Shadows (16 page)

Adam shrugged, but then went to the window. “What—What if I changed my mind? I mean, afterward?”

Jeff chuckled hollowly. “It’d be sort of too late, wouldn’t it? I mean, you’d already be gone.”

“I know,” Adam agreed, his voice barely audible. “That’s what I keep thinking about.”

He turned around to see his brother regarding him angrily.

“You
are
chickening out, aren’t you?” Jeff accused.

“I didn’t say that,” Adam argued, his voice taking on a plaintive note.

“Yeah, but it’s what you meant. Jeez, Adam, you really are a wimp, aren’t you? All you ever do is whine about everything, but when you have a chance to do something, you chicken out. Well, if you don’t go tonight, you might as well forget it. I’ll tell Mom and Dad about what you’re planning, and they’ll stop you. This time, they’ll probably send you to Atascadero, or something.”

Adam’s eyes widened with fear at the thought of being locked up in the state mental hospital. “You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

“I might. Anyway, even if they don’t lock you up, I bet they’ll take you out of school and keep you at home. Then you’ll never have another chance to do it, will you?”

Adam swallowed. “I—”

Jeff could feel his brother wavering. “Come on, Adam. Tonight. You’ve got to do it tonight.”

Adam’s temper, usually held perfectly in check, suddenly
flared. “If you’re so hot for it to happen, why don’t you do it yourself?” he demanded.

Jeff said nothing, his mind racing. They’d already talked it out, spent hours arguing about it. And Adam had agreed that he was the one who should go. Now he was trying to back out, losing his nerve at the last minute.

Well, it wasn’t going to happen. It had all been planned, all been decided, and this time Adam wasn’t going to chicken out at the last minute. “You’re going to do it,” Jeff finally said, his voice dropping to a furious whisper that sent a chill through Adam. “If you don’t do it, I’ll kill you myself, Adam. I’ll figure out a way so no one will know it was me. And I’ll make sure it hurts. Is that what you want me to do? Do you want me to hurt you?”

Adam shrank back in his chair. “No,” he breathed. “And I’m not saying I’m not going to do it. I just—”

Jeff didn’t let him finish. Instead, he kept talking to his brother, browbeating him, convincing him, putting his own thoughts into Adam’s mind, just as he had since they were old enough to talk.

At last, as always, Adam nodded.

“Okay,” he said, his face pale. “I’ll do it tonight. So just leave me alone, and let me get ready, all right?”

“You swear you’re going to do it?” Jeff demanded.

Adam held up both his hands, intertwining his fingers with his brother’s, in the way they had ever since they were little more than toddlers. It was a gesture that meant one of them had made an unbreakable promise to the other. “Swear,” he said.

Jeff finally smiled, but there was no kindness in it. “Okay.” He started out of the room, then paused at the door.

He looked back at his brother, his eyes devoid of emotion. “Afterward, I’m going to take your leather jacket. Okay?”

Adam shrugged. “If I don’t wear it when I go,” he said. “Anyway, tomorrow you can take anything you want. It’ll probably be here.”

Jeff paused for another moment, then spoke once more.
“Just make sure you leave it. See ya.” Then he was gone, and Adam was alone in his room.

“Yeah,” Adam replied. “See ya.”

But he wondered: Would he really ever see his brother again?

Probably not.

But what did it matter?

What, really, did anything matter?

After all, he couldn’t ever remember having been really happy, not on a single day of his life. For every day of his life, Jeff had always been there, thinking for him, making up his mind for him, telling him what to do.

And he had always given in.

So wherever he was going tonight, it couldn’t be any worse than it was here.

After all, wherever he was going, Jeff wouldn’t be there. At least not for a while.

Picking up his virtual reality helmet, he placed it on his head once more.

A second later he was lost in the world conjured up by the computer, a world that was nothing more, or less, than a projection of what it would be like to be inside the computer itself, to be an electron whizzing through the minute circuitry, exploring the endlessly complex world contained on the surface of the microchip.

That’s what I should have been, Adam told himself.

I never should have been born at all.

I should have been something else, something that doesn’t feel any pain.

Tonight, he reflected with a cold shiver of anticipation, he would run away from the pain. And never come back.

A
dam Aldrich waited until thirty minutes after the Academy’s ten-thirty lights-out before he rose from his bed and, without turning on the light, quickly pulled on his clothes, choosing a pair of jeans that were all but worn-out, and a bright red shirt that he’d never liked. Unlike Jeff, Adam had never much cared about clothes. Clothing was just stuff, and
stuff
had never mattered to him at all. The only thing that really mattered to Adam was the world inside his own brain, and, once he’d discovered it, the world inside his computer. And the only person who mattered at all to Adam was Jeff.

Jeff

The one person who knew him almost better than he knew himself.

The person who could talk him into absolutely anything.

The person with whom he had been closest all his life.

And who, tonight, was sending him away.

But maybe, somehow, they’d be together again. At least they would be if it was anything like Adam thought it was going to be.

It.

That was how he always thought about what he’d decided to do. Even tonight, when the time had finally come, he still put no other name to it.

Dressed, he moved to his computer and turned on the
screen. It glowed softly in the dark, and Adam sat down at the keyboard. When the menu came into focus, a menu Adam had designed himself, he stared at it for a few seconds, then chose one of his utilities programs from the list.

Slowly, almost regretfully, he began deleting all the files from the eighty-megabyte hard drive in the computer. Finishing the task, deleting the directories and subdirectories one by one, he stared silently at the new directory tree, which now showed nothing more than the utility program he was using.

He could still change his mind. After all, the files weren’t really gone yet—all he’d done was erase the first letter of the file names. The data itself was still there on the hard drive. If he wanted to, he could recover it all in just a few more minutes.

He hesitated, then made up his mind.

His fingers working quickly, he typed in the commands that would begin washing the disk, going through the whole drive, recording a series of randomly selected digits over all the existing data.

The computer would go through the process three times. When it was done, nothing at all would remain except the single utility program.

It would be gone, all of it. All the programs he’d learned to use in the five years since he’d gotten his first computer, all the data he’d compiled, all the games he’d not only loved, but reconstructed to suit himself, reworking the codes so that no one but he could play them.

In a way, it was as if he was wiping his life out, obliterating it, so that no one would be able to search for clues as to why he’d done what he’d decided to do.

After all, it wasn’t anybody else’s business—it was his life, and he could do anything he wanted to with it.

The computer beeped softly, indicating that its task was completed.

Adam dropped the utility program out of memory, and when the “C:” prompt appeared, typed a single line:

C ERASE* *

He pressed the enter button, and a question appeared:

ARE YOU SURE? ALL FILES WILL BE ERASED. N (Y)

   For a fleeting moment he was once again tempted to change his mind. Then, taking a deep breath, he hit the Y key. When the final question reappeared, giving him one last chance to reverse his course, he pressed it again.

A second flicked by, and then the “C:” prompt reappeared. Though the computer was still functioning, there was nothing it could do, for Adam had stripped away everything that made it useful. Now it was nothing more than a blank memory, waiting for data to fill it up.

Adam typed for a few seconds, then turned off the monitor, plunging the room again into total darkness. Moving silently to the door, he opened it a crack and peered out into the dimly lit hallway that ran the length of the second floor.

The hall was empty, and he could hear nothing.

He stepped into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind him, its soft click resounding in his ears with an unnatural loudness. He froze, half expecting the doors along the hall to open as the other kids peered accusingly out at him.

Nothing happened.

The silence of the building closed around him like a shroud.

He crept to Jeff’s door, pausing for a moment. Should he go in and say good-bye to his brother?

No.

Better just to disappear into the darkness of the night.

Moving silently down the hall, he came to the top of the broad staircase that curved down to the floor below and listened once more.

Silence.

The chandelier hanging in the entry hall had been dimmed for the night, casting only a soft glow through the spacious room. For a moment Adam gazed at the crack under Hildie Kramer’s office door.

Was there a light on inside?

He wasn’t sure.

He crept down the stairs, clinging to the wall as if its mass could somehow shelter him from any eyes that might be watching, waiting for him.

At last he came to the front door. He twisted the knob slowly, as if even the faint sound of its sliding bolt might betray him. Pulling the door only wide enough to slip through the narrow opening, he moved out onto the porch, waiting in the deep shadows of the loggia until he was certain no one was on the grounds in front of the house. Then, at last, he made his move, darting across the lawn, scuttling from tree to tree like a small animal exposed to predators. Only when he was through the gate did he allow himself to breathe easily.

When his pulse, racing from the tension of his clandestine departure from the Academy, finally settled into a normal rhythm, he moved off into the night. Though the air was unseasonably warm, even for mid-September, he felt a chill run through him.

But his mind was made up.

Twenty minutes later he stood in front of the house he’d grown up in, the old shingled two-story house his parents had bought when he was only two years old. Three blocks from the beach, it was surrounded by a neat lawn that was his father’s pride, with enormous camellia bushes growing on either side of the front porch. Adam’s eyes drifted over the house, pausing briefly at the second floor, on the room that had once been his. A lot of his stuff, he knew, was still in that room, waiting for him when he came home.

Now it would wait forever. He would never come back to this house again.

Another tiny doubt assailed his mind. For just a second he had an urge to go into the house and wake up his mother. Maybe he should talk to her about what he was going to do

No!

Jeff’s threats rang in his mind, and Adam knew what she’d do.

Call the doctor and have him taken away.

Away, where he’d never be able to do what he wanted again.

He turned away from the house and moved on to the town’s small business area, pausing in front of the stores to look at the displays in their windows. There was nothing in any of them he wanted, nothing he would miss.

He walked on, glancing warily around every few seconds, ducking into deep shadows whenever a car approached. He couldn’t get caught now, not when he was so close.

He started back toward the Academy, moving quickly now, feeling every minute passing. He came to the gate, edging through it, then skirting around the lawn, staying near the fence. Finally he moved toward the mansion itself.

He gazed at the darkened windows of the enormous house, and then his eyes moved up to the fourth floor, to the odd cupola perched atop the structure almost like a bird hunching above its prey.

He could see lights glowing in Dr. Engersol’s windows.

He stared at those lights, shining brilliantly while the rest of the Academy slept.

The rest of it, except for him.

Ducking his head and hunching his shoulders, he shoved his hands into his pockets.

It was time to get on with it.

   The train moved fast down the track, for it was barely a train at all. Nothing more than an engine, a couple of empty cars, and a caboose. There would be no stops on the trip—there never were—for this was no more than one of the weekly runs the train made up the spur from Salinas, moving through Santa Cruz, then running up to the end of the track. It was a pointless run, except for one thing.

It kept the right of way open, protected the Barrington Western Railroad’s right to use it.

It was a boring run, the only interesting part of it being the northern leg, when the train ran steadily backward, creeping slowly along while a member of the crew stood in the caboose, watching the track and giving an unbroken stream of all-clear signals to the engineer. But once it
reached the dead end forty miles north of Barrington and started back, the crew was tired, more inclined to watch the moonlight playing on the sea than the track ahead.

After all, in the twenty-five years the engineer had been making the run, there had never been an event worth reporting to his supervisor. So tonight, as the train hit sixty along the straightaway north of Barrington, and the engineer prepared to begin his slow deceleration to the fifteen mile speed limit through the town itself, he wasn’t really pitying too much attention to the track ahead.

Not that it would have made any difference, for by the time he saw the object on the track as he came around a curve, it was far too late to stop the train anyway.