Authors: Kenneth Oppel
Dead Water Zone (4 page)
“I wanted you to have a look at the cabin cruiser, anyway,” said Armitage. “The engine’s
been acting up, and you know it better than anyone else. Work some magic with it, okay?”
It was a kind of peace offering, but Monica didn’t seem particularly pleased. “Fine, but I’m not going to babysit the boy genius.”
“I don’t need a babysitter,” Paul said quietly.
Monica shook her head wearily. “You sure as hell do. I’m just sorry we don’t have any board games.”
“Have you finished?” Paul asked.
“Not yet.”
Board games were a passion with Sam. The most complicated ones, war games, with rule books as thick as school texts, boards that folded out over half the living room floor, and hundreds of tiny cardboard counters with symbols and numbers in every corner.
“You said you wouldn’t take so long this time.”
“I’m almost done.”
Paul rolled his eyes. Sam seemed to spend an eternity analyzing every possibility. Paul didn’t have the patience for games that dragged on all afternoon and sometimes longer. He couldn’t take it all that seriously. Besides, he always got decimated.
“Ready,” Sam proclaimed.
“Let’s hear it, General,” said Paul sarcastically.
Sam read out his orders, expertly annihilating Paul’s best tanks and artillery. Paul shook his head, dazed. Sam always seemed to be three or four moves ahead of him. Paul didn’t stand a chance. He reluctantly read out his orders and actually fired mistakenly on his own troops.
“This is boring,” he said.
“It’s just getting good,” Sam said distractedly, already studying the board for his next set of victorious moves.
“Boring,” Paul said again.
“You’re not concentrating,” Sam scolded him. “Honestly, Paul, you have to think it through.”
“Let’s go outside.”
Sam sighed. “You’re just angry because you’re losing.”
“I’m not angry. I’m just bored! Come on. We can call David and Barry and get a game of touch football going.”
He knew Sam hated playing games outside, but he wanted to go to the park, get his body into the sun, stretch his muscles.
“No thanks,” said his brother in a tight voice.
“All you want to do is sit on your ass reading books or playing these games.”
“The doctor said I shouldn’t overexert myself.”
Sam’s doctors—the names changed every few months or so, as his parents became dissatisfied
with the treatment. His brother would come back from his appointments with more pills, more instructions. And the fact was, he hadn’t put on a single pound in months. Paul knew he was supposed to be understanding, but he spent enough time playing bodyguard at school. Was he really expected to stay indoors on weekends and let Sam pulverize him with his war games?
“Maybe if you got more exercise—” he began testily.
“Playing football with your half-wit friends is not the solution.”
“Don’t be such a wimp!”
“Look, you always want to stop in the middle of the games. Grow up. If you put in more of an effort, there’s a small chance you’d make fewer moronic mistakes!”
Paul swiped his hand across the playing board, knocking all the counters onto the carpet.
“That was stupid!” shouted Sam.
“This game is stupid.”
“There’s more to life than track meets and bodybuilding, Paul.”
Before Paul could stop himself, he shoved Sam sprawling against the sofa. He’d never hit him before.
“Don’t call me stupid,” he muttered halfheartedly, startled by the rage in his brother’s face.
“Don’t ever do that again!” Sam’s voice crackled. “You can’t treat me like that! You’re nothing without me!”
Paul only stared numbly, knowing that Sam was right.
S
HE WAS WORKING
in the engine hatch of the cabin cruiser, so Paul could see only her hunched head and shoulders above the deck. Occasionally, a grease-smudged hand darted out for the tools arranged nearby. He listened to the efficient sounds of metal on metal and felt inadequate.
“Can I help?”
She glanced up, wisps of dark hair hanging untidily around her face. She pushed them away, leaving a streak of soot across her cheekbone.
“I don’t know. Can you?”
Her ferocity startled him. He jammed his hands into his pockets. “No.” He didn’t know anything about boats or motors.
“Why’d you ask then?”
She disappeared beneath the hatch.
“I’m sorry about earlier,” he said awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to start a fight between you and Armitage.”
“Forget it,” came her muffled voice. “Happens all the time. Armitage doesn’t like it when you criticize his little empire.”
“Empire?”
She lifted her face to him. “Come on, Paul, haven’t you got us pigeonholed by now?”
His eyes roved across the neat stacks of cardboard boxes against the walls. He couldn’t help his automatic reaction. It was wrong to steal.
“Armitage is a businessman,” she said from below. “It’s the truth, more or less. Everyone on our pier works for him—including me, I suppose. Whatever we take in, Armitage sinks into merchandise. He buys it right off the freighters, cheap. The freight handlers adjust their inventories. Armitage files off serial numbers and resells the goods in the City for big profits. He’s doing well.” She laughed softly. “He’s even got his own bank account in the City—under a fake name, of course. He’s a good old-fashioned entrepreneur. Pass me the vise grips.”
He was pleased to have been given a job. He looked at the tools and took a guess.
“Paul, these are needlenose pliers.” She reappeared from the engine hatch. “Tell me, do you have any skills, besides being a bodyguard?”
She said it jokingly, but he was taken aback. He felt an absurd urge to launch into a list of the track ribbons he’d won, how much he could curl, his lap times in the pool. And maybe his school marks, too—they weren’t so bad.
Monica grunted and grabbed the vise grips. “Armitage wants to rebuild this place. He hates it that everyone in the City thinks Watertown’s a slum. So he wants to make a lot of money and change things here.” She added dubiously, “That’s his plan, anyway.”
“You don’t think it’ll work?”
“Oh, it might,” she replied, ducking down again. “Just don’t know if I like the idea. There’s good things about it, I suppose. Armitage’s little bank account paid for our water tower on the pier, the big gate to keep people out, electric generators, the boats. We live pretty well. Seems to me, though, that if it goes too far, we won’t be an island anymore. It’ll turn into—I don’t know—just another suburb. We’ll get people like you showing up all the time, making rules, screwing everything up.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not here to stay,” said Paul, surprised that her words had stung him.
“Well,” she said, “you’re sure stirring things up.”
“Not enough, obviously.”
Armitage had left for the docklands almost two hours ago but might not be back for a couple of days. What was he supposed to do in the meantime? Where was Sam now; what was he doing? He paced restlessly, tormented by the thought of all the wasted time. There must be something he could do.
“I’ve been thinking about the police,” he began carefully.
“It’s too risky.” Monica gestured around the boathouse. “What would they think of all this, huh? One look, and me and Armitage get sent to some group detention home in the suburbs. No way.”
“They wouldn’t have to know about you or Armitage.”
She slammed down the vise grips and hoisted herself up onto the deck.
“Fine,” he said. “No police. I’m just trying to find my brother.”
“You two must be close,” she said. He thought there was a trace of wistfulness in her voice.
Paul felt an unexpected fluttering of arousal. He didn’t know why. She was too thin, too pointy, and she was probably flat, though it was impossible to tell through all the layers of clothing. The
girls he liked in Governor’s Hill were curvier, healthy looking, with tans they managed to hold on to year-round. His eyes traveled over the sharp angles of Monica’s pale face, her mop of uncontrollable hair. She was like no girl he’d ever seen.
“I suppose we were—we are, yes.” Lately he’d caught himself thinking about Sam in the past tense. It had been months since they’d last seen each other, and they hadn’t parted on the best of terms. A silent, awkward handshake.
“You came all the way down here to look for him,” she said. “Sounds like you take pretty good care of him.”
Paul felt the familiar spasm of guilt—the circle of jeering faces, Sam on the ground, Randy Smith astride him. Paul watched, helpless. There was nothing he could do. They held him back.
“So how does he pay you back for all your bodyguard services?”
“What do you mean?” Paul asked nervously.
“He must help you with your homework, right?”
“Sometimes, sure,” he answered, relieved.
“Come on, Paul, you know what I mean,” she said quietly. “Didn’t he ever tell you you were really stupid?” There was an almost vindictive quality in her voice.
“Sometimes he wasn’t as patient as he—”
“You were doing your two-times tables and he was doing
E
equals
mc
squared, right? And he didn’t make you feel like a total moron? He never rubbed it in? You with all the nice big muscles?”
“That’s enough.” His heart was pounding, and a sweaty prickle was working its way down his back.
“You must have been real pissed off—all those put-downs.”
“Sometimes, maybe,” he stammered. “It wasn’t so bad.”
“You beat him up, didn’t you?”
“I did not beat him up!”
“That’s why he ran away.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about! They beat him up, not me! I was the one who stopped them!” He jabbed a thumb defiantly toward his chest. “I was the one who protected him all the time. Me. And he just took it for granted. He didn’t even notice the things I did for him!”
He’d run out of breath, and all at once felt horribly empty. Maybe he’d just needed to spit out the words, like the crazy lady on the main pier, shouting her litany of persecution to anyone who passed.
“That wasn’t fair, what I just said,” he told her anxiously. “He had a lot to put up with, too. More
than me. I mean, I didn’t get what he got. It could have been me, but it was Sam.”
“I’m sorry,” said Monica.
“Why did you do that? Say those things?”
“I just wanted to know what made him leave. It was stupid of me.”
He shrugged, feeling a little sick.
“How do you know he’s even in Watertown? Maybe he just packed up, went home.”
“He’s blind without his glasses.”
And Sam would never return to Governor’s Hill. Neither of those things necessarily meant that Sam was still here in Watertown. But there was something else—that shadowy figure dancing across the rooftops. Why that electric jolt of recognition? All he’d seen was a knife-edged silhouette—no face, no details. Sam couldn’t run that fast, and he certainly couldn’t make those jumps.
“What’s the place we met at?” he asked with sudden urgency.
“Jailer’s Pier.”
“No, I mean the place on the other side.”
She seemed hesitant. “It’s where the old prisons used to be.”
“There was a jail here?” he asked, surprised.
“This whole place was a jail once. I guess they don’t teach that up in Governor’s Hill.”
“No.”
“It goes back more than two hundred years. The City prisons were overcrowded, so someone came up with the idea of putting convicts out in the harbor. They tethered a couple old hulks together and made a prison island.”
He followed her along the pier and up the ladder into the stilt house.
“So, you stole a loaf of bread, you were sent to the hulks,” she said. “Below deck you couldn’t even stand upright. Tiny, cramped spaces, bodies pressing against you all the time. Epidemics wiped out whole ships. Prisoners sometimes tried to swim back to shore. Not many made it—they had these iron balls chained around their wrists and ankles.”
“When did they shut it down?”
“About a hundred and fifty years ago. The ships were taking on too much water. But some of the convicts stayed. Wasn’t long before most of the hulks rotted away completely, but the piers and jetties were still there. Over the years, more and more people came.”
“How did you learn all this?”
“My mom told me.”
“So, across the canal, that was where the last hulks were anchored?”
She nodded. “Watertowners call it Rat Castle.”
“Why don’t people live there anymore?”
“They’re stupid. Superstitious.”
“Ghosts?”
“I guess,” she said.
“But someone could be hiding in there.”
“There’s no one there, Paul.”
“But how can you be certain?”
“You think because you saw something it means your brother’s in there? I’ve seen things, too.” She lifted her hands in a gesture of futility. “People disappear here all the time.”
“Your parents.”
His words startled him.
“I never knew my father.” She shrugged. “He did the vanishing act before I was born. Armitage might remember him, but I doubt it.”
“What about your mother?”
“She went eight months ago.”
“How?” he asked awkwardly. “Did she die?”
“She walked out. Another runaway.”
She spoke with complete indifference. He felt a pang of tenderness for her, but there was a spark of excitement, too. They had something in common.
“Maybe she’ll come back.”
“I’m not holding my breath. Anyway, Armitage is right. She was useless. We’re better off without her.”
“Oh.”
“She used to be a teacher at some college before she ended up down here. She taught history. One day she couldn’t stand it anymore. She said there was no point because it just didn’t get any better. The tyranny of the past. Anyway, she just shredded all her work and went wandering. I guess that’s what you call a nervous breakdown.”
Paul waited, not wanting to break the mood.
“Armitage and I were born here. She brought us up, but she just wasn’t all there. She’d go off every now and then. One day she didn’t come back. End of story.”
“But you still look for her, don’t you?”
“Not much point, really.”
“You look for her by Rat Castle.”
She didn’t answer for a few seconds. “She used to wander around there sometimes, that’s all. I found her on Jailer’s Pier once or twice. Looking at the water.”
Paul thought of her last night, cupping the water in her hands, letting it slither through her fingers.
“So, what about the rest of your family?” she asked quickly. “What are your parents like?”
With a start he realized how little he thought about them; they were so distant from his everyday life. Usually they were both gone when he got up in the morning, and they didn’t come home from
work until seven. Work—that was it, he could start with that.
“Well,” he began, “my mom is an insurance adjuster.”
Monica’s nose wrinkled. “What’s that?”
“I don’t know.” And he laughed with her. “I swear, I have no idea what that means!”
“What about your dad?”
“He’s a sales rep for a company that makes, um, business forms.”
“Oh, a stiff.”
“A what?”
“You know, like a corpse—because his job’s so boring.”
Paul grinned. “I guess.”
“But what are they like? Do you like them?”
If she had asked whether he loved them, he could have automatically answered yes. But did he like them? That was different.
“I…I guess I don’t know them,” he said, a little bewildered.
“Well, you never do, do you?” she said matter-of-factly. “Anyone in your family. I don’t think I know Armitage very well.” She paused, looking at him carefully. “And how well do you know Sam?”
He held the pose in front of the mirror, chest heaving from the push-ups. He studied his reflection
critically, forcing himself to hold the position even though it was beginning to hurt. When he was younger, he’d been afraid that one day he’d wake up to find himself like Sam—losing weight, shriveling up. It still lingered, that irrational fear, always at the back of his mind as he pushed and strained against the gym machines.
But there was another reason he’d worked so slavishly for his body. He liked the strength. It gave him power. Power over Sam. Sam needed his muscles.
“So you’ve got one wish,” Sam said. “What do you do with it?”
It was a game they often played.
“Just one wish?” Paul asked.
“This time, just one,” he said, setting down his notebook.
“Can I ask for more wishes, as my wish?”
“Sorry.”
Sam wasn’t normally so stingy with the wishes. Three was the usual number—it gave you some room to play around, to find out what you really wanted. Sometimes the games were serious, but mostly their wishes became more and more ridiculous until they were shrieking with laughter.
When he was younger, Paul almost always
wished for things: video games, a portable stereo, new track shoes. Occasionally, he wished his parents wouldn’t fight so much or that Sam’s new pills would work. Lately he’d been wishing for various girls in his class, a better lap time on his fifty-meter crawl, a fraction of an inch on the high jump.
Just one wish. It was a serious game. What did he want? It had been on his mind quite a lot recently. He didn’t want to be separated from his brother.
Sam had just applied for early admission to college. If he got in, he’d be leaving home next fall. The two of them had often talked about leaving Governor’s Hill together, being roommates. It was silly, he supposed, because he lagged years behind Sam at school. But they’d still talked about it, made plans, imagined what it would be like to live in a new place. Their rules only.
Sam had seemed so eager when he’d filled out his applications, as if he’d forgotten about their plans. Or maybe they just didn’t matter. Hadn’t Sam known how hurt Paul would be if he went away to college?
“My wish,” he said, losing courage, “is for a shower with Susan White.”
“That’s it?” said Sam.
“Yeah. What about yours?”
“Forget it.”
“Why?”
“You’re not taking this seriously.”
“I just couldn’t think, that’s all. Tell me your wish anyway.”
Sam wouldn’t look up at him. He was sketching in his notebook, tracing lines, shading in with the side of his pencil.
“At the doctor’s this afternoon,” he said in a conversational tone, “he left the room for a few minutes. My file was just lying there on his desk. You should see the size of it!” He spread two of his fingers, grinning, and Paul found himself grinning back uneasily.
“I couldn’t resist. I wanted to see all this stuff about me—charts, letters, ECG scrolls, X-ray results. You thought my textbooks were bad!”
Paul chuckled nervously.
“I was looking at this one lab report, and my eyes caught the words ‘Life Expectancy.’ So I kept reading.”
Paul’s smile congealed on his face. “What did it say?”
“I’ve got a best-before date. Between twenty-three and twenty-seven years old.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“No.”
“Mom and Dad never said anything!”
“They got a letter,” Sam said. “A copy of it was in the file, too. Obviously they didn’t want me to know.”
“Maybe it’s a mistake,” said Paul. “Some of your other tests were wrong. They can’t know stuff like that!”
He wanted to hug his brother—but something held him back. They didn’t ever really hug, but it was more than that. He felt a vague sense of revulsion, of anger. Sam was letting this happen to him! He could fight back if he wanted!
His gaze suddenly dropped down to Sam’s open notebook. On the front page was a sketch of da Vinci’s perfect man, but half the body was mechanical metal limbs, rubber arteries, a chrome rib cage, and a stainless-steel heart.
“So my wish,” said Sam, “is to heal myself.”
