iBoy by Kevin Brooks
She’d hate me.
Wouldn’t she?
She’d hate me, despise me, and I’d lose her . . .
I’d lose her by trying to be true.
But the only way I was ever going to be with her was also by trying to be true.
Lucy was right, I thought to myself then. There are always two sides to everything.
I spent the next few hours just lying on my bed, thinking as hard as I could, racking my (ordinary) brain, trying to work out how to be true without losing everything . . . and maybe if I’d had more time, I might just have come up with an answer.
But I didn’t.
I never got the chance.
It was 02:12:16 when the doorbell rang. I was still lying on the bed, still fully dressed, still chasing circles inside my head, and I’d been lying there in the silent darkness for such a long time by then that some kind of inertia had set in. My head was dead. My body was ten thousand miles away. I wasn’t really aware of myself anymore. But when the doorbell rang, I was instantly wide awake.
Something was wrong.
It had to be.
The doorbell only rings at two o’clock in the morning when something is wrong.
With my iBrain already scanning for nearby phones, I jumped off the bed and ran out into the hallway. Gram was just coming out of her room, and it was obvious from her sleep-scrunched face and her messed-up hair that the doorbell had woken her up.
“Tommy?” she said sleepily, tightening the belt on her bathrobe. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know . . .”
The bell rang again.
Gram looked at me, slightly worried now. “Who could it be at this time of night?”
“I don’t know.”
She started moving toward the door. “Well, I suppose we’d better see —”
“Hold on, Gram,” I said, moving ahead of her. “I’ll deal with it.”
“No, Tommy —” she started to say, but I was already at the door now. My iBrain had picked up the presence of four mobile phones in the corridor outside, all of them switched to silent.
“Who is it?” I called out.
There was a moment’s silence, a muffled whisper, and then I heard Lucy’s voice.
“Tom . . . ?”
She sounded desperate.
“Tom, don’t — ummf . . .”
I didn’t stop to think, I just grabbed the door handle, unlocked the door, and yanked it open . . . and there they all were: Lucy, Eugene O’Neil, Yusef Hashim, a big black guy I’d never seen before . . .
And Howard Ellman.
Lucy was barefoot, dressed only in a long white nightgown, so I guessed she’d just been dragged out of bed. Her face was streaked with tears, she had an ugly red cut just below her right eye, and her mouth was sealed with a strip of black tape. Yusef Hashim had a gun to her head. The gun, an automatic pistol, was taped to his hand and wrist with black duct tape, and his hand and the pistol were tightly fixed to Lucy’s head with more duct tape. Hand, pistol, Lucy’s head . . . all taped together, like some kind of nightmare repair job.
I stared at Lucy, unable to move.
She was petrified.
And so was I.
“Hello, Thomas,” Ellman said softly. “I hear you’ve been looking for me.”
I stared at him, unable to speak.
“Just so you understand,” he said, smiling calmly, “Hashim’s finger is taped over the trigger of the gun, OK? So if you try zapping him, or me, or anyone else . . . if you go anywhere near her, if you try calling the police . . . if you do anything that I don’t like, Hashim’s going to pull the trigger and your girlfriend’s brains are going to be splattered all over the place. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said quietly. “I understand.”
I saw his eyes glancing over my shoulder then, and as I turned to see what he was looking at, I saw Gram picking up the phone in the hallway.
“No, Gram!” I shouted. “No . . .”
Ellman pushed past me, shoving me into the wall, and strode over to where Gram was standing. Without a moment’s thought, he snatched the phone from her hand, ripped out the cable, then cracked her across the head with the phone. She didn’t make a sound, she just crumpled to the floor and lay still, her head streaming with blood.
“You fucking bastard,” I spat, lunging at Ellman.
“Hash,” he said quickly.
A muffled cry of pain stopped me in my tracks, and I turned round to see that Hashim had rammed Lucy’s head against the wall and was digging the barrel of the gun into her head.
“I warned you,” Ellman said to me. “You make another move, your bitch is dead.”
As I turned to face him, breathing heavily, he just smiled at me.
I looked down at Gram. Her face was very pale, and she was breathing shallowly. Through gritted teeth, I said to Ellman, “She needs help.”
He shrugged. “It’s up to you — you can help her all you want . . . as long as you don’t mind having a girlfriend with no head.”
I heard the flat door closing then, and I looked down the hallway to see Lucy being dragged into the front room by Hashim, with O’Neil and the black guy following them.
I gazed down at Gram again, then back at Ellman. “Can I at least get her into her room and make her comfortable?”
Ellman smiled, shaking his head. “You’ve only got yourself to blame, you know. If you’d left things alone, none of this would be happening.”
I stared desperately at Gram. Her poor gray hair was matted with blood now, and she looked so small and weak . . .
I’d never felt more helpless in my life.
“Get in there,” Ellman told me, nodding his head toward the front room.
When I went into the front room, Hashim and Lucy were standing over by the window, and O’Neil and the black guy were just hanging around by the door.
Ellman told me to sit down.
I looked over at Lucy.
“I’m so sorry,” I said to her.
She couldn’t answer me.
“Don’t worry —” I started to tell her.
“Sit down!” Ellman barked.
I sat down on the settee, and he sat in the armchair opposite me. He hadn’t changed very much from the photograph I’d seen of him in his police record. He was about fifteen years older, of course, so his face wasn’t quite so young-looking as before, but apart from that, he looked pretty much the same. The same shaved head, the same angular face, the same soulless eyes. His eyes — described in the police record as pale blue — were actually so pale that they were almost transparent, like the blue of a distant sky. He was dressed in an expensive black suit, an equally expensive black T-shirt, and shiny black crocodile-skin shoes.
My iBrain told me that in the inside pocket of his suit jacket he had a BlackBerry Bold 9700.
“All right,” he said calmly, lighting a cigarette. “This is how it’s going to go. I ask you a question, you give me an answer. If you don’t give me an answer, or if you lie to me, the bitch gets it. OK?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” He puffed on his cigarette. “All right, first question. You’re the kid who calls himself iBoy, right?”
“How do you know—?”
“Just answer the fucking question.”
I glanced over at Lucy. Her eyes were on me, but I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. I looked back at Ellman.
“Yeah,” I told him.
“You’re iBoy, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“And it’s you that’s been going round Crow Town fucking things up?”
“Yeah.”
“Stirring up all kinds of shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Yeah, why? I mean, what’s in it for you?”
“Nothing.”
He shook his head. “No one does anything for nothing.”
“I’m just doing what I think is right,” I told him.
He laughed. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
I nodded at O’Neil. “He raped Lucy. Him, Hashim, Adebajo . . . the rest of them. They raped her, for Christ’s sake. They fucking raped her.”
Ellman shrugged. “And your point is?”
There was nothing in his eyes, nothing at all. No feeling, no sympathy, not a shred of humanity. This man was sick. There was no point in talking to him.
“Forget it,” I sighed, looking away. “It doesn’t matter . . .”
“You want revenge, is that it? You want payback? Is that what this is all about?”
“Yeah, if you say so . . .”
“Well, is it or not?
I said nothing.
Ellman suddenly leaned forward and yelled into my face. “Fucking answer me . . . NOW!”
“Yes,” I said slowly, looking right at him. “Revenge . . . that’s what it’s all about. Revenge, punishment, retribution. You’re just as much to blame for what happened to Lucy as the ones who actually did it —”
“Yeah? And how d’you work that one out?”
“You tempt people to ruin and destroy —”
“What?” he said, frowning at me.
“You ruin people, you and your world . . . you ruin lives.” I shrugged. “So, yeah, I’ve been going round the tower blocks stirring up all kinds of shit, because I knew that’d piss you off, and that eventually you’d come looking for me . . . and I guess it worked. Because here you are.”
Ellman smiled. “And now what? You’re going to kill me?”
“If I have to.”
He laughed, looking over at O’Neil and the others. “You hear that? He says he’s going to kill me if he has to.” They laughed along with him, and then he turned back to me. “OK,” he said. “Next question. This iBoy thing . . . what’s that all about?”
I shrugged again. “Nothing, really . . .”
“Nothing?”
“It’s just a bit of fun, you know . . . dressing up like a superhero, wearing a costume and a mask so no one knows who I am.”
“Where is it?”
“Where’s what?”
“The costume, the mask. Where are they?”
“Why?”
“That’s not an answer, that’s a question.” He nodded over at Hashim. Hashim jabbed the pistol into Lucy’s head again. She winced, but didn’t make a sound.
“All right,” I said to Ellman, holding my hands up. “All right, please don’t hurt her anymore.”
“Where’s the costume and the mask?” he repeated.
“There isn’t any costume,” I sighed.
“What?”
“No costume, no mask. Honestly . . . it’s just me.”
Ellman stared at me for a moment, then he looked over at O’Neil. “Check his room, Yo. And all the other rooms, too. See if you can find any of this iBoy shit — costume, mask, Taser, any kind of tech stuff.”
O’Neil went out, and Ellman turned back to me. “So, it’s just you, yeah?”
I nodded.
Ellman smiled. “You want to show me what you mean by that?”
I didn’t have any choice now — I had to show him the truth. If I didn’t, if I tried to hide what I was, what I could do . . . well, I didn’t even want to think about what Ellman would do to Lucy.
I just couldn’t risk it.
“Look,” I said to Ellman, and I turned on my iSkin. As I felt it starting to glow and shimmer, I watched his reaction. He didn’t move or say anything for a while, he just sat there in mute disbelief, staring openmouthed at the shifting colors and shapes of my skin. Without saying anything, I showed him my hands, and then I lifted up my shirt and showed him my chest, letting him see that my iSkin was everywhere.
“Shit, man,” he whispered eventually. “How the fuck do you do that?”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“You see this, Tweet?” he said to the black guy without taking his eyes off me.
“Fucking right.”
“Shit,” said Hashim. “He’s a fucking freak, man.”
I couldn’t bear to look at Lucy. I hadn’t looked at her since admitting to Ellman that I was iBoy. And now . . . well, Hashim was right. I was a freak. And who in their right mind wants anything to do with a freak?
I turned off my iSkin.
Ellman said, “You can turn it on and off, just like that?”
“Yeah.”
“Fuck . . .” He looked at me. “So how does it work?”
“I don’t know . . .”
I could hear O’Neil ransacking my room now, emptying drawers, throwing stuff around . . .
I said to Ellman, “He’s not going to find anything.”
“No? What about the Taser?”
I sighed. “There’s no Taser.”
“And the phone stuff, the computer stuff . . . whatever it is you’ve been using to track and hack and all that shit?”
I tapped my head. “It’s all in here.”
He shook his head. “I don’t get it.”
I looked at him. “If I tell you everything, absolutely everything, will you let me check on my gran? I just want to make sure that she’s OK, you know? Make her comfortable.”
Ellman thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “OK.”
So I started telling him everything. How the iPhone that Davey Carr had thrown from Lucy’s window had cracked open my skull and left bits of itself inside my brain, and how those bits had somehow become part of me, giving me all the powers of an iPhone and more . . . but as I told Ellman all this, I wasn’t looking at him or thinking of him . . . I was just staring at the floor, thinking of Lucy. I was telling my story for her. I still couldn’t physically look at her, but I was looking at her in my heart.
When I’d finished explaining everything, I finally looked up at Ellman. His icy blue eyes were fixed on mine, his face emotionless.
“That’s it?” he said.
“Yeah. I mean, I know you probably don’t believe it, but —”
“Show me.”
“What?”
“Show me what you can do.”
“What about my gran? Can I go and check on her now?”
“No.”
“But you said –”
“I was lying.” He smiled. “Now, show me what you can do, or I’ll go and get your gran and rip her fucking head off.”
I stared at him for a moment, hating him, despising him, wanting to hurt him more than anything else in the world, but I knew he wasn’t bluffing. I knew he had it in him to kill Gram without even thinking about it. So I just nodded at him, and I watched as he felt his phone vibrate.
“Answer it,” I said.
He took his BlackBerry out of his pocket and opened the text I’d just sent him.
It read: your dead.
He looked at me, grinning. “I’m impressed.”
“I sent you some pictures, too,” I said.
He opened up the photographs. One of them showed him hitting Gram with the phone, another one was of Hashim and Lucy . . . others showed O’Neil and the guy called Tweet.
Ellman studied them all for a while, then looked at me. “And this is all in your head, yeah?”
I nodded.
He said, “You got WiFi?”
“I’ve got everything.”
“So you could be calling anyone right now?”
“I could be, but I’m not.”
“Good. Because you know what’ll happen if I hear a siren, or if anyone comes anywhere near this flat, don’t you?”
I nodded. “I’m not going to call anyone.”
He leaned toward me. “It won’t only be your bitch who gets it —”
“She’s not my bitch,” I said coldly.
“She’ll just be the first,” he continued, ignoring me. “Any trouble from you, anything at all, and I’m going to do the bitch first, then her family, then the old lady, and I’m going to make you watch me doing it . . . and then I’ll fucking do you.” He smiled. ??
“Yeah.”
“OK, good.” He lit a cigarette. “Now what about all this electric stuff I’ve heard about? Yoyo says you zapped him or something. Is that right?”
“Yeah.”
“Show me how you do it.”
I looked at him. “Who do you want me to zap? I can do it to you, if you want.”
He grinned at me. “Come here, Tweet.”
Tweet came over and stood in front of me. He was huge — big, strong, solid — and as he stood there staring down impassively at me, there was no trace of fear in his eyes. He wasn’t frightened of pain.
Ellman said to me, “Can you do it without putting him in the hospital?”
I nodded, looking up at Tweet. “I can hurt him as much or as little as you want.”
Ellman smiled. “Do it.”
I hesitated for a moment, considering my options. I knew that I could take out Ellman and Tweet with a big burst of power, but that still left Hashim and O’Neil. O’Neil was still searching my room — I could hear him crashing around — so it was possible I could get to him before he realized that anything was wrong.
But Hashim . . . ?
I glanced over and saw him watching me. His hand was so tightly taped to the gun, and the gun so tightly taped to Lucy’s head, that even if I could have zapped him from here — and he was all the way over on the other side of the room, so I was pretty sure that I couldn’t — it only needed the slightest twitch of his finger for the pistol to go off. And I guessed that being electrocuted would more than likely make his finger twitch.
I glanced at Lucy.
Unbelievably, she winked at me.
God, it made me feel so good.
“What are you fucking waiting for?” Ellman said.
I looked at him, looked up at Tweet, then reached out and touched Tweet’s knee. Like I said, he was a really huge guy. So, just to make sure that he felt it, I gave him a zap that was somewhere between not-too-bad and pretty-bad. And he felt it, all right. He yelped — in a surprisingly high-pitched, almost girly, kind of way — and as his knee flashed blue and his leg jerked out from under him, he toppled over and crashed to the floor.