Where by Kit Reed

back when you’re done.”
    With one leg over the edge of the boat, Davy says, “Too dark. It’s not like you’ll know. Shit, I don’t even know when I’ll be done.”
    â€œDude, how you’re gonna get back?”
    â€œAnybody’s car.” He eases himself over the side. “It’s not like anybody needs it. They’re all gone.”
    â€œEvery shitass with a rifle’s up there guarding the road.”
    â€œAnybody’s boat,” he says, and drops.

 
    11
    Ned
    Anywhen
    I had a whole world, and now it’s just me and Father, Father and me, and it’s awful. He locked me in! It’s been forever. Like days. More like weeks, but in this white hell where I’m stuck with him, who knows?
    I’m trapped in here with nothing to do but wonder what’s going on back in the real world, i.e., the game.
    Are they OK? Are they pissed at me?
    What if they think I croaked at my machine, or that, I got, like, booted for some heinous act I did that they don’t know about? I was fucking disconnected. Did they even notice when I went POOF? Shit. What if they picked up another eighth, like, that Secaucus Serpent guy from the Kendo Kadre that’s always trying to get in with us and played on through. They could be storming Chinyatsu Yo right now, like there never was a Hydra Destroyer.
    Like there never was a me.
    There kind of isn’t, now. Just Ned fading into the woodwork, one more white thing in a place with white everything: no rugs on the bleached-sand floor, if you go barefoot you can pretend it’s the beach but shit, there’s no curtains or pictures on the nubbly white walls and if they were, they would be white. It’s like color’s not allowed— not even a fucking picture puzzle to take your mind off it, whatever it is, like thinking will corrupt your soul. What are we supposed to, meditate? Plus, nothing to write on and nothing to write or draw with except your own blood and one other thing that it’s too disgusting to try and if I tried it Patrice would have a cow, except she wasn’t with us when we got took. Where is she anyway? Poor Patrice said Whatever to Father the other week and he smacked her so hard that he had to buy her a ticket up to her mama’s house in Charleston to make up for it, so when it grabbed us, unlike me, Patrice got Left Behind.
    Father’s gone back inside himself and he won’t come out. His fringe is turning into a great big Moses beard, like he’s doing it to match. One more day like this we’ll seize up like a Civil War monument. Gazillion years from now archaeologists will find us: Ned and Father alone in this white house in the bone-white silence, turned to stone.
    He sits at that table all day and half the night in his white outfit with his white face buried in his white, white beard, all broody and stone silent, but I try. ’Od damn I try. I start a conversation between us every night, the problem being that the only one talking is me.
    When the food comes, I start, “How was your day, Father?” but Father just chews.
    Then I move around to the chair on his side and put on that deep, preachy voice, going, “Fine, son. How about yourself?”
    My voice: “It’s fucking bored out, Father.” That’s me doing what Father used to call “dropping the F bomb” so he’ll get up and hit me like he does back home, but his fists don’t clench. He doesn’t even scowl.
    I go back around to his side. “Language, Edward.”
    Me: “Don’t call me Edward, I hate Edward.”
    I do a pretty good Father: “It’s your grandfather’s name and I will damn well use it.”
    â€œDon’t be an asshole, Dad. You can fucking call me Ned.”
    Like Father ever answered to the name Dad. I thought two insults consecutive plus the “Dad” would bring him out. No, he gives me the bleakest look, but