AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Deborah pressed closer. “Can you keep her safe?”
Evan said, “Yes.”
“No matter what?”
“Yes.”
Through the door issued televised sounds of gunfire and explosions. An action movie?
“Okay,” she said. “Then let Ruby tell you.”
Evan asked, “Tell me what?”
“That’s up to her,” Mason said to his wife. “To decide whether she trusts him.”
Deborah said, “We should be in there with them.”
“We will ask Ruby what she wants,” Mason said. “If she’s comfortable being alone with him, she’ll say so.”
Evan picked up the third person: “He will do his best to make her comfortable.”
Deborah rapped on the door with a single knuckle.
A voice from beyond: “C’min!”
Deborah opened the door, and the three of them crowded at the threshold like bozos determining how to exit a clown car.
Slumped in a beanbag cast in the sterile blue light of a big-screen TV, Ruby worked an intricate joystick, playing a first-person shooter game. Her face was pallid, slack. It looked like she’d been at it for hours.
It took a moment for Evan to understand the decor.Sports Illustratedswimsuit pictures tacked up over a bed with green flannel sheets. A framed Red Sox jersey covered with Sharpie signatures hung on the wall next to a pennant. Photos wedged in the frame of a mirrored closet door showcased Johnny through the years with different friends and girlfriends—and quite a few with his sister.
Ruby nestled deeper into the beanbag, seemingly comfortable in her brother’s room.
“Ruby,” Deborah said with enviably refined diction, “you have a visitor. Evidently approved by the president of the United States.”
Ruby didn’t look over. Her hands pulsed around the controller. On the television several shady mercenary types met their end, their heads exploding in tomato bursts. The game was no more demure when it came to their screams of agony. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“Cool.” Ruby favored them with a single quick glance. “Well, hi.”
Deborah said, “Would you like us to stay, dear?”
“I’m fine.” Ruby shot a soldier in a gas mask in both knees and then kicked him back into the conveniently located tail propeller of an attack helicopter. Intestinal muck spattered a heretofore invisible lens.
Mason offered Evan a nod of encouragement. “Good luck.”
For the first few minutes after Deborah and Mason withdrew, Evan watched Ruby obliterate an entire squad of mercenaries with a .50-cal meat chopper.
She neither spoke nor looked up.
Finally she tossed over a second remote and chinned at the beanbag next to her. “Don’t just stand there. Get in.”
A challenge.
Evan sat with the remote and tried to figure out the weapon-control system. The movement mechanics were baffling; every time he tried to lead a target, he missed by several inches. The little recoil buzz of the joystick drove him crazy.
He missed all his shots.
