Page 4 of The Code (Orphan X)

The guy wheels on him. Whorls of facial hair form a ragged almost-beard. Around Evan’s age, he looks ropy and wolfish, a too-big jean jacket hanging on his tall frame. His name tag, CLAY , sports the carnival logo.

Evan says, “Sorry.”

“You drunk, man? A meth-head?”

Clay shoves him. Evan lets him.

Evan says, “No.”

“This is a family place, man.” There is booze on Clay’s breath, something cheap and syrupy like triple sec. “You look like a fuckin’ hobo.”

Clay goes to shove him again but Evan swats his hand aside.

“Don’t,” Evan says. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Not in the mood?” Clay snickers. “Or just scared?”

On the main thoroughfare, people keep whisking by, the altercation by the row of porta-potties relatively unseen .

Evan cannot kill anyone. Jack has recounted the cautionary tales—the SEAL who accidently snapped a guy’s neck in a bar fight in Virginia Beach, the Delta candidate who paralyzed a mouthy outlaw biker at a gas station when the guy fell back in a fight and hit his head on a curb.

Evan stares at Clay’s throat. He can see the pulse beating faintly in the side of his neck. But it cannot happen.

Never let an innocent die. The Tenth Commandment.

And the Eighth: Never kill a kid.

But oh how he wants to.

Clay sucks his teeth at him. “Not tonight, dear, says the scared little faggot. I’m not in the mood.”

Evan shows his palms, backpedaling. Clay holds his spot and eye contact, watching Evan go.

Once Evan disappears into the crowd, he searches out food. Everything is junky—cotton candy, caramel popcorn, funnel cake. He cannot risk the crash after a sugar high. One stall has a bag of FunTime trail mix for $3.99.

The family in line ahead of him debate what to do with a knocked-out three-year-old in a stroller. “We’d better play the keep-the-baby-awake game till we get him in the car,” the dad says. He starts to tickle the child, who stirs and grunts.

The grandmother considers the sleeping boy, one angular arm flopped to her side, hand perched out from the wrist as if awaiting a cigarette holder. Her head is drawn back with Dorothy Parker wry cynicism. “Perhaps a shock collar,” she observes.

Her daughter swats her: “ Mother! ”

Evan buys his little bag of protein, breaking the precious and slightly moist twenty-dollar bill. The girl working the register is high-school cute, with baby-fat cheeks and braces.

He asks, “Is there a bus stop nearby, ma’am?”

“‘Ma’am’? Ain’t you cute?”

A surge of self-consciousness rolls through him.

He knows he looks a mess with his dirt-smeared cheeks and stretched-out lowest-bidder navy shirt.

Part of him is still back at the Pride House Group Home in his worn-thin foster-kid jeans, hungry and filthy, the kind of boy that respectable folks crossed the street to avoid.

The girl points southward. “’Bout a half mile that way. They’re running ’em late ’cuz the carnival.”

Her skin is shiny and clean, her breath watermelon gum. She seems like something from a movie, something perfect and pure around which he deserves no place.

Again he senses the dried dirt streaks on his arms, the side of his neck, and he lowers his eyes. “Thank you.”

Sitting on a bale of hay, he picks out the almonds, peanuts, yogurt-covered raisins, and dark chocolate chips, eschewing the mini-marshmallows.

On an adjacent bale, two scrawny middle-school kids wearing black concert T-shirts discuss a stuffed-animal prize they won, a salamander in pajamas and roller skates.

“So lame,” one kids snickers. “Like, why would an axolotl wear PJs with axolotls on it? It’s not like humans go around wearing suits with pictures of little humans on them.”

Through a break in the stream of carnivalgoers, Evan spots Clay across the way. Now he has two friends with him and he is leaning to talk to them out of the side of his mouth, his gaze locked on Evan.

“Not as lame as the roller skates,” the nerdy friend says. “Real useful for all their extensive land travel. Like: ‘There goes that highly mobile axolotl!’”

Clay and his buddies knife through the crowd, heading Evan’s way.

Evan thinks, Here we go.

He rises, moving quickly in the opposite direction, toward the scattering of trailers he noted on the east side of the carnival.

The crowd thins out as he nears the park’s periphery. The area is unlit, though the glow of the rides follows him. He hears shuffling footsteps behind him, quickening.

“Ole boy looks homeless,” one of the other guys says.

“And scared,” Clay’s voice pipes in. “Go hand in hand, Franky.”

Evan takes a hard right around a corner, heading up a dark alley hemmed in by trailers on either side. The last in line are parked tightly perpendicular against the side of a barn, forming a makeshift cul-de-sac.

Precisely what he is seeking. There are three of them and one of him. He can guard his back here, the dead end horseshoeing him. And the position gives him three walls to shove off for leverage, shatter noses against, bounce heads off.

These boys, they think they’ve cornered him alone.

But that means they have to be alone with him .

As he heads into the cul-de-sac, the light of the Ferris wheel spills across his shoulders, laying his shadow clear on the ground before him. He can see the three kids’ shadows as well, sweeping around the corner, stretching along the sides of the trailers. He gauges distance.

“Ole boy took a wrong turn,” Franky’s voice says. “Whatja think, Dale? Think he needs a escort outta here?”

Laughter.

“You ran the wrong way, m’man,” Clay says. “’S what happens when you run scared.”

Franky again: “You scared, ole boy? What you think we’re gonna do to you?”

Dale now: “Definitely scared. Look at him. Gimp leg and everything.”

Evan reaches the dead end and turns.

The three young men spread out, blocking his egress, and sidle closer. Evan takes one step back out of the reach of the light, the shadow of the barn eclipsing him, turning him into a dark outline.

“Scaredy-cat’s done run himself into a trap,” Clay says.

Evan scans them. No guns beneath their shirts, but he can make out the slender outline of an everyday-carry knife in Clay’s front right pocket.

“Look, I’ve been there,” Evan says.

Franky sidles forward a step. “Where’s that?”

Evan reminds himself once more not to kill anyone. He keeps his voice low: “Where you are. Nothing better to do but go find trouble. But you don’t want this trouble.”

“You been there?” Dale brays laughter, jerks a thumb. “He’s been there?”

“I severely doubt that,” Clay says. “You look like a rich kid from a soft neighborhood. Got meth-hooked, think you had it rough. You don’t understand rough though. Not till you’ve traveled this country like we have, set up in all kinds of places with all kinds of tough guys.”

“Tryin’ to bluff his way out,” Franky says, drawing even with Clay. “He’s scared as shit.”

Evan waits in the shadows.

Clay draws himself fully upright. A tall kid, he wears boots with blocky heels and a flaming-skull tattoo on the soft underbelly of his left forearm.

“That a butterfly knife in your left front pocket?” Evan says.

Clay looks surprised. “Switchblade.”

Sure enough, Evan can make out the tiny dimple of the button. “Quaint,” he says.

“‘Quaint’?” Clay says. “Listen to how this scared motherfucker talks.”

Evan pictures that master chief up in his face, head tilted, words flying.

Are you scared? You look fucking scared.

No, sir.

Get it outta yer eyes then.

He draws in a breath. Four-second hold. Release. He feels himself snap into solidity, rigid like steel.

“You’ve made a mistake,” he says. “You think you were stalking me up this alley. But you weren’t. I was leading you here.”

Franky says, “’Z that so?”

Clay: “Led us here to get yer ass kicked?”

Assorted chuckles.

Evan says, “I know you think you’re intimidating with your mangy beards and second-rate tattoos, your shitkicker boots and broad shoulders. You been in plenty of fights, sure, and three-to-one makes you confident. But I want you to look at me. Look at me closely. And ask yourself…”

He steps forward out of shadow and into the band of light from the park, and the big tall glow of the Ferris wheel catches him square in the face and he can feel the heat of it right through his pupils and he knows his eyes are shining like the eyes of a great cat and his muscle memory already has the fight choreography, which thumb to jam into which eye, the low shuddering dig of a close-in body shot, the crackling yield of a floating rib.

“… do I look scared?”

All three sets of eyes flare—fear, surprise, adrenaline—and he sees Clay’s emotions migrate from terror to ramped-up aggression and Clay’s right hand balls into a fist and his legs tense to lunge.

Evan darts forward, fingers held together and slightly curved, the tips forming a spear. Generate power through legs and hips, rapid arm extension, the bil jee strike landing squarely on the impression of the switchblade button in Clay’s pocket.

Evan’s middle fingertip strikes and already he’s driving the heel of the same hand forward, jabbing the knife handle down to angle into the vastus lateralis of the thigh.

A ffffft sound as carbon steel ejects into flesh.

Clay looks down.

The handle is jogged forward, tenting the pocket and trapping the blade in place. A red carnation blooms on the denim.

Clay wails.

He hops on one leg but the blade is inside him and wedged in the pocket; any movement skewers him deeper. Franky and Dale have parted like the Red Sea, shoulders to opposing trailers, horror lighting their faces.

Clay screams and topples onto his side, jackknifing.

“Don’t move,” Evan says. “Stop moving.”

Whimpering, Clay stills, hands hovering above the embedded knife.

“You’ll be fine,” Evan tells him. “It’s just slipped beneath the dermis where all the nerves are.” He looks at the two others. “But he can’t move much. And he can’t walk. Not until you carry him back to get his jeans cut off.”

Dale and Franky blink at him.