The Last Book in the Universe (15 page)

 

 

T
HE LATCH IS BURNING
. From high atop the stackboxes we can see the fireglow lighting up clouds of smoke along the dark horizon. The clouds look like angry mouths biting holes in the night.

The jetbikes roar like an acid-rain storm, coming closer and closer. There's another sound, too, a kind of high-pitched moaning that follows the jetbikes.
Ooohhh … oooohhh …
like an evil wind. A furious wind.

Standing beside me, Ryter says, “‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.'” Then he grunts to himself, as if remembering something important. “That's from a poem,” he explains. “Yeats. The poet himself is long forgotten, but some of his lines live on. Thought I knew what it meant, all these years, but I had it wrong. Now I know.”

“We'd better run,” I tell him urgently. “They're coming this way.”

“Of course they're coming this way,” he says, as if speaking to himself.

The night blazes in his sky-gray eyes. I tug at his sleeve. “Come on!”

Gently he frees himself from my grasp. “Ssssh,” he says. “There's nothing to fear.”

“What are you talking about?” I plead.

“‘Nothing to fear but fear itself,'” he says. “That's from another poem, I think. Or was it a speech? Can't recall.”

“Ryter, we've got to get out of here right now!”

When he turns to me, his face looks peaceful and oddly young. “Listen to me, son. My running days are over. And if I did run away, others would be hurt.”

“You're zoomed!” I cry. “Come on, you stupid old geez! We can run for the Pipe! They'll never find us. Let 'em burn the whole latch, what do we care! We'll just keep running and running! We'll have lots more adventures and you can write them down in your book!”

“Ssshh,” Ryter says. “Hush.”

Suddenly the jetbikes swarm into the stackboxes, splitting the air with their furious roaring. Headlights scorch the sky like laser beams, and somewhere close by a baby starts to cry.

This is the end, I'm thinking, the end the end.

Must be a hundred jetbikes swarming fast and deadly. The jetbikers howl, firing splat guns in the air as the mob follows them into the stackboxes. A mob like we saw in Mongo's latch. More animal than human. Shrieking and howling, ripping apart anything they can get their hands on.

They see Ryter standing high on the stackboxes, and they shriek his name. “WHEEL HIM! WHEEL HIM!”

No, I'm thinking, no. But there's nothing I can do, no way to stop the furious, mindless wave that breaks over the stackboxes. A wave of fists and snapping teeth and empty eyes.

“Save my pages!” Ryter yells to me as the hands grab hold and suck him down into the mob.

I try to save them, I do. In the light-exploded darkness I crawl into his stackbox on my knees and gather up the pages of his book. Trying to stuff them under my shirt, close to my heart. But there are so many pages that some get loose and drift away like the falling leaves of Eden.

Empty faces glitter with glee, finding my fear. Snatching pages out of the air. Tearing the pages to pieces. Stuffing the pieces in their bloody mouths as they scream, “WHEEL! WHEEL! WHEEL!” and then hands rip open my shirt and seize the rest of Ryter's book, feeding pages to the fire that follows them everywhere.

The pages burn and burn and burn.

“No!” I'm screaming. “Don't!” but they're not listening. They can't listen. They don't know how.

Hands grab me and carry me away and throw me to the ground. I'm spitting out dirt and trying to get my breath when someone speaks my name.

“Spaz boy! Is that you?”

When I roll over on my back, I'm looking up at Billy Bizmo. He's got a chetty blade in one hand and a splat gun in the other, and his eyes are alive with the fire.

“Stop them!” I beg him. “He's just an old man!”

Billy uses his chetty to clear a space. The mob backs off a few feet and he's able to get to me. At first I think he's going to cut me with the chetty, but that's not it. He wants to tell me something.

“Nothing I can do, Spaz boy. Those proov enforcers that brought you back? They deactivated all the probes.”

“What?” I gasp.

“Ruined the whole deal. Mindprobes don't work anymore. You can still stick the needle in your brain, but nothing happens.”

Now I get it, why the latch is burning, why the jetbikes have come. Because the probes have been destroyed and somebody has to take the blame. We were with the proovs, so it must be our fault.

“WHEEL!” the mob shrieks. “WHEEL!”

They've tied a rope around the old man's waist. He's not struggling or anything, his eyes look like he's already a long ways from here. Someplace clean and peaceful and quiet. Someplace where the sky is blue.

“Ryter!” I scream out, but he can't hear me or see me.

Then I'm begging Billy Bizmo. “You're the latchboss, you can stop them!”

Billy does a weird thing. He puts his chetty blade on the ground and reaches out and touches the side of my face. “Sorry, kid. No one can stop a mob when it wants blood. Not even me.”

“You didn't even try!”

“I did what I could, Spaz boy. They could have blamed you. I made sure it was the old man.”

“But why? Why him and not me?”

Billy shakes his head as if he can't believe I'm so stupid. “Because you're my son,” he says.

 

 

Y
OU
'
RE MY SON
.

The truth of it explodes inside my head and turns me upside down and inside out. I don't know my name, or who I am. I don't know anything. All I know is, I'm running away from Billy Bizmo. Running into the mob, fighting my way to the old man. Screaming for them to stop, it wasn't his fault, please stop.

The crowd melts enough so I can see what's happening. They've tied the rope to the back of a jetbike, and Ryter is hobbling along, trying to keep up.

I try to call his name, but nothing comes out. All I can do is follow as they wheel him through the stacks. The mob chanting, “DO IT! DO IT!” but the jetbikers are taking their time.

People from all over the Urb have come to see them wheel the old man. They want to punish Ryter for all the bad things that have ever happened, and I see from their faces that Billy's right. No one can stop what's going to happen.

A couple of times I try to grab him and undo the drag ropes, but the Bangers keep shoving me off. They think it's funny, me trying to free a wheeler. Part of the game. Their eyes are dead cold because they can't feel anything, and if I'm not careful, they'll wheel me, too.

I don't care if they do.

“Don't risk it!” the old man warns me when I make a move. “You're my only hope!”

“But they burned your pages!” I cry, running after him. “Your book! They tore it up and burned it! I tried but I couldn't stop them.”

Ryter looks back at me and smiles. “The pages don't matter,” he says. “You're the book now! You're the last book in the universe! Make it a good one!”

The Bangers finally get bored and decide to end it. They gun their engines. The drag rope yanks at Ryter and he falls, his frail body spinning away from me.

They wheel the life out of him, then, until there's nothing left but a bundle of rags, and the broken bones of my old friend. But I'm not there at the very end. My brain won't let me see it, not the worst part.

The last thing I remember is running after the jetbikes and then the smell of lightning fills my nose, the clean electric smell that comes after a thunderstorm, and the blackness rises up and takes me down.

 

 

W
HEN
I
FINALLY WOKE UP
, the mob was gone and the fires had burned out. The whole latch felt empty, but I could see people hiding in the shadows, biding their time until it was safe again. As safe as it ever gets in the Urb.

I thought about running away. I thought about following the Pipe to the end of the world. And then I thought about what Ryter said, and I went back to his empty stackbox, but there was nothing left, not even a scrap of paper. So I walked through vacant streets where the buildings were taller than daylight. I walked through burned-out blocks that still smoldered, and empty ruins that even the rats had left behind. I walked until I found myself at the Crypts, the concrete bunker where the Bully Bangers live, and I went to my cube and stayed there, watching old 3Ds and trying not to remember. Staring at the walls and trying not to remember. Sleeping and trying not to remember.

Nothing worked. I kept remembering.

Once a Banger came and told me Billy Bizmo wanted to see me, but I said forget it, and then one day Billy himself came down and told me how my mother had died when I was born, and he'd put me with a family unit because it was no good growing up with a latchboss for a dad, and he hoped someday I'd understand about that, and about everything else, too.

“I understand I never want to be like you,” I said, and he went away and left me alone.

Later that night I did a really strange thing. I went down to the pawn mart and found this old voicewriter in a tronic junkpile, covered with dust. There's a lot of gizmos you have to attach, but basically you talk in one end and words come out the other. And so I started talking about the old man, and all the things he told me, and how he helped me run the latches and save Bean and everything, and after a while I sort of figured out what he meant about me being the last book in the universe.

They call me Ryter now, like they called him.

 

And then one night I wake up in the dark and know I'm not alone.

“Who's there?” I say to the darkness.

A latch runner speaks from the shadows. “I'm not here,” he says. “We never met, understood? All I am is a message.”

“What message?”

“A message from Eden,” he says. His voice sounds like the whisper of wind in a clear sky.
“Someone you know says, ‘Chox!' and ‘Don't forget me!' and ‘Thank you!' and a whole lot more. He grows a little every day and we love him as our own. Do not despair, my friend. Today is theirs, but the future is ours.”

Long after the runner vanishes, I can hear Lanaya's message echoing in my head. Especially the last part about the future being ours.

Yes, I'm thinking, yes, I'm writing, yes, yes, yes.