John Saul - Shadows

Standing behind his brother, Jeff frowned. Adam wasn’t going to chicken out, was he? He couldn’t! Not now, not after everything they’d planned. “Come on,” he said. “I thought we’d already decided. You hate it here. You hate it everywhere. So what’s the big deal? If you want to get out, you get out. Isn’t that what we decided?”

Adam shrugged, but then went to the window. “What — What if I changed my mind? I mean, afterward?”

Jeff chuckled hollowly. “It’d be sort of too late, wouldn’t it? I mean, you’d already be gone.”

“I know,” Adam agreed, his voice barely audible. “That’s what I keep thinking about.”

He turned around to see his brother regarding him angrily.

“You are chickening out, aren’t you?” Jeff accused.

“I didn’t say that,” Adam argued, his voice taking on a plaintive note.

“Yeah, but it’s what you meant. Jeez, Adam, you really are a wimp, aren’t you? All you ever do is whine about everything, but when you have a chance to do something, you chicken out. Well, if you don’t go tonight, you might as well forget it. I’ll tell Mom and Dad about what you’re planning, and they’ll stop you. This time, they’ll probably send you to Atascadero, or something.”

Adam’s eyes widened with fear at the thought of being locked up in the state mental hospital. “You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

“I might. Anyway, even if they don’t lock you up, I bet they’ll take you out of school and keep you at home. Then you’ll never have another chance to do it, will you?”

Adam swallowed. “I—”

Jeff could feel his brother wavering. “Come on, Adam. Tonight. You’ve got to do it tonight.”

Adam’s temper, usually held perfectly in check, suddenly flared. “If you’re so hot for it to happen, why don’t you do it yourself?” he demanded.

Jeff said nothing, his mind racing. They’d already talked it out, spent hours arguing about it. And Adam had agreed that he was the one who should go. Now he was trying to back out, losing his nerve at the last minute.

Well, it wasn’t going to happen. It had all been planned, all been decided, and this time Adam wasn’t going to chicken out at the last minute. “You’re going to do it,” Jeff finally said, his voice dropping to a furious whisper that sent a chill through Adam. “If you don’t do it, I’ll kill you myself, Adam. I’ll figure out a way so no one will know it was me. And I’ll make sure it hurts. Is that what you want me to do? Do you want me to hurt you?”

Adam shrank back in his chair. “No,” he breathed. “And I’m not saying I’m not going to do it. I just—”

Jeff didn’t let him finish. Instead, he kept talking to his brother, browbeating him, convincing him, putting his own thoughts into Adam’s mind, just as he had since they were old enough to talk.

At last, as always, Adam nodded.

“Okay,” he said, his face pale. “I’ll do it tonight. So just leave me alone, and let me get ready, all right?”

“You swear you’re going to do it?” Jeff demanded.

Adam held up both his hands, intertwining his fingers with his brother’s, in the way they had ever since they were little more than toddlers. It was a gesture that meant one of them had made an unbreakable promise to the other. “Swear,” he said.

Jeff finally smiled, but there was no kindness in it. “Okay.” He started out of the room, then paused at the door.

He looked back at his brother, his eyes devoid of emotion. “Afterward, I’m going to take your leather jacket. Okay?”

Adam shrugged. “If I don’t wear it when I go,” he said. “Anyway, tomorrow you can take anything you want. It’ll probably be here.”

Jeff paused for another moment, then spoke once more. “Just make sure you leave it. See ya.” Then he was gone, and Adam was alone in his room.

“Yeah,” Adam replied. “See ya.”

But he wondered: Would he really ever see his brother again?

Probably not.

But what did it matter?

What, really, did anything matter?

After all, he couldn’t ever remember having been really happy, not on a single day of his life. For every day of his life, Jeff had always been there, thinking for him, making up his mind for him, telling him what to do.

And he had always given in.

So wherever he was going tonight, it couldn’t be any worse than it was here.

After all, wherever he was going, Jeff wouldn’t be there. At least not for a while.

Picking up his virtual reality helmet, he placed it on his head once more.

A second later he was lost in the world conjured up by the computer, a world that was nothing more, or less, than a projection of what it would be like to be inside the computer itself, to be an electron whizzing through the minute circuitry, exploring the endlessly complex world contained on the surface of the microchip.

That’s what I should have been, Adam told himself.

I never should have been born at all.

I should have been something else, something that doesn’t feel any pain.

Tonight, he reflected with a cold shiver of anticipation, he would run away from the pain. And never come back.

Adam Aldrich waited until thirty minutes after the Academy’s ten-thirty lights-out before he rose from his bed and, without turning on the light, quickly pulled on his clothes, choosing a pair of jeans that were all but worn-out, and a bright red shirt that he’d never liked. Unlike Jeff, Adam had never much cared about clothes. Clothing was just stuff, and stuff had never mattered to him at all. The only thing that really mattered to Adam was the world inside his own brain, and, once he’d discovered it, the world inside his computer. And the only person who mattered at all to Adam was Jeff.

Jeff

The one person who knew him almost better than he knew himself.

The person who could talk him into absolutely anything.

The person with whom he had been closest all his life.

And who, tonight, was sending him away.

But maybe, somehow, they’d be together again. At least they would be if it was anything like Adam thought it was going to be.

It.

That was how he always thought about what he’d decided to do. Even tonight, when the time had finally come, he still put no other name to it.

Dressed, he moved to his computer and turned on the screen. It glowed softly in the dark, and Adam sat down at the keyboard. When the menu came into focus, a menu Adam had designed himself, he stared at it for a few seconds, then chose one of his utilities programs from the list.

Slowly, almost regretfully, he began deleting all the files from the eighty-megabyte hard drive in the computer. Finishing the task, deleting the directories and subdirectories one by one, he stared silently at the new directory tree, which now showed nothing more than the utility program he was using.

He could still change his mind. After all, the files weren’t really gone yet — all he’d done was erase the first letter of the file names. The data itself was still there on the hard drive. If he wanted to, he could recover it all in just a few more minutes.

He hesitated, then made up his mind.

His fingers working quickly, he typed in the commands that would begin washing the disk, going through the whole drive, recording a series of randomly selected digits over all the existing data.

The computer would go through the process three times. When it was done, nothing at all would remain except the single utility program.

It would be gone, all of it. All the programs he’d learned to use in the five years since he’d gotten his first computer, all the data he’d compiled, all the games he’d not only loved, but reconstructed to suit himself, reworking the codes so that no one but he could play them.