Downsiders

by Neal Shusterman

  So in the end he can’t even enjoy his bitter little victory as the Juvey-cops push him out into a cool December night.

  * * *

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  * * *

  The Juvey squad car leaves the driveway with Starkey locked in the backseat behind a bulletproof barrier. Mouthpiece drives while Lady-Lips flips through a fat file folder. Starkey can’t imagine his life could have that much data.

  “It says here you scored in the top ten percentile in your early childhood exams.”

  The mouthpiece shakes his head in disgust. “What a waste.”

  “Not really,” says Lady-Lips. “Plenty of folks will get the benefit of your smarts, Mr. Starkey.”

  The suggestion gives him an unpleasant chill, but he tries not to show it. “Love the lip graft, dude,” Starkey says. “What’s the deal? Did your wife tell you she’d rather be kissed by a woman?”

  Mouthpiece smirks, and Lady-Lips says nothing.

  “But enough lip service,” says Starkey. “You boys hungry? Because I could go for a midnight snack right about now. Some In-N-Out? Whaddaya say?”

  No answer from the front seat. Not that he expects one, but it’s always fun to mess with law enforcement and see how much it takes to irritate them. Because if they get ticked off, he wins. What’s that story about the Akron AWOL? What did he always say? Oh yeah. “Nice socks.” Simple, elegant, but it always undermined the confidence of any figure of false authority.

  The Akron AWOL—now there was an Unwind! Sure, he died in the attack on Happy Jack Harvest Camp almost a year ago, but his legend lives on. Starkey longs for the kind of notoriety that Connor Lassiter has. In fact, Starkey imagines Connor Lassiter’s ghost sitting by his side, appreciating his thoughts and his every action—not just approving, but guiding Starkey’s hands as he wriggles his handcuffs down to his left shoe—just low enough to fish out the knife from the lining. The knife he’s saved for special occasions like this.

  “Come to think about it, In-N-Out Burger does sound good right about now,” says Lady-Lips.

  “Excellent,” says Starkey. “There’s one up ahead on the left. Order me a Double-Double, Animal Style, and Animal fries, too, because, hey—I’m an animal.”

  He is amazed that they actually pull into the all-night drive-through. Starkey feels like the master of subliminal suggestion, even though his suggestion was not all that subliminal. Still, he is in control of the Juvey-cops . . . or at least he thinks he is until they order meals for themselves and nothing for him.

  “Hey! What’s the deal?” He pounds his shoulder against the glass that separates their world from his.

  “They’ll feed you at harvest camp,” says Lady-Lips.

  Only now does it hit home that the bulletproof glass doesn’t just separate him from the cops—it’s a barrier between him and any part of the outside world. He will never taste his favorite foods again. Never visit his favorite places. At least not as Mason Starkey. Suddenly he feels like hurling up everything he’s eaten, backdated to six days postconception.

  The night shift cashier at the drive-through window is a girl Starkey knows from his last school. As he sees her, a whole mess of emotions toy with his brain. He could just lurk in the shadows of the backseat, hoping not to be seen, but that would make him feel pathetic. No, he will not be pathetic. If he’s going down, then it will be in flames that everyone must see.

  “Hey, Amanda, will you go to the prom with me?” He shouts loud enough to be heard through the thick glass barrier.

  Amanda squints in his direction, and when she realizes who it is, she turns up her nose as if she’s smelled something rancid on the grill.

  “Not in this life, Starkey.”

  “Why not?”

  “A, you’re a sophomore, and B, you’re a loser in the back of a police car. And anyway, don’t they have their own prom at the alternative school?”

  Could she possibly be any denser? “Uh, as you can see, I’ve graduated.”

  “Pipe down,” says Mouthpiece, “or I’ll unwind you right into the burgers.”

  Finally Amanda gets it, and suddenly she becomes a little sheepish. “Oh! Oh, I’m sorry, Starkey. I’m really sorry. . . .”

  Pity is something Mason Starkey can’t stand. “Sorry for what? You and your friends wouldn’t give me the time of day before, but now you’re sorry for me? Save it.”

  “I’m sorry. I mean—I’m sorry that I’m sorry—I mean . . .” She sighs in exasperation and gives up, handing Lady-Lips a bag of food. “Do you need ketchup?”

  “No, we’re good.”

  “Hey, Amanda!” Starkey shouts as they drive away. “If you really want to do something for me, tell everyone I went down fighting, will you? Tell them I’m just like the Akron AWOL.”

  “I will, Starkey,” she says. “I promise.”

  But he knows she’ll forget by morning.

  Twenty minutes later they’re turning into the back alley of county lockup. No one goes in the front way, least of all the Unwinds. The county jail has a juvenile wing, and in the back of the juvey wing is a special box within a box where they hold Unwinds awaiting transport. Starkey’s been in regular juvey enough to know that once you’re in the Unwind holding cell, that’s it. End of story. Even death row inmates don’t have such tight security.

  But he’s not there yet. He’s still here, in the car, waiting to be transferred inside. Right here is where the hull of this little ship of fools is thinnest, and if he’s going to sink their plans, it has to happen between the car and the back door of the county jail. As they prepare for his “perp walk,” he thinks about his chances of breaking free—because as much as his parents may have imagined this night, so has he, and he’s made up a dozen valiant escape plans. The thing is, even his daydreams are fatalistic; in every anxiety-filled fantasy, he always loses, gets tranq’d, and wakes up on an operating table. Sure, they say they don’t unwind you right away, but Starkey doesn’t believe it. No one really knows what goes on in the harvest camps, and those who find out aren’t exactly around to share the experience.

  They pull him out of the car and flank him on either side, grasping his upper arms tightly. They are practiced in this walk. Lady-Lips grips Starkey’s fat file in his other hand.

  “So,” says Starkey, “does that file show my hobbies?”

  “Probably,” says Lady-Lips, not really caring either way.

  “Maybe you should have read it a little more closely, because then we’d have something to talk about.” He grins. “You know, I’m pretty good with magic.”

  “That so?” says Mouthpiece, with a twisted sneer. “Too bad you can’t make yourself disappear.”

  “Who says I can’t?”

  Then, in his finest Houdini fashion, he raises his right hand, revealing the cuff no longer on it. Instead, it dangles free from his left hand. Before they can even react, Starkey slides the penknife he used to pick the lock out of his sleeve, grips it in his hand, and slashes it across Lady-Lips’s face.

  The man screams, and blood flows from a four-inch wound. Mouthpiece, for once in his miserable life of public disservice, is speechless. He reaches for his weapon, but Starkey is already on the run, zigzagging in the shadowy alley.

  “Hey!” yells Mouthpiece. “You’re only making it
worse for yourself.”

  But what are they going to do? Reprimand him before they unwind him? The Mouthpiece can talk all he wants, but he’s got no bargaining position.

  The alley turns to the left and then to the right like a maze, and all the while beside him is the tall, imposing brick wall of the county jail.

  Finally he turns another corner and sees a street up ahead. He charges forward, but just as he emerges into that street, he’s grabbed by Mouthpiece. Somehow he made it there before Starkey. He’s surprised, but he shouldn’t be, because doesn’t every Unwind try to run? And couldn’t they build a twisting alley specifically designed to waste your time and give the Juvey-cops an advantage that they never really lost?

  “You’re through, Starkey!” He crushes Starkey’s wrist enough to dislodge the knife and brandishes a tranq gun with trigger-happy fury. “Down on the ground, or this goes in your eye!”

  But Starkey does not go down. He will not humble himself before this legalized thug.

  “Do it!” says Starkey. “Tranq me in the eye and explain to the harvest camp why the goods are damaged.”

  Mouthpiece turns him around and pushes him against the brick wall, hard enough to scrape and bruise his face.

  “I’ve had enough of you, Starkey. Or maybe I should call you Storky.” Then Mouthpiece laughs, like he’s a genius. Like every moron in the world hasn’t already called him that. “Storky!” he snorts. “That’s a better name for you, isn’t it? How do you like that, Storky?”

  Blood boils hotter than water. Starkey can vouch for that, because with adrenaline-pumped fury, he elbows Mouthpiece in the gut and spins around, grabbing the gun.

  “Oh no, you don’t.”

  Mouthpiece is stronger—but maybe animal-style beats strength.

  The gun is between them. It points at Starkey’s cheek, then his chest, then to Mouthpiece’s ear, then under his chin. They both grapple for the trigger and—Blam!

  The concussive shock of the blast knocks Starkey back against the wall. Blood! Blood everywhere! The ferrous taste of it in his mouth, and the acrid smell of gun smoke and—

  That was no tranq bullet! That was the real thing!

  And he thinks he’s microseconds away from death, but he suddenly realizes that the blood isn’t his. In front of him, Mouthpiece’s face is a red, pulpy mess. The man goes down, dead before he hits the pavement and—

  My God, that was a real bullet. Why does a Juvey-cop have real bullets? That’s illegal!

  He can hear footsteps around the bend, and the dead cop is still dead, and he knows the whole world heard the gunshot, and everything hinges on his next action.

  He is partners with the Akron AWOL now. The patron saint of runaway Unwinds is watching over his shoulder, waiting for Starkey to make a move, and he thinks, What would Connor do?

  Just then another Juvey-cop comes around the bend—a cop he has never seen and is determined to never see again. Starkey raises Mouthpiece’s gun and shoots, turning what was just an accident into murder.

  As he escapes—truly escapes—all he can think about is the bloody taste of victory, and how pleased the ghost of Connor Lassiter would be.

  * * *

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  * * *

  To be an AWOL Unwind is one thing, but to be a cop killer is another. The manhunt for Starkey becomes more than just your typical Unwind chase. It seems the whole world is put on alert. First Starkey changes his look, dying his straggly brown hair red, cutting it bookworm-short, and shaving off the little victory garden goatee that he’s been cultivating since middle school. Now when people see him, they might get a feeling they’ve seen him before, but not know from where, because now he looks less like a face from a wanted poster and more like someone you’d see on a Wheaties box. The red hair is a bit of a disconnect with his olive complexion, but then, being a genetic hodgepodge has served him well all his life. He’s always been a chameleon who could pass for any ethnicity. The red hair just adds one more level of misdirection.

  He skips town and never stays anywhere for more than a day or two. Word is that the Pacific Northwest is more sympathetic to AWOL Unwinds than Southern California, so that’s where he’s headed.

  Starkey is prepared for life as a fugitive, because he has always lived in a kind of protective paranoia. Don’t trust anyone, not even your own shadow, and look out for your own best interests. His friends appreciated his clear-cut approach to life, because they always knew where they stood. He would fight to the end for his friends . . . as long as it was in his own interest to do so.

  “You have the soul of a corporation,” a teacher once told him. It was meant as an insult, but he took it as a compliment. Corporations have great power and do fine things in this world when they choose to. She was a glacier-hugging math teacher who got laid off the following year, because who needs math teachers when you can just get a NeuroWeave? Just goes to show you, hugging a chunk of ice gets you nothing but cold.

  Now, however, Starkey’s one with the huggers, because they’re the kind of people who run the Anti-Divisional Resistance, harboring runaway Unwinds. Once he’s in the hands of the ADR, he knows he’ll be safe, but finding them is the hard part.

  “I’ve been AWOL for almost four months now and haven’t seen no sign of the resistance,” says an ugly kid with a bulldog face. Starkey met him while hanging out behind a KFC on Christmas Eve, waiting for them to throw out the leftover chicken. He’s not the kind of kid Starkey would hang with in real life, but now that real life has flipped into borrowed time, his priorities have changed.

  “I’ve survived because I don’t fall for no traps,” Dogface tells him.

  Starkey knows all about the traps. If a hiding place seems too good to be true, it probably is. An abandoned house with a comfortable mattress; an unlocked truck that happens to be full of canned food. They’re traps set by Juvey-cops for AWOL Unwinds. There are even Juvies pretending to be part of the Anti-Divisional Resistance.

  “The Juvies are offering rewards now for people who turn in AWOLs,” Dogface says, as they stuff themselves sick with chicken. “And there are bounty hunters, too. Parts pirates, they call ’em. They don’t bother with collecting rewards—they sell the AWOLs they catch on the black market—and if you think regular harvest camps are bad, you don’t wanna know about the illegal ones.” The kid swallows a mouthful so big, Starkey can see it going down his gullet like a mouse being swallowed by a snake. “There never used to be parts pirates,” he says, “but since seventeen-year-olds can’t be unwound no more, there’s a shortage of parts, and AWOLs fetch a huge price on the black market.”

  Starkey shakes his head. Making it illegal to unwind seventeen-year-olds was supposed to save a fifth of the kids marked for unwinding, but instead it forced a lot of parents to make their decision earlier. Starkey wonders if his parents would have changed their mind if they had another year to decide.

  “Parts pirates are the worst,” Dogface tells him. “Their traps aren’t so nice as the ones the Juvies set. I heard this story about a trapper who got put out of business when fur was made illegal. So he took his heaviest
animal traps and retooled them for Unwinds. Man, one of those traps snaps around your leg, and you can kiss that leg good-bye.” He snaps a chicken bone in half for emphasis, and Starkey shivers in spite of himself. “There are other stories,” Dogface says, licking chicken grease from his dirty fingers, “like this kid in my old neighborhood. His parents were total losers. Strung-out druggies who prolly shoulda been unwound themselves, if they had unwinding back in the day. Anyway, on his thirteenth birthday, they sign the unwind order and tell him about it.”

  “Why would they tell him?”

  “So he’d run away,” Dogface explains, “but see, they knew all his secret hiding places, and they told a parts pirate where to find him. He caught the kid, sold him, and split the fee with the kid’s parents.”

  “Son of a bitch!”

  Dogface shrugs, and flicks away a chicken bone. “The kid was a stork-job anyways, so it was no great loss, right?”

  Starkey stops chewing, but just for a moment. Then he grins, keeping his thoughts to himself. “Right. No great loss.”

  That night the dogfaced kid takes Starkey to a drainage tunnel where he’s been hiding out, and once the kid falls asleep, Starkey gets to work. He goes out into a nearby neighborhood and leaves a bucket of chicken at some strangers’ front door, rings the bell, and runs.

  There’s no chicken in the bucket, though. Instead there’s a hand-drawn map, along with the following note:

  Need money? Then send the Juvey-cops here, and you’ll collect a fat reward. Happy holidays!

  Right around dawn, Starkey watches from a nearby rooftop as Juvies storm the drainage tunnel and pull out the dogfaced kid like so much earwax.

  “Congratulations, asshole,” he says to himself. “You’ve been storked.”

  * * *

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