by Steven James
Though she tried to keep track of how long they drove, she was too scared to really have any idea how much time actually passed. Besides, for all she knew, the man might have been driving around extra just to fool her.
She told herself that they’d just taken her for ransom and nothing more.
That’s what they want. Ransom. Nothing’s going to happen to you.
Dad will pay it. They’ll let you go. It’s all going to be okay.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, they slowed and she heard a garage door open. They drove inside.
Parked.
The door clattered shut behind them.
The thin-lipped man turned off the engine.
Scared of what would happen next, Petra stared nervously at the minivan’s side door, trying to keep herself calm.
Calm, calm, calm.
Just keep calm.
She could hear the man and the woman talking in hushed voices outside the minivan, but couldn’t make out much of what they were saying. However, at one point, she did hear him say something about Monday night and refer to the woman as Deedee, and when she replied, she called him Sergei.
When the door slid open at last, Deedee was standing there holding Petra’s phone. “Okay, my dear,” she said. “Let’s get you ready. We have a very important video to shoot.”
PART II
DESCENT
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SATURDAY, JUNE 15
6:51 A.M.
Mom stays home while Dad takes me to Nicole’s house to drop me off.
“So, you have that debit card for gas?” he says as we pull into the driveway.
“Yes.”
“Check.”
“I’ve got it, Dad.”
“Check.”
I pull out the preloaded card that the camp’s registrar had sent us from the anonymous donor who’d paid for my scholarship. He didn’t tell us how much money is on it, but he assured us it would be enough to cover my travel expenses.
“And some cash, just in case, for emergencies?”
“I’ve got everything. I’m good.”
“And what are the ground rules?”
“Check in every day. No drinking. No drugs. Nothing stupid.”
“Okay.” He raps the steering wheel once, definitively, and I take that to mean the questions are done. “Be safe. Have fun. Be careful. And do well at the camp.”
“I will.”
“And don’t get re-injured.”
“I won’t.”
“And as far as your mom goes, don’t worry. I know things have been a bit tense this week, but she’ll be alright—we’ll be alright.”
“Okay.”
I climb out and grab my basketball and duffel bag from the backseat.
The trunk of Nicole’s dad’s sedan is open and has her suitcase in it, so even though she’s not out here at the moment, I figure I’m good to toss my things in there.
It’s possible that Mia might have stayed the night here because, though her car is here, it has dew on the windshield.
As my dad is pulling away, she comes out of the house.
She’s wearing black leggings that match her inky black hair and make her look even skinnier than she really is. Pierced lip. Studded tongue. Her tank top leaves her red bra straps visible across her bare shoulders.
Her arms are loaded with five jumbo-size bags of Fritos and a camo military rucksack that she once told us was her dad’s back when he was in the Army.
“What’s up, Daniel?”
“Nothing. How’re you doing?”
“Smokin.”
She tosses the pack and Fritos into the car. “You ready for this camp thing?”
“I think so.”
“So your mom eased up on it all?”
“She agreed to let me go—so, I guess so. You think you have enough Fritos there?”
She assesses her Fritos stockpile. “Good point. We can always stop for more if we need to.”
“Right.”
Nicole appears in the front door wearing her pajama bottoms and one of my T-shirts that I left over here a couple weeks ago.
She’s clutching an armload of pillows that she stows in the backseat where she and Mia are planning to lounge for the first part of the trip.
When Nicole sees my basketball in the trunk, she looks at me quizzically. “Are you really bringing that along?”
“I might want to shoot around when there’s free time.”
“It’s a basketball camp. They’ll have, like, a million basketballs there.”
“But they won’t have Alfie.”
Mia blinks. “You named your basketball Alfie?”
“Yeah, I know.” Nicole beats me to a reply. “It’s a little troubling. That and his football.”
“Fred,” I tell them.
Mia speaks as if I’m not standing right in front of her. “Hashtag: hemightverywellbealostcause.”
Kyle and his mom pull up, he hops out, and we collect his things.
I offer to drive first, but he shakes his head. “How are you supposed to do that with one arm in a sling?” Then he holds up an enormous travel mug. “Besides, this is my special brew. Guaranteed to keep me awake and alert for at least the next half hour.”
“What is it?”
“Red Bull, Dr Pepper and two bottles of 5-Hour Energy.”
“That’s going to do more than keep you alert for half an hour,” Nicole says. “It’ll probably keep you up for a week.”
“My record is thirty-eight hours. You should have seen the song lyrics I was writing at the end of that.”
“I can only imagine.”
The girls get situated in the back, and then Nicole, who has burned some CDs for the ride, hands them up to me.
“Okay, so this car actually does have a jack for your phone,” she explains, “but it also has a CD player—which is cool, even though CDs are a little old school.”
As she goes on, she sounds slightly philosophical. “It sort of straddles two ages. Like those cars they used to make that had both cassette players and CD players.”
Straddling two ages.
Hmm.
Interesting.
“Like Janus,” Kyle says, “that Greek god that had two faces. One to look at the past. One to look toward the future.”
“So this trip is officially in honor of Janus then.” Mia rips open a bag of Fritos and dives into them. “I eat this corn chip in honor of Janus.”
I shuffle through the CDs, which Nicole has labeled Awesome Tunes, Road Trip Mix, and Chill. “I wonder what cars will be like twenty years from now, what kinds of things they’ll include along with the phone input.”
Kyle takes a long gulp from his mug as he pulls onto the road. “Probably wireless signals to cranial implants that pump tunes directly into your brain.”
“Well.” I hold up Nicole’s CDs. “I think I’ll stick with these for now.”
“Ditto.”
Since we all have pretty different tastes in music, we make a deal that the driver gets to choose the tunes and no one else is allowed to complain about the music or strangle the driver, but we all have earbuds or headphones, so we should be able to handle things either way.
Nicole is into techno and trance—anything with a driving beat but no words. Kyle goes for the alternative indie bands you’ve never heard of, but that seem to always make it big about six months after he starts listening to them. It’s uncanny.
For Mia, it’s grunge and for me, Rush. My dad had all of their albums back when I was a kid and I used to listen to them when I was going to bed. Geddy Lee sang me to sleep through the years. All those rock anthems got lodged in my mind and I’ve never really been able to get them out.
Not such a bad thing, actually.
“Seriously though,” Mia says. “I can’t believe it’s June and we’re driving to Georgia. We’re gonna die from the heat.”
“That’s what air conditioning is for.” Kyle blasts it, even though there’s no ne
ed for it yet.
“No, don’t do that,” Nicole insists. “The Freon’s bad for the ozone.”
“Oh, that’s just an urban legend. Like the one about the people who wedge razor blades in waterslides.”
“Ew! What? No, it’s not like that at all!”
“Why did you have to say that, Kyle?” Mia punches his arm. “Now I’m never gonna wanna go down a waterslide again in my life.”
“That’s not as bad as the one about the AIDS-infected hypodermic needles they found in—”
“Don’t,” Mia says. “I don’t want to know.”
“—those little kids’ climby ball pit things.”
“Kyle!” both girls exclaim.
“Okay, okay.”
“And turn off the air conditioning,” Nicole tells him firmly. “Save the planet.”
He does.
And we head south.
Petra Amundsen pounded on the narrow window in the basement room where the people who’d abducted her had left her.
Had imprisoned her.
It was useless.
She ran her fingers along the sill for the hundredth time, searching for some way to get it open, but of course, found nothing.
Well, ninety-eighth time, but who was counting.
She didn’t really expect to find anything, but it was sort of like when you misplace your car keys and you know they have to be somewhere, so you check your purse, and then you look around your room and when you don’t find anything, you come back to your purse and look in it again.
You know the keys won’t be there, but you look anyway.
Just in case.
Just to be sure.
And now, Petra still found no way to open the window.
And no way to break the glass.
Sergei and Deedee had provided her with food and water, as well as a wire-handled five-gallon bucket to use for a toilet. But besides that, and the cot and blanket, her room was empty.
They’d been down to check on her a couple times, but mostly left her alone in this sparse, cement-block cell with that single, thick-glassed window.
When she stood on the cot and looked outside, she could see trains rocket past just a hundred yards or so away.
So close.
Yet so far out of reach.
Every couple of hours they passed by.
There were a lot of things she didn’t know, but from the video her kidnapper’s had filmed when they brought her here, she did know that the ransom they wanted from her dad didn’t involve money but had to do with one of the committee hearings he was in charge of.
Money would have been no big deal.
Yeah, to put it plain and simple, her dad was filthy rich—and with her trust fund, so was she. He came from family money, but also made smart investments and had a knack for choosing the right stocks. By the time he was forty, he’d more than doubled the inheritance he’d received.
But what these people wanted was a different matter altogether.
Their ransom demand involved something her dad had told her about, something vital to stopping off-the-books government research that could hurt a lot of people. So, although Petra obviously didn’t want to die, she also didn’t want him to give in to the blackmailing.
They’d stipulated that he comply on Monday night at exactly nine o’clock.
Going that long without her medication was not going to be good.
Not at all.
You’ll be okay. With Dad’s connections, there are probably a thousand cops out there right now looking for you. They’ll find you before Monday night. They’ll find you for sure.
That’s what she told herself as she stared out the window that would not open, through that glass that was too thick to break.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Everyone else takes a turn at the wheel, but whenever I offer to drive, my friends tell me to just rest my shoulder.
Now, as we come up on Janesville, Mia is driving with Nicole beside her.
Nicole starts using the calculator on her phone to figure out the distance and time we need to travel today, but Kyle just shakes his head. “No need for that. Not when we have a human calculator sitting right here in the car with us.”
“Kyle,” I say, “really, we don’t need to—”
“For instance,” he goes on, unfazed, “Nikki, how far is it to Mr. Schuster’s house?”
She taps at her phone’s screen. “Two hundred sixty-two miles.”
“So Daniel, if we’re averaging fifty-nine miles an hour, how long will it take us to get there?”
“Four hours, twenty-six minutes and twenty-six seconds.”
“Although, by now, the seconds part has changed just a bit.”
“Yes. Just a bit.”
“It’s like they say: Time flies like the wind, fruit flies like bananas. And what if Mia pushes it and we average seventy-one miles an hour?”
I sigh. “Three hours, forty-one minutes and, just over twenty-four seconds.”
“See?”
“I’m not a human calculator,” I tell him.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“How many seconds until we would get to Mia’s aunt’s house, if we just drove straight through?”
“I’m not even going to answer that.”
“But you know, don’t you?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Ah. I knew you did.”
Man, sometimes I wish I could shut this off.
Mia, who has brought along a bottle of bubbles, asks Nicole to hold the bubble dipper-thing in front of the air vent and bubbles go shooting all through the car.
Even though she and Nicole go back and forth about whether or not to put the AC on, since Nicole loves bubbles almost as much as Mia does, she has a small moral dilemma.
The bubbles are a lot better with it on, though.
As a group, we work our way through two bags of Fritos, a can of Pringles, and a bag of black-pepper beef jerky, which Nicole politely allows the rest of us to tackle on our own.
We have to stop to let Kyle relieve himself of his forty-four ounces of thirty-eight-hour energy sludge more than once, but he doesn’t learn his lesson and mixes another liter of it, still hoping to break his personal best for staying awake.
Dr. Adrian Waxford made the final arrangements with the Wisconsin Department of Corrections for the next arrival to be sent down tomorrow.
Though this convict wasn’t as violent as his other subjects, Adrian had his own, more personal reasons for requesting him.
Then, when the paperwork was finished, he spent some time doing critical flicker-fusion frequency tests with the Tabanidae to learn more about their ability to process time more quickly than humans do.
Hopefully, it would help him determine how much Telpatine, the chronomorphic drug he was developing, he would need to administer to create the same effect in his subjects.
His research would do more than just provide a way for justice to be served; it would also save the government tens of billions of dollars a year that could then be used for job growth, social programs for the poor, and judicial reform.
Currently in the United States, there were more than 2.3 million people in prison—more than any other country on the planet. And, at the cost of over $34,000 annually to keep each one incarcerated, the total expenditures reached close to eighty billion dollars per year.
Just to warehouse people.
Adrian’s research would cut that down at least sixty or seventy percent, allow people to serve their complete sentences more quickly—psychologically, at least—even if they were sentenced to hundreds of years, and as a result it would also help ease the overcrowding at prisons.
The legal reforms would be fair, just, and save the taxpayers fifty to sixty billion dollars a year. True, it would require our society to rethink its views on how convicts should serve their time, but it would be well worth it in the long run.
However, all of that depended on Senator Amun
dsen canceling Tuesday’s inquiry—the one that would abrogate things before the research was refined enough for broader use, and before society had been primed to be ready for its implementation.
But once the senator saw the video that Deedee and Sergei had filmed of his daughter, Adrian was confident that he would make the right decision and comply with their demands.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Kyle is driving as we pass into Illinois.
We twist Mia’s arm until she finally agrees to read us some of the ghost story she’s been writing over the last year.
“If Mary Shelley can write Frankenstein when she’s eighteen,” she told us one time, “who’s to say I can’t write a novel too?”
True enough.
But she’s been keeping the details about the story secret.
Until now.
“Well,” she begins, “first of all, you need to know about ossuaries. They’re rooms where they keep bones. Or, they can be just a container of some kind—a box, a chest, something like that. A lot of times they were needed in the Middle Ages during the days of the Black Plague in Europe when thousands of people were dying off so fast that their relatives didn’t have a place for all the bones or all the bodies.”
“Oh, lovely,” Nicole says.
“My story, it happens at a monastery where they have an ossuary. It’s based on a real place, actually. A Capuchin monastery—that’s an order of monks, by the way. So this place has an entire wall made of skulls. The chandeliers are made of bones. You can Google it. It’s crazy.”
Nicole makes an ew face. “Why on earth would they do that? It sounds like something out of a horror movie, some sort of inbred-backwoods-cannibal-psycho-killer-thing.”
“I know. So, like I was saying, sometimes it was crowding problems, they didn’t know what to do with the bodies of the monks and stuff—but mostly they used it as a reminder to visitors about how brief life is.”
“That would work for me.”
I wonder what it would be like to walk into a church that has its walls covered with human skulls.
Honestly, it might not be the best way to attract new members.
At least not today.
