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

Adam reached out and took the knife, moving quickly before he could think, and smashed the butt into Davey's jaw, which cracked audibly. Davey let go of Kurt's calf and Alan worked quickly to lash his feet together, using half the bundle of twine, heedless of how he cut into the thin, cracking skin. He used the knife to snip the string and then handed the roll to Kurt, who went to work on Danny's wrists.

Alan got the lights and rolled his brother over, looked into his mad eyes. Dale was trying to scream, but with his jaw hanging limp and his teeth scattered, it came out in a rasp. Alan stood and found that he was naked, his shoulder and bicep dripping blood down his side into a pool on the polished floor.

"We'll take him to the basement," he told Kurt, and dug through the laundry hamper at the foot of the bed for jeans. He found a couple of pairs of boxer shorts and tied one around his bicep and the other around his shoulder, using his teeth and chin as a second hand. It took two tries before he had them bound tight enough to still the throb.

The bedroom looked like someone had butchered an animal in it, and the floor was gritty with Darrel's leavings, teeth and nails and fingerbones. Picking his way carefully through the mess, he hauled the sheet off the bed, popping out the remaining staples, which pinged off the bookcases and danced on the polished wood of the floor. He folded it double and laid it on the floor next to Davey.

"Help me roll him onto it," he said, and then saw that Kurt was staring down at his shriveled, squirming, hateful brother in horror, wiping his hands over and over again on the thighs of his jeans.

He looked up and his eyes were glazed and wide. "I was passing by and I saw the shadows in the window. I thought you were being attacked --" He hugged himself.

"I was," Alan said. He dug another T-shirt out of his hamper. "Here, wrap this around your hands."

They rolled Davey into the sheet and then wrapped him in it. He was surprisingly heavy, dense. Hefting his end of the sheet one-handed, hefting that mysterious weight, he remembered picking up Ed-Fred-Geoff in the cave that first day, remembered the weight of the brother-in-the-brother-in-the-brother, and he had a sudden sickening sense that perhaps Davey was so heavy because he'd eaten them.

Once they had him bound snugly in the sheet, Danny stopped thrashing and became very still. They carried him carefully down the dark stairs, the walnut-shell grit echoing the feel of teeth and flakes of skin on the bare soles of Alan's feet.

They dumped him unceremoniously on the cool mosaic of tile on the floor. They stared at the unmoving bundle for a moment. "Wait here, I'm going to get a chair," Alan said.

"Jesus, don't leave me alone here," Kurt said. "That kid, the one who saw him -- take -- your brother? No one's seen him since." He looked down at Davey with wide, crazed eyes.

Alan's shoulder throbbed. "All right," he said. "You get a chair from the kitchen, the captain's chair in the corner with the newspaper recycling stacked on it."

While Kurt was upstairs, Alan unwrapped his brother. Danny's eyes were closed, his jaw hanging askew, his wrists bound behind him. Alan leaned carefully over him and took his jaw and rotated it gently until it popped back into place.

"Davey?" he said. The eyes were closed, but now there was an attentiveness, an alertness to him. Alan stepped back quickly, feeling foolish at his fear of this pathetic, disjointed bound thing on his floor. No two ways about it, though: Davey gave him the absolutely willies, making his testicles draw up and the hair on the back of his arms prickle.

"Set the chair down there," Alan said, pointing. He hoisted Davey up by his dry, papery armpits and sat him in the seat. He took some duct tape out of a utility drawer under the basement staircase and used it to gum Danny down in the chair.

"Davey," he said again. "I know you can hear me. Stop pretending."

"That's your brother?" Kurt said. "The one who --"

"That's him," Alan said. "I guess you believe me now, huh?"

Davey grinned suddenly, mirthless. "Still making friends and influencing people, brother?" he said. His voice was wet and hiccuping, like he was drowning in snot.

"We're not going to play any games here, Davey. You're going to tell me where Edward, Felix, and Griffin are, or I'm going to tear your fingers off and smash them into powder. When I run out of fingers, I'll switch to teeth."

Kurt looked at him in alarm. He moaned. "Jesus, Adam --"

Adam whirled on him, something snapping inside. "Don't, Kurt, just don't, okay? He tried to kill me tonight. He may already have killed my brothers. This is life or death, and there's no room for sentiment or humanity. Get a hammer out of the toolbox, on that shelf." Kurt hesitated. "Do it!" Alan said, pointing at the toolbox.

Kurt shrank back, looking as though he'd been slapped. He moved as if in a dream, opening the toolbox and pawing through it until he came up with a scarred hammer, one claw snapped off.

Davey shook his head. "You don't scare me, Albert. Not for an instant. I have a large supply of fingers and teeth -- all I need. And you -- you're like him. You're a sentimentalist. Scared of yourself. Scared of me. Scared of everything. That's why you ran away. That's why you got rid of me. Scared."

Alan dug in his pocket for the fingerbones and teeth he'd collected. He found the tip of a pinky with a curled-over nail as thick as an oyster's shell, crusted with dirt and blood. "Give me the hammer, Kurt," he said.

Davey's eyes followed him as he set the fingertip down on the tiles and raised the hammer. He brought it down just to one side of the finger, hard enough to break the tile. Kurt jumped a little, and Alan held the hammer up again.

"Tell me or this time I won't miss," he said, looking Davey in the eye.

Davey shrugged in his bonds.

Alan swung the hammer again. It hit the fingertip with a jarring impact that vibrated up his arm and resonated through his hurt shoulder. He raised the hammer again. He'd expected the finger to crush into powder, but instead it fissured into three jagged pieces, like a piece of chert fracturing under a hammer-stone.

Davey's eyes were squeezed down to slits now. "You're the scared one. You can't scare me," he said, his voice choked with phlegm.

Alan sat on the irregular tile and propped his chin in his palm. "Okay, Davey, you're right. I'm scared. You've kidnapped our brothers, maybe even killed them. You're terrorizing me. I can't think, I can't sleep. So tell me, Danny, why shouldn't I just kill you again, and get rid of all that fear?"

"I know where the brothers are," he said instantly. "I know where there are more people like us. All the answers, Albert, every answer you've ever looked for. I've got them. And I won't tell you any of them. But so long as I'm walking around and talking, you think that I might."

Alan took Marci back to his bedroom, the winter bedroom that was no more than a niche in the hot-spring cavern, a pile of rags and a sleeping bag for a bed. It had always been enough for him, but now he was ashamed of it. He took the flashlight from Marci and let it wind down, so that they were sitting in darkness.

"Your parents --" she said, then broke off.

"It's complicated."

"Are they dead?"

He reached out in the dark and took her hand.

"I don't know how to explain it," he said. "I can lie, and you'll probably think I'm telling the truth. Or I can tell the truth, and you'll think that I'm lying."

She squeezed his hand. Despite the sweaty heat of the cave, her fingers were cold as ice. He covered her hand with his free hand and rubbed at her cold fingers.

"Tell me the truth," she whispered. "I'll believe you."

So he did, in mutters and whispers. He didn't have the words to explain it all, didn't know exactly how to explain it, but he tried. How he knew his father's moods. How he felt his mother's love.

After keeping this secret all his life, it felt incredible to be letting it out. His heart thudded in his chest, and his shoulders felt progressively lighter, until he thought he might rise up off his bedding and fly around the cave.

If it hadn't been dark, he wouldn't have been able to tell it. It was the dark, and the faint lunar glow of Marci's face that showed no expression that let him open up and spill out all the secrets. Her fingers squeezed tighter and tighter, and now he felt like singing and dancing, because surely between the two of them, they could find a book in the library or maybe an article in the microfilm cabinets that would really explain it to him.

He wound down. "No one else knows this," he said. "No one except you." He leaned in and planted a kiss on her cold lips. She sat rigid and unmoving as he kissed her.

"Marci?"

"Alan," she breathed. Her fingers went slack. She pulled her hand free.

Suddenly Alan was cold, too. The scant inches between them felt like an unbridgeable gap.

"You think I'm lying," he said, staring out into the cave.

"I don't know --"

"It's okay," he said. "I can help you get home now, all right?"

She folded her hands on her lap and nodded miserably.

On the way out of the cave, Eddie-Freddie-Georgie tottered over, still holding his car. He held it out to her mutely. She knelt down solemnly and took it from him, then patted him on the head. "Merry Christmas, kiddo," she said. He hugged her leg, and she laughed a little and bent to pick him up. She couldn't. He was too heavy. She let go of him and nervously pried his arms from around her thigh.

Alan took her down the path to the side road that led into town. The moonlight shone on the white snow, making the world glow bluish. They stood by the roadside for a long and awkward moment.

"Good night, Alan," she said, and turned and started trudging home.

There was no torture at school the next day. She ignored him through the morning, and he couldn't find her at recess, but at lunch she came and sat next to him. They ate in silence, but he was comforted by her presence beside him, a warmth that he sensed more than felt.

She sat beside him in afternoon classes, too. Not a word passed between them. For Alan, it felt like anything they could say to one another would be less true than the silence, but that realization hurt. He'd never been able to discuss his life and nature with anyone and it seemed as though he never would.

But the next morning, in the school yard, she snagged him as he walked past the climber made from a jumble of bolted-together logs and dragged him into the middle. It smelled faintly of pee and was a rich source of mysterious roaches and empty beer bottles on Monday mornings after the teenagers had come and gone.

She was crouched down on her haunches in the snow there, her steaming breath coming in short huffs. She grabbed him by the