Inspection

  Inspection is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Josh Malerman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9781524796990

  Ebook ISBN 9781524797003

  randomhousebooks.com

  Title-page and part-title-page images: copyright © iStock.com/​AGrigorjeva

  Book design by Victoria Wong, adapted for ebook

  Cover design and illustration: David G. Stevenson and Faceout Studio, based on images © Getty Images (tower) and © Shutterstock (trees)

  v5.4

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One: The Alphabet Boys

  Good Morning at the Parenthood!

  The Body Hall Before Breakfast

  The Alphabet Boys Eat

  Warren Bratt and Lawrence Luxley

  At the Window Overlooking the Yard

  Richard

  In the Orchard

  Warren Writes

  J

  Warren Learns the Printing Press

  Part Two: Needs

  Warren at Work

  Black Math

  The Floor Shift

  Needs

  “A Monster in My Rooms”

  Effigy Meet

  Time Enough at Last

  Free Swim/The Pool

  Lockdown

  Panic

  It Came from the Land of Snow

  Part Three: K

  The World as It Looks Whizzing Past You

  Bad Decisions, Always, with B

  Tomorrow

  Marilyn

  B Scared

  Going Back

  Live Like You’re in a Judith Nancy Book

  The Woman Wore Red, All Red

  Still a Place You’ve Never Seen

  Over and Over

  Marilyn and Richard

  The Corner

  Eye Contact

  Frozen Truth

  M.O.M. and D.A.D.

  Part Four: Spoiled Rotten

  Inspection

  Cheers to a New Beginning

  Kill ’Em All

  Boats

  “Show Us What You Would Do”

  Two Markers in the Dark

  Revolt

  Revenge

  Out

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Josh Malerman

  About the Author

  Good Morning at the Parenthood!

  No boy had ever failed an Inspection.

  For this, J felt no anxiety as the steel door creaked open before him, as the faces of the Parenthood looked out, as the Inspectors stood against the far wall, each with a hand on the magnifying glasses hooked to their belts. J had done this every morning of his life, every morning he could remember, and, despite Q’s theories on likelihoods and probabilities (his idea that eventually someone must fail in order to justify a lifetime of Inspections), J felt no doubt, no dread, no fear.

  “Enter, J,” Collins called. Collins, the stuffiest, oldest, burliest Inspector of all. The man smelled of old textbooks. His belly hung so far over his belt D joked he kept an Alphabet Boy hidden in there. That’s where we come from, D had said. But all the Alphabet Boys knew they came from the Orchard, having grown on the Living Trees.

  “Come on, then,” Collins said. It was a wonder any words at all made it through the man’s bushy brown mustache.

  J knew the Inspector did not speak for himself.

  D.A.D. must’ve given the signal it was time to begin.

  To the snickers of L, D, and Q behind him, J entered and removed his pajamas, folding them and placing them in a neat pile upon the steel end table by the Check-Up room door. As the door was closing behind J, D called, “Shoulda showered, J!” And J pointed at him, the Alphabet Boys’ gesture that meant, You’re a jerk, brother.

  The door locked into place, his clothes nicely piled, J stepped to the pair of rubber footprints on the cold steel floor. Winter was close, arriving perhaps as soon as tomorrow. And while J enjoyed the Effigy Meet as much as his brothers, he liked to keep the cold outside. The Check-Up room was as frigid as any he knew in the Turret.

  “Turn,” Inspector Collins said. He and Jeffrey observed from a distance, always the first step of the morning’s Inspection. The dogs breathed heavy behind the glass door beyond the men. J turned to his left. He heard the leather of D.A.D.’s red jacket stretching. The man, as of yet out of sight, must have crossed his arms or sat back in his chair.

  Winter outside the Turret could be brutal. Some years were worse than others. J, nearing his thirteenth birthday along with his twenty-three brothers, had experienced twelve winters. And with each one, Professor Gulch warned the boys about depression. The sense of loneliness that came from being stuck inside a ten-story tower, when the Orchard and the Yard froze over, when even the pines looked too cold to survive.

  Hysteria, J thought. He shook his head, trying to roll the idea out his ear. It was a word he didn’t like anywhere inside his head. As if the four syllables had the same properties as Rotts and Moldus, Vees and Placasores. The very diseases the Inspectors searched him for now.

  “Turn.”

  Collins again. His gruff voice part and parcel of the Check-Up room. Like the sound of clacking dishes in the cafeteria. Or the choral voices of his brothers in the Body Hall.

  “Cold,” J said, turning his back to the Inspectors, facing now the locked door.

  It was often chilly in the Check-Up room; unseen breezes, as if the solid-steel walls were only an illusion, and the distorted reflections unstable drawings on the wind. J imagined a slit somewhere, a crack in those walls, allowing pre-winter inside. It was similar, J thought, to the veterinarian’s office in Lawrence Luxley’s book Dogs and Dog Days. The brilliant leisure writer had described the poor animals’ reactions so well:

  Unwelcoming, cold, it was as though Doctor Grand had intentionally made it so, so that the dogs understood the severity of their visits. And still, despite the inhospitable environs, the dogs understood that the room was good for them. That their lives depended on these regular visits. Some of them were even able to suppress their basest instincts…the ones that told them to run.

  J had memorized all of Lawrence Luxley’s books. Many of the Alphabet Boys had.

  “Turn.”

  J did as he was told. Always had. The routine of the Inspections was as ingrained in his being as chewing before swallowing.

  And with this third turn, he faced D.A.D.

  A thrill ran through him, as it always had, twelve years running, to see D.A.D. for the first time in the day.

  The bright-red jacket and pants were like a warm fire in the cold Check-Up room. Or the sun coming up. “Did you sleep well, J?”

  D.A.D.’s voi
ce. Always direct, always athletic. J wasn’t the only Alphabet Boy who equated the man’s voice with strength. Comfort. Security. Knowledge.

  “I actually did not,” J said, his twelve-year-old voice an octave deeper than it was only a year ago. “I dreamt something terrible.”

  “Is that right?” D.A.D.’s hazel eyes shone above his black beard, his hair black, too. J had black hair. Just like his D.A.D. “I’m intrigued. Tell me all about it.”

  “Turn,” Collins said. And J turned to face the Inspectors and the dogs all over again.

  No longer facing D.A.D., the color red like a nosebleed out of the corner of his eye now, J recounted his unconscious struggle. He’d been lost in a Yard four hundred times the size of the one he enjoyed every day. He described the horror of not being able to find his way back to the Turret.

  “Lost?” D.A.D. echoed. The obvious interest in his voice was as clear to J as the subtle sound of his leather gloves folding around his pencil.

  Yes, J told him, yes, he’d felt lost in the dream. He’d somehow strayed too far from the Turret and the Parenthood within. He couldn’t remember how exactly—the actual pines framing the Yard were not present in this dream. But he was certainly very anxious to get back. He could hear his floor mates Q, D, and L calling from a distance but could not see the orange bricks of the tower. He couldn’t make out the iron spires that framed the roof’s ledge like a lonely bottom row of teeth. Teeth J and the other Alphabet Boys had looked through many nights, having found the nerve to sneak up to the roof. Nor could he see the tallest of the spires, the single iron tooth that pointed to the sky like a fang. Gone were the finite acres of the Yard, the expanse of green lawn between himself and the Turret. So were the reflections in the many elongated windows of the many floors. In their stead was endless green grass.

  And fog.

  “Well, winter is upon us,” D.A.D. said. His voice was control. Always. Direction. Solution. Order. “Couldn’t even see the fang, hmm? No sign of the Parenthood at all. No sign of home.”

  J thought of the yellow door on the roof, visible all the way from the Yard below. He thought of the solid orange bricks and how, on a summer day, the Turret resembled a sunrise.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head, looking to the silent faces of the Inspectors, who quietly fingered the magnifying glasses at their belts. J understood now, as a twelve-year-old boy, something he hadn’t at eleven: The Inspections didn’t begin when the Inspectors used their glasses. It began the second you walked through the door.

  “You must have been so scared,” D.A.D. continued. His voice was fatherhood. Administration. Always. “But, tell me, did you eventually find the Turret before waking?”

  J was quiet a moment. He scratched at his right elbow with his left hand. He yawned a second time.

  Hysteria, he thought again. He actually made fists, as if to knock the thought out of his head. Professor Gulch taught psychology and often stressed the many ways a boy’s mind might turn on itself: mania, attention deficit, persecution, dissociation from reality, depression, and hysteria. For J, it had all sounded like distant impossibilities. Conditions to be studied for the purpose of study alone. Certainly J wasn’t afraid of one day experiencing these states of mind himself. Yet here he was…twelve years old…and how else could he explain the new, unknown feelings he’d been having of late? What would Gulch call the sense of isolation, of being incomplete, when he looked out across the Yard, toward the entrance to the many rows of the Orchard? To where the Living Trees grew?

  The boy recalled his childhood as though through a glass with residue of milk upon it. Unable to answer the simple question: Where do I come from?

  Another Lawrence Luxley line. A real zinger, as Q would say.

  But no, J thought, there in the Check-Up room. He wasn’t trying to answer that question at all. No boy had ever determined which of the cherry trees in the Orchard were the ones they had grown on. And as far as J knew, they were fine with that.

  Weren’t they?

  “No,” J finally said. “I never found my way home.” He heard the pencil against paper again, could easily imagine D.A.D.’s bright science eyes reading the words he wrote.

  Like all the Alphabet Boys, J felt honored whenever D.A.D. noted what he said.

  “And when you woke?” D.A.D. said. He didn’t need to finish his sentence. It was clear what he was asking for.

  “I thought it was real. I thought I was still out there. Like I’d woken in the Yard, on my bed. I looked up, must have seen the ceiling, but I mistook it for more of that fog. It took me a minute to understand I was just in my bedroom.” He paused. Imagined D.A.D. stroking his black beard with a gloved hand. “This all happened moments ago, of course, as the call for Inspection woke me.”

  “Of course,” D.A.D. said. “Now tell me,” he began, and J knew the question he was about to be asked, before D.A.D. asked it. “Do you have a theory on what prompted this dream?”

  While J had experienced a wide range of emotions in this room before, he wasn’t prepared for the one he felt then.

  Fear.

  And where had it come from? Surely he knew this question was coming. Had he not had time to prepare for it? Was that it? Or was it something Q would call “deeper”?

  Of course J knew the right answer to D.A.D.’s question. But for the first time in his life, he didn’t feel like telling the truth.

  The shock of this realization didn’t strike him as hard as the one that immediately followed: a sense that he had decided to lie before entering this room and had simply not told himself about it.

  Why? Why lie?

  Because, just prior to going to bed the night before, long after his studies were done, J had seen someone crouched behind Mister Tree, the lone willow that denoted the end of the Yard and the beginning of the Orchard. It was a figure, he believed. Perhaps it was the way certain branches reached down to the forest floor as others united across it, but in J’s mind’s eye, the sight he’d seen was a person.

  Crouched.

  By Mister Tree.

  At the time, J thought it was A or Z. He couldn’t say why.

  And maybe that was good enough reason to lie, J told himself. D.A.D. and the Inspectors would think he was crazy for suggesting such a thing!

  A dead brother hiding behind a tree at night.

  As if!

  He looked from Jeffrey to Collins and thought maybe the two Inspectors could detect the hidden story. Jeffrey adjusted his cap. Collins the gold sash that ran from over his shoulder to his waist. J looked to their belts, as if that glass could penetrate his very skin, could determine the purity of his heart. Even the shepherds started breathing heavy, and one, Max, tilted his head to the side, the way dogs do when they hear a curious sound.

  Hysteria. J didn’t want to sound crazy. He didn’t want to be crazy. It was branches and shadows and nothing more. Surely.

  Yet, lying was a betrayal of sorts. J knew that. Perhaps, as kids, he and D had fibbed about who spilled the cherry juice on the hall carpet. Maybe once or twice, as a toddler, he’d shaken his head no when asked if he had gone to the bathroom in his pants. But these brief (and harmless, J believed, despite what lying could lead to) fabrications were easily washed clean with a single slap of that red-leathered hand. D.A.D. was very good at getting the real story out of his boys, as if he owned unseen shovels that always dug for the truth.

  “J?”

  J thought of Lawrence Luxley’s book about soldiers, Great Horses. Thought about one soldier in particular, a general named Sam. Sam, Q had pointed out, dressed much like the Inspectors did. A gray wool uniform that always looked too warm, no matter that the temperature seemed to gradually lower during an Inspection. A gray kepi. A gold sash and a brown belt. Black boots. All throughout Great Horses, Sam felt a similar feeling to the one J had now: Sam had information he wasn’t sure he
should tell his troops. Luxley did a masterful job of highlighting this, a near twenty-page interior monologue where Sam weighed lying and lies and the right and wrong time to use them. In the end, he’d determined that no time was a good one and that his troops deserved to know the truth, even if it hurt them. But J read something deeper into that monologue than simply the merits of honesty: General Sam was scared. Not scared in the way the Parenthood had lovingly taught the Alphabet Boys to be afraid—that is, of themselves and what they were capable of doing to themselves if they did not adhere to the laws of the Turret. But rather…scared for himself.

  “Why?’ he asked out loud. Both Inspectors tilted their heads like the dog had just done.

  “What’s that?” D.A.D. asked.

  Again, Professor Gulch’s lectures on psychology rose up like birds in J’s suddenly troubled mind.

  Sam, J knew, was torn. J felt the same way, exposed beneath the bright fluorescent lights of the Check-Up room. After all, the harsh illumination showed every crevasse in the faces of the Inspectors, lines that told the boys how old these men truly were even if the sun in the Yard could not. And the reverse held true for the boys. Their youth was never as obvious as when they removed their pajamas and folded them in a pile on the end table by the door. A boy could see much more of his body in here than when he was in the shower…revelations that often alarmed him. Holding out his arm, looking down at his belly, lifting a knee, a boy could almost make out the very tunnel-and-bridge system of veins and arteries traveling beneath his skin. A pimple, normal in the hall light, could be Placasores in the Check-Up room. The light hairs on the arms looked sewn into the skin. Knuckles and toes resembled old weathered leather. Belly buttons looked like holes. Fingernails like dead wood.