Oct 6th, 2083: The Reader

We reached Miles City today.  Against Sam and Charlie's advice, I stopped by the library.  The library in my hometown is small; I hoped to have better luck finding reference materials in a larger town. 

Sam and Charlie stayed outside, choosing to watch me through the gaps in the boarded up windows.  The building was quiet, lights flickering and making the shadows dance.  Shelves after shelves of books.  I could have lived here all winter, absorbing all that knowledge. 

"Dull sublunary lovers' love
    -Whose soul is sense-cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
    The thing which elemented it"

It was coming from the poetry section.  I peeked around a shelf to see a Reader.  The girl was curled up in a corner, muttering to herself.  This was my first time seeing a Reader, though I had heard about them.  She did not react when I approached, nor when I gently shook her.  She merely continued to recite her poem.  I stepped past her and continued to browse the shelves.  A mistake on my part.

"Thy firmness makes my circle just,
    And makes me end where I begun." 

I heard the Reader laugh, a sad hopeless laugh. 

"Where, like a pillow on a bed,
    A pregnant bank swell'd up, to rest-

Charlie was kneeling over me, slapping my cheek.  I waved him off and sat up.  A terrible headache throbbed in my temples and spots danced before my eyes.  When my vision cleared, I spied Sam.  The man stood with his back to us and was cleaning blood off his knife.

"That was a close call.  The Librarian almost got you."  This was the first time I had seen Charlie without a hint of a smile.  I rose to my feet and looked in the window of the library.  The Reader lay on the floor, blood staining the scattered tomes around her.  A man stood over her, an old man in tattered robes.  He looked at me with his eyeless face and gave me a smile full of rotted teeth.

Sam grabbed my shoulder and pulled me from the window.  "You're a damned fool."  He told me, his voice low and fierce.  "No more libraries, you hear?"  I nodded, the image of the Reader's sightless eyes still in my mind.  "I did her a favor," he growled and shoved me at the carriage.  "She wasn't a person anymore.  She was a tool."  He made his disgust evident by spitting at the building behind us.

"Hell, Sam, they're not all bad."  Charlie looked worried.  Upon retrospect, Sam seemed especially stricken by the event in the library.  And Charlie has been overly protective of him since then.  The two are fast friends and perhaps something more.  Ah well, better that these feelings of mine die a quiet death instead of being cruelly ground into the dust.