Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (graded readers TXT) 📕

The previous night's humidity had thickened to a gray cloudy soup, swift thunderheads coming in from all sides. The foot traffic was reduced to sparse, fast-moving umbrellas, people rushing for shelter before the deluge. Ozone crackled in the air and thunder roiled seemingly up from the ground, deep and sickening.

They started with a circuit of the house, looking for footprints, body parts. He found a shred of torn gray thrift-store shirt, caught on a rose bramble near the front of his walk. It smelled of the homey warmth of Edward's innards, and had a few of Frederick's short, curly hairs stuck to it. Alan showed it to Edward, then folded it into the change pocket of his wallet.

They walked the length of the sidewalk, crossed Wales, and began to slowly cross the little park. Edward circumnavigated the little cement wading pool, tracing the political runes left behind by the Market's cheerful anarchist taggers, painfully bent almost double at his enormous waist.

"What are we looking for, Alan?"

"Footprints. Finger bones. Clues."

Edward puffed back to the bench and sat down, tears streaming down his face. "I'm so hungry," he said.

Alan, crawling around the torn sod left when someone had dragged one of the picnic tables, contained his frustration. "If we can find Daniel, we can get Frederick and George back, okay?"

"All right," Edward snuffled.

The next time Alan looked up, Edward had taken off his scuffed shoes and grimy-gray socks, rolled up the cuffs of his tent-sized pants, and was wading through the little pool, piggy eyes cast downward.

"Good idea," Alan called, and turned to the sandbox.

A moment later, there was a booming yelp, almost lost in the roll of thunder, and when Alan turned about, Edward was gone.

Alan kicked off his Birks and splashed up to the hems of his shorts in the wading pool. In the pool's center, the round fountainhead was a twisted wreck, the concrete crumbled and the dry steel and brass fixtures contorted and ruptured. They had long streaks of abraded skin, torn shirt, and blood on them, leading down into the guts of the fountain.

Cautiously, Alan leaned over, looking well down the dark tunnel that had been scraped out of the concrete centerpiece. The thin gray light showed him the rough walls, chipped out with some kind of sharp tool. "Edward?" he called. His voice did not echo or bounce back to him.

Tentatively, he reached down the tunnel, bending at the waist over the rough lip of the former fountain. Deep he reached and reached and reached, and as his fingertips hit loose dirt, he leaned farther in and groped blindly, digging his hands into the plug of soil that had been shoveled into the tunnel's bend a few feet below the surface. He straightened up and climbed in, sinking to the waist, and tried to kick the dirt out of the way, but it wouldn't give -- the tunnel had caved in behind the plug of earth.

He clambered out, feeling the first fat drops of rain on his bare forearms and the crown of his head. A shovel. There was one in the little coach house in the back of his place, behind the collapsed boxes and the bicycle pump. As he ran across the street, he saw Krishna, sitting on his porch, watching him with a hint of a smile.

"Lost another one, huh?" he said. He looked as if he'd been awake all night, now hovering on the brink of sleepiness and wiredness. A roll of thunder crashed and a sheet of rain hurtled out of the sky.

Alan never thought of himself as a violent person. Even when he'd had to throw the occasional troublemaker out of his shops, he'd done so with an almost cordial force. Now, though, he trembled and yearned to take Krishna by the throat and ram his head, face first, into the column that held up his front porch, again and again, until his fingers were slick with the blood from Krishna's shattered nose.

Alan hurried past him, his shoulders and fists clenched. Krishna chuckled nastily and Alan thought he knew who got the job of sawing off Mimi's wings when they grew too long, and thought, too, that Krishna must relish the task.

"Where you going?" Krishna called.

Alan fumbled with his keyring, desperate to get in and get the keys to the coach house and to fetch the shovel before the new tunnels under the park collapsed.

"You're too late, you know," Krishna continued. "You might as well give up. Too late, too late!"

Alan whirled and shrieked, a wordless, contorted war cry, a sound from his bestial guts. As his eyes swam back into focus, he saw Mimi standing beside Krishna, barefoot in a faded housecoat. Her eyes were very wide, and as she turned away from him, he saw that her stubby wings were splayed as wide as they'd go, forming a tent in her robe that pulled it up above her knees. Alan bit down and clamped his lips together and found his keys. He tracked mud over the polished floors and the ancient, threadbare Persian rugs as he ran to the kitchen, snatching the coach-house keys from their hook over the sink.

He ran back across the street to the little park, clutching his shovel. He jammed his head into the centerpiece and tried to see which way the tunnel had curved off when it turned, but it was too dark, the dirt too loose. He pulled himself out and took the shovel in his hands like a spear and stabbed it into the concrete bed of the wading pool, listening for a hollowness in the returning sound like a man thudding for a stud under drywall.

The white noise of the rain was too high, the rolling thunder too steady. His chest heaved and his tears mingled with the rain streaking down his face as he stabbed, again and again, at the pool's bottom. His mind was scrambled and saturated, his vision clouded with the humid mist rising off his exertion-heated chest and the raindrops caught in his eyelashes.

He splashed out of the wading pool and took the shovel to the sod of the park's lawn, picking an arbitrary spot and digging inefficiently and hysterically, the bent shovel tip twisting with each stroke.

Suddenly strong hands were on his shoulders, another set prizing the shovel from his hands. He looked up and blinked his eyes clear, looking into the face of two young Asian police officers. They were bulky from the Kevlar vests they wore under their rain slickers, with kind and exasperated expressions on their faces.

"Sir," the one holding the shovel said, "what are you doing?"

Alan breathed himself into a semblance of composure. "I..." he started, then trailed off. Krishna was watching from his porch, grinning ferociously, holding a cordless phone.

The creature that had howled at Krishna before scrambled for purchase in Alan's chest. Alan averted his eyes from Krishna's shit-eating, 911-calling grin. He focused on the cap of the officer in front of him, shrouded in a clear plastic shower cap to keep its crown dry. "I'm sorry," he said. "It was a -- a dog. A stray, or maybe a runaway. A little Scottie dog, it jumped down the center of the fountain there and disappeared. I looked down and thought it had found a tunnel that caved in on it."

The officer peered at him from under the brim of his hat, dubiousness writ plain on his young, good-looking face. "A tunnel?"

Alan wiped the rain from his eyes, tried to regain his composure, tried to find his charm. It wasn't to be found. Instead, every time he reached for something witty and calming, he saw the streaks of blood and torn clothing, dark on the loose soil of the fountain's center, and no sooner had he dispelled those images than they were replaced with Krishna, sneering, saying, "Lost another one, huh?" He trembled and swallowed a sob.

"I think I need to sit down," he said, as calmly as he could, and he sank slowly to his knees. The hands on his biceps let him descend.

"Sir, do you live nearby?" one of the cops asked, close in to his ear. He nodded into his hands, which he'd brought up to cover his face.

"Across the street," he said. They helped him to his feet and supported him as he tottered, weak and heaving, to his porch. Krishna was gone once they got there.

The cops helped him shuck his drenched shoes and socks and put him down on the overstuffed horsehide sofa. Alan recovered himself with an effort of will and gave them his ID.

"I'm sorry, you must think I'm an absolute lunatic," he said, shivering in his wet clothes.

"Sir," the cop who'd taken the shovel from him said, "we see absolute lunatics every day. I think you're just a little upset. We all go a little nuts from time to time."

"Yeah," Alan said. "Yeah. A little nuts. I had a long night last night. Family problems."

The cops shifted their weight, showering the floor with raindrops that beaded on the finish.

"Are you going to be all right on your own? We can call someone if you'd like."

"No," Alan said, pasting on a weak smile. "No, that's all right. I'll be fine. I'm going to change into some dry clothes and clean up and, oh, I don't know, get some sleep. I think I could use some sleep."

"That sounds like an excellent idea," the cop who'd taken the shovel said. He looked around at the bookcases. "You've read all of these?" he asked.

"Naw," Alan said, falling into the rote response from his proprietorship of the bookstore. "What's the point of a bunch of books you've already read?" The joke reminded him of better times and he smiled a genuine smile.

Though the stinging hot shower revived him somewhat, he kept quickening into panic at the thought of David creeping into his house in the night, stumping in on desiccated black child-legs, snaggled rictus under mummified lips.

He spooked at imagined noises and thudding rain and the dry creaking of the old house as he toweled off and dressed.

There was no phone in the mountain, no way to speak to his remaining brothers, the golems, his parents. He balled his fists and stood in the center of his bedroom, shaking with impotent worry.

David. None of them had liked David very much. Billy, the fortune-teller, had been born with a quiet wisdom, an eerie solemnity that had made him easy for the young Alan to care for. Carlos, the island, had crawled out of their mother's womb and pulled himself to the cave mouth and up the face of their father, lying there for ten years, accreting until he was ready to push off on his own.

But Daniel, Daniel had been a hateful child from the day he was born. He was colicky, and his screams echoed through their father's caverns. He screamed from the moment he emerged and Alan tipped him over and toweled him gently dry and he didn't stop for an entire year. Alan stopped being able to tell day from night, lost track of the weeks and months. He'd developed a taste for food, real people food, that he'd buy in town at the Loblaws Superstore, but he couldn't leave Davey alone in the cave, and he certainly couldn't carry the howling, shitting, puking, pissing, filthy baby into town with him.

So they ate what the golems brought them: sweet grasses, soft berries, frozen winter fruit dug from the base of the orchards in town, blind winter fish from the streams. They drank snowmelt and ate pine cones