Not even cold yet.
The body. The kid…the thing.
I remember being ten, bumming around behind Dad’s restaurant after school with two of my friends. One afternoon we pushed all the garbage cans onto their sides because one of us had the genius idea of jumping over them with our bikes like the guys we’d seen on MTV—one of those stupid shows. Only, when we turned the first one over, there was a dead cat behind it. I will never in my life forget that damn cat. The way its gray fur was matted, coated with blood, the back half of its body broken by what I’d guess was a car. The three of us, we just sat there staring at it, taking turns trying to get close to it without puking. For hours.
And that cat was the first thing I thought of later that night when I found Dad’s body.
What is it about horrible, violent things that capture us? I’d never seen a dead thing before that moment, but years later, it would be one funeral after another and everyone would want to know every detail about each one. The twenty-four-hour news stream would stop pretending like there were other stories to report. And all of us, we were hooked to the coverage of the hundreds, thousands, millions of deaths like junkies, waiting to see how bad it would get, drowning in it. And when the D.C. bombings happened, forget it. I stayed home from work for two weeks, overdosing on CNN.
There’s a second of silence before the pounding starts and a small, pale hand begins slamming against the back passenger window. I feel my legs moving, running, bringing me around to the other side of the SUV, where the doors are hanging open.
There’s a girl, maybe eleven years old at most, in the seat directly behind the driver, peering at me through the wreckage, her face streaked with blood. She’s hanging upside down, struggling with her seat belt. The driver’s seat looks almost broken in half, bowing back so that the small kid is pinned in place. For a second, I doubt my first impression and I think I’m looking at a boy. Her black hair is spiked out around her head like a pixie’s, and it takes me a moment longer than it probably should to realize she—it—is wearing a bright pink dress.
The seat belt’s jammed, I think. I’m dimly aware of my hand’s reaching toward her—it, dammit—and all of a sudden I’m gripping the strap myself, trying to rip out the buckle by force. I climb inside to go at it from a better angle, and her look of relief turns to one of irritation—like, Hey, asshole, if that was ever going to work, would I still be sitting here?
Her face is pink with the blood rushing to it, but she managed to get her right leg free. She strains, stretching it out as far as it’ll go, using her toe to point at the dead kid in the front seat. At the knife strapped to his hip. Damn, I think. Why don’t I have a knife? And because she clearly thinks I’m an idiot, she makes a sawing motion with her hands against the part of the seat belt over her hips.
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” I mutter. I’m trying to ignore that voice in the back of my head, the one that sounds suspiciously like my dad. He’s asking, What are you doing? He’s pointing out, Stealing money is one thing, but if you think those are the kind of guys to let you get away with this…
Isn’t three enough for them, though? They have to be greedy and take four freaks in? I just need one. Just one to get this operation going. Aren’t they stupid for not checking to see if this freak was alive before they ran after the other ones? It seems like I was supposed to find her—it—like this one was meant for me. Somewhere deep inside, I know I’m right. I know I’m never going to have it this easy again. It’s a gift, and it’s meant for me, and I’m going to take it.
Those guys wouldn’t hesitate to take her from me. Of course, I can’t know either way, but who’s to say they wouldn’t just shoot me in the back and step over my corpse to get to her? Yeah.
I need this freak. I need food and gas and money to pay Phyllis so she can start hounding some other poor schmuck for his rent.
I’m going at the seat belt with everything I’ve got, and I still haven’t cut through it. The strap did a number on the girl; I can see the red welt forming where it locked across her neck as she was thrown forward.
“Stay still!” I snap, because she’s twisting and squirming like a fish in hand trying to get back to the water. Finally, the fabric frays and snaps altogether. The girl is slight enough to slide down from under the strap across her chest, falling onto the SUV’s crushed roof. She has to crawl through the broken section of the driver’s seat. I see her eyes start to drift toward the body there, and I don’t know, I don’t know why, but I don’t want her to see it.
“Come on, come on!” I hold both hands out to her and she practically slides right into them. She weighs next to nothing; she’s all fine, delicate bones and sweat and blood-slicked skin. I haul her out of the SUV, trying to crane my neck away from where she has her arms locked around it, almost like she’s going in for a big hug.
“Jesus, kid, stop—I’m not rescuing you!” I say. “Are you that stupid? Stop it!”
I try to force the image of her face out of my mind, to kill the corner of my heart where sympathy comes home to roost. Think of them like stray dogs, the handbook said. They have to be brought in, or put down if they exhibit too much fight.
The first kick to my crotch makes me see stars. The little feet in those stupid-ass pink tennis shoes are all of a sudden flying, beating against my chest and legs. I stumble forward, throwing both of us down onto the warm asphalt. She’s up and on her feet while I’m rolling around on the ground, holding my crotch, trying not to cry.
Shit—I need to get up, I need to get up, I need to—
I push myself onto my knees and try to lunge for her, but the freak is so damn pint-sized all she has to do is duck and my arms are cutting through air. I go lurching after her, thinking she’s going to try to lose me down the road, disappearing into the low, dry brush that dots the green valley.
Instead, she crashes into the skip tracers’ beige sedan, throwing both hands out against the hood. The whole car makes this low, whining sound, the way my middle school violin used to sound when it wasn’t tuned and I tried to drag the bow across it. I snag her around the waist, swinging her away. This time, I don’t make the same mistake. I throw her over my shoulder and she knows better than to fight back.
“Hey!” A shout slices through the silence, echoing down the open road. I spin around, searching for the source. One of the beards is running for us. There’s a flash of silver, like the light is giving me a wink. That’s where my brain goes. Not that it’s a gun, not that I should drop that kid and book it for my car, but Oh, look! A sparkle!
“Drop it!” he hollers.
The bullet slams into the warped frame of the SUV, making me jump. I’ve seen them—guns, I mean—before on TV, and in movies, and in games. But real guns, they’re loud. Angrier.
I can’t move. Physically cannot put one foot in front of the other. I can feel my brain racing in circles around the realization of what’s going to happen if I don’t get my ass in gear. Why don’t I have a gun? Why didn’t I save enough to buy one before I left?
It makes me feel stupid, like I’m some elementary school kid who shows up for varsity tryouts.
A sharp pain shoots through my lower back. The little girl jams her bony elbow against my kidney again. It hurts like a bitch, but I stumble forward, and once I’m moving, I don’t stop, not for anything. I can’t. The beard is right there. As I reach the truck, I see him stop and brace himself, and I know what that means even before he raises his arms and aims. I practically throw the girl into the truck’s cab and dive in after her. One-two-three bangs—Jesus, this guy is trying to kill me.
I’m trying to keep myself from shaking. I’m trying to keep from thinking about the freak thing buckling herself into the seat next to me. I’m trying to remember which pedal is gas and which is the brake, and all of a sudden we’re flying backward instead of forward. Bullets ping against the tailgate. In the rearview mirror, the beard has to dive to avoid being crushed under my wheels. Reality comes back like a blow
to the head, and suddenly, I’m whipping the car around, shifting the gears. The truck squeals and moans at the pressure I’m putting on the gas, but it gets the job done. I watch the other beard run out of the charred trees, waving his arms through the air. The first one snags the rifle off his shoulder and brings it up to eye level, but we’re too far away. I finally let my eyes drop from the mirror and realize I’m driving down the middle of the road again.
We’re out of there.
I don’t know why the relief comes out as a laugh. This is zero percent funny. Zero percent. The gas light is glowing like a red demon and those guys have a car that’s about twenty years younger than mine, but as the minutes tick on, I realize they’re not following. They would have caught me by now.
Then I remember.
I glance to my right, at the kid—the freak sitting next to me staring out the window. There’s something almost…I don’t want to say that she looks broken, because I know she is. They all are; otherwise we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. It’s more that her face has gone completely blank, and she’s staring at the passing forest but not seeing it. The reflection I see in her window, with the blood caked beneath her nose and across her forehead, makes me feel like she’s kicking me all over again.
It is kicking me all over again. I can’t even get that part right. It is not human. It is a living creature with needs, but it is not one of us.
“Did you do something to their car?” I ask, surprised at how rough my voice sounds. I worry for a second I was somehow screaming without hearing or feeling it.
She nods.
“That makes you what?” I almost don’t want to know, because I know the answer is not going to be Green. My luck is never, ever that good. I can barely keep the stupid color system straight. They tried to model it after the old terrorist warning scale. That whole threat level is orange, so you should feel above-average levels of fear that someone is going to blow up your plane. That system. I think Red is when the kid can explode things or start fires, Blue means they can move shit around, Yellow is…
Shit. Yellow is messing with electricity. Like frying cars. Holy shit.
“You’re Yellow?” I ask.
It’s only when she nods that I realize I haven’t heard a single word out of her.
“What? You too good to talk to me?”
She looks at me like, Give me a break, her dark eyebrows drawing sharply down.
“You can’t?” I press. “Won’t?”
She doesn’t answer and I have to tell myself to stop. This whole not-talking thing works for me. It’s easier to think of her as a freak if she can’t or won’t whine about being hungry or start screaming until her lungs burst. And anyway, I don’t care. I definitely do not care. Ten grand, sitting next to me.
“Any chance those guys can come after us?” I ask, because, in the end, that’s really all that matters.
Nope. I see the answer in her face. There’s a bit of pride there, too.
It takes five full miles for me to realize that whatever she did to the skip tracers’ car, she can just as easily do to mine. If I’m remembering right, the handbook says that they can manipulate electricity only through touch, so I just need to keep her hands in one place and her mind convinced she won’t be able to escape. I jerk the car onto the shoulder and throw the parking brake on. My “supplies kit” is nothing more than an NAU duffel bag full of whatever crap I could buy off the policemen who got let go in the economic crash. Handcuffs. Some zip ties. A Taser that doesn’t work but I feel could be a pretty good threat.
My hands are still shaking, and it’s embarrassing and awful, and it makes the fact that I can’t figure out how to use the zip ties that much worse when the girl has to do it herself. I feel her silently judging me as she slides the flat end through the end with the nub. She puts her hands through and then tightens the loop by taking the flat end between her tiny pearls of teeth and pulling. When she finishes, the kid puts her hands delicately back in her lap and looks at me, all expectant. Like, What’s next?
“I’m not saving you,” I remind her. But something makes me wonder if she even wants me to.
THREE
I’M actually stuck.
I need gas to make it up to the PSF station in Prescott—the only one in northern Arizona—but the gas is in Camp Verde, south of here. And to get to Camp Verde, I’d need to backtrack, risk running into the skip tracers I just screwed over. Chances are if the kid fried their car, they’re still sitting there. Or they’re walking down the freeway to get help.
So I find myself back in Cottonwood at Phyllis’s joint. I don’t really remember driving there, or the sun starting to go down, or how I managed to park, but the dashboard clock tells me it’s six o’clock. And somehow, I’ve managed to sit here next to this kid for a silent two hours, running through every possible plan.
Tomorrow. By tomorrow they’ll be out of Camp Verde and the PSF station will be open. After I fill the truck’s tank, I can backtrack to Prescott to drop her off and pick up my new tech and her bounty. Tonight we can stay here. She may be a freak, but I’m bigger than her and I think I can lock her in the bathroom from the outside. I can watch her for one night.
We have to wait another twenty minutes before the men and women loitering on the sidewalk, enjoying the cool twilight, are finished with their conversations and cigarettes. Then I take the girl’s arm and force her to slide across the bench, out my door.
I worry, just for a second, that I might be pulling on her arm too hard as I run the length of the parking lot, but I have to hand it to her. Little Miss looks like she got herself into a cage fight, and she still more than keeps up with me.
I fumble with the key to the room, sliding the cheap plastic card in and out, getting a red light every time. I glance around, convinced Phyllis or one of her sons is going to pop out of thin air, hand extended, waiting for the rent money before they reactivate my key. Before I can hash that particular conundrum out, the little girl reaches up and touches the reader, and the light goes out altogether. I hear the lock pop, and suddenly, she’s the one dragging us inside the dark, musty room.
Compared to my old trailer, the motel room might as well be Buckingham Palace. But there’s this tiny, nagging ache in my stomach as the girl glances around. The longer she stands there looking, assessing with those dark eyes, the more ashamed I feel. I didn’t make the queen-sized bed before I left. The abysmal mauve country chic quilt is a rumpled pile on the ground. Both nightstands bookending the bed are littered with food wrappers, soda cans, and a few stray beer bottles.
The kid sucks in a deep breath of stale air, and the way her mouth twists into a painful grimace makes me wonder if she’s caught in some kind of bad memory. The desk behind her is piled with dirty clothes awaiting the five dollars I need to wash them. I don’t smoke, never have, never will, but both neighbors do and I swear the stench is somehow bleeding through the paper-thin walls.
I push the girl forward, toward the bathroom.
“Clean yourself up,” I tell her just as there’s a knock on the door.
I feel about ten times more panicked than the girl looks as she walks to the bathroom and shuts the door. I stand there, just to make sure she doesn’t have ideas about causing trouble, but the knocking turns into pounding.
I look through the door’s peephole and one of Phyllis’s boys glares back at me. He’s got a good twenty years on me but also is carrying about a hundred extra pounds tucked into his bright yellow polo shirt. I keep the chain on as I crack the door open, more to make a point than to stop him.
“Yeah?” My brain is scrambling to remember the guy’s name. He’s the one who’s actively balding. The other one just looks like he lets his mother cut his gray hair. I know this one is trying to figure out how I managed to get back in.
“You need to be outta here tonight if you aren’t going to pay,” he says. “I thought we made that perfectly clear.”
“I’ll have the money for you—
” I start, but then I remember the lump of bills in my back pocket. I didn’t get a chance to count it before I stole it, so I start to thumb through them, making a show. That’s when the bathroom’s crappy faucet sputters to life. What’s-his-name looks up sharply, trying to wedge himself farther between the door and the frame.
“You know it’s extra if you have another person sleeping here,” he snaps.
“Oh, she’s not spending the night,” I said, wagging my brows. “You know how it is.” Except, clearly, this guy does not know how it is. And also, given the age of my “guest,” that was one of creepiest things that’s ever come out of my mouth.
“Here—here’s the hundred,” I said. And two hundred slides back into my pocket. Nice. “Tomorrow I’ll be out of your hair.”
The guy stares at the twenties in my hand like it’s Monopoly money.
“Where’d you get this?” he demands, snatching it up and recounting the five bills himself. “You doing something sketchy in here? Something we need to know about?”
“Just finished some freelance mechanic work,” I say, holding up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”
“You wouldn’t know honor if it was spitting in your face,” the man mutters, still staring at the bathroom door at the other side of the room, the shadow of her feet moving beneath it. He’s looking at it like he’s thinking, like he’s finally realized what I meant earlier, and suddenly, he’s interested.
“She done with you?”
Well, at least I’m not the biggest scumbag here.
“Already booked.” The words taste like vomit in my mouth. So all of a sudden it doesn’t matter to him that hookers definitely fall under the category of something sketchy? “Sorry, dude.”
The Darkest Minds: In Time Page 3
