Security: A Novel

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  A police car traces Manderley’s long driveway. It putters down the gravel at the posted speed limit of seventeen and a half miles per hour, which seems random, and it is. The randomness is what makes people look at the sign and slow. The cruiser approaches the main doors. Delores is there, or some of Delores, and most of Destin. Some of them is smeared on the windows. The police car’s brakes screech like a pterodactyl, and the vehicle reverses from the main doors until its right-rear tire is twenty feet from the hedge maze. Red and blue lights begin to whirl. No one gets out of the car.

  Brian’s bleeding from the forehead, nose, and one ear. He’s stumbling backward, and up the stairs of the bandstand, toward the glass. He trips, and the Killer kicks him, backward. Brian knocks over a music stand.

  Tessa sits up. She holds her head. She roots around in her mouth and throws a tooth on the floor disinterestedly. She stands. She’s walking toward the bandstand, when the Thinker grabs her ankle. She lets out a yell that curdles the blood. She takes a fork off the nearest table, basically falls with it, with all her weight behind it, and the tines bury themselves into the Thinker’s left wrist. He screams. Tessa stands up, smashes her knee into his mask, and walks away from him like his unconsciousness is boring. She looks at the stage like she’s watching a play she hates. The Killer is standing over Brian. Staring down at Brian. Brian is coughing. The Killer steps on Brian’s chest. He begins to apply pressure. It takes a lot of pressure to crack a sternum. It’ll take the Killer a few seconds.

  And Tessa is moving like this is a dance. The Killer doesn’t see her in the reflection of the glass, because the glass is broken. Tessa’s bleeding from the mouth. She’s crying silently.

  “Tess,” Brian’s saying, gasping, the pressure on his chest increasing. He can see, as clearly as I can see—perhaps (of course) he can see more clearly—the look on Tessa’s face. He’s holding the Killer’s foot, trying and failing to twist it, and he’s twisting inside, because Tessa’s decided something. She climbs the few steps to the stage, and her posture changes. All of her changes, because she’s become in this instant, quintessentially, the person she’s always been.

  She’s twenty-five feet behind the Killer.

  Enough for an excellent running start.

  Camera 64

  Most would say their favorite part of the landscape here is the ocean, but a few, who want to be different—the people who most want to be different are those most likely to be like everyone else—would say they favor the mountains. I think the best part of any landscape is its highway. I didn’t always. I was stationed in Hawaii when I was twenty years old. The beach near the barracks was volcanic rock, which I’d never seen. The other guys thought it was ugly or beautiful—those were the words they used—but I thought it simply was. I’d wake early and do extra PT, mostly so I could watch the sun coming up over the other islands far distant. Hardened lava made shapes against my backside where I sat. I meant to go to Kauai, and I never did. It was right there. It was so green. I thought I’d take Tessa to Kauai for our honeymoon. I thought I understood what it was to be alive, but I didn’t. I never embraced my own shame, until now. I watch the far-off, winding road between the mountains and the sea, red and blue lights strung down its length, like the highway is a priceless necklace. Like it’s all leading somewhere. And I am afraid. I am afraid of the pain that waits for me; I am afraid to face it alone. I am alive, and I am horrified.

  Camera 33

  Tessa moves as if this is the most natural thing in the world to do. She moves as if fear is silly, and not important, and not germane. But not not there—it is there, the fear; it always is. It simply is. The body tells the story, her body: If I am more than this body, then I give of this body, I give this whole body, for him. I am the inertia and the life. I am his life, gladly paid for. She makes no sound. No war cry as the Killer looks over his side at the subtle plud of her bare feet on marble. She needn’t make a sound, for her body is saying: We are more than mere bodies. I’ll prove it. I’ll show you. Watch this. She catches the Killer around his waist. The Killer’s mass might have stopped her if he hadn’t bumbled, off-balance, at the sight of Tessa coming so fast toward him. The Killer has a knife in his hand, but his hand is thrown forward as his body’s thrown backward, where smooth marble keeps traction for Tessa’s hard feet, where the Killer tries to get traction with his hard boots, where he gets traction but the wrong way, heels digging, adding to the backward force, and back there, there is nothing. Music stands all moved to the front. But there’s the window. The window with a bullet hole in it. The bullet hole almost like an eye in a portrait.

  My eyes snap shut. I can’t do anything about my ears. Or my mind, imagining:

  The window blows outward. I picture it as if I’m standing at the shore at low tide, the waves remote behind me, and quiet. That dull white block blocking the mountains, most of its windows dark, the light ones so bright, so many stories—and there, where basic spatial reasoning would dictate the top is (those tinted windows at the very top must be an architectural flourish), a huge window pops like a glass balloon. The glass a bright Milky Way, shards like stars. Two people in its midst, Castor and Pollux. Or Orion, but which is Orion? Is it the Killer, knife still in his hand? Is the knife still in his hand? Or is it Tessa, calm and wordless? The Killer’s scream is audible, but not hers. Not hers. Brian’s yell is deafening. He chokes on her name.

  I picture her descending. The wind loosens her hair. It’s the color of one thirty in the morning, and so is her skirt, flying up, contrasting a downy lack of underwear and the white cotton of her shirt, breasts small but nipples hard as dark diamonds. She raises her unhurt arm. It’s the sense of being in a dream and waiting to wake. A tiny distance opens between them, a function of his backward inertia or her lesser weight or both, and if he does stab—determined, still—he stabs at sheer atmosphere. He can’t kill. He is nothing here. He is a joke. Tessa is thinking of Brian, and she is smiling. She’s passing the fourteenth, twelfth, elev-ten-ninth—. Tessa pretends she’s fly—

  CAMERA 33, 34, X, 4-3-2

  The pool. Immense sound, glass, crash. My eyes open to a sudden profusion of red across the screen, dripping down. Rain of fricasseed meat into pinking water. A boot floats. Not Tessa’s; she’s barefoot. Where is she, where is she, a piece of her, somewhere, and then I’ll know no, no.

  “Tess, stop kicking.” Brian is panting. He has her left arm in a death grip above the wrist. I can see only the part of her hair from this steep angle behind him, but yes, yes, yes, Brian’s entire torso leans out of the enormous ruined window, his right hand braced against the frame. The veins in that bicep stand at attention. That bicep is visible because it’s the sleeve he tore off to wrap Tessa’s hand, long ago and far away, this afternoon in the foyer. He’s not wearing his motorcycle jacket. He looks oddly naked without it.

  Tessa’s breathing is staccato. I imagine the dark mouth yawning wide underneath her. “Careful,” she says. She’s not talking about her body being suspended more than two hundred feet in the air. She’s talking about Brian’s body being poised above a shard of shattered window, a tip of glass inches from his taut belly, which he’s sucking in to avoid being gutted.

  “You have to climb,” Brian says.

  “How?”

  “Press your feet to the wall and lean back. Then walk up.”

  I can’t watch. I can’t watch anymore. Brian’s insane. Walk up? I eye the pencil, the override system. It wouldn’t help them anyway. It’s much too far. It’s ten inches too far away. Brian grits his teeth. His shoulder is straining out of the socket. It’s as painful as one would think.

  An airless sob escapes Tessa. She’s looking past Brian.

  At the Thinker, who’s rolling onto his side and sitting up.

  “He’s awake, fuck, he’s awake,” she says. The Thinker touches the cleaver buried in his arm. It’s in the back of his shoulder. It missed his carotid artery. He trains the black pits of his mask on Tessa, whom Brian is
ordering: “Look at me; look at me, Tess.” The Thinker puts his fist under the cleaver’s handle. It flips backward when he pushes. It lands with a clang against a soup bowl. He grabs a nearby tablecloth and begins to fashion a bandage-cum-sling.

  “Tess? Tess, Tess.” Brian says it like a litany.

  Tessa loosens her fingers from Brian’s straining elbow. “Let go, Bri,” she says. “You have to run, baby.” Their faces are a few feet and light-years apart. Tessa’s toes must be cold in that vast nothing of space underneath her.

  “No.” He gasps as the knife of glass he’s poised over kisses his navel. Tessa gasps with him and grabs back onto his arm.

  The Thinker folds the chin of his mask to bite a knot. The sling is of phenomenal design, bracing the joint around the front while controlling blood flow in the back. His arm bleeds copiously, but lazily, splattering the marble floor. He braces himself, and stands.

  Brian says, “We live or we die, Tess.”

  The Thinker reels, grabbing a chair for balance.

  “Come on now,” says Brian.

  Tessa nods, and so do I. We nod. The pencil isn’t that far away, not really. It’s not too far for us.

  The Thinker looks at Tessa and Brian, then at his gun. He’s roughly equidistant between the two, but he goes for the .45, with its now-unnecessary silencer. He’s tired of surprises. His footfalls are heavy, and their plud-plud hides the sound of Tessa’s bare feet smacking Manderley’s sheer, frigid face as she steps. The security counter is smooth against my left cheek, and I feel the point of the knife scraping Formica when I move, a fraction of an inch at a time, the bulk of the blade juddering minutely between those funny little bones. It tickles, but it doesn’t kill me. Her feet are cold, but that’s life. We’re alive and we move. We’re moving, goddamn it.

  Brian shoves his right side against the window frame and pulls upward, using his legs. Forked tongues of glass lick the right side of his neck and nick him. Tessa leans back farther, still farther, so she can walk up that flat vertical surface like a full-sized middle finger to the universe’s notions of what is possible. They’re all but silent, both of them, even at the most impossible point of the whole operation, when Tessa’s essentially horizontal and she takes a final step, her heel poised above the gone window, and Brian yanks backward with the full force of his weight, and she straightens and plants her foot on the stage like she did nothing less mundane than mount a sidewalk. If the ballroom were full of dinner guests, they would all stand up and applaud. If I could, I would, too. Tessa’s shaking so badly, her knees fail. Brian catches her and rights her, and they speed away more quietly than any phantom. This has taken eight seconds.

  The Thinker hasn’t been watching. He’s been purposely walking at a sedate pace toward his dropped weapon, to prolong Brian and Tessa’s fear, their suffering. He arrives at the gun. He kicks a flap of napkin off its snout. He bends, picks it up, and turns with it raised. He assumes his prey are still hanging over the ledge.

  Except they’re gone.

  I laugh out loud. A real guffaw. It hurts my throat, but I can’t not, he’s so pissed. He roars at the carefree, silent swing of the kitchen door. He wastes time, standing there and bellowing at the ceiling, where the cherubim look down on him, uninterested. He plods into the stairwell. The Thinker is taking it for granted that Tessa and Brian have boarded the secret elevator, and he’s correct (I managed to use my controller twice more, to open the juice concentrate shelf and to close it behind them; they’re passing the fourteenth floor). He’s taking it for granted that the secret elevator and the hollow wall in Franklin’s office will open for them when they get to the first floor, and damn it, goddamn it, he’s going to be correct about that, too.

  We’re only three more inches from this ludicrous pencil.

  We’re holding each other in the secret elevator, careful not to look at Vivica.

  “We’re almost there,” he says, I say. She holds us. She worries over our injuries and asks, “How bad?” and we tell her.

  Camera 64

  “Well, I’m paralyzed, Tessa, so I’d say slightly worse than average, wouldn’t you?”

  Camera X

  “Not as bad as that time I landed a jump on an old seat and a spring hit my balls.”

  I laugh. I turn my head with infinite caution, stick out my tongue, and taste the acrid point of sharpened graphite. Suck it to me. Sink my teeth in. It tastes like the birch bark I chew on long hikes. Brian and Tessa are passing the fourth floor.

  The Thinker has mustered a jog past the sixteenth floor.

  The pencil point pokes the inside of my lower lip. The taste of blood is welcome. An eraser covers a larger surface area, and more accurately simulates a fingertip. I move a last few inches, stop gratefully at the override screen, but my head is at the wrong angle to reach it. The pencil eraser clicks on the screen’s Formica border. I pull a Brian, taking a deep breath and letting it out as I turn, turn. Come on now. The point of the knife in my neck sticks into the security counter like a tent stake. I feel the blade pierce new skin, but not much of it. I stop a squeal at the feeling, because then I might drop the pencil that now juts proudly over the control panel. The black screen turns blue when I tap it. The eraser floats into my pass code numbers—01311984, Tessa’s birthday—like a round, pink, incandescent fantasy. The screen asks for a command. I override all systems. It asks for another code, because this is an emergency measure, so: Tessa’s birthday backward.

  The override system beeps, and the screen fast-motion etches a schematic of Manderley—a transparent blueprint of the hotel’s bones, in pixels, building from the foyer to the twentieth floor, where we perch on the roof. Then we plunge inside, where the walls appear, even the furnishings, in a rendering as faithful to reality as current technology allows. My bloody teeth bare themselves. I look a bit mad, and I like it.

  The Thinker is passing the twelfth floor. He’s walking. He pulls a syringe from his coveralls pocket and jabs it into his thigh. Probably an amphetamine and painkiller cocktail. I blow through a memory of injecting one of those. Burma, I think. I had the flu but was running an op. I don’t recall the op—that particular narcotic mixture effaces events nearly as well as it jacks up energy and pain tolerance—but my men called me “Ahnold” after that. Predator was doing big box office at the time. I snort rudely as the Thinker’s pace starts to quicken. Great.

  The secret elevator settles on the first floor. Brian and Tessa stand waiting. And waiting.

  “No,” Brian says, panic rising up in him for the first time. He can handle a fight to the death in an open space but not passive entrapment in a tiny box, and “Oh no, oh shit,” and “Bri, we’ll get it,” and don’t lose your cool now, you Tantric whippet-bodied woman-stealer. We’re going as fast as we can here.

  The digital override program works a lot like a first-person video game. I don’t like video games, but I’m no fool: my team loves them, plays them all the time. It sets the programmer in Manderley’s driveway to start. There is no police cruiser, no patrolman; my new virtual world is as empty and tranquil as paradise. I enter the front doors by tracing my path with the pencil. Through the foyer, to Franklin’s office. Tap on the secret elevator.

  The secret elevator opens.

  Tessa and Brian bound out. The lamp on Franklin’s desk glows. Tessa’s limp right hand knocks it over. Brian bats Franklin’s top desk drawer open. The drawer sails backward and to the floor. Adrenaline is making Brian’s movements too powerful. He squats and grips a large pair of scissors; he precedes Tessa to the foyer. He turns right, but Tessa says, “Not that way,” reminding Brian the front doors are locked. He tosses a look of yearning at the police car in the driveway. They go left, out the rear exit, stepping around the dead girl in the gold dress. Brian squints at the reddened windows of the pool, but Tessa’s intent—pulls him by his belt loop to the left, then left again at the corner, where Manderley’s glowing white edge meets the night.

  The Killer’s mask floats
in the pool. A portion of his head floats facedown beside it.

  The Thinker is passing the fifth floor. He’s invigorated, running again. Holding the gun like something he treasures, holding it to his chest with the arm that’s not wrapped in a perfect field dressing. He jumps at the sound of the fire alarms, the earthquake alarms, and the bomb threat alarms, all going off at once. They’re of different tones but all terrible and unavoidable and un-sleep-through-able, and continuing, and continuing, like a church choir in hell, or a Brooklyn Saturday morning when one is trying to sleep in. He covers one ear with his functional hand, tries to lift his shoulder to cover the other, but it hurts his shoulder too much. He groans and I groan. Graphite is puncturing the tip of my tongue, but I don’t care.

  I can access wider hotel systems more easily. So easily I have to stop myself from making every faucet go full-blast, every door slam open and shut. Targeted assaults. The foyer chandelier, a stupid, expensive pinecone that dusts up every time a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa. Off.

  In green, black, and white, the Thinker hurtles into the ink-dark foyer. He stays calm and commits to a direction. He runs. He remembers that the front doors are locked but not that a skinny gold-clad trophy date lies between him and the rear ex—A once-in-a-lifetime wipeout! Masked-face-first into the stain-destroyed Italian marble floor. I laugh and laugh, coughing saliva and spools of blood onto the counter. I’m a little worried, but I can’t stop.

  Brian and Tessa round Manderley’s front. The police officer pops from his cruiser, points his revolver at them, and shouts, “Freeze!” Brian and Tessa skid to a stop. Brian puts his hands up. Tessa puts her left arm up, but her right hangs, loose and streaked red. They start shouting in tandem. Brian stops so Tessa can do the talking. I shut off the alarms so Tessa needn’t shout.

  “I’m the one who called,” she says with admirable composure, when Manderley stops screeching. “We need help.”