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

were friends; as though he didn’t scare the shit out of me; as though being near him wasn’t my least favorite thing in the world.

“Frightened Boy,” Escher said, “you’re coming with me today. There’s something important I have to take care of, and I want you to be there.”

Fuck.

This was worse than him coming for Erika—I was the one who should have been hiding. Nevertheless, I tried to sound calm and collected. “What have you got in mind?”

“A few things. I think it’s time you and I really got to know each other.”

“Okay,” I mumbled. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Let’s walk. Come with me.”

Escher seemed to know the best ways to navigate the trees, and soon we were far out of sight of the space Erika and I shared. I realized I wouldn’t be able to find her again if I tried.

A lump of dread stuck in my throat, but I soldiered on. If I was going to save her, I was going to have to do it with Escher’s help. I wasn’t going to go head to head with him and come out of it alive, I knew. There was simply no competition.

Escher led me to a camouflaged jeep. The rear of the vehicle was filled with toolboxes, automatic rifles, hand grenades, and pistols.

“What—umm…” I started. “What are you going to do with those?”

“I’m going to assault a heavily guarded compound today. Frightened Boy, I have to admit, I’m growing to like you. Today is something of a test. Today, we will get to know each other. I’ve got some suspicions about you.” He turned to me and tapped his head.

“What kind of suspicions, sir?” My panic rose a notch.

Escher laughed. “I don’t think you’re the spy,” Escher said. He clapped me on the back. “I think you’re up here,” he said, tapping his forehead with his other hand. “I think you might be a piece of me. Today we are going to find out. All you have to do is stay alive.”

My throat muscles refused to swallow. I was going to drown in my own saliva, and I was almost certain this might be worse than being the spy.

Escher turned the keys in the jeep and it roared to life. He drove expertly through a winding clearing of trees amidst the all-encompassing flora of the forest. “I made this path, you know,” Escher said proudly, looking around.

“You cut through the clearing?” I asked. It would have been an impressive feat, and I didn’t see any hacked-away branches. In fact, the path we were on seemed naturally formed.

“You still don’t understand,” Escher said. “You will though. Or, I will understand, and when I do, you will—because you're me. Or, my anxiety, anyway. And once you're fixed, I will be stronger.”

I couldn’t wait. “So, what exactly are we doing today?”

“This,” he said. He pulled a folded sheet of paper from inside of his jacket pocket. “This is the drug pipeline into Banlo Bay. The train stops here, outside the city, to be unloaded. These are the plans that Sam drew up of the facility. ”

I looked at the map. It showed our point of entry—along the tracks of the train, toward the front of the rectangular station. The warehouse where the shipments were sorted and eventually loaded into trucks was located at the opposite end of the compound. It was clear we'd be approaching from the front, attacking along the train tracks; it seemed like the most obvious opening. Red dots indicated where guards would be posted. There were at least twenty, and Escher’s plans showed him storming the gates.

“This is the train station where, once a month, millions upon millions of capsules of antidepressants arrive for sorting and shipping. The pills are another way Little Brother controls the country. That first time I met you—inside your little office building—your eyes had that glazed look, that happiness you didn’t earn. You were on them?”

“Xanask,” I said. God, I missed it.

Escher pun the wheel suddenly, spinning us away from a thick wall of trees. Soon, we were out of Kingwood and into an open plain—a wasteland of short grass and dried dirt. About fifty yards to our right were train tracks. Behind those, over the horizon, were the shining tips of buildings that must have been twenty miles away—downtown Banlo Bay

A pack of wild dogs, startled by our noise, scampered away from the jeep and into the trees. Escher maneuvered the vehicle sharply off its course and into the thick grass; a wall of dried stalks had grown so high that they shielded the already camouflaged vehicle from view.

A train bombed through the tracks behind us, easily going triple the speed of the jeep. The trains had to be armored, and they had to be fast. Who the hell knew what was out there in that vast divide between the cities? There was no law in the Red.

I wondered what would happen if his plan worked, if he destroyed a month’s worth of drugs that most everyone in the city was dependent on. Was it really a good idea? It was terrorism. Some people needed those meds.

Then again, to Escher those people were a part of his mind. And if they were on drugs, maybe that meant he was on drugs too.

The wall of noise and steel passed, and Escher drove us over the elevated tracks. I flew fully out of my seat, and without a seatbelt, only the laws of trajectory kept me from flying out the jeep.

The Red King drove parallel to the train's right side, staying even with the last car of the train, hiding us behind it. As the train slowed, so did Escher, until we parked a few hundred yards away from the fence marking the train station's entrance.

He hopped out of the jeep in a single motion, leaping over the seats and door and landing on the ground, then began digging through the arsenal of weapons sitting loosely in the back of the truck. “Get out of the truck. Follow me, do what I do. If something should strike you as being important, then let me know. It could be pivotal."

Escher set about strapping most of the arsenal to his body. A black pistol went in each boot. The silver pistol he’d killed Rush with was tucked into his pants at the small of his back. He removed his red jacket to strap on a harness with two small submachine guns, and then he put the jacket back on. A large rifle with a scope that was half the length of the barrel went across his back, and then he wrapped a set of binoculars around his neck, hooked some sort of blowtorch onto his belt. He opened one of the two boxes, and it was full of grenades.

"You're ridiculous," I said, standing beside him with my hands in the pockets of my slacks.

"What? Am I overdoing it?" He pulled the rifle from his back, stared at it in two hands. "Okay, maybe this." He opened the coat and unhooked the two submachine guns. "And these." They were dumped back into the bed of the truck. "I'll stick with this." He patted the silver pistol where it sat holstered at the small of his back. "It doesn't really matter, Frightened Boy. When I kill someone, I'm only forgetting them. The bullet is just a symbol. It's the way this dream works."

“Where do you get all of this shit?” I asked, incredulous.

“I imagined it," Escher said.

He counted up and down the cars of the train and then clipped eight grenades to his belt. He tossed one to me, which I promptly dropped. He didn’t seem to notice, so I put the heavy metal orb in my pocket.

“You know that grenade I gave you?” Escher as he strapped a long, straight-blade knife onto his belt.

“Yes,” I stammered. The grenade.

“If they capture you, if they have you surrounded, wait until you’ve given up, but don’t let them search you. The second they close in and start to search you, you pull that pin while it’s still in your pocket. Do you understand me?”

“Can’t I get a gun instead?”

“Do you know how to use one?” Escher asked.

“Pull the trigger?” I asked.

“Can you reload it? Clear a jam?”

“No,” I admitted. I’d never fired a gun.

“Then no, you don’t get a gun.”

Escher looked at my face and chuckled. “Don’t worry, Frightened Boy. They’ll kill you regardless if they capture you. At least this way you will have contributed."

Escher hefted the rocket launcher over his shoulder and began walking further to the right in an arc, away from the docking station as well as the train. I struggled to keep up with his easy lope, weighed down as he was with the green metal tube hefted over his shoulder.

After five minutes of this steady pace, Escher suddenly dropped down to his stomach and began to look through his binoculars. We reached an angle where the furthest edge of the farthest side—the back of the complex, relative to where we had entered—of the unloading dock was visible.

“Here we go,” Escher said to himself. “Here we go.”

He picked up the rocket launcher lifted it onto his shoulder. Without taking a split second to aim, he fired.

The sound was deafening; a blast of hot smoke fired from the back of the hollow launcher just as Escher dropped it to the ground. He was on his feet running back toward the train—and the train station—before the rocket finished its flight.

All I had to do was keep up.

The rocket connected destroyed the far corner of the complex—the exact opposite side from which Escher was now approaching.

I raced after Escher. Barely kept him in my sights. First we heard shouts and screams. Seconds later, they were drowned out by sirens.

Escher intersected the stationary train about 100 yards before he reached the unloading station. He hadn’t been spotted yet.

So far behind that I might lose him. Might end up arrested. Would I pull the pin, blow myself up? No, never. Better to just keep up. But, no matter how hard I pumped my legs—and I’ve done some serious running in my time—I couldn't reach him.

A wall of heat and force overtook me from behind. Explosions began erupting in the train, each a dozen seconds behind a charging Escher and only a few yards behind me. He tossed grenades into cars of the train. There were eight explosions, one for each grenade he’d brought, each sending hot wind chasing up my calves and bare arms.

By the time he reached the front edge of the compound, fire and smoke consumed the blue sky. There could be no doubt about where the attack was coming from now.

Rather than running into the train depot, Escher ran around the right side of the building toward the original detonation he made with the rocket.

The silver pistol was gripped in two hands. Escher prepared to step around the corner, ready to fire. I rushed and accidentally turned the corner before him.