The Only Ones Read Free Page B

father had predicted. “They will keep coming,” he had said. “There will be more and more of them, until the place becomes a theme park.”
    “What’s a theme park?”
    “It’s torture, son. With roller coasters.”
    His father was wrong.
This
was torture. Alone, clueless, Martin was trapped. His body throbbed with anxiety. He slept very little. As strange and cruel as it might have seemed, the loss of Martin’s father paled in comparison to the loss of George. Devastation was worsened by desperation. He needed to know what had happened to everyone. When the summer ended, he had to make a choice. He could go on just as he had been, wallowing in self-pity. Or he could prepare.
    He thought about something George had once told him: “There are all sorts of people in the world. With all sorts of ways of seeing stuff.”
    With this in mind, Martin formulated a plan. He would start breaking into the island’s houses. He would search them front to back. He would gather every book he could find. From that point on, he would do little else but read.
    So he did. He went from house to house, living in each until he finished every title inside. He continued fishing, gardening, and trapping, but only for a couple of hours a day, only for long enough to keep himself going, to keep himself reading.
    From the books, he came to realize that the world hadplenty of joy in it, but also some terrible things. Bombs that wiped out cities. Savage landscapes full of people willing to fight you at the drop of a hat. Diseases and vengeful gods and science gone mad. Whether it was fiction didn’t matter. This was how the people out there saw their home. If he was going to survive among them, he needed to speak their language.
    Eleven years old became twelve years old. Fall tumbled into winter, and winter raged into spring. Another summer arrived and Martin still hadn’t seen a single person, but his head was now rattling with a hoard of stories and dialogues. And when that summer neared its end, he confronted a fateful day. He read the last of the books on the island.
    So he returned to his cabin. He grabbed the grubby mass of paper that was the book his father had left him. He found the sheet with the address George had given him and slid it into the pages of the book. He placed it all in a canvas bag, which he slung over his shoulder. And he didn’t think much about what he did next. Thinking often leads to second thoughts, and he certainly didn’t need those. He simply headed straight across the island.
    Martin’s body could have withered during his year of bookish solitude, but a recent growth spurt had gifted his muscles with an unexpected bulk and had forced him to scavenge a new wardrobe from cardboard boxes in the summer peoples’ closets. It had also granted him the strength to drag the rowboat out from behind George’s house and over the rocks. He placed it into the ocean. With oars on his shoulder and the bag on his hip, he climbed inside. He looked up at the sun. He looked back at the island he had called home for as long as he could remember.
    “They come from where the sun sets,” Martin’s father had once said about the summer people. “That’s why we do our fishing where the sun rises.”
    Martin leaned an oar into a rock and pushed off. He would head toward the sunset. If he wasn’t ready now, then he never would be.

PART I

    “They were frozen stiff. I think we mighta killed ’em. There was that blondie, layin’ out past those stupid palm trees. I don’t think she was breathin’.”
    “Don’t worry about that. Keep running.”
    “We need to go back for it. We need to check on them.”
    “You’re done with that bunch. We’ll find other folks. People we can trust.”
    “I keep tellin’ you. There’s nobody else.”
    “Nonsense. Lies.”
    “He wasn’t lyin’ ’bout that. In the mornin’, you’ll see. It’s a totally different world out there.”
    “Well, if that’s true, then … it’s