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  I rattled the floorboards outside a locked room.

  “D?” I said.

  Nothing.

  “D, what’s your name? I just escaped from the other wing. Is someone there?”

  A loud crash, something fell.

  “Hello, hello! Please, let me out!” She screamed this phrase repeatedly, frantic she became, as I clawed through the ring of keys, which I had collected from my own locked door, and found the right one. Interestingly, her lock was antiquated, a simple turnkey lock so unlike my titanium upgrade. Why was she so trusted? Underestimated? I would have picked this lock on the first night. As her door opened, a blond girl struggled to sit on her bed. A pile of books was strewn along the floor, so I presumed they were the source of the crash. D wore a purple dress and one black Converse All Stars sneaker; her other foot was bare. I wondered again where my shoes were, as I scrunched my toes in the gifted, too-large Nikes. Why was she allowed to keep her shoe? This D was very pregnant, just as I.

  “The cops are coming. They’re coming right now.”

  As I said this, the sound of tires and an engine rumbled outside.

  Why didn’t I hear cars pull up in my wing? She must have heard whenever the Kitchen People arrived, The Doctor, The Obvious Couple, the Girl Scouts and their mother, Brad. Did she scream for help each time? They must not have heard her.

  “My name is Dorothy Salucci. I need a doctor.”

  A car door slammed. That can’t be the cops yet. I called 3.5 minutes ago. Must be the cops. Someone is walking around outside. Where are they going?

  Beads of sweat dotted her pale face. Her eyes drooped in sickness, not lethargy. One of her legs was swollen and red; her right shin appeared as though it would burst. Her hair was matted with grease, the bangs pulled aside by one bobby pin.

  Where are they?

  Dorothy’s dungeon mirrored mine in many respects: wood bed without mattress on the bottom slats, just resting in the frame, plastic covered her box spring, the beams were the same, the window, the wood floor. But she had no TV. She had no radio. No pencil case, no ruler, no pencils, no paper, and no pencil sharpener. And I guessed, no tacks. She did have two assets, however, that I did not: knitting needles and several books.

  Screaming began in another part of the building. My wing.

  I tried to lift Dorothy, get her to move.

  A door slammed. Again, my wing.

  “Come, Dorothy, come now.”

  She froze.

  “Dorothy, Dorothy, we need to leave, now!”

  Running feet outside the building below us.

  And up the stairs.

  Dorothy pasted herself to the wall behind her bed.

  I pulled her arm.

  A floorboard rattled behind us in the hall.

  That’s when I accepted my colossal miscalculation.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SPECIAL AGENT ROGER LIU

  As soon as I hung up with Boyd, Lola and I found our way to the Skyway, the one road to Indiana that afforded a quickened, lights-and-siren-blaring path. I called the local Indiana police station and warned of our imminent arrival, instructing the chief to not move a muscle or make one solitary call on the open wire. He said, “No problem,” and promised to bring his troops off the street by way of an innocuous code.

  When we hit Gary, Indiana, we abandoned the lights and sirens, opting to blend into Indiana’s straw-and-wheat air like other unmarked motorists on this cold spring day. The sky was a steel blanket of gray with just a faint hint of fighting blue. The sun, a distant memory behind the murky froth.

  Lola’s instincts were up on a high wire, for her sweat of Old Spice pervaded every last inch of the interior. I opened the passenger window as she drove.

  “Shut the damn window, Liu, I’m dying over here with that pumping sound in my ears.”

  The fast-moving air annoyed me too, and I suppose it annoyed even more a woman with a hound’s senses. I pushed the button to shut the window.

  We beat our way into the police station, which had been turned into a makeshift command central of two men. The one-floor box of a structure had gray desks facing a waist-high wood partition, which itself faced the door. The wall of patrolmen in local blues I had expected to meet us was absent. An older officer extended his hand to mine.

  “Agent Liu, Chief Marshall. This is my deputy, Hank. Sorry, I know you were expecting more of us. But soon as I hung up with ya, I realized, out of all the damn days, all my boys are attendin’ a funeral for the wife of their old chief. They’re all two-and-a-half hours away. But listen here, listen here.”

  The chief stepped closer, peering into my eyes to accentuate his announcement.

  “Listen here. You won’t believe this. Your kidnapped girl just called. I can’t believe the timing.”

  “Dorothy called here?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Dorothy? Who’s Dorothy? No, the girl said her name was Lisa Yyland.”

  “Pink bear,” Lola whispered.

  “Come again?” Chief Marshall asked.

  “Never mind, never mind. Did you say Lisa Yyland?” I said.

  “Yeah, you can hear it on our recording. She called three minutes ago. I’ve been trying your phone number. She said to go on up to the old boarding school. She’s waiting. Said not to use sirens or we’d jeopardize her and another girl.”

  Another girl. Another girl. I bet that girl is Dorothy.

  “Who is Lisa Yyland? If you’re looking for a Dorothy, do you know?”

  “Yes, we know. A team went to inspect Lisa’s home when she vanished from New Hampshire about a month ago. A week after the girl, Dorothy, we’ve been trailing. Lisa had packed a big backpack the morning she went missing, clothes, a box of her mother’s hair dye, lots of food, and other items. They thought the contents all stacked up to one conclusion: a suspicious runaway. Her case landed with another team, based solely on these facts. Fucking metrics. Damned computer models. I knew she was part of the cases we’re tracking.” I wiped my forehead with a fist and clenched my teeth, fighting a prehistoric growl.

  “Roger, come on. Let’s get over there, now,” Lola beckoned, pulling on my crooked elbow.

  Lola had enough tact to call me Roger instead of Liu in front of other people, which was not lost on me. Also, she never called me Roger unless she needed me to snap out of it.

  “Chief, you can take us to this place?”

  “Sure as hell can. We’ll use Sammy’s Volvo. Sammy’s our operator. No one will suspect that rusty beast.” The chief pointed to a fat man eating a donut, slumped in a chair, barely awake, in front of a switchboard in what seemed to be a back closet. Fat Sammy nodded, kept chewing, and handed the chief his keys without any words. The powdered sugar on his lips and chin, along with his uniform shirt missing two buttons, reminded me we were in a small, small town.

  We climbed into Sammy’s orange Volvo, Chief Marshall, his deputy, Lola, and me. Gas station coffee cups and dog food from an open Purina bag rolled at my and Lola’s feet in the back. Our guns were loaded, cocked in the holsters, and ready for a bloodbath. Lola hung her nose out the window, following the scent of something along the way. Her muscles twitched in anticipation, her fingers straightened to a rigor mortis upon her clenched thighs. My emotions matched her physical message.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  DAY 33 CONTINUES

  I turned from facing Dorothy to see my twin captor, and in so doing, became immediately cognizant of my duty to protect four people: me, my unborn child, hysterical Dorothy, and Dorothy’s unborn child. I evaluated the tears bubbling like lava from his bloodshot eyes. A sludge of wetness sagged the top layer of his face in a mudslide of sorts, as though his skin were melting. Concerned I was delusional and witnessing the decay of a wax figure, I inspected closer and realized his crying was cutting lines, like the receding tide to soft sand, and smudging his thick foundation. Makeup? Yes, makeup. Wow. Soon enough, his underlying giant pours revealed him as the true and exact twin of the man I’d ju
st killed. His deep breathing was of the variety summoned from only unfathomable grief. Like a hungry, bee-stung bull, he practically ground his feet in the floorboards, preparing to charge and impale.

  Four quick conclusions surfaced for me:

  Brad found the remains of his brother;

  Brad had his own set of keys to our dungeons—they dangled from his loose grip. Fortunately, I had plunked my set into my back holster once I entered Dorothy’s room;

  Brad had, in fact, not flown away;

  Brad intends to harm us in a very bad way—worse than even before.

  “My brother!” he screeched, pacing Dorothy’s room and lunging in my face.

  “My brother, my brother, my brother,” he kept saying, turning and pacing and flinging arms here and there.

  Around his third lunge of growling, I caught glimpse of a dent in one of the four gold buttons on the right sleeve of his rather flamboyant, navy-blue, velvet blazer. He seems so impeccable, despite his tirade. But the dent…

  When he back armed my left temple like I was the tennis ball and his forearm the racket, I figured that perhaps the dent was merely a future vision, for I’m sure my skull is what caused the dent. Perhaps in my constant evaluation and planning of each miniscule step, I had primed my brain to anticipate near-future actions. Of course, I can’t prove this theory, but I’d like to study the phenomenon with neuroscientists someday.

  With the blow, every emotional switch I might have allowed on, although none were truly on, were securely turned off. A satisfaction of nothingness washed over me as I crashed to the floor. I became no more than a vessel. A robot. An automaton. A murder-seeking android.

  With wincing eye, I followed one of my bedpost arrows roll free of my holster. I clutched it in the same motion as grabbing the bow from my now prone back. Laying on my side on Dorothy’s floor, I positioned the arrow in the sling and waited for my new pacing jailer to again turn to face me—all of which occurred in the three seconds from his arm hitting my head. Practice. Practice. Practice will make you like this—detaches your physical actions from a horror of reality. Ask any soldier in any war.

  Dorothy was up standing on her mattress, screaming all hellfire as though lead soprano in an opera about horrific agony, written entirely in C7. Perhaps even air shattered upon her deafening pitch. How I longed to replace her voice with my yard-sale radio and the pianissimo assai of the keys. I did not turn to calm her; I did not have the time. There I lay before her, she stripping vocal chords on the bed behind, me aiming an arrow at our mutual foe. My eye closest to where he hit me swelled. A trickle of blood blinded that side of my vision. My top eye, however, was clear of bruise, clear of blood, and sharp and free of pain.

  He spun to me. My quarry trapped only four feet away, I lifted the blade of the arrow toward his eyes. And, not giving him any chance to retreat or even freeze to collect his thoughts, I let go the arrow with a simple plunk of the bowstring.

  Go arrow. Nail him.

  The arrow wobbled mid-air, but like a heat-seeking missile, adjusted itself upward and straight, all while keeping speed. Landing bull’s eye in the sensitive chasm between his nose cartilage and the bone part of his left cheek, about an inch below his lower lid, the determined wood blade bore deep enough to stab itself in place. If only I had had the chance the practice on a hay-bale, I could have impaled his eye and possibly his brain.

  Beastly screaming ensued. He lifted his arm and pulled the arrow from his face, which I considered the stupidest reaction. Leave the knife in place if you’re stabbed. Get to a doctor. The blade will sear the blood, my father once taught, while explaining the military wound on his right flank. I walked ten miles with the insurgent’s kitchen knife in my obliques. Had I removed it, neither you nor I would be here today.

  An eruption of blood burst from Brad’s cheek and drained down his velvet jacket to plop on the floorboards. A large drop moving too fast splashed to spray my hands. Dorothy, God love her, quit her screaming and jumped to my side to begin hurling books at Brad’s bleeding head. Catcher in the Rye, Breakfast of Champions, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Something Wicked This Way Comes, several other classics typical of school learning—J.D. Salinger, Vonnegut, Marquez, Bradbury—all became weapons in our war. Collective Asset #39: Literature.

  Brad, reduced to a whimpering weakling, skuttle-waddled to the hall, and, with one hand pressed firmly on the blood hole in his face, slammed through the motions of locking the door in a fitful, keys-dropping manner. I was less concerned with being a prisoner again and more concerned with having a wounded animal to contend with. Wounded animals, those grief-stricken and vulnerable, have nothing to lose and no one to coax them to their senses.

  So I had a rabid hyena on my hands outside the room. Inside, a hysterical teen: Dorothy had returned to the bed with a harrowing writhing of sound. My black butterfly, although I stood drop-shouldered on a weathered floorboard, one that seemed a place for pacing, and I searched and pleaded the triangular window for him to flutter up, failed to show.

  How could you miss Brad’s possible presence? How on Earth did you miscalculate by so much? I chastised myself.

  Admittedly, my self-expectations have always been unrealistically high. I do expect Me to be omniscient, although I know very well I am not. It is a wish, I guess, a wish that I could harness all of the knowledge in the universe and make good use of a collective intelligence. Solve all of the theories out there on space and time and matter vs. dark matter. The creation of life. The meaning of everything.

  Humbled, always when reminded of my human handicap, I merely expect more of myself, never relenting to reality.

  I circled the perimeter my new jail, reminding myself I’d called the cops. This is soon over, relax, relax, breathe. They should be here any minute now. They better get here before he comes back up. I better map out a plan in case something’s wrong. What if whoever answered the phone is in on it?

  Dorothy lay on her bed in the curled position of a dying fawn. Her moaning interrupted my plan making. I wasn’t used to including anyone in my personal strategies, whether in my lab at home or whether in incarceration. I was also not used to holding, let alone beginning, a conversation with a girl my own age. Back home, I had no girlfriends. My only friend was Lenny, my friend since age four, my boyfriend since age fourteen. Lenny was a poet, who had a surplus of emotion, and we found that when mixed with me, we evened each other out. Lenny had an uncanny grip on the English language; he saw patterns so quickly in a list of seemingly unrelated words, our teachers struggled to challenge him. In fifth grade, they placed Lenny in a special class of one, and a specialist from the State of New Hampshire Council on Higher Education came once a week to deliver Lenny a packet of challenges. People with PhDs and MDs and XYZs bandied the word “savant” around as casually as though labeling him with ADD. But I think Nana, known simply as Nana, presented the best diagnosis of all.

  Nana had flown in to New Hampshire from her estate in Savannah just about eight months before Day 33. My parents had gone to Boston for a “Broadway in Boston” play, so Nana, Lenny, and I played Scrabble on our butcher-block counter, all of us snug on the bar stools with cushioned backs. Of course, Lenny was winning by some will-crushing seventy points, and I had deciphered there was no point in continuing the game.

  “Nana, let’s just make fudge because there is no point in continuing,” I said. “I’ve done the math, and we can’t possibly win, so we might as well call the game now. Or, how about chess? Lenny is terrible at war strategy, and we can destroy him.”

  “You mean you can destroy both of us,” Nana said.

  “Well, okay, if you see it that way,” I said. I had flicked on my Affection switch, so I allowed Nana an eyes-wide and simple grin, which she returned with a fuzzy-eyebrowed Nana-wink. I liked the way her wrinkled skin looked so soft and white, so very white to match her white, curled hair. She seemed like a luminous ghost to me—a happy specter in my life. Her red blouse with lime flowers, her l
ong, red corduroy skirt with a pink silk ribbon as a belt, her red, leather clogs with purple straps—so white of hair and face, and yet so colorful—like a rainbow wrapped her soul.

  Nana was a published author of a regionally popular crime series. Her target demographic consisted of ladies her age who, unlike her, spent time in rocking chairs on retirement lakes or in brick nursing homes. Unlike her audience, Nana never relented to age: she wrote and sewed, sewed and wrote, and made fudge when she visited me.

  On this particular night eight months prior to Day 33, Lenny and I had just begun our junior year. It was a Friday in mid-October. The air was unseasonably warm, and a breeze whooshed in through the open kitchen windows, fluttering the arched drapes above the soapstone sink. Nana slid off her stool to quiet the tea kettle when it began to whistle.

  “You know,” she said. “Lenny here is just like us. The difference, my dear, is he is the lucky host of whatever literary parasite Charles Dickens suffered, or Bob Dylan suffers. Some glorious strain mere mortals find impossible to bottle. How I wish I were so afflicted.”

  As she wrapped the kettle handle with a quilted potholder, I passed Lenny a vacant stare—the kind he says that freaks him out.

  “Lisa, don’t start,” he said, while snapping his fingers to break the spell. But I was already mentally gone, lost to a solitary, invisible hiding place, well within study mode.

  When Nana reduced Lenny’s literary gift to a microbiological ailment, something clicked in me, some question of science made me hungry for evaluation. Perhaps her friendly comment should have been taken lightly as intended, a humorous lilt to our weekend song. Perhaps I shouldn’t have elevated her theory to proven biology—but, mixed with the warped mentality of a teenager, I found myself in a hormonal fit of science and desire. Yes, perhaps I wished to catch Lenny’s disease of words. Perhaps I caused our amorous protections to fail: our child was conceived that night, in Lenny’s car, after we’d filled ourselves on a batch of Nana’s fudge. I was 100 percent thinking of microbial inoculation and zero percent about ovulation. Science Fiction vs. Established Medicine. The one slip I allowed—a slip made possible given my brief stumble in the battle with hormones. I really hated being a teenager.