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

still holding the thumb, and made ready to charge him, holding his sore face with one hand, when he heard the slap of running footfalls behind him and then Bill was streaking past him, baseball bat at ready, and he swung it like a polo-mallet and connected with a hollow crunch of aluminum on chitinous leathery skin.

The sound shocked Alan to his feet, wet sick rising in his gorge. Benny was winding up for a second blow, aiming for Darren's head this time, an out-of-the park smack that would have knocked that shrunken head off the skinny, blackened neck, and Alan shouted, "NO!" and roared at Benny and leapt for him. As he sailed through the air, he thought he was saving Benny from the feeling he'd carried with him for a decade, but as he connected with Benny, he felt a biting-down feeling, clean and hard, and he knew he was defending Drew, saving him for once instead of hurting him.

He was still holding on to the thumb, and Davey was inches from his face, and he was atop Benny, and they breathed together, chests heaving. Alan wobbled slowly to his feet and dropped the thumb onto Drew's chest, then he helped Billy to his feet and they limped off to their beds. Behind them, they heard the dry sounds of Davey getting to his feet, coughing and hacking with a crunch of thin, cracked ribs.

He was sitting on their mother the next morning. He was naked and unsexed by desiccation -- all the brothers, even little George, had ceased going about in the nude when they'd passed through puberty -- sullen and silent atop the white, chipped finish of her enamel top, so worn and ground down that it resembled a collection of beach-China. It had been a long time since any of them had sought solace in their mother's gentle rocking, since, indeed, they had spared her a thought beyond filling her belly with clothes and emptying her out an hour later.

The little ones woke first and saw him, taking cover behind a stalagmite, peering around, each holding a sharp, flat rock, each with his pockets full of more. Danny looked at each in turn with eyes gone yellow and congealed, and bared his mouthful of broken and blackened teeth in a rictus that was equal parts humor and threat.

Bradley was the next to wake, his bat in his hand and his eyelids fluttering open as he sprang to his feet, and then Alan was up as well, a hand on his shoulder.

He crouched down and walked slowly to Davey. He had the knife, handle wound with cord, once-keen edge gone back to rust and still reddened with ten-year-old blood, but its sharpness mattered less than its history.

"Welcome me home," Davey rasped as Alan drew closer. "Welcome me home, motherfucker. Welcome me home, brother."

"You're welcome in this home," Alan said, but Davey wasn't welcome. Just last week, Alan had seen a nice-looking bedroom set that he suspected he could afford -- the golems had left him a goodly supply of gold flake, though with the golems gone he supposed that the sacks were the end of the family's no-longer-bottomless fortune. But with the bedroom set would come a kitchen table, and then a bookcase, and a cooker and a fridge, and when they were ready, he could send each brother on his way with the skills and socialization necessary to survive in the wide world, to find women and love and raise families of their own. Then he could go and find himself a skinny redheaded girl with a Scots accent, and in due time her belly would swell up and there would be a child.

It was all planned out, practically preordained, but now here they were, with the embodied shame sitting on their mother, his torn thumb gleaming with the wire he'd used to attach it back to his hand.

"That's very generous, brother," Danny said. "You're a prince among men."

"Let's go," Alan said. "Breakfast in town. I'm buying."

They filed out and Alan spared Davey a look over his shoulder as they slipped away, head down on his knees, rocking in time with their mother.

Krishna grinned at him from the front porch as he staggered home from Kurt's storefront. He was dressed in a hoodie and huge, outsized raver pants that dangled with straps and reflectors meant to add kinetic reflections on the dance floor.

"Hello, neighbor," he said as Alan came up the walkway. "Good evening?"

Alan stopped and put his hands on his hips, straightened his head out on his neck so that he was standing tall. "I understand what he gets out of you," Alan said. "I understand that perfectly well. Who couldn't use a little servant and errand boy?

"But what I don't understand, what I can't understand, what I'd like to understand is: What can you get out of the arrangement?"

Krishna shrugged elaborately. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"We had gold, in the old days. Is that what's bought you? Maybe you should ask me for a counteroffer. I'm not poor."

"I'd never take a penny that you offered -- voluntarily." Krishna lit a nonchalant cig and flicked the match toward his dry, xeroscaped lawn. There were little burnt patches among the wild grasses there, from other thrown matches, and that was one mystery-let solved, then, wasn't it?

"You think I'm a monster," Alan said.

Krishna nodded. "Yup. Not a scary monster, but a monster still."

Alan nodded. "Probably," he said. "Probably I am. Not a human, maybe not a person. Not a real person. But if I'm bad, he's a thousand times worse, you know. He's a scary monster."

Krishna dragged at his cigarette.

"You know a lot of monsters, don't you?" Alan said. He jerked his head toward the house. "You share a bed with one."

Krishna narrowed his eyes. "She's not scary, either."

"You cut off her wings, but it doesn't make her any less monstrous.

"One thing I can tell you, you're pretty special: Most real people never see us. You saw me right off. It's like Dracula, where most of the humans couldn't tell that there was a vampire in their midst."

"Van Helsing could tell," Krishna said. "He hunted Dracula. You can't hunt what you can't see," he said. "So your kind has been getting a safe free ride for God-knows-how-long. Centuries. Living off of us. Passing among us. Passing for us."

"Van Helsing got killed," Alan said. "Didn't he? And besides that, there was someone else who could see the vampires: Renfield. The pathetic pet and errand boy. Remember Renfield in his cage in the asylum, eating flies? Trying to be a monster? Von Helsing recognized the monster, but so did Renfield."

"I'm no one's Renfield," Krishna said, and spat onto Alan's lawn. First fire, then water. He was leaving his mark on Alan's land, that was certain.

"You're no Van Helsing, either," Alan said. "What's the difference between you and a racist, Krishna? You call me a monster, why shouldn't I call you a paki?"

He stiffened at the slur, and so did Alan. He'd never used the word before, but it had sprung readily from his lips, as though it had lurked there all along, waiting to be uttered.

"Racists say that there's such a thing as 'races' within the human race, that blacks and whites and Chinese and Indians are all members of different 'races,'" Krishna said. "Which is bullshit. On the other hand, you --"

He broke off, left the thought to hang. He didn't need to finish it. Alan's hand went to his smooth belly, the spot where real people had navels, old scarred remnants of their connections to real, human mothers.

"So you hate monsters, Krishna, all except for the ones you sleep with and the ones you work for?"

"I don't work for anyone," he said. "Except me."

Alan said, "I'm going to pour myself a glass of wine. Would you like one?"

Krishna grinned hard and mirthless. "Sure, neighbor, that sounds lovely."

Alan went inside and took out two glasses, got a bottle of something cheap and serviceable from Niagara wine country out of the fridge, worked the corkscrew, all on automatic. His hands shook a little, so he held them under the cold tap. Stuck to the wall over his work surface was a magnetic bar, and stuck to it was a set of very sharp chef's knives that were each forged from a single piece of steel. He reached for one and felt its comfort in his hand, seductive and glinting.

It was approximately the same size as the one he'd used on Davey, a knife that he'd held again and again, reached for in the night and carried to breakfast for months. He was once robbed at knifepoint, taking the deposit to the bank after Christmas rush, thousands of dollars in cash in a brown paper sack in his bag, and the mugger -- a soft-spoken, middle-aged man in a good suit -- knew exactly what he was carrying and where, must have been casing him for days.

The soft-spoken man had had a knife about this size, and when Alan had seen it pointed at him, it had been like an old friend, one whose orbit had escaped his gravity years before, so long ago that he'd forgotten about their tender camaraderie. It was all he could do not to reach out and take the knife from the man, say hello again and renew the friendship.

He moved the knife back to the magnet bar and let the field tug it out of his fingers and snap it back to the wall, picked up the wine glasses, and stepped back out onto the porch. Krishna appeared not to have stirred except to light a fresh cigarette.

"You spit in mine?" Krishna said.

Though their porches adjoined, Alan walked down his steps and crossed over the lawn next door, held the glass out to Krishna. He took it and their hands brushed each other, the way his hand had brushed the soft-spoken man's hand when he'd handed over the sack of money. The touch connected him to something human in a way that made him ashamed of his desperation.

"I don't normally drink before noon," Adam said.

"I don't much care when I drink," Krishna said, and took a slug.

"Sounds like a dangerous philosophy for a bartender," Adam said.

"Why? Plenty of drunk bartenders. It's not a hard job." Krishna spat. "Big club, all you're doing is uncapping beers and mixing shooters all night. I could do it in my sleep."

"You should quit," Alan said. "You should get a better job. No one should do a job he can do in his sleep."

Krishna put a hand out on Alan's chest, the warmth of his fingertips radiating through Alan's windbreaker. "Don't try to arrange me on your chessboard, monster. Maybe you can move Natalie around, and maybe you can move around a bunch of Kensington no-hopers, and maybe you can budge my idiot girlfriend a couple of squares, but I'm not on the board. I got my job, and if I leave it, it'll be for me."

Alan retreated to his porch and sipped his own wine. His mouth tasted like it was full of blood still, a taste that was woken up by the wine. He set the glass down.

"I'm not playing chess with you," he said. "I don't play games. I try to help -- I do help."

Krishna swigged the glass empty. "You wanna know what makes you a monster, Alvin? That attitude right there. You don't understand a single fucking thing about real people, but you spend all your time rearranging them on your