UnBound by Neal Shusterman
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.
8 • Cam
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.
9 • Keliana
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.
10 • Keaton
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.
“No!” he shouts. “Eraser! Fumble! Red X!” He forces the right words. “Mistake! You’re making . . . a mistake!”
And a boeuf-looking teen close
11 • Cam
“This could be worse,” Una tells Cam as they drive the short distance to Kaunakakai, followed by a whole military entourage.
“Really? How?”
“The girl could have been hurt, but she wasn’t.”
Practically the same moment the security detail found the hole in the perimeter fence, the call came in from the Kaunakakai sheriff about the attack.
“One of your damn monsters came after a girl.” The sheriff had spoken with such seething vitriol in his voice it made Cam wince. “I want you to know I’m authorizing the use of deadly force.”
Cam pounds the steering wheel of the jeep hard enough to bruise his hand.
“Easy,” says Una, “that won’t help anyone.” Then she adds, “Besides, those hands were meant for better things.”
He takes a deep breath and tries to dispel his frustration. This is entirely his fault. He should have given in to everyone else’s paranoia. He should have treated them like prisoners. He should not have let his personal feelings get in the way. Maybe the rewinds need to prove their humanity before it can be granted to them. But he knows it’s not all the rewinds, is it? There’s only one that’s a problem. One that’s profoundly different from the others. Number 00047. Dirk Mullen. Even when he chose his name, he just pointed randomly to the page, as if he didn’t care. As if he knew his existence didn’t warrant a name. For so long Cam had obsessed over whether or not he himself had a soul. Now he realizes he must. Because he’s seen into the eyes of one who doesn’t, and that void within—whatever it is—is the very definition of hell.
“Of all the rewinds to escape, why did it have to be Forty-seven?”
“What about the other one?” Una asks.
“Keaton,” Cam says. Dirk might still be a number, but Keaton is not. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Forty-seven killed him.”
“I hope not,” Una says. “He’s a good kid.”
“They all are,” Cam points out, then has to qualify. “All but one.”
They’re headed to the police station, but a commotion on what should be a quiet residential street pulls their attention. Shouts and headlights and revving engines, like some sort of street race—then the blast of a shotgun followed by silence.
“I was wrong,” Una says as they turn a corner and race toward the crowd. “This couldn’t get any worse.”
12 • Keaton
Five minutes before Cam and Una hear the gunshot, the mob’s emotion reaches a fever pitch. They will have justice. They will not wait for it to be meted out; they will take it themselves.
Keaton cannot speak. They have gagged him. But what would it matter if he could? They did not listen to his protests before; why should they listen to him now? They have their man. He fits the description. And what are the chances, really, that there’d be two rewinds running around town? Much less two rewinds with one umber hand and a cut on the forehead?
Keaton knows from their angry shouts what Dirk has done. Not the details but the gist of it, and it’s enough. He doesn’t blame the crowd for what they’re doing. Were he one of them, he might do the same. Or maybe not. Because their choice of punishment is far too visceral, and Keaton feels the terror of every single Unwind within him. A hundred screams fill his head.
They have him stretched out on the ground in the middle of an intersection with ropes tied to each arm and each leg. The ends of those four ropes are tied to four vehicles, each pointed in a different direction. The ropes are slack now, but they won’t be for long.
The boeuf-looking teen gets in his face—the one who probably threw the first stone the other day. He’s so incensed, spittle flies from his mouth when he speaks.
“You’re gonna die, you know that, don’t you?”
“You tell him, Todd,” goads one of his buddies.
Keaton doesn’t give him the satisfaction of mumbling from behind the gag.
“This is what they used to do to people who didn’t deserve to live,” Todd says. “Back when punishment fit the crime. It’s called quartering. We’re gonna pull apart what never shoulda been put together in the first place.”
Engines rev. He feels vibrations in the ropes. They pull just taut enough to make his joints ache. He can hear people in the crowd talking to one another. Some are entirely on Todd’s side and wait for this horrible circus to commence. But there are other voices too. “This is going too far,” he hears a woman say. “Someone should stop this.”
Someone. Not her. The faint voices of protest aren’t really interested in stopping this, Keaton realizes. All they want is to assuage their own guilt, so after it happens, they can say to themselves, Well I wanted to put an end to it, but nobody listened. Which makes them just as complicit as the others.
Engines rev again. He closes his eyes and tenses his muscles, but he knows that he is no match for the horsepower in those four vehicles.
Then he hears a girl’s voice. She’s cursing. She’s yelling at people to get out of her way. He opens his eyes to see her pushing through the crowd. Her eyes are red from crying. Her jaw is hardened in resolve—but as she looks at him, her expression changes. Her head tilts a bit. She suddenly looks confused. Troubled, but in a different way than she was just a moment ago. Keaton recognizes her, too. This is the girl who came up to him at the fence. The one who was kind to him. Keliana. He resolves to hold eye contact with her for as long as he can, until the cars throw their transmissions into gear, which will be any second now.
“This isn’t him!” she says. Quietly at first, then again, more loudly. “This isn’t him!”
Todd storms to her like he might strike her but doesn’t. “What do you mean it isn’t him? Of course it is!” He tries to move her away from Keaton. “You let us take care of this! He’s hurt you enough.”
“No!” She shakes him off and comes closer to Keaton. “You can’t do this!”
Todd ignores her and raises his hand, signaling the drivers.
Then a shotgun blast rings out. It brings everyone to silence.
Another man—a police officer, maybe the sheriff—comes forward, holding the shotgun he has just fired into the air.
“She says you have the wrong rewind. You want to go to prison, Todd? Not just for murder, but for killing the wrong man?”
“It’s not a man!” screeches Todd.
“That’s right,” says the sheriff calmly. “It’s a boy. Now cut him loose.”
That’s when Cam and Una arrive on his other side.
“Untie him, or I swear to you, every one of you will be held accountable!” the sheriff warns. The spirit of the mob seems to melt into the ground. It’s no longer a mob but a bewildered group of people, sheepish and ashamed. Now people crowd around Keaton, untying him. It’s Cam who takes the gag from his mouth, and Keaton coughs, choking on his own saliva.
“It’s all right, Keaton,” Cam says. “It’s all right.”
He tries to stand, but his joints ache from the strain, as if he’d been on a medieval rack. Una helps him to his feet. He turns and finds Keliana, who is still there, but keeping her distance. He holds up his umber hand to show her. “Not me!” he says. “Left hand, not right!”
“I know,” she says.
Then the sheriff calls out to the crowd. “Everyone better get yourselves home before I remember who was here tonight.”
People begin to meander away, then, from the edge of the crowd, someone says, “Hey—where the hell is my Harley?”
13 • Cam
Cam’s brain has begun to feel disjointed. Fragmented. It always does when stress starts to overwhelm him. He can’t let it happen. Not now. Lockdown, he says to himself, and clamps down on his panic. The crew of his own personal submarine must not mutiny.
The first clue to Dirk’s whereabouts is the missing motorcycle. While the mob was
A part of Cam wants to run, just like Dirk trying to escape the mob’s judgment. But he can’t. He won’t. He looks at Una, and, as always, her presence stabilizes him.
“You didn’t make him,” Una says, reading him better than he reads himself. “What he did—what he is—it’s not your fault.”
“No,” Cam admits. “But the fact that he escaped—that is my fault. Which means I’m accountable for anything that he does.”
There’s nothing she can say that can soften that reality.
“I’ll deal with the fallout later,” Cam says. “What matters now is that we catch him.”
As he looks around, he sees more and more military personnel from the compound arriving, not quite outnumbering the mob, but their presence begins to subdue the worst of the hatemongers even more than the sheriff’s presence had. Some people leave, but more linger, probably anticipating a more accurate reckoning. Not mob justice, but at this point any justice will do.
With the support of troops under his jurisdiction, Cam tells the sheriff, “We’ll take it from here. This is our problem.”
But the sheriff isn’t about to yield. “It stopped being your problem when your thing attacked that girl.” For a moment it looks like there’s going to be a standoff, until Keaton comes between them.
“Sunset!” he says. “Into the sunset!”
Keaton sputters and grimaces, trying to force coherence to his thoughts.
“What’s this one babbling about?” asks the sheriff, with no patience for it.
“Shh!” says Cam, and gives Keaton time to form his thoughts.