When No One Is Watching

by Alyssa Cole

  Easier. Easier, and a million times harder because these aren’t pixels on a screen. The people we’ve shot, we’ve killed, are real. Oh god, they’re real and somehow I can’t even make myself feel that anymore. I’m not a hardened killer—I think my brain has reached some kind of overload point and the choices are curl up or keep it moving.

  I grip my gun tightly, my eyes darting back and forth as we enter a lobby space. Looking for more people we might have to shoot.

  “I’m selling my PlayStation after this,” Theo says darkly as he peers around.

  The lobby we’re passing through is a small one, with the same yellow-and-beige color scheme as the first part of the tunnel. This area is slightly nicer than what we’ve seen so far.

  Instead of holding cages with test subjects, there are normal-looking offices behind the glass in these rooms. Plants sit on desks and hang from ceilings. Pictures of children and families are in frames of all shapes and sizes.

  It could be any workplace, quiet on a Saturday night because everyone is off for the weekend. No. Two people, four people, had been working, and now they’re . . . not.

  Theo walks ahead of me, peering into offices. He stops in front of one, so suddenly that I’m sure someone is inside, but he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t raise his gun. His jaw works and his Adam’s apple bobs.

  When I move beside him, I look into an office that belongs to one of the people who is no longer working. A piece of patterned purple cloth that you can buy from one of the tiny Indian storefronts around Nostrand—well, you could before they got shut down—hangs on the wall. The room smells of lavender and sandalwood, and crystals of all colors and sizes sit on shelves and most available spaces. Instagram-meme-style affirmations written in calligraphy like Rise and shine! and Just Breathe and Kindness is the key are framed on the walls, and on the desk is an eight-by-ten of Julia laughing in a wedding photo with a slim, beaming Black guy. Beside it, a picture of her with two brown kids.

  “Jesus,” Theo says.

  I can’t absorb this. Did her husband know what her job was? How will her children feel when their mother doesn’t come home? Because of me.

  I look away and my eye catches on another affirmation.

  The only way forward is through.

  I shake my head and continue the sweep of the offices—that’s what this is.

  Theo peels away from the window and walks along beside me, and when I glance up at him, his expression is blank, his complexion chalky.

  We pass down the corridor back to back, the glass making it easy to see that no one is inside, and no one is hiding under desks or behind doors. Interspersed with the offices are examination rooms like you might find in any urgent care center—somewhere in my head, I’d disconnected this section from the other, but the people sitting here would have seen the test subjects brought through, would have heard their cries.

  They were the ones doing the testing.

  Theo stops and scrubs a hand through his hair in agitation. “Do you think they were the only ones here? The people we already encountered?”

  “There’s the meeting,” I say, trying to figure out how much time has passed since he stripped my assailant of his phone and we scrolled through the private group. Since the police started their siege of my neighborhood. It could have been minutes or hours. “Maybe that’s where everyone is.”

  “I guess we keep going,” he says flatly.

  We reach the next set of double doors without encountering anyone, and swipe through; they lead us into a stairwell that’s creepy as shit. A metal cage separates this level from the stairs, the gray paint peeling to show the rust beneath, but the door is ajar. The stairwell itself is concrete, dank, and dimly lit, lined with random clusters of pipes and HVAC tubes. We begin to climb, expecting to find a doorway at each landing and being met with blank wall.

  “Theo?” I don’t mean to say his name, don’t mean for my voice to be breathy and panicked, but the dimness and the silence start to press in on me, a claustrophobic nightmare. Part of me wonders if there are any doors. Maybe we should turn back—if we do, will we find the door to the metal cage locked? Is this a trap? Maybe we should have turned back. Maybe I’ve chosen incorrectly, like I always do.

  Theo’s big hand presses into my back as we climb, right over the growing knot of tension between my shoulder blades. “Don’t forget the tunnels are underground, so it’s going to take time to reach ground level. There will be a door. We just have to keep climbing.”

  I nod.

  Finally, finally, we reach a landing with a metal door. Light seeps out from the space where it doesn’t meet the ground, and ugly office lighting never looked so good.

  Theo tries the ID card on the scanner, and the lock mechanism whirs and releases. We crack the door and enter another level, which looks entirely different from the underground tunnels. It’s clearly still under renovation, but the medical center closed relatively recently. This floor is still pretty ugly, but twenty-first-century ugly, with bright lights embedded in gray-speckled drop tile ceilings and bone-white walls.

  The murmur of voices can be heard down the hall, and the scent of coffee fills the hallway, though I can’t shake the smell of that first corridor we’d encountered—what would be the last corridor for people approaching from inside the building.

  My insides are quaking but my hands are steady as I pull out my second gun. Theo shakes his head, leans down to whisper. “That only works in movies, Syd.”

  A spurt of frustration goes through me, but I tuck it away like I do the gun. He’s right, and I’m used to Mommy’s gun anyway.

  We creep down the hallway, toward the sound of a man talking loudly. Confidently. I don’t know who it is, but I know the type—the guy who expects to get what he wants, and does.

  “Okay, we have some live view from the street here, via the drones and the doorbell cams,” the voice says. “Look at this mess. I told those idiots to be mindful of property damage. This should have been done in the middle of the night not at the beginning of it, and it should have been done tomorrow, during the block party and leading into the parade.”

  Theo places a hand on my shoulder, leans down to whisper again. “Kim’s dad.”

  I realize something. Up until now, this has not been personal for him. Yeah, Con Dead had been fucking his ex, but he hadn’t walked in on them or anything. He hadn’t known the cops attacking us and had barely known the people on the street.

  Now it’s about to get real personal.

  My thoughts start racing again.

  Theo is on my side. But Drea was on my side, too, wasn’t she? Until money made her betray me.

  Theo said he likes me, but if I keep it real, I’m his rebound hookup. He was with Kim for how long, and we’ve only known each other a week. I hate Marcus and haven’t spoken to him since the divorce was finalized, and I’m not sure I could walk into a room and point a gun at him for any reason, though I’ve fantasized about it a lot.

  I’m frozen as Theo moves ahead of me, gun at his side.

  “Wait,” I say, but my whisper doesn’t leave my mouth, like I’m in one of the bad dreams again. I could leave, run, but I’d be caught in the melee outside and have no idea who would believe me enough to come back to the hospital with me. I might get arrested or killed, or put into one of the rooms downstairs and tested on, before I can do anything.

  I want to trust Theo because he’s come this far with me, but I don’t. I don’t trust anyone, or anything, except the fact that I have to end whatever is going on, and if I run now that won’t happen.

  I start walking, too, steeling myself for whatever’s behind the door in this conference room. For the fact that just because Theo didn’t turn on me before doesn’t mean he won’t now.

  “The rejuvenation is not going as smoothly as planned, but if it continues as it is, then by daylight we’ll have a new neighborhood under our umbrella.”

  “Did we really have to be so blunt about it?” another man
asks. “I still think we should have moved more subtly, like with the Williamsburg and Park Slope projects.”

  Theo is standing beside the door now, his back to me.

  “The carafe is empty,” someone mutters, and gets shushed.

  “Subtlety is no longer necessary. This neighborhood is ours. We had to get ahead of the other developers trying to move in,” Kim’s father says, voice hard. “This is no time to get squeamish. Inching slowly toward rejuvenation isn’t an option anymore, and with the police, the media, and the government on our side, there’s nothing to worry about. Even with any destruction and bribes, the cost of getting this over and done quickly is negligible.”

  A woman’s voice cuts in, her tone glib. I recognize it from when she threatened to call the cops on me. “When you add the incentives we’re getting from the city, this latest project will gain us billions of dollars to get back land that we could have paid untold amounts of money for otherwise. We totally pulled a Stuyvesant.”

  She laughs.

  “Well, hopefully we manage things a bit better than our forebear,” her father says. “On the next slide are the projected earnings for the eventual addiction cure. Methadone has such a negative connotation, and the new drug crisis sweeping the country calls for a hipper, funkier product. Something that can appeal to a family in the heartland and an urban millennial family.”

  “Our online monitoring teams have started to spot stories linking our production of opioids and our getting paid to find the solution, but nothing is sticking so far,” a deeper voice chimes in, the brownnosing in his tone apparent. “They’re mostly getting written off as crackpot conspiracy theorists.”

  Multiple voices laugh at that.

  “Good. Make sure to plant some additional stories, and also even more embellished ones, like we’re growing babies in tanks or something. Hell, dredge up the mole people thing, that seems to get good play.”

  “Speaking of vermin,” someone else says, “as for the cure itself, while it’s effective in mice, most of our human test subjects haven’t fared as well. This one was promising, but was compromised.”

  “We’re trying to eat here,” another man says in annoyance.

  I tug at Theo’s shirt, but he ignores me and steps inside the room. The chatter abruptly stops.

  Shit. Shit shit shit.

  We were supposed to have the element of surprise, but not to just walk in and stare at them.

  I grasp my gun and very carefully peek inside. Theo is standing there like a dummy, partially blocking my view. After everything that’s happened, I expect the room to be filled with monsters, but no. Just a bunch of normal-looking people in rumpled suits, mostly men, mostly white. But not entirely. Goddammit. I recognize the Black man who’s frozen with his napkin to his mouth, ready to bolt—a politician who’s been on the scene for years. An older Asian man has his head turned toward Theo, eyebrows raised.

  They’re all sitting at an oval table with paper cups, plates, and stacks of documents scattered across it. A PowerPoint presentation is being projected onto a screen. It could be any old meeting, at any old company, except the slide on the screen shows a picture of Kavaughn, eyes bulging and blood crusting both nostrils. Greenish spittle has dripped from the corner of his mouth and down to his neck.

  I pull my head away, press my back against the wall next to the door, and try to calm my stomach, my nerves, my soul. They killed Kavaughn. And Drea. They want to do this to all of us.

  “You told us he was dead, Kimberly,” her father says.

  “Don’t blame this on me! Erik told me—”

  “Hey,” Theo says sharply. “Enough. This is it. You’ve been caught. It’s over.”

  “What? Oh, you really thought you would stop us?” It’s the incredulous laughter in her voice that stomps all my emotions flat except for one—rage.

  “You always tried to be so smart, when you’re nothing but trailer trash,” she says, and the tone is so similar to how Marcus would calmly tell me I was nothing. “Did you think you would waltz in here and tell us to stop and we would? Is that how this played out in your head? You really didn’t pay attention at all when you met my family and their friends, did you? All the lawyers, and CEOs, and politicians?”

  “You can’t stop us. This is too big, and there’s too much money on the line,” her father says calmly. “We own the jails, shithead. They’re not for people like us.”

  Kim’s father is right. In the best-case scenario, there are some good cops in this mess, and some clean lawyers, and a jury that does the right thing. However it plays out, maybe he goes to a white-collar prison for a few years. Maybe.

  I make the sign of the cross, something I haven’t done since I was a teenager, and then whirl and take a step into the room beside Theo. I don’t just stand there though—they’ve already said that nothing we can do within the bounds of the law will stop them. I get the motherfucker standing with a smug smile in front of the room’s heart in my sight, and pull the trigger until the chamber is empty.

  I watch his eyes, see the smug light fade from them, but I feel nothing this time. Not with Kavaughn’s face up on that screen, though now it’s splattered with the old man’s blood.

  Shocked silence fills the room. Kim, dressed in a bootleg Hillary Clinton pantsuit, jumps to her feet and stares at me.

  “You—you—”

  “You can see me now, can’t you, bitch? Funny how that works.”

  I point the gun at her and pull the trigger, forgetting I’m out of bullets in my rage. She dives under the table, and pandemonium ensues. The people who’ve been sitting around the table in shock start to run, knocking over chairs and scattering, and Kim’s father’s words play in my head.

  “You can’t stop us. We own the jails.”

  I don’t have time to reload. I pull the Glock I took from the cop, fumble with the safety, and start firing. This is a higher-caliber gun; the shape of it in my hand feels wrong and hitting a running target is way more difficult than hitting one standing in front of you—about a third of the people go down, but the rest of them run out of the room.

  Shit!

  The gun jams and I shake it, like that will fix anything, but it’s messed up. I don’t know what to do, so I drop it on the floor, pull out Mommy’s trusty .22, and fumble for the baggie of bullets in my pocket.

  The cries and shuffling of the people I clipped fills the room, and even that’s muffled by the loudness of my heartbeat and my breathing and the ringing of my ears.

  Bullets are spilling on the floor when I hear a gun cock next to my head.

  Theo.

  “Don’t,” he says in a barely recognizable voice. “Don’t even think about it.”

  I thought I couldn’t feel anything but rage, but sadness slices through me in a million tiny blades, like everything I’ve been trying not to feel compressed and then exploded inside of me. I have no one.

  No one.

  I see the muzzle of the gun in my peripheral vision. It’s shaking almost uncontrollably, and when Theo steps past me, I follow where the gun is pointed. While I was busy reloading, Kim had stood from behind the table with a gun of her own.

  “Kim, it’s over for real this time,” Theo says.

  Her expression suddenly softens, eyes filling with tenderness even though she’s pointing a weapon. “Can you really shoot me, babe? Really?”

  “Do it, Theo,” I urge. “She’s going to kill us. She’s hurt so many people.”

  Kim tilts her head and smiles. “You know, I’m glad you’re not dead.”

  “Why?” Theo asks sadly, still just standing there. I can’t seem to get the bullets into my gun, because my own hands are shaking, too, my body too overwhelmed by what’s happening even if my mind is still hanging in there.

  “Theo, please,” I plead as more bullets drop to the ground.

  “Because you’ve finally done something useful. I’ve been waiting for my dad to drop dead. Now I’m in charge.” She grins, releases the safety
on her gun. “You’re big and strong, but so what? You’re just a soft little mama’s boy.”

  “Howdy Doody!” I yell at Theo. “Howdy fucking Doody!”

  Theo grunts, his finger jerks on the trigger, and Kim stumbles back, blood blooming on the front of her blouse like the zinnias Mommy planted in our backyard.

  I don’t have time to say anything, to process anything; I hear steps running down the hall toward us and Theo is staring blank-eyed at the spot where Kim was standing. I reach for his back pocket, grab something that looks like a gun, and come away with the Taser I stripped from the cop instead.

  A bullet whizzes past my head and I turn, flip what I hope is the safety, and when a laser sight appears on the chest of the man shooting at us, I fire. Two metal wires shoot out and hit him, and he drops to the ground writhing. I don’t let up, watching the gun slip from his splayed fingers and the Red Sox cap slide back and be crushed as he rolls onto it.

  “Fucking Drew,” I say in a voice so low it rasps my throat. I finally release my finger, which is starting to cramp from willing my anger through the Taser.

  I walk over to Drew and pick up his gun. I can’t bring myself to shoot him, unconscious and with a piss stain on his jeans. I should kill him, but instead I slip to the floor as my legs give out without so much as a warning tremble.

  Theo walks up to me. “I’m sorry I froze. I should have—I should have—”

  “It’s okay not to be that cold-blooded,” I say, my teeth starting to chatter. “I’m sure as hell not. Fuck.”

  Theo drops down beside me and pulls me against him, and we stay like that for a minute. Holding each other in a room full of bodies and gore because if we didn’t need a hug after all that, it would mean this night had broken something in us that couldn’t be fixed.

  “We need to get the people out of those rooms down there,” I say. I don’t want to give up the sensation, but there might be more Drews and there are definitely people in need of immediate medical attention. I don’t know how we’ll get it to them, but we have to finish this.

  “Let’s go,” he says.

  We shuffle back down the stairs—my adrenaline surge has faded and I’m fucking exhausted, and the night isn’t even close to over. We each grab a wheelchair from the lobby as we head back toward that awful wing of horrors we first encountered.