Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (phonics books TXT) 📕

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 and
the baby Davey cried and cried until Alan couldn't remember what it was
to live in a world of words and conversations and thought and
reflection.

No one knew what to do about Davey. Their father blew warm winds scented
with coal dust and loam to calm him, but still Davey cried. Their mother
rocked him on her gentlest spin cycle, but still Davey cried. Alan
walked down the slope to Carl's landmass, growing with the dust and
rains and snow, and set him down on the soft grass and earth there, but
still Davey cried, and Carlos inched farther and farther toward the
St. Lawrence seaway, sluggishly making his way out to the ocean and as
far away from the baby as possible.

After his first birthday, David started taking breaks from his
screaming, learning to crawl and then totter, becoming a holy terror. If
Alan left his schoolbooks within reach of the boy, they'd be reduced to
shreds of damp mulch in minutes. By the time he was two, his head was
exactly at Alan's crotch height and he'd greet his brother on his return
from school by charging at full speed into Alan's nuts, propelled at
unlikely speed on his thin legs.

At three, he took to butchering animals -- the rabbits that little Bill
kept in stacked hutches outside of the cave mouth went first. Billy
rushed home from his grade-two class, eyes crazed with precognition, and
found David methodically wringing the animals' necks and then slicing
them open with a bit of sharpened chert. Billy had showed David how to
knap flint and chert the week before, after seeing a filmstrip about it
in class. He kicked the makeshift knife out of Davey's hand, breaking
his thumb with the toe of the hard leather shoes the golems had made for
him, and left Davey to bawl in the cave while Billy dignified his pets'
corpses, putting their entrails back inside their bodies and wrapping
them in shrouds made from old diapers. Alan helped him bury them, and
then found Davey and taped his thumb to his hand and spanked him until
his arm was too tired to deal out one more wallop.

Alan made his way down to the living room, the floor streaked with mud
and water. He went into the kitchen and filled a bucket with soapy water
and gathered up an armload of rags from the rag bag. Methodically, he
cleaned away the mud. He turned his sopping shoes on end over the grate
and dialed the thermostat higher. He made himself a bowl of granola and
a cup of coffee and sat down at his old wooden kitchen table and ate
mindlessly, then washed the dishes and put them in the drying rack.

He'd have to go speak to Krishna.

#

Natalie answered the door in a pretty sun dress, combat boots, and a
baseball hat. She eyed him warily.

"I'd like to speak to Krishna," Alan said from under the hood of his
poncho.

There was an awkward silence. Finally, Natalie said, "He's not home."

"I don't believe you," Alan said. "And it's urgent, and I'm not in the
mood to play around. Can you get Krishna for me, Natalie?"

"I told you," she said, not meeting his eyes, "he's not here."

"That's enough," Alan said in his boss voice, his
more-in-anger-than-in-sorrow voice. "Get him, Natalie. You don't need to
be in the middle of this -- it's not right for him to ask you to. Get
him."

Natalie closed the door and he heard the deadbolt turn. *Is she going to
fetch him, or is she locking me out?*

He was on the verge of hammering the buzzer again, but he got his
answer. Krishna opened the door and stepped onto the dripping porch,
bulling Alan out with his chest.

He smiled grimly at Alan and made a well-go-on gesture.

"What did you see?" Alan said, his voice tight but under control.

"Saw you and that fat guy," Krishna said. "Saw you rooting around in the
park. Saw him disappear down the fountain."

"He's my brother," Alan said.

"So what, he ain't heavy? He's fat, but I expect there's a reason for
that. I've seen your kind before, Adam. I don't like you, and I don't
owe you any favors." He turned and reached for the screen door.

"No," Alan said, taking him by the wrist, squeezing harder than was
necessary. "Not yet. You said, 'Lost another one.' What other one,
Krishna? What else did you see?"

Krishna gnawed on his neatly trimmed soul patch. "Let go of me, Andrew,"
he said, almost too softly to be heard over the rain.

"Tell me what you saw," Alan said. "Tell me, and I'll let you go." His
other hand balled into a fist. "Goddammit, *tell me*!" Alan yelled, and
twisted Krishna's arm behind his back.

"I called the cops," Krishna said. "I called them again and they're on
their way. Let me go, freak show."

"I don't like you, either, Krishna," Alan said, twisting the arm
higher. He let go suddenly, then stumbled back as Krishna scraped the
heel of his motorcycle boot down his shin and hammered it into the top
of his foot.

He dropped to one knee and grabbed his foot while Krishna slipped into
the house and shot the lock. Then he hobbled home as quickly as he
could. He tried to pace off the ache in his foot, but the throbbing got
worse, so he made himself a drippy ice pack and sat on the sofa in the
immaculate living room and rocked back and forth, holding the ice to his
bare foot.

#

At five, Davey graduated from torturing animals to beating up on smaller
children. Alan took him down to the school on the day after Labor Day,
to sign him up for kindergarten. He was wearing his stiff new blue jeans
and sneakers, his knapsack stuffed with fresh binders and
pencils. Finding out about these things had been Alan's first experience
with the wide world, a kindergartner sizing up his surroundings at speed
so that he could try to fit in. David was a cute kid and had the benefit
of Alan's experience. He had a foxy little face and shaggy blond hair,
all clever smiles and awkward winks, and for all that he was still a
monster.

They came and got Alan twenty minutes after classes started, when his
new home-room teacher was still briefing them on the rules and
regulations for junior high students. He was painfully aware of all the
eyes on his back as he followed the office lady out of the portable and
into the old school building where the kindergarten and the
administration was housed.

"We need to reach your parents," the office lady said, once they were
alone in the empty hallways of the old building.

"You can't," Alan said. "They don't have a phone."

"Then we can drive out to see them," the office lady said. She smelled
of artificial floral scent and Ivory soap, like the female hygiene aisle
at the drugstore.

"Mom's still real sick," Alan said, sticking to his traditional story.

"Your father, then," the office lady said. He'd had variations on this
conversation with every office lady at the school, and he knew he'd win
it in the end. Meantime, what did they want?

"My dad's, you know, gone," he said. "Since I was a little kid." That
line always got the office ladies, "since I was a little kid," made them
want to write it down for their family Christmas newsletters.

The office lady smiled a powdery smile and put her hand on his
shoulder. "All right, Alan, come with me."

Davey was sitting on the dusty sofa in the vice principal's office. He
punched the sofa cushion rhythmically. "Alan," he said when the office
lady led him in.

"Hi, Dave," Alan said. "What's going on?"

"They're stupid here. I hate them." He gave the sofa a particularly
vicious punch.

"I'll get Mr Davenport," the office lady said, and closed the door
behind her.

"What did you do?" Alan asked.

"She wouldn't let me play!" David said, glaring at him.

"Who wouldn't?"

"A girl! She had the blocks and I wanted to play with them and she
wouldn't let me!"

"What did you hit her with?" Alan asked, dreading the answer.

"A block," David said, suddenly and murderously cheerful. "I hit her in
the eye!"

Alan groaned. The door opened and the vice principal, Mr. Davenport,
came in and sat behind his desk. He was the punishment man, the one that
no one wanted to be sent in to see.

"Hello, Alan," he said gravely. Alan hadn't ever been personally called
before Mr. Davenport, but Billy got into some spot of precognitive
trouble from time to time, rushing out of class to stop some disaster at
home or somewhere else in the school. Mr. Davenport knew that Alan was a
straight arrow, not someone he'd ever need to personally take an
interest in.

He crouched down next to Darren, hitching up his slacks. "You must be
David," he said, ducking down low to meet Davey's downcast gaze.

Davey punched the sofa.

"I'm Mr. Davenport," he said, and extended a hand with a big class ring
on it and a smaller wedding band.

Davey kicked him in the nose, and the vice principal toppled over
backward, whacking his head on the sharp corner of his desk. He tumbled
over onto his side and clutched his head. "Mother*fucker*!" he gasped,
and Davey giggled maniacally.

Alan grabbed Davey's wrist and bent his arm behind his back,