In Time (6 page)

And I swear, the minute that big pink bubble appears and the good witch, whatever her name is, appears in that froufrou dress, I feel the bed jerk as the freak handcuffed to it twists to get closer to the screen.

I prop myself up on my elbows, peering down at her in the dark. She’s rearranged herself so she’s sitting awkwardly on her knees. I know the handcuff must be digging into her skin, but she doesn’t seem bothered by it. Her face is reflected in the TV’s glass face, and even before the Munchkins start singing and parading around, I see her eyes go wide and her lips part in a silent gasp. She’s riveted, like she’s never seen anything like it before. That seems impossible. Who hasn’t watched
The Wizard of Oz
?

It keeps her quiet and occupied—and to be honest, I’m too lazy to get the remote from where it’s fallen on the floor. So I leave it on and switch off the light on the nightstand. I try to sleep, but I can’t. And it’s not that the TV is on too loud, or that it’s too bright—I actually want to watch this. My brain wants to puzzle out why my dad was so hell-bent on getting me to sit through the whole thing. Like with everything he else loved, I’m searching for him in it. A line he borrowed, some kind of philosophy he gleaned from it…and really, all I can see is how this candy-colored world must have made him happy on the days he could barely bring himself to get out of bed.

I don’t want to think about this—to bring Dad into it now, when I’m already feeling this low. The virus-disease-whatever hit these kids at a young age, but my dad carried his sickness with him his whole sixty years of life, through the good years and the bad ones, and the terrible ones after he lost his restaurant. Until the weight of it finally sank him.

I want to laugh when all the characters start delivering the moral of the story, that all these things they’re looking for have been inside them all along—that that’s where goodness and strength live. They want you to think that darkness or evil is only something that gets inflicted on you by the outside world, but I know better, and I think the freak does, too. Sometimes the darkness lives inside you, and sometimes it wins.

“Now I know I’ve got a heart,” the Tin Man says as I shut my eyes and roll away from the screen, “because it’s breaking.”

The girl has nightmares. It’s the only time I hear her talking, and it scares the shit out of me. I sit straight up in bed, fumbling in the dark for the knife I left on the nightstand. I think a wild dog’s broken in, or one of those feral cats I always see lurking around the motel’s Dumpsters. My brain is still half asleep—well, three-quarters asleep. I don’t remember about the kid sleeping on the floor until I’m basically stepping on her. I don’t even assume the noise is human, because it can’t be. No way. The words that come crawling out of her mouth aren’t words at all, but these gut-wrenching, god-awful moans.

“Nooooo, pleassssssse…nooooooo…”

I stand over her, and stand there and stand there and stand there, and I think,
Wake her up, Gabe, just do it,
but that feels like a line that shouldn’t be crossed. That means I care.

I don’t. No matter what she does or doesn’t do, no matter how hard she makes this for me, I won’t ever care.

The bed creaks as my weight sinks back down into it. I half hope the noise will wake her and get me out of having to make the decision. One hour drives into the next, and I lie there, as still as I can force myself to be. I listen to her cry all night, and it feels like a punishment I deserve.

FOUR

M
ORNING
comes in a blinding burst of white light as the thick motel curtains are thrown aside, their metal rings screeching in protest. The flood of sun into the dark, musty room is so sudden that my body reacts before my brain does. I drop off the side of the bed and stagger onto my feet, throwing up a hand to shield my eyes.

Shit—
shit
! I slept too long, what time is it, where’s the
—

A few things come into focus quickly. First the pile of clean laundry sitting on top of my duffel bag, just to the left of the door. I can smell the fresh scent from here and take a step toward it, confused. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a small form at the desk, sitting in front of two plates of food—powdered doughnuts, some fruit snacks, and pretzels—with my jar of peanut butter open between them. Clear plastic wrappers are dangling over the edge of the room’s small trash can, caught on the lip. I know exactly where they came from: the vending machines in the laundry room.

Carefully coating each pretzel on her plate with a delicate dab of peanut butter, she keeps her back to me as I walk to the table. The zip tie is gone, and so are the handcuffs. She’s changed, too, out of her dirty, bloodied clothes into a baggy pink Route 66 T-shirt and jeans she’s had to roll up a few times at the ankles. I stare at them until I remember there’s a donation box in the laundry room that no one’s ever done anything with, filled mostly with kid stuff.

With the exception of the bed I just fell out of, the room is impeccably tidy. The trash is gone, and she’s even cracked the window open slightly to get fresh, cool air flowing in. I storm to the window and throw the curtains shut. The room is pitched into darkness, but I don’t care. It makes it easier somehow.

“Are you
stupid
?” I yell. “You think this is going to work on me? That if you play nice with me, I’ll be nice right back? Are you really that big of an idiot that you think I want to
help
you?”

She shrinks a tiny bit in her chair, but she doesn’t look away. She doesn’t even blink, and I can’t help it—I know she’s a freak, I know that I shouldn’t be talking to her at all, or acknowledging this, or letting her get me this worked up, but it all explodes inside me until I feel anger making a mess of every other thought in my head.

Even if she wasn’t trying to play that game, she obviously thought I couldn’t take care of myself, let alone her. And this was her way of throwing it back in my face, wasn’t it? Mocking me. Why else wouldn’t she have run when she had the chance? Clearly I don’t know how to latch the handcuffs, I don’t know how to restrain her, and I can’t even keep myself alert enough to know when she’s left the goddamn room.

Why did I think I could do this? The freak won’t say a word, but I just look at her and I know the dialogue running through her head.
He sucks, he’s dumb as roadkill, he’s better off scrubbing trailers.
Same script as everybody else.

But I’m not. I’m not. I swear I’m not.

I can be better than this. I know I can be. These freaks, they all know the right way to mess with your thoughts, make you doubt yourself, but I won’t let her. Not anymore. The clock says that it’s only eight in the morning. They’ll be open. I can get rid of her now and be done with this. Get the ten-ton weight off where it’s caving my chest in.

“This isn’t Kansas, Dorothy,” I snap at her. “People here aren’t nice. They aren’t your friends.
I’m
not your friend.”

She ignores me, swinging her legs back and forth on the desk chair as she chows down on her breakfast. I get the look—the one I’m starting to think of as
that look
—in return. One eyebrow raised, lips pursed, eyes blazing with
Give me a break, buddy
.

I leave the food there and take her arm, ignoring her wince as I yank her up from her seat. I fasten two zip ties around her wrists this time, not caring when she makes a small noise of surprised pain. We’re leaving. Right now. I’m going to show her how serious I am. She’ll finally see she should have run when she had a chance.

She’s wrong about me.

I decide to risk driving up to Prescott without doubling back down to Camp Verde for gas. Now that they’ve started drilling in Alaska, tankers have been showing up on the highway again, but the station in Camp Verde is the only one that gets reliable shipments. It’s not that I’m afraid those skip tracers will still be there waiting for me on the highway; I just want to get this done and over with so I can start hunting kids for real.

I’m going to think of this as a trial run for the real thing. Practice.

My gamble pays off. I find a gas station, though I’m out almost two hundred dollars with still almost half a tank left to fill. I’ll get the rest on the way back,
I tell myself, waving to the station attendant. I keep my eye on the highway and the evergreen forest cupping the station in its earthy palm as I make my way back over to the truck. I’ve heard stories about people getting mugged for gas. It sets me on edge every time I have to stop.

I open the passenger-side door, angling my body to block the view of the kid sitting knees-to-chest on the floor. I don’t let her protest; I don’t let her move. I was banking on her false sense of security by leaving her in the car and expecting her not to tamper with it or run, but I won’t do it anymore.

The handbook recommends employing the use of rubber gloves to restrict Yellow freaks’ abilities; if they can’t form a connection with the electricity, they can’t control it. The best I could find in the station were the gloves my mom used to use when she still washed dishes. I know they’re not thick enough, but I’m going to double up and hope that’s enough.

I use the knife to cut the zip ties off, and she slumps forward, rubbing her wrists with a faint, grateful smile. For someone who says nothing, her face is incredibly expressive. It’s how I know she’s so repulsed when I pull the gloves out of my back pocket and try to jam them over her hands. It’s the first time she fights me on anything, really fights—hitting and kicking until I have bruises up and down both arms. For once she’s acting like a real kid having a meltdown, and it throws me that much further off my game. I don’t even bother aligning them on each finger; she can wear them like mittens for all I care. Another zip tie over her wrists will be more than enough to hold them in place.

The kid never once loses the defiant set of her shoulders, but her dark eyes practically burn with the betrayal. I can see the plan forming behind them, and I cut it off before it can take root. “You scream or run or try to draw attention to yourself, I’ll knock you out. I have a Taser, and since you seem to like electricity so much, I’m more than happy to introduce you to it.”

Then I slam the door in her face. But each step I take around the truck has me feeling a foot smaller, until I finally reach the nozzle and get to pumping the gas. I think, Maybe this is what Hutch meant when he said the ones who like doing this are the real monsters. You have to be a bully. You have to teach them to behave, or they’ll walk all over you.

I keep trying to tell myself none of us would be in this situation if it weren’t for them. If they hadn’t gone freak on us, if those other ones hadn’t died, things would have gone on as usual. Mom would be at home taking care of her garden, and Dad would be alive, working himself to the bone keeping his restaurant running and his customers happy. I just wonder, you know, what kind of person the Gabe in that world would have been.

According to the handbook, all PSF recruitment centers and bases are forced to take in Psi refugees when you have them in your custody and honor their bounty. This is only a recruitment center and administrative offices; the real base is down in Phoenix, with most of the state’s population.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but it just seems a little cruel they had to set up shop in the old elementary school.

No one’s coming in or leaving, though the parking lot is filled with cars ranging from old junkers like mine to military Humvees and vans. I loop a pair of handcuffs through the girl’s zip tie and lock them on the metal bar beneath the passenger front seat. She doesn’t beg or plead or cry—not that I expect her to. But she doesn’t look resigned to her fate, either, which—given her Houdini act this morning—makes me feel a little nervous as I lock the door behind me.

I want to scope things out myself before I take her inside. Take things slow. It seems like the smart thing to do. They need to be able to register me in the network and outfit me with all the tech I’ll need. Hutch says sometimes they’ll try giving you the runaround in the hope that you’ll just give up on ever being treated fairly. Make things as frustrating and difficult as possible. That’s why he gave up after his first score, at least.

Ten thousand dollars, I remind myself. A future. Or at least the start of one.

Lincoln Elementary is a stately kind of brick building. Classic in a way that a lot of the newer buildings from the second half of the twentieth century aren’t. A fully uniformed PSF meets me at the door with his rifle resting against one shoulder. I’ve seen pictures and shots on TV, but man, in person, it’s a whole new level of intimidation. Whoever decided to jack Darth Vader’s red-and-black color scheme knew what they were doing.

“What’s your business?”

Not getting my ass shot.

“I’m here about…” The words trail off. The school’s entry hallway has been converted to look a great deal like a police station. There are desks with uniformed PSFs behind them around the perimeter, and a rainbow of men and women hanging around the waiting area in hunter camo and caps, biding their time until it’s their turn to be seen.