Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (best pdf ebook reader txt) 📕
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- Author: Cory Doctorow
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“When are we going to do it?” Krishna spat out his cigarette and shook another out of his pack and stuck it in his mouth.
“Don’t light it,” Drew said. “We’re going to do it when I say it’s time to do it. You have to watch first—watching is the most important part. It’s how you find out what needs doing and to whom. It’s how you find out where you can do the most damage.”
“I know what needs doing,” Krishna said. “We can just go in there and trash the place and fuck him up. That’d suit me just fine. Send the right message, too.”
Danny hopped down off the trash can abruptly and Krishna froze in his paces at the dry rasp of hard blackened skin on the pavement. Davey walked toward him in a bowlegged, splay-hipped gait that was more a scuttle than a walk, the motion of some inhuman creature not accustomed to two legs.
“Have you ever watched your kind, ever? Do you understand them, even a little? Just because you managed to get a little power over one of my people, you think you understand it all. You don’t. That one in there is bone-loyal to my brother. If you vandalized his little shop, he’d just go to my brother for protection and end up more loyal and more. Please stop thinking you know anything, it’ll make it much easier for us to get along.”
Krishna stiffened. “I know things,” he said.
“Your pathetic little birdie girl is nothing,” Davey said. He stumped over to Krishna, stood almost on his toes, looking up at him. Krishna took an involuntary step backward. “A little one-off, a changeling without clan or magic of any kind.”
Krishna stuck his balled fists into the pockets of his space-age future-sarcastic jacket. “I know something about you,” he said. “About your kind.”
“Oh, yes?” Davey’s tone was low, dangerous.
“I know how to recognize you, even when you’re passing for normal. I know how to spot you in a crowd, in a second.” He smiled. “You’ve been watching my kind all your life, but I’ve been watching your kind for all of mine. I’ve seen you on the subway and running corner stores, teaching in classrooms and driving to work.”
Davey smiled then, showing blackened stumps. “Yes, you can, you certainly can.” He reached out one small, delicate hand and stroked the inside of Krishna’s wrist. “You’re very clever that way, you are.” Krishna closed his eyes and breathed heavily through his nose, as though in pain or ecstasy. “That’s a good skill to have.”
They stood there for a moment while Davey slowly trailed his fingertips over Krishna’s wrist. Then, abruptly, he grabbed Krishna’s thumb and wrenched it far back. Krishna dropped abruptly to his knees, squeaking in pain.
“You can spot my kind, but you know nothing about us. You are nothing, do you understand me?” Krishna nodded slowly. Alan felt a sympathetic ache in his thumb and a sympathetic grin on his face at the sight of Krishna knelt down and made to acquiesce. “You understand me?” Krishna nodded again.
Davey released him and he climbed slowly to his feet. Davey took his wrist again, gently. “Let’s get you something to eat,” he said.
Before Alan knew it, they were nearly upon him, walking back down the alley straight toward his hiding place. Blood roared in his ears and he pressed his back up against the doorway. They were only a step or two away, and after a couple of indiscreetly loud panting gasps, he clamped his lips shut and held his breath.
There was no way they could miss him. He pressed his back harder against the door, and it abruptly swung open and a cold hand wrapped itself around his bicep and pulled his through into a darkened, oil- and must-smelling garage.
He tripped over his own heel and started to go over, but a pair of hands caught him and settled him gently to the floor.
“Quiet,” came a hoarse whisper in a voice he could not place.
And then he knew who his rescuer was. He stood up silently and gave Billy a long hug. He was as skinny as death.
Trey’s phone number was still current in the video store’s database, so she called him.
“Hey, Trey,” she said. “It’s Lara.”
“Lara, heeeeeeyyyy,” he said, in a tone that left no doubt that he was picturing her panties. “Sorry, your bro ain’t here.”
“Want to take me out to dinner tonight?”
The silence on the other end of the line made her want to laugh, but she bit her lip and rolled her eyes and amused the girl browsing the chop-socky epics and visibly eavesdropping.
“Trey?”
“Lara, uh, yes, I’d love to, sure. Is this like a group thing or… ”
“No, Trey, I thought I’d keep this between the two of us. I’ll be at the store until six—meet me here?”
“Yeah, okay. Okay! Sure. I’ll see you tonight.”
Brad was so thin he looked like a corpse. He was still tall, though, and his hair and beard were grown out into long, bad-smelling straggles of knot and grime. In the half-light of the garage, he had the instantly identifiable silhouette of a street person.
He gathered Adam up in a hug that reeked of piss and booze, a hug like a bundle of twigs in his arms.
“I love you,” he whispered.
Andrew backed away and held him at arm’s length. His skin had gone to deep creases lined with soot, his eyes filmed with something that looked like pond scum.
“Brady. What are you doing here?”
He held a finger up to his lips, then opened the door again onto the now-empty alley. Alan peered the way that Davey and Krishna had gone, just in time to see them turn a distant corner.
“Give it another minute,” Blake said, drawing the door nearly closed again. A moment later, they heard another door open and then Kurt’s chain-draped boots jangled past, headed the other way. They listened to them recede, and then Brian swung the door wide again.
“It’s okay now,” he said.
They stepped out into the sunlight and Bert started to walk slowly away. Alan caught up with him and Bert took his arm with long bony fingers, leaning on him. He had a slight limp.
“Where have you been?” Alan asked when they had gone halfway home through deft, confident turnings led by Blake.
“Watching you,” he said. “Of course. When I came to the city, I worked out at the racetrack for a week and made enough money to live off of for a couple months, and avoided the tough guys who watched me winning and waited to catch me alone at the streetcar stop. I made enough and then I went to watch you.
“I knew where you were, of course. Always knew where you were. I could see you whenever I closed my eyes. I knew when you opened your shops and I went by at night and in the busy parts of the day so that I could get a better sense of them. I kept an eye on you, Alan, watched over you. I had to get close enough to smell you and hear you and see you, though, it wasn’t enough to see you in my mind.
“Because I had to know the why. I could see the what, but I had to know the why—why were you opening your stores? Why were you saying the things you said? I had to get close enough because from the outside, it’s impossible to tell if you’re winking because you’ve got a secret, or if you’ve got dust in your eye, or if you’re making fun of someone who’s winking, or if you’re trying out a wink to see how it might feel later.
“It’s been four years I’ve been watching you when I could, going back to the track for more when I ran out of money, and you know what? I know what you’re doing.”
Alan nodded. “Yeah,” he said.
“You’re watching. You’re doing what I’m doing. You’re watching them to figure out what they’re doing.”
Alvin nodded. “Yeah,” he said.
“You don’t know any more about the world than I do.”
Albert nodded. “Yeah,” he said.
Billy shook his head and leaned more heavily on Alan’s arm. “I want a drink,” he said.
“I’ve got some vodka in the freezer,” Alan said.
“I’ll take some of the Irish whiskey on the sideboard in the living room.”
Adam looked at him sharply and he shrugged and smiled an apologetic smile. “I’ve been watching,” he said.
They crossed the park together and Buddy stopped to look hard at the fountain. “That’s where he took Edward, right? I saw that.”
“Yeah,” Alvin said. “Do you know where he is now?”
“Yeah,” Billy said. “Gone.”
“Yeah,” Adam said. “Yeah.”
They started walking now, Billy’s limp more pronounced.
“What’s with your leg?”
“My foot. I lost a couple toes last year to frostbite and never got them looked at properly.” He reeked of piss and booze.
“They didn’t… grow back?”
Bradley shook his head. “They didn’t,” he said. “Not mine. Hello, Krishna,” he said.
Alan looked to his neighbors’ porch. Krishna stood there, stock still, against the wall.
“Friend of yours, huh?” Krishna said. “Boyfriend?”
“He offered me a bottle of wine if I let him take me home,” Bradley said. “Best offer I had all week. Wanna make it a threesome? An ’ow you say ‘mange ma twat?’”
Krishna contorted his face into an elaborate sneer. “Puke,” he said.
“Bye, Krishna,” Buddy said. Alan put his key into the lock and let them in.
Blaine made a hobbling beeline for the sideboard and picked up the Jim Beam Apollo 8 commemorative decanter that Adam kept full of Bushmills 1608 and poured himself a tall glass of it. He drank it back in two swallows, then rolled his tongue around in his mouth with his eyes closed while he breathed out the fumes.
“I have been thinking about that bottle ever since you bought it,” he said. “This stuff is legendary. God, that’s good. I mean, that’s fucking magical.”
“It’s good,” Andrew said. “You can have more if you want.”
“Yeah,” Burke said, and poured out another drink. He carried it and the decanter to the sofa and settled into it. “Nice sofa,” he said. “Nice living room. Nice house. Not very normal, though.”
“No,” Andrew said. “I’m not fitting in very well.”
“I fit in great.” He drank back another glug of whiskey and poured out another twenty dollars’ worth. “Just great, it’s the truth. I’m totally invisible and indistinguishable. I’ve been sleeping at the Scott Mission for six months now and no one has given me a second glance. They can’t even steal my stuff, because when they try, when they come for my shoes or my food in the night, I’m always awake and watching them and just shaking my head.”
The whole living room stank of whiskey fumes with an ammoniac tinge. “What if I find you some clothes and a towel?”
“Would I clean myself up? Would I get rid of this protective coloration and become visible again?” He drank more, breathed out the fumes. “Sure, why not. Why not. Time to be visible. You’ve seen me, Krishna’s seen me. Davey’s gonna see me. Least I got to see them first.”
And so he let his older brother lead him by the hand upstairs to the bathroom with its damp-swollen paperbacks and framed kitsch-art potty-training cartoons. And so he let his brother put him under the stinging hot shower and shampoo his hair and scrub him vigorously with a back brush, sluicing off the ground-in grime of the streets—though the calous pads on his hands remained as dark with soot as the feet of an alleycat. And so he let his older brother wash the stumps of his toes where the skin was just a waxy pucker of scar, like belly buttons, which neither of them
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