by J. A. Dauber
And now I knew it was serious, because the cutesy map interface disappeared, and instead there were those windows with lots of letters and numbers, the ones I’d expected in the first place. He started muttering to himself, things about wiping traces and rapping protocols and other stuff that made no sense to me whatsoever.
And then we saw it.
Him. Dad.
“Live feed,” Kaz muttered. “Hope you’re happy.” And kept typing.
And I was, but also I was torn apart at the same time, you know? Because it was Dad. But it was an older, thinner, sadder Dad, walking around a small room, reading a newspaper—a real, paper newspaper, just like the kind he had always liked to read.
I had expected him to be shouting and screaming, or crying, or catatonic. But I guess you can’t keep that up for seven years.
I thought I would feel more, though. When I saw him, I mean. I had gone through all of this, for months, for him. Caroline. Clapham Junction. And even though I started to cry, inside it felt a little…smaller, I guess, than I had expected. I remember when I went to my grandmother’s funeral, mom’s mom, and I was there, at the graveside, and they started shoveling dirt on the coffin, and I could hear that thunk, thunk, and I thought: This is it, you know? This is really it, and I was sad, but it wasn’t overwhelming. It felt smaller, almost surreal. Like I was watching the scene on TV.
Which I guess was what was going on here. Maybe that’s why it felt so small. Maybe it’ll be different when I see him, in—how long now? Just a few minutes. I hope so.
Considering everything. Considering what Mom…
The point is. It was him. He was there. Wherever there was.
I looked at my mom. She wasn’t crying, and she wasn’t smiling. She was firm, set, furious. “GIVE ME A LOCATION,” she said. “GIVE ME A LOCATION, KAZ. I’M GOING TO BURN IT ALL DOWN.”
But then the screen started dripping blood.
Not actual blood—some kind of computer graphic. But it was bright, and red, and Kaz stepped away from the computer like it was real, and said we had to get out of here, we’d been made, reverse-hacked, his proximity alarms had been time-looped and shunt-delayed—
And that was when there was a massive explosion and machine-gun fire lit up the entire building, getting Kaz in the head and the neck.
* * *
It didn’t get me, obviously, since I’m telling you this story. No thanks to my reflexes or anything. I was getting better at dodging these sort of things while wearing the suit, but when it’s just me, my instincts are to freeze, flail, and scream.
Is it weird that I feel worse about the fact that Kaz died with my mom threatening him than that Mr. Jones killed him? It has to be. But that’s how I feel. I want us to be the good guys.
She saved me, of course. Mom. With the Mayhem suit on, she was able to bend over, cover me, and take the brunt of the blast on her back. And then—it must have been within three, four seconds—she ripped out a big chunk of wall and plunked it down between me and the bullets. It was the wall separating Kaz’s back room from the comic bookshop, and before it came down and blocked my field of vision I got a good view of the customers running screaming out the front door.
And the four nasty-looking military-grade drones flying above them.
I’ll be honest, if I expected anything, it would have been the Bloody Front. Maybe even Assassin himself, itching for payback. But I guess wherever they were hiding out after Clapham Junction, they couldn’t get here, not at five hundred miles per hour, anyway.
Now that I’m thinking about it, if Mr. Jones had these drones, why he didn’t use them to drop a big old bomb on us from a thousand feet up? Take both us and the hard drive out in one gigantic blow.
It must have been because of Mom. How he felt about her. What he needed. Or hoped for, despite everything. So more precise targeting was necessary.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he wanted to see us die up close and personal. Because I could see the red camera lights on the drones, and they were recording.
Anyway. Once I was as safe as possible, Mom went into action.
I didn’t see everything. There were wall fragments flying everywhere and it was incredibly loud, so I had to keep closing my eyes and putting my fingers in my ears. But I saw enough. I saw Mom rip apart a drone with her bare hands—well, gauntlets. That was awesome. And then she did this midair maneuver where she fried one drone with a boot rocket while swinging a second one right into a bank of computer equipment, which shorted out.
Which left one final drone. Mom floated there, in midair, looking at it. It looked back at her and chattered out a few bullets, which spanged off Mom like they were nothing. It fired a missile. At such close range, Mom simply caught it and crushed it into a ball, the same way I did with that car. It looked even more awesome when you got to see it with your own eyes, not through the monitor. And then Mom held out her hand, palm up, and the thing crumpled to the floor, done.
The whole fight had taken thirty seconds. Maybe.
Mom touched down and gently, so gently, pulled me up from behind the wall. “Are you all right?” she asked.
I asked her what that last thing was.
“Microwaves,” she said. “Fried its insides.”
I didn’t know the suit could do that.
“Not everything was in the files,” she said. “There’s so much you don’t know.”
She stopped and leaned over, and for a minute I thought she was going to give me a hug. But she reached past me and lifted up Kaz. I thought she was going to, I don’t know, lay him to rest or something.
But she was just moving him aside. To get what was underneath him.
The hard drive. In a million jillion pieces.
Nobody, absolutely nobody, could have done anything with that.
I gave her a big hug, trying to ignore the fact that it felt like putting my arms around a truck. She took her helmet off, and leaned over, and gave me a soft kiss on the head.
And then we both heard it.
That voice, that smooth, calm voice, coming from a computer. No, from all the computers—the ones that weren’t fried by the explosion.
“What a beautiful moment,” Mr. Jones said.
* * *
It was like a scene from one of those music videos from the eighties, the ones you can find on YouTube. A guy in a Halloween mask—one of those death’s head ones this time—showing up on five different screens at once. It was almost silly, except, of course, it wasn’t.
Mayhem and Mr. Jones stared at each other for a moment.
Then my mom spoke.
“Come on, Leonard,” she said. “I’m not going to talk to you while you’re wearing that stupid thing. Take it off.”
The mask didn’t budge.
I got this feeling that for the first time since I’d met him, I was sure—absolutely, completely certain—that Mr. Jones, Leonard, didn’t know what to do.
I could relate. This was his Rebecca encounter, kind of. I mean, on the one hand, I had never attacked Rebecca with drones. On the other hand, my mom and Mr. Jones had an actual history….
Wait. I’m having this horrible image of Mom and Mr. Jones, you know, together. Make it stop. Make it stop. Make it—okay. It’s gone. Mostly. That’s…I mean…I can’t. Not ever, but especially not now.
The point is that I’m pretty sure that right then, Mr. Jones—the guy who always, always had a plan—didn’t know what he was going to do. I’m sure he had thought through options. I’m sure he’d played out this conversation a hundred times. But this I know from personal experience: when you’re in love, or obsessed, or both, all that goes out the window when the actual moment comes.
Maybe he’d told himself something like, I’m going to keep the mask on. It shows I’m in control. Whatever she says, whatever arguments or threats she makes, it won’t matter.
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But if that’s what he said, he was right. It didn’t matter. Because she said what she said, that one sentence, and he took off the mask.
I guess I wasn’t surprised. I’d’ve done the same thing. In his shoes. Lord knows I’d done worse.
So what did he look like? I probably shouldn’t say. I mean, if someone hears this, that means I’m probably already in jail, but there are worse fates than that…. The truth is, it doesn’t matter. He’s not like this frightful supervillain with a burned-up pizza face, or a mysterious set of scars or mystical tattoos. He’s just a guy. He looks like a middle-aged guy. That’s what he looks like.
“It’s good to see you, Barbara,” is what he said. “We’re really seeing each other, face-to-face, for the first time. In so many years.” That’s when I noticed that his hands were trembling. And even there, in the middle of a bombed-out store, Kaz’s body lying three feet from me, I felt a stab of sudden sympathy—empathy? I can never remember which is which—for the man currently holding my dad hostage. I guess I felt like we had some things in common.
My mom told him, in calm, soothing language that I think would have sounded natural coming from a psychologist—or, now that I think about it, a hostage negotiator—that she wished she could say the same, but they were in a difficult situation. “But maybe that could change,” she said. “Maybe we can change that together. Even after all this time, after everything, maybe there’s a way out. Especially now that”—and she pointed to me—“now that things are more out in the open.”
Let my dad go, she said, and leave us alone, and that would be the end of it. We would walk away. Heal. And then—who knew? Maybe in a while, they could do business again. Maybe even become friends. Probably a long while, but maybe. They’d both been around enough to know those things sometimes happened.
“Or alternatively,” she said. “I could destroy you. It’s your choice.”
My mom is a world-class actor. Liar? Let’s say actor. Even though the stuff about them being friends one day was hard to swallow, she really sold it. And she was even able to give off this vibe—it makes me nauseated to say it, but it’s true—that one day, there could be more than that. That maybe she’d find that she had changed, Dad had changed, he wasn’t what she remembered, she’d been in love with a memory. And that she’d face up to what she hadn’t wanted to admit: the strong, decisive genius was who she was supposed to have been with all along. It might take some time, maybe even that long time she was referring to, to put her conscience at ease, but she could see it happening.
She didn’t say any of that. She didn’t think it, either. At least, I’m almost positive she didn’t. But it was there, in her tone and her body language, subtle, subtle. Even the threat part seemed almost…regretful. What a tragedy it would be. To have to blow up a real man like you.
Which is another way of saying that although Mr. Jones is like a hundred times smarter than me, and I knew what Mom was saying was pure bull, it took him a full ten seconds to respond.
And he smiled when he did. When we saw that smile…the best way I can put it is that my mom shrunk a little bit. Because she knew it hadn’t worked. She’d put her best shot out there, and it hadn’t done the trick.
When he finished smiling, he said, “I have a counteroffer. Here it is. I will kill Gerry in sixty minutes.”
* * *
Unless.
Unless my mom agreed to take his place.
That was the counteroffer: a trade. My dad would be free to come back and live with me. And my mom would stay as Mr. Jones’s, well, guest was the word he used, but who were we kidding.
Oh, and it had to happen right away.
It would be easy enough. All my mom had to do was finish putting on the Mayhem suit, and then disable the override switch. Then Mr. Jones would airlift her to his favorite undisclosed location by remote control. The minute he had control of the suit, he said, he’d let my dad go.
And that was when I spoke up for the first time.
Well, shouted, more than spoke up, really. I said this was insane. I said there was no way we would do it. I said Mom would kick his butt all the way to next Sunday and back again.
No one paid the slightest bit of attention.
There was about five seconds of silence after I finished my tantrum. And then my mom asked Mr. Jones, “What makes you think I’d trust you to keep your word?”
To which he responded, “Once I have what I want, what do I care about anything else?”
He tried to smile big again when he said it, make it a real supervillain thing, but now he didn’t have the mask on and I could see the truth of it. The desperation.
Then he added, “Not that you have much in the way of choice. Trusting me is your only option. If you don’t, I’ll kill Gerry anyway.” And then he made a big show out of looking at his watch. “In…fifty-seven minutes.”
And this time—I’m sure we both noticed—his hands weren’t trembling.
My mom took a deep breath, looked Mr. Jones straight in the eye, and said, “I’ll have to call Bailey a cab if I’m not driving him back. It’ll take some time.”
It was the most ridiculous thing to say—I mean, I actually laughed out loud. And then immediately felt terrible. Terrible and horrified, all at once.
Because this was happening.
She put her hands on my shoulders, and told me she needed me. I stopped her to say no, you’ve got it wrong, I need you, and she interrupted me—I think she knew she had to get through it, before she couldn’t, and there wasn’t a lot of time to waste—and she said she needed me at home, transmitting proof of life.
She could see in my face that I didn’t get it. She turned back to the screens. “Leonard,” she said, “let me be clear here. I understand that you are probably clinging to some twisted fantasy about Stockholm syndrome.” Which I looked up, by the way, on the way home. It means prisoners falling in love with their jailers. “This is not going to happen.” But with that same…tone, that slight hesitation, letting him hang on to the chance that maybe she couldn’t say it, to him or even to herself, but that maybe, just maybe, given time and circumstance, it just possibly could.
It was just a strategy. I’m sure it was.
But she kept talking. “I can tell you this: be smart. It’s going to happen even less if Bailey doesn’t send me proof of Gerry’s safe return.”
We waited. It was impossible to tell what Mr. Jones was thinking. At least for me it was. The only thing I knew for sure was that the seconds were ticking away.
Finally, “Deal,” he said. “Five minutes after you’re in the air, Gerry’s on his way. Any time in the next fifty-four minutes is fine.”
“Deal,” my mom replied. And then she screamed.
It was a long, loud scream, accompanied by gunfire.
Hers.
And by the time she was done, every computer in the room that had shown Mr. Jones’s smug, smiling face was in tiny pieces.
NOW. SATURDAY. 5:17 P.M.
Hold on. I think I hear a knock. I hear something, anyway.
Maybe it’s Dad.
Maybe it isn’t.
Wouldn’t Dad still have his own key?
It’s stopped. Unless it wasn’t there to begin with. Unless it was just my imagination.
Unless…
I’m just freaking myself out here. Sit tight. Keep going.
TWO HOURS AGO
There wasn’t much to say before she went.
I mean, of course there was. But what are the things you say when you know that, in a little over forty-five minutes, you’re never going to see your mom again?
I spent a lot of that time in her arms. As in, cradled by Mayhem in midair, like I was a baby. We’d had to get out of the comic shop fast, before the SWAT teams arrived, and so she flew me back to a ravine, a mile or two away from the hatch, from home. That
’s where we had our final conversation.
I told her I was going to find a way to get her back. She told me—crying, but insisting—that that was something I could never do. For my own safety, and for Dad’s, I had to promise her: I would never try to track her down, or Mr. Jones. I would never go to the police or the government. I would try to live my life with Dad, to grow up to be the happiest and best person I could be, and to forget everything about these past few months—everything except that she would always, always, always love us.
We were both bawling through this. I mean, snotting crying. But when I really lost it—I couldn’t even see—was when she told me I was the one who was going to have to tell Dad it was okay if he wanted to get married again. “You need a mom,” she said, and that was—I mean that was it.
I’m sorry. I have to stop here for a second.
Okay. There were other things, too. She asked me if I wanted her recipe for tuna noodle casserole. And although I did, otherwise I’d never eat it again, I didn’t want to spend our time together talking about celery or parmesan cheese or whatever. Then she tried to give me advice on how to be a good man—but it felt too much like something from a deathbed, and I just couldn’t.
So we spent most of the time holding each other and hugging.
I mean, that’s what you do, right? In a situation like that?
I don’t think it was a bad way to spend the time. I’ll live with that.
And then, precisely fifty-nine minutes and forty-six seconds after Mr. Jones had made his counteroffer, my mom sealed herself into the Mayhem suit. I couldn’t see her flip the override switch, of course, but she must have. Since all of a sudden the suit rocketed away.
And Mr. Jones must have frozen the arms and the vocal circuits, too. Because she didn’t say goodbye. Or even wave.
