Duplex

by Orson Scott Card

  Then Dad let go of him. “Both of you go out, open the front door, and let them see that you enter Bizzy’s side of the house. Then when your mom comes, Bizzy, I’m betting it won’t be long before they make their move.”

  “And you’ll be on this side?”

  “When you open the front door, I’ll let them see me standing in here, so they’ll think this is where I am. And it’ll be true for a while, because I have to get to your back door, Ryan, so they don’t all get up onto the Horvats’ deck and try to go inside from there.”

  “Ah,” said Bizzy. “Yeah, that’s the most obvious back entrance.”

  “And it helps shield our back door from view, because it’s at ground level,” said Dad.

  Ryan noticed that Dad slipped from “your back door, Ryan,” to “shield our back door from view.” In his heart, Dad still lived in this house. It was still “our” door.

  22

  Dad had done a good job of providing sound insulation between the two halves of the duplex. He must have done it while Ryan was at school, because for Ryan, the division went from bare studs to mudded wallboard between leaving for school and getting home. Yet despite knowing that he had never heard a sound from the Horvats’ side since they moved in—not through the walls, anyway—Ryan still kept straining to hear the GRUT members getting drawn into the Burke house.

  All he heard was Mrs. Horvat’s nervous grumbling or cursing or—it was conceivable—praying. If she was praying, she didn’t use a very deferent tone of voice with the Almighty. She pretty much talked to him the way she talked to Ryan—as if she was constantly choosing between talking to him and slapping him really hard.

  But Ryan wasn’t offended or even annoyed. Mrs. Horvat had plenty of reason to be afraid. Ryan was pretty sure he hadn’t overreacted this morning at school—that fake FBI lieutenant was about to lay him out on the floor and quite probably kill him. This would have removed him as a possible obstacle to abducting Bizzy, and it would have shown Bizzy that her abductors weren’t shy about being brutally violent, so she would probably be more cooperative. Especially because Dead Ryan wouldn’t have been much help to her. So Ryan knew he had been right to use maximum force on the guy. He had no way of knowing that the “maximum force” he could exert from his skinny body might possibly be lethal.

  And what about now? How would he protect them now, with himself inside the house with them? He couldn’t even see any threats until they got inside, and that might be too late.

  Of course, for all he knew, these guys weren’t loveks after all, or Mrs. Horvat didn’t know what they were really about. Maybe they wanted Bizzy as a hostage so they could force Mrs. Horvat to work for them. If they wanted to assassinate somebody without being detected, having her be near them and mutter, “Awfully clumsy of you,” might be lethal, and it would be an accident that killed them, so nothing would have to be faked or covered up.

  But it would be good to stop Mrs. Horvat from being forced into a killing spree. Stopping these guys from kidnapping Bizzy and controlling Mrs. Horvat was every bit as essential as stopping them from killing the Horvats.

  In his mind, when he tried to think of them as the Horvats, he always felt like he was lying. They weren’t “the Horvats” like any common neighbor. They were the woman he loved and his potential nightmare of a mother-in-law. They were Bizzy and, oh yes, Mrs. Horvat.

  But it wouldn’t keep him from doing what it took to protect them both. They were his responsibility.

  There was a knock on the door.

  Bizzy started to get up.

  “Sit down,” said Ryan. Since Bizzy wasn’t used to obeying him—or anybody, really—he had to stand up, hook her arm in his, and wheel her around and push her back on the couch.

  “What am I here for?” he asked her sternly. “To watch you get abducted from the front door and then wring my hands and say, ‘Dear me, dear me, who’da thunk they’d be so bold, those bad men?’?”

  Bizzy chuckled as Ryan went to the front door.

  It was Defense. “Nobody answered your door,” he said.

  “Nobody’s answering this door, either,” said Ryan. “Go away.”

  “Yeah, I know, I’m always dropping in at the wrong time.”

  “This is the time when guys with guns might burst in at any moment,” said Ryan. “And of the people in this house right now, third on my gotta-save list is you. Third out of three.”

  Defense caught sight of Mrs. Horvat and Bizzy. He waved.

  “Did you notice that I haven’t invited you in?” asked Ryan. “I’m not joking. Bullets. Guns. Defense la morte.”

  “Frenchmen don’t talk like that even with three cigarettes in their mouths at once,” said Defense.

  Mrs. Horvat spoke loudly from the couch. “Get the little idiot through the door and out the back,” said Mrs. Horvat. “Everybody here is a hostage.”

  Defense came in and Ryan closed the door behind him. “Nobody wanted you here, Defense.”

  “That only proves how much I was needed, to help expunge their anti-Defenseur prejudices.”

  Ryan led Defense around behind the couch. “You see these throw pillows on the floor? Please arrange one tightly over your mouth and nose, then press down until you can’t breathe.”

  “Do your own homicide, Ryan,” said Defense. “If you want me dead, be man enough to—”

  “Shut up,” said Bizzy.

  “Someone is coming up the walk,” said Mrs. Horvat.

  Ryan returned to his place by the door. Two man-size shapes appeared through the translucent windows in the door. “Charlottesville Police,” said one of them. “Please open the door.”

  Ryan saw that they were indeed in uniform. Ryan opened the door as he was saying, “Nobody here called the police and I know we’re not making too much noise,” but before he got half of that out, the two policemen had pushed past him into the room.

  “We’ve had reports of men with concealed weapons in this neighborhood,” said one of the cops. “We have reason to suspect a home invasion might be taking place in one of these houses.”

  The other cop said, “Since they might be holding one of you hostage, we have to check every room.”

  “Where’s your son?” asked the first cop. “Our records show you have a boy and a girl.”

  Ryan glanced at Bizzy and saw she was wearing her plain face. Neither ugly nor glamor.

  Then Ryan noticed some details of the police uniforms. Identical to the fake cop uniforms on Halloween. Good fakes, but not actual Charlottesville uniforms.

  So they weren’t cops. One of them was already heading past the couch toward the back. But the other was directly in front of the couch, and Ryan saw his arm flex and his hand reach for the handgun at his belt.

  That was apparently all that Ryan needed—he was already in motion. As the fake cop was drawing the gun, which Ryan knew he was going to use to kill Mrs. Horvat and Bizzy, Ryan got his own hand onto the gun and squeezed a shoulder nerve in the guy so that his grip on the pistol suddenly let go.

  Ryan raised the handgun and shot the guy square in the shoulder. It was a heavy bullet fired at close range. The guy dropped like a rock, screaming and rolling on the floor. Meanwhile, Ryan was clearly aware of the bullet, which had passed clean through the shoulder, flying into the wall dividing the halves of the house, just in front of the stairs.

  By now the other fake cop had turned around and was drawing his pistol. Ryan was nowhere near close enough to do anything. But he had a very powerful projectile weapon in his hand, so he took aim at the guy.

  He meant to shoot him in the right shoulder, because that was the arm he was using to hold the gun. But at the last moment Ryan redirected his aim and shot him in the left shoulder, through and through. It had the desired effect, sending him to the ground without firing his weapon.

  “Defense, I saw you thinking abo
ut being brave. Thanks for not blocking my shot.”

  “Brave would have been stupid,” said Defense.

  “Be brave enough to get his weapon,” said Ryan. “Don’t fire it. Don’t fiddle with it. Just slide it far away from his reach.”

  “Weapon,” said Defense. “You said ‘weapon,’ like a soldier. They’ve been trained not to call personal weapons ‘guns’ because that means artillery.”

  Ryan understood the nervousness that made Defense babble. Two pistol shots had just brought down two uniformed policemen. Ryan didn’t make him shut up, because he was kicking the gun away from the guy while he babbled.

  “Just so you all know, those aren’t real Charlottesville police uniforms. They’re costumes. I saw a couple of guys wearing them as costumes on Halloween.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Defense.

  “We saw the costumes and real cop uniforms within seconds of each other. So I noticed the differences.”

  “You just shot two guys,” said Bizzy.

  “They were going to shoot the two of you,” Ryan said. “And I didn’t have time to get my lightsaber, so I used the tools they brought me.”

  “Very ecology-minded,” said Mrs. Horvat. “Don’t buy things when you can use what’s already at hand.”

  “I’m not just shooting fake cops,” said Ryan, “I’m protecting the environment.”

  “Does anybody else notice that this isn’t funny?” said Bizzy. “Those were two very loud gunshots, which I’m assuming could be heard outside the house.”

  Thinking of people hearing gunshots, Ryan thought of a bunch of micropots huddling upstairs. But by now they’d already be headed down, wouldn’t they? Dad wouldn’t keep them upstairs with gunplay going on.

  Ryan looked toward the far wall of the kitchen-that-used-to-be-Dad’s-office and imagined people climbing down the concealed ladderway.

  Then he realized that the second fake cop had been standing in such a place that if the bullet had passed clean through his gun-holding shoulder, it still would have been going very, very fast when it struck the thin wall of the secret passage. Ryan could easily have shot and injured, or maybe killed, somebody going down through that passage.

  But he must have realized this at some level, which was why he changed his aim at the last moment. The bullet that went through the guy’s left shoulder ended up embedded in a wall of the living room. It didn’t make it into the kitchen at all.

  Since the guys on the floor were still making a racket with all their complaining about the pain, Ryan let them both see that he still had the pistol. “I’m jumpy and I’m nervous,” Ryan said. “You can see how my hands are shaking, right? I may need to start shooting again, just to let off some of this energy. I might want to use a couple of bullets to let all the gas out of your intestines to shut you up.”

  And Ryan pointed the barrel of the pistol at the belly of the first guy he shot.

  “Can I use this other gun to shoot this guy?” asked Defense.

  “Weapon, not gun,” said Ryan. “And no. Because he’s quiet now, see?”

  “Of course he’s quiet,” said Defense. “While you were waving your weapon at that guy’s gut, I kicked this guy really hard in the head.”

  “Is he unconscious?”

  “Either he is, or he wishes he were,” said Defense.

  The panel under the stairs fell open. Defense rushed over and helped Dr. Withunga into the room.

  “Before I left the premises, I thought I should warn you that I counted about thirty belly buttons approaching the house rapidly but carefully. Most of them are crawling, but they’ll be here soon.”

  “Everybody’s okay?” asked Ryan.

  “Dahlia refused to leave the attic,” said Dr. Withunga. “She was having fun making all these guys yawn their brains out. Everybody else is still trying to do whatever they can, but from under the house instead of at the top.”

  “How are you going to get under the house without going outside?” asked Ryan.

  “The trapdoor under the stairs on your side of the house, of course,” she said.

  So Dad hadn’t shown Ryan all the secret passages.

  Dr. Withunga went back through the passage behind the stairs. Defense took a moment putting the panel back in place.

  Someone was pounding on the front door. A window broke in the kitchen.

  “They’re he-ere,” intoned Defense.

  “I hope you feel as useless as you are,” said Ryan.

  “Oh, much more useless than that,” said Defense.

  When the front door shuddered open, Ryan aimed his pistol at the first man to come through. He was yawning, his mouth so wide open his eyes were closed. Same with the guys behind him. Thanks, Dahlia.

  No fake police uniforms this time—just shabby business suits. When he got his eyes open, the first man saw one of his compatriots on the floor and screamed as if in agony, “Why did you kill them!”

  “He isn’t dead,” said Ryan, “but I’m perfectly willing to kill you if you don’t stop where you are and lie down on the floor.”

  In reply the man drew a weapon and began to raise it to aiming position. He was slowed down, however, by the fact that he was yawning again, his eyes pouring tears down onto his cheeks.

  Ryan did not believe in playing fair when the other guy is holding a pistol, so he didn’t wait till the guy’s yawning stopped. He fired his pistol and the man sprouted a hole in his forehead and dropped like a rock.

  “Was that where you were aiming?” asked Bizzy.

  “I didn’t expect to hit what I was aiming at,” said Ryan. His gun was still pointed at the door, where two more yawning men came through, their guns already out and vaguely pointed—not at Ryan, but at the women on the couch.

  At that moment, the couch rocked backward and so did Bizzy and Mrs. Horvat. Ryan didn’t have time to look, though, because he was shooting at the two guys who now didn’t know where to aim. They dropped to the ground, probably not dead because Ryan’s shots took them in the knees. They were screaming in pain, while yawning.

  Then there were flashing lights outside and somebody was yelling over a loudspeaker, saying something about “weapons down,” “lie on the ground,” and the last two guys coming through the doorway knelt down and lowered their guns.

  Four uniformed Charlottesville cops—not costumes, real uniforms, Ryan noted—came through the door.

  “Don’t shoot him!” yelled Defense. “He was protecting us from the intruders!”

  Oh, yeah, Ryan realized. Cops just came into a place where shots were fired, and I’m holding the gun that fired them. Ryan set down his pistol.

  “I think that guy might be dead,” said Ryan. “But these other two were only shot in the shoulder.”

  “And who shot them?”

  “Ryan Burke!” shouted Defense. “He was great! He never fired until they had their weapons out aiming them at people. But the dead guy, he was aiming right at me and Ryan had to save my life!”

  Ryan wanted to tell Defense to shut up, they were all supposed to tell the truth. But when he turned, he saw that the couch was upright again and Bizzy and Mrs. Horvat weren’t in the room.

  Defense was leaving them out of it. He had tipped the couch over—he used to do that at parties, especially when some couple was kissing on the couch. He flipped over the couch to take Bizzy and Mrs. Horvat out of the line of fire, and then as the real cops came in, he must have pushed Bizzy and her mother through the passage under the stairs. Nobody would be asking questions of people they didn’t know had been present.

  Defense had his uses.

  “Officer,” said Ryan, using his toe to touch the pistol lying on the floor beside him. “I got this pistol from that guy,” he said. “I really don’t want to hold it anymore.”

  “You disarmed a guy and shot him with his own pistol?” ask
ed one of the cops.

  “It was the only weapon I could reach at the time,” said Ryan.

  “Any idea who these guys are?” asked the other cop.

  “Sure seemed to be a lot of them,” said Ryan. “But these two are just wearing cop costumes. Pretty convincing fakes, though.”

  “We’re going to track down the source of these costumes and get an injunction to stop renting them out. Very confusing and could cause fatal misunderstandings.”

  “He just shot me in the shoulder without provocation!” shouted the guy on the floor in the other room.

  “Didn’t I kick you hard enough in the head?” demanded Defense.

  “And this one kicked me in the head! Really hard!” the guy shouted.

  “Sounds like a good day’s work, guys,” said a cop to Ryan and Defense. “You both fifteen?”

  “I’m thirteen,” said Defense. “We’re both in eighth grade. But he’s fifteen. He was held back twice.”

  “We’re both students at Vasco da Gama,” said Ryan, “and we’re both fifteen.”

  “And you live here?” asked a cop.

  “In this building,” said Ryan, “but my family lives next door.”

  “So you live here?” the cop asked Defense.

  “Sure do,” said Defense.

  “He does not,” said Ryan. He gave Defense’s name and address. “The Horvat family lives here. My dad is their landlord. They asked me to watch the place so I was going to do my homework over here and then I got interrupted.”

  “So where is your homework?” asked the cop.

  Ryan blushed. “All right, I was going to play games on their iPad.” Bizzy had left her iPad on the couch when she disappeared.

  “And nobody in that family was here?” asked a cop.

  “They didn’t answer when I came in,” said Ryan, “but maybe upstairs?”

  A couple of cops dutifully started up the stairs.

  That was just the beginning, because one of the guys on the floor had to say something about the Horvat women being right on that couch, that’s why they came, to . . .