by Ella James
“Chew this, hop on the table, we’ll get going.”
I blanched. “I’m not taking that thing.”
Mary sighed and plopped down in a plastic rolling chair. “That’s fine by me.” She folded her arms and gave me the evil eye.
I thought about my mother, about Dad. I thought about Sara Kate and Halah and Bree, and I longed to be back home. I thought about how impossible it would be to escape here. No, I corrected myself. It wasn’t impossible. I was going to get away. I had to.
I inhaled deeply and thought of Nick. I had to be strong. For Nick. Freaking out would get me nowhere. I needed to act compliant. Make my captors lower their guard. When they did, I would… what exactly?
I exhaled, inhaled again. “What kind of medicine?” I asked.
“It’s cyanide.” She blinked, deadpan. “Xanax, honey. You ever had a Xanax?”
In fact, I had. I’d been given one the morning of Dad’s funeral. I knew about them anyway, because I’d seen them sold at school.
I looked around the room, at the wall-mounted rubber cabinets and the tiny counter crammed with cotton balls, swabs, needles and vials. I looked at Mary in her rolling chair. I couldn’t sit in this room forever. I needed to get out, back to my room. I took the Xanax.
I stuck it in my mouth, and Mary handed me some headphones. She helped me get situated on the table—I squeezed my legs together, praying that she couldn’t see my rainbow underwear—and after that, I could hear her voice over the headphones, over the low lull of classical music. Handel, I thought.
She explained that I’d have to stay perfectly still while she took pictures of my insides, and if I did, she’d try not to take more than an hour. An hour! Already, the machine’s smooth walls felt like they were closing in on me. I nibbled on the pill, using my left incisor to break off a small piece, and spit the rest out, onto the table; the tiny piece rolled toward my left forearm.
“I’m getting stared now. Don’t move, hun. Just relax.”
I shut my eyes, and behind the music, I could hear a mechanical hum—or maybe more a roar. I heard some clicking sounds and sensed the machine moving around me. It reminded me of a robot, and from there it was all too easy to think about an alien.
The miniscule amount of Xanax I’d ingested must have worked like a charm, because I was able to drift off into a kind of daydream land. I thought about Nick’s arms around me at the decimated cabin, about the way he’d looked when he was sprawled out on my bed. I remembered how he’d been hurt—and how he’d healed himself. If they hurt him here, could he heal himself again? Was he even here? Would I find him if I tried? If I tried, would I get caught?
My reeling thoughts were interrupted by a sharp, familiar voice: Sid! He must’ve come into my room, because I could hear him through Mary’s microphone. He said something in a low, hushed voice, and Mary murmured something in return. I opened one eye, trying to see them, but I couldn’t see anything but the machine around me.
“Milo?” That was Mary. “You’re doing good.”
I didn’t answer, and she said, “You sleeping?”
“Mmm.”
I was starting to feel heavy and tired, but mostly I just didn’t want to talk to her. Especially not if Sid was around. A few minutes later, Sid said something that made my drifting mind think that he was leaving. I fought to stay aware, but I was so sleepy. I dreamed about Diego coming in. He teased Mary, then told her something; I wasn’t quite sure what. I heard her laugh, and he said, “Yeah, it’s wild.”
Wild? I had the hazy fear that they were going to get busy right there in the room with me. People around here seemed inappropriate like that.
Then Mary said: “Is he conscious?”
My heart tumbled.
I heard a rustling sound, like someone’s hand over Mary’s microphone. Then a cacophony of voices. My mind processed them a bit too slowly, so the sounds had the feeling of cars crashing in slow motion.
“…sounds rough…”
“…don’t kill him…”
“…Never seen one of these guys before.”
Then the bit I later prayed I’d dreamed: “… slice and dice… see what he can do.”
31
It wasn’t Xanax. I was out of it, but that part of my mind that checked out all the other parts was aware that they hadn’t given me a Xanax. I felt dizzy and weird, restless but too heavy to move, and when the MRI was over, some people got me out and put me on a stretcher. My lids were heavy—too heavy to lift—but I wasn’t totally unconscious. I could feel my arms strapped down.
Everyone around me was talking, and the only thing I understood was “twilight anesthesia.” I heard Ariel say something about “such tiny veins!” just before I felt a prick in my hand.
My head felt buzzy, like it was filled with singing crickets, and I couldn’t figure out how to talk, but I could hear them, as the metal doors slid by—so slow—and, at the very same time, the rectangular fluorescent lights darted by, dizzyingly quick, over my head.
As my other senses dimmed, my hearing seemed more acute.
“So you think he’s her boyfriend?” That was Ariel.
“Dunno,” Diego said. “Could be.”
Suddenly Ursula was there. My eyes were open, and I could see her bobbing up and down, saying something about, “MRI was crazy!”
Whatever she was saying interested all of them. Even through my haze, I could feel their interest. The gurney slowed, and they all looked at each other.
“I need to see,” I heard Diego say, and seconds later it was just me and Ariel. She glanced at me—I could hardly see her through the shadow of my eyelashes—and, when she was confident I wasn’t with it, she put her phone up to her ear. “Downstairs. Diego, you guys wait for me. I’m coming down. I know I’m not; I’m an observer. Oh,” she said. “You mean dooownstairs?”
It sounded like she was talking in a code. I strained to understand, but fog was creeping over me again.
She laughed. “Like, forever, baby. He’ll be down there forever. Unless E.T. phones home.”
After that, I was somewhere else, and Sid was there. He kept asking me how I knew Nick, and I kept saying, “band camp.” At one point, I saw Ariel’s face—frustrated—and I felt another pin-prick in my hand. And I think Sid asked me if Nick was an alien.
I laughed. “That’s insane.”
And I’m pretty sure he asked me: “Are you human?”
No, dipshit. I’m a vampire, I thought. I’m a vampire with bloody fangs.
I giggled, “You suck at this.”
Mary was there, hanging in the doorway, saying something about “…normal. Not like him.”
*
I woke up mad.
Ursula was there, in the blue chair at the foot of my bed, and she was watching Wheel of Fortune. I squinted at the screen, and she shouted, “FAIRY TALE PRINCESS PRIDE!”
Princess Bride, I thought disdainfully.
I stared at her short, spiky hair, thinking what a moron she was. How was it possible that people like her were successfully keeping me in hotel prison? But they were—and re-realizing it brought on a fresh crest of panic. Which brought on a larger wave of panic as it dawned on me (for the dozenth time) that Nick was really an extraterrestrial (I’d started calling it ‘ET’), and that there were ETs at all and I freakin’ knew one, and that instead of peaceful discourse, the government had chosen capture and imprisonment. And they’d kept me around, too.
Suddenly it didn’t seem real—that he was actually an alien. Not an ET—an alien. I looked out at Diego and Ursula and the flatscreen TV and none of it seemed real. But my hand was sore from the IV line in it, and my head throbbed, and I was finally feeling hungry…
My eyes watered. This was real. All of it was real. I didn’t know how to swallow it.
Nick, an alien…
If he was an alien, why couldn’t he talk to me inside my head? If he was an ET, why hadn’t he broken out and saved me? What if he’d gone…home. What if I never
got out? I felt momentarily betrayed; I had taken care of him, and I’d never known…anything. I hadn’t known what— who I was dealing with.
I didn’t care. He was just Nick, and I cared about him.
From somewhere in the back halls of my mind, I remembered hearing something about Nick. Something…bad. Something that made me feel certain he had not escaped, made me feel desperate to escape and free him. I tried hard to remember what it was, but my mind was filled with nightmare images—abstract and completely without context.
Palms sweating, heart hammering, I sat straight up and blurted, “I want to go home.”
Ursula turned her head, looking like a slutty college girl in her snug black outfit. Her eyes widened—she wasn’t even smooth enough to keep her face neutral!—and she turned the rest of the way around to face me.
“Well, good morning, sunshine.”
“Is it daytime?” I demanded.
“No.”
“I want to go home,” I said again, noticing, as I did, that I had plastic oxygen tubing in my nose and I was wearing a gown.
Ursula nodded, completely disingenuous. “You will—at some point.”
“When?” I sounded bitchy.
She shrugged, looking slightly annoyed, and ran her palm over the tips of her hair. “It’s not up to me.”
I peeled the tape off my IV line and pulled it out, and did the same to the oxygen line, then hopped off the side of the metal bed and stepped toward the door. I don’t know what I was doing; I guess I was freaking out.
“Milo, don’t—”
At that exact second, Diego emerged from the bathroom, zipping up his fly, and I became aware that my butt was bare.
I jumped back into bed, dizzy as I jerked the sheet up to my chest.
“Whoa!” Diego held up his hands, but he didn’t step back into the bathroom.
“Milo! I told you—” Ursula started.
“No you didn’t. You haven’t done shit for me!”
I was shaking—from fear and embarrassment and God only knew what else. As Diego and Ursula exchanged a faux worried expression and settled in front of the TV, I struggled not to cry. I thought Dad’s death had been the hardest thing that would ever happen to me. I felt ten times more lonely and scared now.
On that note, I burrowed under my covers and curled into a ball, feeling self-conscious that my butt was facing out but needing to hunker down more than I needed my (already ruined) modesty.
I told myself to think, and when I couldn’t come up with anything I thought would work, I shed another tear or two and fell asleep out of what must have been sheer exhaustion.
I awoke after what must have been a shift change to the sound of Diego and Ariel arguing the merits of printed books. It sounded like Ariel had a Kindle—possibly it was even in her hands that second—and Diego thought “books should just be books.”
Ariel was trying to tell him he could buy a book anywhere—“even right here, in the middle of a mountain”—and I was feeling impressed that they even read books, when my brain made its great leap.
In the span of a second, I remembered what I’d heard while I was out of it: how everyone had rushed “downstairs” to gawk at something Nick-related. Maybe Nick himself. How someone had said something that had made me think they would keep messing with him until they found out everything they needed to know. Not just messing with him—treating him like one of those cats we’d dissected in sophomore biology.
The horror that I felt at that—that someone might hurt Nick—Nick who had humored my inebriated friends and taken care of Annabelle, Nick who had held me so gently at the party and kissed me so sweetly on the stage—was indescribable, and I guess it kicked my mind into overdrive, because immediately I had a plan.
It was actually embarrassingly simple. I would, to use one of Dad’s old Southern phrases, “play possum” until one of them went to the bathroom (preferably Diego). Then I’d burst out of bed and pounce on the other one (preferably Ariel) and steal…well, whatever they carried for defense. I hoped it wasn’t a gun; then I hoped it was. Anything to help me escape and find Nick. And I would find Nick.
Sometimes things just seem too easy. Usually those easy things seem to happen to other people, but every once in a while they happen to you. This was one of mine.
Not fifteen minutes after I came up with my plan, Diego ceded the argument—which had morphed into a discussion about newspapers, which had morphed into something more along the lines of a political debate. I could hear a shuffling sound, like him standing up, and he said, “There,” and Ariel said, “See how superior it is?”
Diego said, “If you’re like, a book addict. ‘Gotta have my Nora,’” he said in a high-pitched voice.
“Nora?”
“Nora Roberts? Isn’t that what you gals like?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Boss Man,” she said, sarcastic. I was holding my breath now. “Do you like big trucks, big boobs, and beer?”
Diego laughed. “Yes ma’am, sure do.”
I wanted to scream, but I managed to lie still until I heard Diego walking toward the bathroom. I inhaled, exhaled, cracked my eyelids open. And saw Ariel leaning over a swanky new Kindle Fire with a little smile on her face.
As she read, something buzzed, and she shifted in her chair and pulled out her cell phone.
She sat the Kindle on her lap and said, “Ariel,” in a crisp tone that made her sound like a model worker. Through the shadow of my lashes, I thought I saw her frown.
“Oh nooo. Yes, I’ve assisted with that before.” There was a little pause, during which I thought my head might explode. Then she said, “Is it bad? Well, you know Ursula; she’s squeamish. I have a stomach of steel.” Another pause. My stomach roiled. “Same place—way down under? You do? Well, okay… She’s sleeping, though. It’s really not necessary…”
Too soon, Ariel was off the phone and headed toward my bed. I opened my eyes just in time to see her reaching for my covers, bringing a syringe toward me with her other hand. I shrieked and jumped at her.
In retrospect, I’m pretty sure I was none too smooth, but I made up for it with cat-like fighting skills. Ariel aimed the syringe at my jugular, but I clawed her face and slapped her hand and, amazingly, she dropped it. My eyes followed it as it fell, so I saw her reaching for a weapon in her belt. I kicked her in the shin, and she grunted, then brought the Taser up and—
“AAAAAAAAHHHH!” I don’t know why, but screaming was the only thing I could think to do. My screaming shocked her for a second. Just long enough for me to snatch the Taser, press pressed what I thought might be the trigger, and point the thing her.
I saw a quick bolt of mini lightning—it shot from the gun toward Ariel’s throat—and she fell like a tall tree. I heard Diego shuffling in the bathroom, then say, “Arie?”
Every muscle in my body trembled with adrenaline. Taking big, shaky strides, I glided to the door and had the Taser aimed at crotch level when he stepped out. He jumped back, but the current caught him anyway, somewhere near the upper thighs. Diego cursed, then dropped down to his knees.
I turned and shot toward the door, realizing a few feet away from it that I needed someone’s tag. Ariel was sprawled out, so I searched for the square bulge in her tight pants and stole hers. I didn’t even have to swipe it. As soon as I reached the door, I saw a green light beside it flash, and when I tried it, it opened.
32
I dashed into the hall, half expecting Sid to jump out at me. I looked left and right. Which way had he taken me? I had no time to think about it. I went with my gut: right. I must have been running fast, but it didn’t feel that way. I felt like I was in a dream, and I couldn’t move my arms and legs fast enough. My gaze hopped from door to door and I held the Taser out, read to defend myself—but no one came. I didn’t even hear an alarm, which in a way made me even more nervous. I took another left, and then a right, before I realized Sid hadn’t taken me to an elevator.
Baktag!
I t
urned a circle, dizzied by the stark white walls and the long line of identical metal doors. My heart was beating so fast I worried I’d pass out. I’d never find Nick! I’d never get out of here! I was wearing a butt-less gown!
And then I saw it—a tiny sign on the white-washed brick in front of me: FIRE EXIT -> , and beside it, a symbol depicting stairs. Elevators were usually beside stairwells, right?! I made like Wiley E. Coyote, following the signs through two more turns, and when I saw the elevators, I wanted to cheer.
There was only one problem: When I pressed the silver “open sesame” button, it beeped discordantly and flashed—in the unmistakable shape of a fingerprint.
