dangerous, I rushed out of the store, ignoring his protests.

Shocked by how the city had come alive again. Cars zipped by, people stepped around me like I was a rock in a river, even with the little girl’s backpack on my shoulders. With Guts’s imposing frame next to me, I must have looked like a bona fide Stranger.

But even amidst this stream of organized chaos, I could sense two bodies walking directly toward me. I moved in the opposite direction.

In an attempt to look casual, I put the cell phone up to my ear.

“What are you doing? Where are you going?” the Voice asked. “That’s not the right way.”

“I’m sorry, man,” I said. “I really am. I have to go. I, uh…I just don’t have the tapes. Thanks for your help so far, but I can’t help you. I’m sorry, really.” I hung up.

Now, truly helpless. I dashed across the street blindly, fear leading me to take more risks. A bus blasted its horn in an angry attempt to reprimand me, freezing me in my tracks.

Guts took the lead and pulled me quickly down a street-side escalator, forcing his way through the mounds of blubber spilling from the sides of fatter pedestrians.

We reached the open station floor just in time to see the tail of a train disappearing down the tunnel. Shit. Minutes to the next one.

I pulled the children’s backpack from my back and placed it under the bench at my feet as I sat down. I seemed to be moving unnoticed in the crowds of Banlo Bay, who attempted at all costs to avoid contact with fellow human beings. Even if I were naked and waving a sword, I would probably have met no resistance.

With the pretend bomb out of sight, I scrunched myself up behind a column, hoping to remain undetected. Guts was too large to do even this and simply sat on the bench, hoping to look as normal as possible despite the sweat dripping from his brow.

“You there,” a voice behind us said in an authoritative way, “take your hands out of your pockets.”

I peeked out from behind the pillar. A policeman was standing behind Guts, one hand near the holster of his gun and the other on his radio.

“Officer, thank God,” Guts said. “We need your help.”

“We?” he asked. “Stay right there.”

“There are Strangers after us,” Guts said. “Look…there’s one right over there.”

He pointed up and behind the officer at the staircase, where I could indeed see a faceless trench coat descending the stairs.

The officer did not look behind himself however and seemed to be paying more attention to the familiar voice coming over the police intercom. “Large black male, six-five, dreadlocks, white tank top, wanted for assaulting a police officer last night.”

"Whoa!” Guts said. “I didn’t do anything like that. I love the police. You’ve got the wrong guy.”

The officer took a step backwards.

“Suspect should be bleeding…I repeat, bleeding,” the radio crackled again.

It suddenly dawned on me why the voice sounded familiar. It was The Voice.

“Voice!” I shouted from behind the pillar. “I’ll do what you want. Just let us go.”

Suddenly, the officer turned in the direction of my voice. I peeked out from behind the pillar and could see the nervous fear in his eyes. It was a fear I was familiar with myself—the fear of Strangers. It was this fear that led him to draw his gun and point it at the pillar.

As Guts took a step backwards, he nodded toward the tunnel where a train was quickly approaching.

“Step out into the open,” the officer commanded.

I did as I was told, and immediately the situation intensified.

“Backup! I need backup,” the policeman said into his radio. “We’ve got the SSS here.”

“Roger. They’re already on the way,” the Voice said over the radio.

“No backup!” I yelled, somehow hoping the Voice would hear me. “I’m sorry I hung up on you, Voice! Please just give me another chance.”

“Sir, calm down. I need you to lie down on the ground and interlace your fingers behind your head.”

“Man, this isn’t what it—”

Before I could finish, Guts took a step toward the officer, which made him turn suddenly and point his gun at the large man. The cop stopped giving directions and seemed more concerned with staying alive until backup arrived.

“Confirmed. I have the suspects here in…in custody. Requesting backup again.” Then he started shouting.

“Down on the ground, right now! Both of you! DOWN NOW!” Another officer arrived behind him, gun already drawn. Guts obeyed and lifted his hands into the air.

The train had stopped behind us. We were only a few feet from safety. People were pouring out of the train just as another policeman arrived and began guiding people away from our standoff.

“Go, Clark,” Guts said. “I’ll get arrested. You can come bail me out later. Deal? We’ll explain the whole thing.”

“Neither of you are going anywh—“

I lunged toward the bench and swung the backpack up from under it, holding it in my hands. “I have a bomb,” I whispered quietly, not believing my own ears.

No one seemed to hear me. I unzipped the backpack, revealing the red and green bottles and bundle of wires.

“Bomb!” Guts’s booming voice echoed up and down the underground chamber.

I could sense the door to the train closing behind me even as he yelled. Guts turned suddenly and shoved me with one hand as he grabbed the backpack with the other, sending me flying into the train car.

“I have a bomb!” Guts screamed again, holding the backpack into the air. The doors in front of me slid shut.

Pandemonium swept like a shockwave out from the suspicious-looking object, filling every onlooker with an urgent need to do the only thing we were ever taught to do to protect ourselves: run.

The train started moving just as I heard a series of loud popping noises. I crawled over to the glass doors and peered out them just in time to see Guts’s body fall backwards onto the tracks, bullets piercing his gargantuan frame.

*

By the time I looked up again and wiped the hot sweat from my face, my subway car was empty. I crawled up into a seat and curled into the fetal position.

I was pretty much dead, I knew. I would try to run because it was all I knew, but even during the worst of the Collapse things weren’t this bad. I was never a target, I was always one of the herd.

I was on death row, and the subway car was the last mile to the electric chair. This burned itself into my brain as the metal box raced through the tunnels of Banlo Bay. Without realizing it, I feel asleep to the mantra, just waiting to be executed.


11. Predestination

The wide circle of the train track sped around the city, sometimes briefly rising out of the tunnels to avoid the complex sewage system. In these moments, I could see an angry orange sun trying to shine from behind the greasy smudge of the downtown skies.

I was lost.

Then a soft voice licked my eardrum, crossing the precipice of my panic attack. A female voice sung out behind me, lips only millimeters from my ear. Felt her warm breath, the percussive, wet tap of her tongue on her teeth, and the slight crack of her lips parting.

“’Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.’

That’s Yeats. 'The Second Coming.' It’s one of His favorites.”

A warm, furry creature jumped into my lap and pressed itself against my face, coiling around my neck before stalking flirtatiously across me to gaze out the window. The Strangers.

I turned around expecting to bump noses with Whisper but instead found her to be at the back of the train, walking steadily toward me.

When I turned around and looked up toward the front of the bus, giant brown aviator glasses took up my view so completely I might have been wearing them myself.

Escher’s face and mine filled the same space, and I was four years old, being scolded by my father again.

“Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight,” he said. “Do you know what the Spiritus Mundi is, Frightened Boy?”

“No,” I whimpered.

“Yeats believed it was the spirit of the world—the common knowledge we all share, the symbols that are universally true to every human, no matter the breadth of his experience or knowledge.”

“It’s a fantastic concept,” Whisper said, “but to believe in it requires a belief in God.”

“This is true,” Escher said. “Or a belief that you are God. I think the Spiritus Mundi is one's own vision, because whose