Dead Girl in 2A (ARC)

by Carter Wilson

  “I feel hate. Right now, right here, nothing but hate.”

  “So, you’re more like Raymond, I suppose.”

  “No, there’s only one person I want to kill,” Jakes says. “You turned Higgins into a monster, and you could have stopped him. Assuming you were even really there for the shooting.”

  “Oh, I was,” Eaton says. “We went to see him, just as I had you come out to see me. Landis and I wanted to see how Raymond was progressing on the program. Our meeting was…not fruitful. He didn’t know how to handle what we were telling him. He had an episode similar to what you experienced in my apartment. The next day we followed him to the mall, but we were too late to stop him.”

  Jake looks at Landis. “You were there too?”

  Landis nods. “It was terrible.”

  Jake spins to Elle.

  “You knew about this?” he asks.

  “No,” she answers. “I swear. I had found Higgins originally, but by then I was only loosely keeping tabs on him. I had no idea they both went to see him.”

  Eaton scratches his cheek. “I think telling you about the shooting was the trigger for what happened in my apartment,” he says to Jake. “I didn’t realize that would occur, but still, it was a breakthrough for you. An episodic event. We learned from Raymond. If we had locked Raymond in a room as we did with you, he wouldn’t have killed all those people. We attempted to be vaguer with you in the hope of more favorable results. There are always casualties with chemical trials.”

  I feel the hate radiating from Jake. It’s so pure, so undiluted. His rage will consume him, as did my desire for death. I need to take him to the school site. I need to cleanse him, just as I was.

  Eaton’s voice isn’t the same as Jake’s. Eaton’s is calm. Hauntingly so. “No one forced you to follow the program,” he says. He then glances at me. “You both did it because you knew there was something to it. You wanted to change. And you wanted to remember.”

  Jake offers him the cold, fixed stare of a predator moments before an attack. “Yet I don’t remember anything, and I’m losing even more memories. Plus, if I thought I had the slightest chance of becoming violent, I never would have taken anything.”

  Eaton opens his hands, and the immediate, dissonant image coming to me is of Jesus breaking bread. “Everything we’ve done has been measured as carefully as we could, given the confines of what we know. After the unfortunate outcomes with Raymond and Kate, we tried a different tactic with you. We thought we could trigger something by getting the two of you together. That maybe if you connected, it would yield different results.

  “We put you on the plane next to Clara after she booked her trip in order to see if that jogged anything in you, and it seems it did, at least based on her own notes. I created the ruse of hiring you for the memoir to try to trigger something in you, and it did. You were taking the drugs and reading the book because you knew—deep inside you knew—you had potential that vastly exceeded your current accomplishments. You wanted to change, Jake. To be more than who you were, because when you were a child you had started on that path and never finished it.” Eaton takes a moment to look at each of us. “The program can work. Clara is proof of that.” His eyes bore into me. “We all started it as children but never finished. Now is the time to complete the work.”

  Jake seems barely able to control himself. “No matter what happens, you have blood on your hands,” he says. “Everything Kate and Raymond did, that’s on you.”

  Eaton nods. “Yes, Jake, I do have blood on my hands. More than you’ll ever know. I want to change, perhaps more than all of you.”

  “Oh, yeah? You’re dying anyway, you told me so, so what’s the point? You’re sick, or was that a lie too?”

  Eaton shakes his head at Jake. “I’m certain I will die if I cannot change who I am. The program can help me.”

  “So fucking experiment on yourself,” Jake says. “Leave us out of it.”

  “Oh, I have.” Eaton nods at Landis. “As Landis said, our results were unfavorable.”

  “How?” I ask.

  Eaton pauses for a moment. “For Landis, it had little effect overall. For me? Let’s just say I have an addiction, and the program merely increased my cravings. My uncontrollable desires.”

  “Addiction to what?”

  Eaton doesn’t answer. He just sits there, still as rock.

  Jake’s hands are shaking. “So the pills are, what, twenty-five years old? You had no idea if they’d lost their chemical properties. Or became harmful. Not to mention we’re all adults now, not children. How could any of this possibly work?”

  “And yet it’s working. We’re close.”

  “Fuck you,” Jake says. “I want to go back to who I was. I don’t care about remembering my childhood. I just want to be who I was a year ago.”

  Eaton gives Jake a thin smile. “I don’t think that’s true at all.”

  “I could have hurt my family,” he says.

  Eaton’s smile grows wider. “It seems to me you’ve been effective at hurting them without any of our influence.”

  Jake takes this comment in unusual stride, even laughing faintly at Eaton’s horrid reference to Jake’s daughter.

  “Yeah,” he says, looking down at the table in surprising and calm contemplation. “I suppose you’re right about that.”

  Jake’s coolness is revealed to be a mask he sheds with stunning abruptness. With the speed of a disappearing memory, he lunges from his chair and throws himself at the man across the table.

  Fifty-Nine

  Jake

  The second my hands are squeezing his throat, it’s like a pure heroin rush.

  He falls to the floor and I collapse with him, but my hands never leave his neck. The red haze fills my eyes, and for a moment I think it’s blood. No. Not blood. Lust.

  Shouting.

  I don’t look over. Just at him. I start drilling my thumbs into the soft tissue beneath his Adam’s apple, convinced I can push all the way through. God, how satisfying it would feel to have my thumbs pop right through his flesh!

  Eaton looks up at me, his eyes wide, more with surprise than fear. He doesn’t fight back. Maybe part of him wants to die, or perhaps he just thinks I won’t have time to finish the job before Markus puts a round in the back of my head.

  An arm hooks around my neck. I twist my neck and see Landis as he tries to pull me off.

  He’s strong, but I just need a few more seconds.

  There’s noise behind me, another scuffle. Someone knocks a chair over, and then I hear Elle shout.

  “Goddamn it.”

  Landis continues to pull, but I remain focused on my prey. Spittle flies off Eaton’s lips as his face grows a deeper red.

  “Jake!” Elle yells. “He took my gun.”

  Then, cold metal against the back of my head.

  Markus’s voice is hauntingly calm. “Drop him, or I’ll kill you right now. Then I’ll kill Elle, just because I can.”

  I need more time to finish this, but that time just expired. I give one last squeeze with my fingers before finally releasing. As I do, Landis repositions his arms around my waist and finally manages to heave me sideways. I fly off and hit the wall a few feet away, my fingers bent as if still clutching Eaton’s throat.

  I try to get up, but Markus rushes over and stomps my chest with his right foot. Pain sears through my core, almost masking the fresh throbs from my leg. I look up, expecting another blow, but it doesn’t come. Markus is pointing his gun directly at Elle, who is sitting on the floor next to an overturned chair. When I attacked Eaton, Markus must have rushed over and overpowered Elle before she could react.

  Now we have no weapon.

  Elle and I make eye contact.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Me too.”

  I shift my gaze to Eaton, whose swea
t I smell. I have a visceral urge to attack again, to rip into him. This is what a shark must feel in a feeding frenzy. The unbridled ecstasy of violence.

  He rubs his neck. Bruises begin blossoming on his pale skin. He holds out his right hand to Markus.

  “Give me the gun,” Eaton says.

  Markus hesitates, then slowly lowers the gun from Elle’s direction and hands it to his employer.

  Eaton takes a step closer and aims the barrel directly at my face.

  “You can’t control yourself, can you, Jake? I suppose that’s somewhat my fault.”

  “Come closer,” I say. I don’t even think he’s listening.

  “I don’t need you anymore, Jake. As far as all this goes, you only have one more purpose to serve.”

  Landis, now a step away, says, “This isn’t necessary, Eaton. We don’t need more death.”

  “Quiet,” Eaton tells him.

  “A gunshot is going to be loud,” Landis says. “If you pull the trigger, we’ll have to leave immediately. And our prints are all over this room.”

  Eaton either isn’t listening or doesn’t care. His entire focus is on me. The image of the king in my book flashes in my mind. The king so easily coaxed into violence.

  Let’s play a game of war.

  “I will shoot you, Jake. It’s not the way I usually do it, but the result is the same.”

  The way I usually do it? What does that mean?

  “Clara,” Eaton says. “Jake is depending on you to answer my questions. So please tell me exactly what you remember, and how you came to remember it.”

  “Clara,” I wheeze. I think Markus broke a rib or two. “Once he has what he needs, he’ll kill us. You, me, Elle. He won’t need any of us.”

  I believe this to be true, because the energy coming off Eaton now is the purest evil I have ever felt. It’s as if he’s been wearing a second skin that’s finally shed, and now I’m exposed to the utter essence of Alexander Eaton. It’s not just that I believe this man will kill. I think he wants to. Actually would take pleasure in it.

  “Clara.” Eaton’s voice is louder now, more commanding. “I can stand here and try to convince you how I’m trying to help us all, which is the truth. But I’ve lost my patience. Tell me what happened to you, or I will kill Jake. Right here.”

  He’s close enough I could try kicking the legs out from under him, but it’s a long shot. In any event, Markus will just subdue me immediately.

  I rest my head back on the floor and look at the ceiling for a moment, then close my eyes.

  Deep breath, slow exhale. I feel my body, the pain rising and falling with my breaths.

  The room is silent. I consider telling Clara once again not to say anything, but I no longer know what’s the right answer.

  Goddamn it all.

  I’m tired.

  I’m so fucking tired.

  Sixty

  Clara

  I have no choice. My vow of silence is immediately invalidated once Eaton points the gun at Jake. I can’t lose him. I’m unsure why I have such a connection to this man other than we were once friends at a school, long ago. As he lies on the floor and closes his eyes, I feel a deep pull toward him. His pain is mine, his life is mine. Whatever happens next, it must happen to us together.

  “I was going to kill myself,” I say.

  Eaton cocks his head to me, but the gun doesn’t waver from Jake’s direction. “Good, Clara. Yes, the Maroon Bells. I read what you wrote about it. Where were you?”

  “On the lakeshore. There was a rock. I was going to climb the rock and slit my wrists, then fall into the water.”

  Jake opens his eyes, stares directly at the ceiling. I turn my head briefly to the woman, Elle, who looks at me with a mix of confusion and pity.

  “Why there?” Landis asks. “Why that specific location?”

  There isn’t an easy answer to this question. How does one describe an indefinable magnetism?

  “I wanted to die in the water. When I first remembered the school, I was underwater. It seemed like the completion of a cycle.”

  “All right,” Eaton says. “You’re on the rock. Then what happened?”

  “I never got on the rock. There was a family there, so I had to wait. I went for a walk on a trail as I waited for them to leave.”

  “That family saved your life.” Jake’s voice is calm, resigned.

  “Yes, I believe they did.”

  “Okay, then what?” There’s a sharper edge of impatience to Eaton’s voice.

  “I walked deeper into the woods. Off path. I started to change my mind.”

  “About killing yourself?”

  “No, about the location. As I got deeper into the woods, I realized everything was mirroring the story in my book. The old man who dies in the woods. There was a tree stump, just like in the story. I thought…maybe I should just sit on the stump and do it there.”

  “But something stopped you. You had second thoughts?”

  “There was a crow.”

  “A crow?”

  “It wasn’t the family who saved me. It was the crow. I was sitting on the tree stump, and it just appeared. It was wounded. A broken wing.”

  “And?”

  “And I started thinking I should help it.”

  “How were you going to do that?”

  “I was going to kill it. In a way, it was going to be an act of mercy for us both. And the way it looked at me and called out… I had to do something. It started hopping away, and I followed it.”

  “Had you remembered anything else at this point?” Eaton asks.

  “No.”

  “And you still planned to kill yourself? After killing the bird?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, so then what?”

  “Then I followed the crow. It couldn’t fly. Only hop. But it started to go through an area of overgrown thicket and fallen branches. An old path that had been covered over. I had to crawl to get to it. Finally, it reached a clearing and I managed to get close, at which point it collapsed and died on its own.”

  This story sounds crazy, and perhaps it is. For a moment I wonder if any of this actually happened. And if the crow wasn’t real, what about everything else I discovered there?

  Landis and Eaton offer quizzical looks and furrowed brows. Jake continues to stare at the ceiling, taking it all in. Or perhaps he’s in some other world altogether, one where he doesn’t have a gun pointed at his skull.

  “Okay,” Eaton says, his tone growing more impatient. “The bird is dead. Then what?”

  “Then the smell of citronella grew stronger.”

  “Citronella?”

  “Yes. It’s a smell from my past, and it was there. It grew stronger as I followed the crow.”

  “You weren’t imagining this?”

  “How would I know?” I ask. “How does one know what’s real and what’s not? When you’re by yourself, the entire world could just be a trick of the mind.”

  Landis speaks. “In my father’s journal, there was a note about the program enhancing olfactory memory in some of the subjects. The sense of smell is the strongest trigger of memory, and if yours was enhanced, it could explain sudden smells.”

  Jake turns his head and catches my eye.

  Eaton presses harder, growing more impatient. “What happened next?”

  “I realized where I was.”

  He gives a rapid, scooping come on gesture with his free hand.

  “Where were you?”

  “I was at the school.”

  Landis stiffens at this comment, and Eaton lowers his gun and turns fully toward me.

  “You were where?”

  I feel myself smiling, not because I’m giving them information they desire. I’m smiling because I’m remembering how it felt in that moment. It was like
feeling sunlight for the very first time.

  “Arete Academy. I found it. I found our school.”

  PART III

  Sixty-One

  Jake

  The bandage around my knee is dark with blood, but not dripping. Knives pierce my torso with each breath. At least I’m still breathing.

  Our two-car caravan heads deeper into the mountains. Landis is driving Markus, Clara, and me. Eaton and Elle follow behind.

  It’s a thirty-minute drive. The afternoon light grows heavy, adding an extra layer of saturation to the blazing trees outside. This time of year, it won’t be long before dark.

  Markus sits in the front passenger seat, half-turned, the gun pointed directly at us. Clara and I share the back seat.

  “That’s really not necessary,” I tell Markus.

  “Not necessary? You tried to choke out my employer.”

  “But he’s not in the car,” I say. “I don’t feel the same hatred toward either of you.”

  I think about explaining to him how my aggression had nothing to do with trying to escape. I wasn’t trying to wrestle a gun away from Eaton—he didn’t even have one at the time of my attack. I knew as I attacked there was no logical reason for my decision, and I would be jeopardizing my life even more. It was pure lust for violence.

  “Yeah, well, forgive me if I don’t believe you.”

  I look at Markus a little longer, taking in the faint crow’s-feet around his eyes and the faded acne scars from his youth. But what I notice most are his eyes. There’s nothing remarkable about them except the wells of emotion he probably doesn’t know are emanating from them.

  “You’re an incredibly desolate man,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Just fucking sad. I can tell.” I examine Markus. “I’m guessing you’re an ex-cop, maybe retired early, maybe got fired. Probably never advanced too much, maybe you always had someone or something to blame, but at some point you hit a ceiling and couldn’t push past it. That’s obvious to anyone looking at you.”

  “Oh yeah?” Markus smiles, but it’s twisted, uncomfortable. “All that is obvious about me?” The smile is followed by a tough-guy laugh. Hollow. Something to fill silence.