UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,103

Cam. Keaton can see the torment in Cam’s face. He wishes he could ease it. All Cam did was try to give them some dignity. It worked for Keaton. It worked for all the others. But not for Dirk. Because Dirk is different. Dirk is missing the spark. Which means there’s nothing holding him together but stitches.

There’s a small burger joint at the end of the pier. This is where Dirk goes to take refuge. The motorcycle skids out from under him as he nears it. He gets up limping. The sharpshooters try to tranq him again. They take down a seagull. It would be funny if things weren’t so dire. One tranq shatters a window, saving Dirk the trouble of having to do it himself. He shoots back once with his stolen pistol—a wild shot that disappears into the dawn, then he climbs in through the broken window to escape the barrage of tranqs. Does he understand what happened? Keaton wonders. Has it finally occurred to his fragmented mind that they’re on an island? That all things here come full circle?

“He’s cornered,” Cam says.

“He’s armed,” Una warns.

“He could jump,” suggests the sheriff. “Swim to shore and escape.”

Keaton shakes his head. “Davy Jones,” he says. “Sink. Drown. Rewinds can’t swim. Not yet. Must learn again. Harder than motorcycle.”

One of Cam’s military officers suggests they take the whole building out. “A single mortar shell could do it.”

“That pier is a landmark,” the sheriff points out.

The officer shrugs. “Doesn’t a landmark need to be on land?”

“We’re not blowing anything up,” Cam announces. “Can we get close enough to shoot a canister of tear gas inside? Smoke him out?”

They throw ideas back and forth. Keaton has one of his own, but he’s not going to tell them. They’ll just dismiss him.

Keaton begins to walk down the pier.

“What the hell is he doing?” shouts the sheriff. “Get back here!”

Keaton ignores him. Let them tackle him or tranq him. That will be the only way to stop him. He knows what he needs to do. Hand of my hand. He and Dirk are, in some twisted way, family, and family takes care of its own. Cam must understand this, because Keaton hears him say, “Let him go.”

Dawn evolves into sunrise in the minute it takes to reach the shack at the end of the pier. There’s blood on the motorcycle lying on the wooden slats of the pier. Blood on the windowsill Dirk climbed over. Behind him military boeufs take position on the pier, weapons drawn, but keeping their distance. Keaton glances back at them once. Then climbs through the window.

Dirk sits in a corner. His pants are ripped, and his leg is torn open from when he flew off the bike, right along one of his rewound seams.

“Dead!” Dirk shouts, waving the gun carelessly “Saw you! Dead!”

“Almost dead,” Keaton says calmly. “They let me go. Knew it was you, not me.”

“Stupid people.”

Keaton sits beside him. Says nothing. He waits to see what Dirk will do. He wonders if Dirk will shoot him. Or maybe, realizing there’s no way out, shoot himself. But then it occurs to Keaton that Dirk would never do that. It’s a choice that Dirk is incapable of making. You have to be alive to kill yourself. A wave of pity suddenly washes over Keaton. What must it be like to go through the motions of life, yet not be alive? Keaton knows he himself lives, because he has compassion for this poor unfortunate creature before him. A creature that is doomed to be nothing more than a collection of parts.

Dirk suddenly grabs his hand. “Hand of my hand. Die with me? Butch and Sundance?”

As one stray memory in Keaton’s internal community recalls, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid died in a hopeless shootout. Keaton has no desire to re-create that scene. “No,” says Keaton, and instead says, “George and Lenny.”

Dirk looks at him questioningly. He doesn’t get the reference. Just as well.

“Give me the gun, Dirk.” It is perhaps the first complete self-motivated sentence he’s said.

Dirk’s dead eyes narrow. “Why?”

“Because I asked.”

“Why?”

Dirk holds the gun tighter. He aims it toward Keaton, and Keaton studies his eyes for a hint of anything. But no. There is no torment, no remorse, no fear, or even resignation. He could shoot Keaton. But he doesn’t. Instead he hands the gun to him.

“I shoot bad,” Dirk says. “You better. Talk better, think better, shoot better.”

“Probably,” admits Keaton.

“You go shoot them. Shoot them all. Is what