The Last Book in the Universe Read online

  When I come out of it, Ryter is there, holding a damp cloth to my forehead. I’m in his stackbox. They must have carried me here — I certainly didn’t walk.

  “You’re okay,” he tells me. “It’s over.”

  Like always I’m exhausted and weak and ashamed. I hate it when someone sees me like this.

  “A grand mal seizure,” Ryter says. “Very impressive. I tried to put a stick between your teeth, and you bit it in half.”

  That explains my sore teeth. I have that familiar dreamy feeling that always comes afterward, and more than anything I want to sleep and forget. But then it comes back to me, like a splash of cold water on my brain, and I sit up and say, “I’ve got to go. What hour is it?”

  “The hour before dawn,” Ryter says. “What’s your hurry?”

  I’m trying to stand up but my legs are too weak to make it.

  “Rest,” he says and, old as he is, Ryter easily holds me down. He doesn’t understand why I can’t stay, so I tell him about Bean and how I have to leave before Billy Bizmo reaches out and stops me.

  Ryter listens, and his ancient eyes go soft. Then he nods and says, “Ah. Now it all makes sense.”

  I’m not sure that anything makes sense, but I haven’t got the strength to argue. Tired, so tired.

  “Sleep,” he urges me. “We leave at dawn.”

  I fight to stay awake but my eyes close on their own and in three deep breaths I’m fast asleep.

  When the old man wakes me, the sky is pale gray and so low you can almost reach out and touch it.

  “Time to go,” he says, nudging my shoulder. “The Bangers are looking for you.”

  That startles me wide awake.

  “How do you know?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “I told you before, bad news travels fast out here near the Edge. Have you recovered? Are you ready?”

  He’s got a ragged old sack strapped to his back, and a long, crooked stick to help him walking.

  “You can’t come with me,” I tell him.

  “And why is that?”

  “You’ll slow me down. I have to move fast.”

  Ryter raises his walking stick and pokes me in my stomach hard enough to get my attention. “Listen, young fool. We haven’t much time, so I won’t waste any of it being polite. I already saved your life once. That little mob would have torn you apart if I hadn’t intervened. So what happens the next time you have a seizure and no one’s there to keep you safe?”

  I shove the stick away. “I’ll take care of myself.”

  His tone softens. “Think about it, son. You can’t do this thing alone. Cross three latches without a guide? You’ll be dead before sundown, or wish you were.”

  I’m shrugging on my carrybag, edging to the door of his miserable little stackbox. “What do you care? Why do you want to help me?”

  The old man raises his stick and bars the door, like he’s buying time while he thinks about his answer. “Two reasons,” he says after a pause. “First, I want to know how your story ends. And second, this will be my last opportunity for great adventure. A mission to save the life of a beloved young woman — what more could an old man want? I shall accompany you, and then write our tale of courage in my book.”

  “You’re crazy,” I warn him. “You might be killed.”

  “Crazy?” He laughs and shakes his head. “They said Don Quixote was crazy, too.”

  “Who’s Don Keehote?” I ask.

  “A man who believed in doing the right thing, even if it cost him his life,” Ryter says. He shoves me out the door. “Come on, boy. Let me show you the way.”

  And he marches into the daylight with his puny walking stick raised like a mighty sword.

  LITTLE FACE TRIES TO FOLLOW us. He’s running along, leaping from one junk pile to the next, making a game of it. “Chox!” he sings out. “Chox!”

  He knows I haven’t got any more. It’s like he gets as much pleasure out of saying the word as eating the actual choxbar.

  “You made a friend,” Ryter says, grinning at me.

  But he knows the little boy can’t come with us, that it’s much too dangerous. He signals to Little Face and the kid dances up to him. Ryter has a word in his ear. A moment later the kid sings, “Chox!” one last time and then runs back in the direction of the stacks.

  It’s a relief but at the same time I’m already sort of missing the little pest.

  “There are thousands like him,” Ryter comments as we pick up our pace. “Orphaned or abandoned, fending for themselves. Very few live to be as old as you, let alone as ancient as me. A great writer once wrote of a very similar situation, in a city called London. His name was Charles Dickens, and he, too, was an epileptic.”

  That’s it. I stop in my tracks. Ryter looks at me with concern. “Something wrong?” he asks.

  “Shut up about the spaz, okay? I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “And you don’t want to think about it,” Ryter adds. “Fine. Agreed. I shall not speak of the innumerable famous and successful human beings who shared your condition. I shall not speak of Julius Caesar, Napoléon Bonaparte, Leonardo da Vinci, Agatha Christie, Lewis Carroll, or Harriet Tubman. I will never again mention Joan of Arc, Vincent van Gogh, Sir Isaac Newton, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edgar Allan Poe, or the great Paganini. Done. Finished. My lips are zipped.” The old man looks really pleased with himself and then gestures with his walking stick. “Proceed. Lead on.”

  I go, “I thought you knew the way.”

  He shrugs. “This is your mission. Have you a plan?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  “Ah,” he says. “Then may I suggest we travel by the Pipe?”

  Like I mentioned before, the Pipe runs out to the edge of the known world, and keeps on going. They say it runs all the way into the Badlands, where the radiation will rot your bones. But what I didn’t know until Ryter tells me is that parts of the Pipe branch off and run between the latches.

  “All part of the greatest water supply system ever devised,” he says, leading us under the ruins of the giant pipe, which is supported by crumbling concrete pylons. “A masterpiece of hydraulic engineering,” he says. “It would still be functional, except the main source of water dried up after the Big Shake. They tried various other solutions for a century or so, at enormous expense, but nothing worked out, and in the long run it fell into disrepair.”

  He loves to rattle on with all his backtimer talk, and I’m willing to listen if he can really help me find Bean. And he’s right about the Pipe. I have to help him climb up the side of the pylon because the old iron stairs are partly rusted away, and when we get to the Pipe itself, you can see where one of the access panels has been unbolted.

  “There,” says Ryter. “Whew! I was a much younger man the last time I climbed this high. Go on, check it out.”

  I slip through the opening. There’s plenty of room to stand up inside, if you don’t mind being ankle deep in smelly old rainwater. Shafts of light come through where bolts have rusted out, and it makes the whole Pipe look shot full of bullet holes. “Hey!” I shout, and my voice sounds like it echoes all the way to the next latch.

  Ryter crawls into the Pipe and sits panting, out of breath.

  “You’ll never make it,” I tell him. “We’ve got miles and miles to go.”

  “I’ll make it,” he gasps. “I’ve got a book to finish.”

  I stare at him huddled there, his frayed leggings soaking up the puddle of rainwater. “No one cares about your old book!” I tell him. “Let’s go.”

  “Right,” he says, using his walking stick to get himself standing.

  “Ready?” I say, feeling bad for yelling at the old gummy.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.” He looks around and seems to like what he sees. “By the Edge we travel, son. By the Edge we live or die.”

  He makes everything sound so noble and grand, but the truth is we’re a couple of nobodies hiding inside a rusty old water pipe. Just us an
d the pale rats that scurry ahead. We slop along in the dead water for a while and then we come to a part that’s dry underfoot, which is easier going. Ryter is breathing better now and he looks stronger than I would have thought possible.

  Maybe he’ll make it after all.

  “Seven miles, more or less,” he says, keeping up with me. “That’ll bring us to the next latch.”

  “You’ve done this before?” I ask.

  “Oh yes,” he says. “Years ago. Certain people took a dislike to me and I thought it best to move along. Many refugees used the Pipe in those days, to move around the city. Now it seems to have been forgotten, like so many other things.”

  We plod on. There’s nowhere to go but straight ahead. Small red eyes watch us, keeping their distance. I’m not afraid of rats, not while I’m awake. Sleeping, that’s different. They say a rat will eat your nose before you can wake up. Eat it before you can smell them. Teeth so sharp you don’t feel a thing until too late.

  “Why do the Bangers care if you leave?” Ryter wants to know.

  I explain what Billy said, about how no one could go anywhere without his permission.

  “What I don’t understand is why the gang leader focused on you in particular,” Ryter says.

  I shrug and say, “He took an interest.”

  “Exactly,” Ryter says, nodding to himself. “But why?”

  I can tell he doesn’t expect me to come up with an answer, that he’s really asking himself. But it borks me off that he thinks I’m not important enough to matter.

  Ryter sees the look on my face and gives my arm a reassuring squeeze. “Something to ponder, son. I mean no disrespect. But sometimes it can be useful, not to say life-saving, to understand why a latchboss does what he does. I’ve an idea that Mr. Bizmo knows something we don’t. He had a specific reason for forbidding your departure. If we can figure out what it is, it may help us get where we’re going.”

  “Yeah? That’s what you think?” I say. “Well, here’s what I think. Trying to read Billy’s mind will get us canceled.”

  That shuts the old geez up, and we trudge along in silence for a couple of miles. We come to a part of the Pipe that sags, which means the rainwater has collected knee-high. The water is slimy and buzzing with mosquitoes, but Ryter doesn’t hesitate, he wades through it like he could care less about the wet or the bugs or the slithery things that slip along the edges. The weirdest thing about him, though, is how he doesn’t seem to get mad at me when I’m mad at him. Like he expects me to be borked about stuff and doesn’t take it personally.

  Later on, when we stop to rest for a few minutes, I share some of the edibles with him. He looks the stuff over and goes, “This is proov food, right?” so I tell him about the proov girl and he says, “Dangerous. Contact with the genetically improved is exceedingly dangerous. Not for them. For us. We’re what they used to be, and they hate us for it.”

  He eats the proov food, though, every crumb, and then we’re on our way. We walk and walk until the daylight fades and the darkness makes the Pipe seem even bigger and longer, and the red eyes are closer. We walk until we feel wind in our faces, and that’s when Ryter stops and says, “We’ve come to the break.”

  “The break?”

  “A section of the Pipe is missing up ahead. We’ll have to go to ground for a mile or so.”

  I walk out to where the Pipe ends, but it’s so dark, I can’t see all the way to the ground. It feels like we’re floating in the sky and that makes me dizzy, so I back carefully away, until the rusty steel is more or less solid under my feet.

  “How do we get down?” I ask.

  “We better wait until daylight,” Ryter suggests. “No sense coming this far and then breaking our necks, is there?”

  It drives me crazy not to keep moving, but I know he’s right about waiting. I can’t save Bean if I’m busted up, that’s for sure. So we crouch at the curve of the Pipe and take turns trying to sleep.

  “You go first,” he says. “I’ll entertain our little friends.”

  He tosses a pebble at the red eyes and they scurry back out of range.

  “Pleasant dreams,” he says, and I’m thinking, right, like I’m really going to fall asleep in a rat-filled pipe, but the next thing I know he’s shaking me and whispering, “Wake up. They’re coming.”

  I hear it.

  shika-tik-tik, shika-tik-tik

  The sound gets closer and closer. Something is coming down the Pipe to get us.

  SHIKA-TIK-TIK, shika-tik-tik

  I’d give anything for a chetty blade or a splat gun, but all I’ve got is my carrybag. Better than nothing, but just barely. It has a rope loop on it, so I can swing it when the thing comes within range. “Thing” because it doesn’t sound human. Too delicate and steady to be the Bangers. Too large and loud to be a rat.

  Unless it’s a rat the size of a wild dog. Just thinking about that makes me shrink up inside myself.

  Ryter and me are both hugging the curved wall of the Pipe, in hopes that whatever it is will go right by us.

  shika-tik … tik

  No such luck — it’s slowing down.

  I’m staring into the dark so hard, it feels like my eyes are bugging out. Tik … tik … closer and closer, until it sounds like I could reach out and touch it. Or it could reach out and touch me.

  The shadows move, and I see it has the shape of a hunched-up monster. It spots me or senses me somehow and veers in my direction. Tik … tik must be talons dragging. Claws as sharp as needles. Icy water floods through my guts. My heart slams. I’ve forgotten how to breathe. The thing is reaching out for me.

  I rear back with the carrybag and start to swing with all my strength.

  “Chox,” the monster says.

  Just what we need tagging along, a five-year-old kid who only knows one word. What happened is Little Face found himself a walking stick like Ryter’s and dragged it along, shika-tik-tik. We’re stuck with him because there isn’t time to take him back, or anybody there to keep him even if we did. It seems like no matter what I do, the kid keeps finding me in the dark.

  I figure it’s the gummy’s fault somehow.

  “If you hadn’t come along, the little brat would still be there,” I tell him.

  “You’re the one who fed him,” Ryter says. “The poor child has been hungry all his life, so it’s no wonder he’s fastened on you, Mr. Choxbar.”

  The gummy speaks true, but that doesn’t make me any less angry. Why should I care what happens to the little brat if nobody else does?

  “Don’t be discouraged,” Ryter says. “The child can look out for himself. That’s how he survives.”

  “Running a latch is hard enough alone,” I remind him. “With three it’s impossible.”

  “Oh,” says Ryter, raising his feathery white eyebrows. “So you’re an experienced latch runner, are you?”

  The way he looks at me makes me want to tell the truth.

  “I’ve never left the latch,” I admit. “Not since they brought me here.”

  “Then perhaps you’ll take my word for it. What we’re attempting to do is far from impossible. Dangerous, yes. But hardly impossible. After all, a runner crossed three latches to get the message to you, didn’t he? If he can do it, so can we. And with three of us we’re less likely to be mistaken for professional runners or smugglers.”

  What he says makes sense, although I hate to admit it. I’m out of choxbars, but I give Little Face a chunk of proov edibles and he gobbles it down like he’s starving, flashing a smile that eats up his whole face.

  We wait until the sky is all the way light, and then check out the end of the Pipe. There’s no stairway, but Ryter figures we can skinny down the pylon somehow. “We haven’t much choice,” he says. “We’ll have to risk it.”

  As it turns out, Little Face shows us the way. He slips over the Edge and then crawls down, using the rusty steel bars that stick out of the concrete. About ten seconds later he’s standing on the ground below, shouting, �
��Chox! Chox!” which I guess is his name for me, or maybe just a way of saying, I did it!

  Ryter’s saggy old face is pale and worried, but I know better than to say anything. He goes next, and it takes him a lot longer than Little Face, but he manages to get down without breaking any bones.

  Now they’re both looking up at me. “Come on!” Ryter calls out. “You can do it!”

  I think about Bean, how she’s waiting for me, and how it doesn’t matter if I’m scared of heights. About halfway down, my feet slip and I have to hug the concrete to keep from falling. Don’t move, I’m thinking, if you move, you fall.

  “You’re almost there,” Ryter says, right below me. “Reach down with your right foot.”

  I do what he says and he keeps telling me where to put my feet and after about a thousand years I make it all the way to the ground and stand there shaking.

  “What if the spaz had hit me?” I say, more to myself than anybody else.

  “It didn’t,” Ryter says. “And we don’t have time to worry about things that didn’t happen. We better get a move on; it’s a two-hour hike to the next section of the Pipe. Assuming it’s still there.”

  “What?” I say with a gasp. “You don’t know?”

  “The last time I came this way was many years ago,” he admits. “Things change. You never know a thing for certain until you’ve seen it with your own eyes.”

  What I do see is pretty amazing. In this latch the old scrapers come all the way out to the Edge. They say in the backtimes the scrapers were made of glass. Giant glass buildings a hundred stories high, maybe more. They say people went inside the glass buildings, traveling up and down in electric boxes, and that toward the end the people never came out or walked on the ground, but lived and died inside. The scrapers are just twisted steel skeletons now, enormous, eerie-looking things that disappear somewhere up in the smog.

  Tons and tons of crumbled concrete surround the base of each scraper, stuff that must have fallen when the Big Shake rocked the world and split open the earth and dried up the rivers and stuff. When the light hits it the wreckage glitters like diamonds, but Ryter says that’s only chunks of broken glass, and that many a man has died looking for treasure that doesn’t exist.