UnBound (32 page)

“Keaton,” he says.

“Keliana,” she answers.

Keaton points to his face. “Ugly. Right?”

But Keliana shakes her head. “No, just . . . weird.”

It makes Keaton smile. He can deal with weird. And his smile makes her smile.

And then suddenly something eclipses them both.

Out of nowhere Dirk hurls himself against the fence like an animal, gripping it with his hands. Keliana gasps and jumps back.

“PROM NIGHT!” shouts Dirk.

“PROM NIGHT—BACKSEAT!” he snarls at Keliana with the nastiest of grins. “MAKE YOU LIKE IT! MAKE YOU LIKE IT!”

“Ew!” Then Keliana looks at Keaton like Dirk is somehow his fault, and she runs away.

“No!” calls Keaton desperately. “Him not me! I'm not him!” But it's too late. Keaton turns to Dirk. “Hate!” Keaton snaps at Dirk. “Hate you!”

Dirk doesn't seem to care. He just holds up his left hand. “Hand of my hand. Me, you, same.”

The first rock hits the fence with a resounding rattle. The second one gets through, hitting Keaton on the arm.

He turns to see that the other island kids have armed themselves and are throwing stones at the two of them.

“Get lost!” they yell. “Stinking monsters.”

“Ground beef!” one of them says, and the others laugh and start repeating it. “Ground beef! Ground beef!” Dirk is the first to run, but Keaton stands his ground a moment longer, until a rock hits his forehead and he realizes it's no use. They'll keep throwing stones as long as he remains a target.

“Ground beef! Ground beef!”

So he turns, leaving the path, and heads into the dense brush to escape them. His only consolation is that Keliana wasn't throwing stones too.

•  •  •

Rewinds sleep the sleep of the dead. Maybe because they've tasted it. When Keaton dreams, they're mostly variations on memories even more disjointed than normal dreams, because the memories are from dozens of different people. But when he dreams of things he's seen after his rewinding, those images are almost as sharp as waking life. He has a dream of Keliana. Of walking with her on Molokai's finest beach, which happens to be part of the colony compound. Is it so wrong for him to be dreaming of her? The doctor keeps expecting the male rewinds to be attracted to the girls among them—as if they are their own species. In nature even the most hideous of creatures are attracted to one another. But rewinds are not a species. The girls find the boys frightening and repulsive to the core, and the boys' disgust is returned in equal measure. There will be no brides of Frankenstein among this bunch. Keaton suspects no girl in the outside world will want to be with him, but the rules of dreams are different.

How infuriating it is, then, when he is shaken out of the depths of such a fine dream.

“Shawshank! Shawshank!”

It's Dirk. He whispers into Keaton's ear so close it doesn't sound like a whisper at all.

“Go away.”

But Dirk won't leave him alone. “Shawshank! Now! Now!”

“Go away! Not your friend!”

Dirk grabs his umber hand. “Hand of my hand. You, me, now!”

Finally Keaton sits up, and Dirk points to the door of the ward. “You, me, now!”

The last thing Keaton wants is to get involved with whatever trouble Dirk has in mind, but somehow he's become Dirk's keeper.

There are two guards on duty at the rewind ward. One for the girls and one for the boys. Currently the male guard is not at his post—probably on a perimeter check. Security cameras are everywhere, but few of them are on. They are leftovers from when the facility was bustling with activity. Now it's just the two wards of dispossessed souls.

At the door, which is always locked from the outside, Dirk produces from his pocket a Proactive Citizenry security pass featuring the picture of some serious-looking man.

“Finders keepers,” says Dirk.

No surprise there. The rewinds are constantly finding things left over from Proactive Citizenry's reign of this place. He taps the pass to the reader, and the door unlocks.

“Sesame,” Dirk says with the same flat affect with which he says everything. But Keaton's emotions are anything but flat. Half of him wants to turn around and return to the comfort of his bed, but if he does, and Dirk gets into some kind of trouble, it will be bad for all of them, so Keaton follows the soulless rewind into the cricket-filled night.

In the stark silver light of a gibbous moon, Dirk leads them to the fence where the locals threw stones at them. The fence is high and rimmed with several rows of tranq-coated barbed wire. With a single prick you're rendered unconscious and fall, landing hard enough to break bones, and maybe your neck. For a rewind still integrating, he wouldn't be surprised if they just popped apart like Legos. The thought makes him queasy.

“Pointless,” Keaton says. “Can't climb out. Pointless.” He grabs Dirk's arm. “Back now. Late. Sleep. Better for you than this.”

But Dirk shrugs out of his grip and walks farther down the fence . . . to a spot where there's a hole in the chain link, just big enough to squeeze through. Clearly the chain link was cut by bolt cutters—and probably from the outside. He once heard guards complaining about how the locals would sneak onto the property since some of the island's best beaches are on the compound. They rarely did it in the days of Proactive Citizenry because their guards shot trespassers on sight. But Cam's guards are all armed with tranqs, which are much less intimidating if you're not an AWOL unwind. Dirk must have found this hole the other day and concealed it. Now there's no barrier between them and the outside world. Keaton feels his heart begin to pound so painfully in his chest, he's afraid it might bounce right out.

“No!” Keaton says. “Not out there. Not yet. Not ready. None of us.” Although he knows that's not entirely true. Some of them might be ready. He certainly feels he is. But Dirk is not. Keaton suspects that he never will be. Maybe that's why Dirk feels the need to break out.

Dirk looks at him with cool curiosity. “You, me?” he says. “Frank and Jesse? Police have no leads?”

“No!” Keaton insists. He can't deny there are plenty of rebellious brain bits that see a hole in a fence as an opportunity, but his will is beginning to exert coherence. Submariners. They must work together for the good of all, and right now, sailing back to port is the best strategy. “Go back now. Sleep. Forget this.”

Dirk shrugs. “You lose,” he says, then slams a rock he's been concealing into Keaton's head, knocking him out cold.

Cam's ringtone is unique. He designed it himself. The first strains of Mozart's
Eine kleine Nachtmusik
, layered over “Hey Jude,” layered over a Coltrane sax riff. It all blends together perfectly. Far better than he does, but it's a constant reminder at his lowest moments that a mash-up can either shine or clash—it all depends on the care one takes with it. At 2:19 a.m., however, he despises his ringtone. There are few who know his personal number, and none of those who do would call him at this hour unless there was an emergency.

He wants to let it go for a second ring, but Una stirs, and he doesn't want this—whatever it is—to wake her up, so he answers it, hurrying to the bathroom and closing the door.

As he suspected, the news is not good. There's been a breakout in the boys' ward.

“Two male rewinds are AWOL,” Dr. Pettigrew says—his voice, as always, like an accusation. The idea of there being such a thing as AWOL rewinds, like AWOL Unwinds, sticks in Cam's mind like some bad stew meat.

“Two of them? Do we know which ones?”

“Thirty-nine and Forty-seven.”

“Names, please.”

“I don't know off the top of my head.”

“And where was the guard?”

“He's got a million excuses. Didn't I tell you we needed more guards at night?”

Cam resists the urge to lash back. Told-ya-sos don't help the situation, but as much as Cam hates to admit it, Pettigrew was right. But before he allows this to rattle his confidence, he lays out a course of action. Scour and secure the perimeter of the complex. Then work inward. The most important thing is that they don't get off the grounds. If they do, the situation could mushroom far beyond any hope of damage control.

When he steps out of the bathroom, Una is already up and dressed. “Have they checked if any vehicles are missing?” Clearly she heard his side of the conversation.

“I'll take care of this; go back to sleep.”

“Spare me the chivalry—you can use all the help you can get.” She tosses him his pants, then ties her hair back with a ribbon. For once he resists the playful urge to pull it out.

The party goes late. They always do. She probably should have stayed at her friend's house and slept on the couch—but her friend's furniture always smells like wet dog. Or maybe it smells of her friend's brother, who smells like wet dog. She should have stayed, but her house is only three blocks away. A five-minute walk. And the town of Kaunakakai is notoriously safe. Usually.

There are no silent nights in Molokai. The dark hours are alive with crickets and katydids. Sometimes the chorus can be deafening. As she walks home from the party, she has the sense of being watched. But of course that's typical. Whenever she walks alone in the dark, she feels that way. It's human nature. A primal survival instinct crying wolf. The feeling is no stronger today than any other time, so she dismisses it as she always does.

It isn't until she turns the key in the lock that a shape emerges from the shadows. His hand covers her mouth before she can scream—a hand that doesn't match the rest of him.

He pushes her inside, and although she struggles, he's much stronger. She knows it's a rewind, but until he speaks, she doesn't realize that she's seen him before.

“Prom night!” he says. “Win the bet!”

It's the horrible one from the fence. She sees his eyes now. Dead. Lifeless. That void in his eyes makes it all the more awful. She breaks free and finally screams—but realizes she's alone in the house. Her father works the night shift, and her mother is at a teacher's conference on Maui. The neighbors must have heard, but will they get here fast enough to stop him from reliving whatever horrific prom night his fragmented brain remembers and whatever twisted bet that particular unwind made with his sleazy friends?

She races to the kitchen, thinking she'll escape through the back door but realizing how unlikely that is. The kitchen has weapons, though. She reaches for the knife drawer, but he tackles her to the ground from behind. With her hand firmly on the drawer handle, the entire drawer comes out, sending knives and skewers and wooden spoons flying across the room—which means he has access to as many potential weapons as she does.

Standing above her now, he starts blathering out names. “Audrey, Katrina, Camille, Hazel!”

Are these girls that some unwind in his head once victimized? It isn't until he adds Andrew to the list that she realizes that they're all hurricanes.

“Category five!” he shouts over her screams. “Surf's up!” He's calling her a storm, and he intends to tame her.

As he moves toward her, she thrusts her hands out across the floor and grabs the first thing she can, swinging it at his head. It's an iron ladle. Not what she wanted, but she swings it hard enough to open a seam on his forehead. She swings again and again, and it keeps him at bay just long enough for a neighbor to arrive at the back door, pounding, then kicking the door.

The doorjamb splinters, the man bursts in, and the unwind turns tail, pushing past him—but not before grabbing the pistol from the man's hand. The rewind—now armed—disappears into the night. Only now that he's gone does Keliana burst into sobs, allowing herself to be comforted by her neighbor.

He regains consciousness, knowing he's not in his bed but not yet realizing where he is, or why he's there. Then awareness begins to shoot back at him in staccato machine-gun bursts. Outside. Perimeter fence. Hit in the head. Dirk! It was Dirk!

What time is it? It's still night. Does anyone know they're gone? Probably. There's a gash on his temple. It's stopped bleeding. He's sure he didn't lose much blood, but he's still dizzy when he gets up. Concussion? Possibly. Not important now. What's important is finding Dirk. So Keaton squeezes his way through the hole in the fence, birthing himself into a world he might be ready for, but is certainly not ready for him.

•  •  •

He follows the road for more than a mile until he reaches a portside town. It's still dark, and morning seems no closer. There seems to be a lot of activity for this time of night. Lights are on in many homes. Cars are on the street. It doesn't occur to him to think why. He's too focused on searching for Dirk. He will be hiding in the shadows. Lurking. That's what Dirk does. Even in the light of day he lurks. It's only when he sees a line of people with flashlights that Keaton realizes this is a search. It seems half the town is up, and Keaton knows who they must be searching for. What the hell did Dirk do?

Keaton hurries to duck into the cover of some bushes, but one of the flashlights catches him.

“Look there! I think it's him!”

They start running in his direction, and he pushes through the bushes and into a backyard, leaps a hedge, and is out on another street. But there are people everywhere. He's spotted again, and another half dozen people take chase. At the end of the street, headlights light him up for everyone to see.

“It's him!” someone shouts. “Look, he's got one umber hand and a cut on his forehead—just like Keliana said!”

He spins, looking for an escape route, but there is none. He's surrounded on all sides, and he knows that the crowd around him senses triumph. They move in.