Security: A Novel

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  “Drop those,” says the cop, referring to the scissors in Brian’s right fist. The rookie’s gun trembles so much, it could conduct “Flight of the Bumblebee.” “No sudden movements.”

  Tessa repeats, “We need help.”

  Brian says, “He’s got—”

  A bullet strikes the police officer square in the forehead. Brian dives and takes Tessa with him. They hit the ground crawling, while the policeman folds to the driveway. Silent shots punch loud holes in “Serve” and “Protect” on the cruiser’s side panel. Brian and Tessa shamble behind the right-rear tire. The whirling lights of approaching emergency vehicles are still a mile away. Brian and Tessa can surely see them. But there’s only one terrible option. They nod at each other, and disappear into the hedge maze.

  The Thinker is loading a new clip. He’s steady; this is business. He must not lose his cool as he did in the ballroom. He’s a professional, and in his profession, there must be no survivors.

  This is stupid. It’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever had. I select every light in every room. Courage is how people die. I know this; I learned this. I watched men learn it, and it was the last thing they ever learned. The Thinker is walking toward the maze. I hear a grunt come out of my throat. I look at myself in the monitor for the twentieth floor, like I’m confirming I’m really there. That poor man, his arms and legs like drop cloths on his office chair. His eyes blinking at me through salty sweat. I see you.

  I tap the lights on. All Manderley’s windows—hundreds and hundreds—shine bright, and darken. Brighten, darken. In varying speeds, specific rhythms—Morse code.

  SOS.

  The Thinker’s mask stretches in a manner that suggests his jaw just fell open.

  Come on, come and get me. Come on now. Leave them.

  I had little hope he’d comply, and he doesn’t. He turns from the hotel and enters the maze with the eerie noiselessness of a panther. I reset the override system so I’m standing in my empty driveway again. I enter the maze and walk where the Thinker walks.

  Tessa and Brian went straight for the maze’s center. They’re a dozen feet from the fountain shooting its spray at the sky. They’re cocooned in each other. I manipulate the eraser up, up, expanding my view to the maze’s convoluted diagram. I’d forgotten how convoluted. It’s a grid overlaid with a mess of systems: sprinklers in case of fire, arc lights in case of guests lost at night, auxiliary cameras in case of same. Tiny icons indicate where each tool of each system resides in the maze, so I’m squinting at a chessboard with hundreds of blue water drops dispersed across it, signifying each of the sprinklers. And yellow lightbulbs for arc lights, and green lenses for cameras. I coded the program to be user-friendly, but it’s dizzying. It’s too much. It’s tempting to think how comparatively easy it must be to take those short, quiet strides the Thinker is taking, how refreshing the smells of soil and dew he inhales in the chilly morning, how exciting the encroachment of flora all around him. The delicious challenge of picking a path. Narrow openings begetting forward motion. Switchbacks that are often the only method of progress. The rare straightaway stretching for twenty-five yards to his either side.

  The Thinker does what I would do—stops at the first long stretch his turns take him to, raises his gun, and fires a volley straight across. The bullets whiz through the hedges. A rose explodes above Tessa’s head. She grabs Brian’s arm and takes him behind the fountain. That’s our girl.

  The sirens blare around the turn to Manderley’s driveway, obscuring the buzz of another clip, fired lower. A rose explodes where Brian and Tessa were hiding thirty seconds ago. Chips of the fountain they crouch behind whir off as if the granite were sneezing.

  The police are speeding into the final stretch of driveway. The lead car swerves and sprays gravel at the dead cop. I can hear barks of “Officer down!” even through their sealed windows. A few cops get out and try to revive him, despite his brains oozing onto their hands.

  Brian’s kissing Tessa behind the fountain. He indicates she should stay here. He rises. She seizes his shirtfront and yanks him down. Brian kisses her again. It’s gentle, tender, profound, and complete. He’s kissing her good-bye. Hypocrite. We live or we die. That doesn’t work if you die for her. That’s not how this ends. She loves you, and I love her, so therefore—no, forget it, I can’t love you by association. I still pretty much hate you, actually. But hey, so what.

  I bite down hard. I feel the pencil tip puncture my soft palate.

  The Thinker looks around at a mechanical hum. It’s coming from the greenery. He peers into a hedge as the sprinkler I’ve set to its top level of water pressure shoots him full in his masked face. My maniacal laugh fills the twentieth floor. It’s conclusively as loud as the Thinker’s girlish, high-pitched cry of offense.

  Which makes Brian and Tessa look up. He’s here; he’s right here. Stay away from right here. I select the arc light nearest to where the Thinker is standing. I’m prompted with a dropdown menu, and I drag the pencil eraser to “Switch On.” The Thinker turns away—the sudden burst of light hurts his eyes—and hope hits me like excellent liquor.

  I select sprinklers all around him. The second and third and fourth jets of sprinkler water make the Thinker spin in a circle. He looks up at the twentieth floor. He looks around for cameras. Good luck, dunderhead. Sid practically made sweet love to these hedges twice a week for months, and he never found one of them. The Thinker steps toward a pathway three turns from the maze’s center, and I douse him repeatedly, discouraging his route, while I keep a close eye on the police’s progress (there isn’t much; exactly one lieutenant is behaving with capable organization—“This will be a tactical assault, so, Johnson, stop throwing up”) and on Brian and Tessa.

  Tessa is looking up. She swallows with effort. “He’s alive,” she says in a whisper. I want to close my eyes and savor the relief in her words. But I can’t. The Thinker is taking another route—a bad one, one that dead-ends. I leave off the sprinklers and render live every camera in every corner of the maze—twenty-six of them, 1A through 1Z. The wall of monitors in front of me wipes clean of Manderley’s bright corridors and becomes a tapestry of night vision. Only motion inside the hotel will reactivate interior surveillance. So the twentieth floor’s camera remains live, showing that sad rag doll in a dark suit, flopping his neck on the counter like a dying fish.

  “He’s alive, Bri.”

  “Who?”

  Tessa points. Brian stares up at the twentieth floor. I authorize a manual angle change on Camera 1, because they’re looking right at it. I make the red power light blink by turning the camera off, then back on, then off, on. Sweat stings my eyes. My nose is running, and I’ve drooled an ochre puddle onto the counter.

  “Jesus,” Tessa says at the camera.

  I turn it left, toward a curve in the maze. Turn the camera straight. Turn it left. Brian and Tessa stare, understandably ignorant that I have to move my neck in order to make the eraser manipulate Camera 1’s mounting mechanism, and that I could at any second sever my last tenuous connections to brain function, but a grunt of frustration escapes me anyway. Seriously. Left.

  Brian and Tessa exchange wide eyes, frightened touches, and finally, dejected shrugs that denote a resignation to having no better choice than to trust me. Which hurts my feelings, but that’s nothing new. Brian puts Tessa behind him, and they mince—left—around the corner.

  It’s delicate work, guiding them. Brian and Tessa know to be quiet, but so does the Thinker. Luckily, the police don’t. Their stampede-like preparations to enter the foyer (They rack shotguns, heft battering rams out of cases, say things like, “You’re fuckin’ with the LAPD this time, bitch.”) amply cover the shuffle of Tessa’s bare feet and Brian’s thick boots on the grass in the maze. They follow the cameras’ pinpoint red lights, pivoting with my aching neck. The hedges loom around them like the fuzzy green backbone of a docile monster. The cameras make a whirring sound on their stands, so I regularly pelt the Thinker with jets of co
ld water, to distract him. After a particularly direct hit to his nose and mouth, he has to stand and cough for several seconds.

  Brian hears the coughs; he perks. Tessa focuses on Brian and ignores my next instruction, which is another right. They begin discussing an idea so awful, it’s almost impressive. Tessa’s communicating via hand signals that she should be the bait, and Brian is refusing this idea adamantly. Tessa is gesturing to her limp arm, and then, without further discussion and without giving me time to prepare, she runs.

  The Thinker makes a last left from a long straightaway. He finds a dead end.

  Tessa hangs a strategic right and left, and then runs full out. Her arm flaps like a dishrag. She appears directly in front of the Thinker for a second in the dead end’s narrow entrance. The Thinker doesn’t follow her—as Brian and Tessa’s imbecilic plan demanded—but raises the .45, as I would, leading her progress past him.

  I select a sprinkler so violently, I feel the pencil tip break off against my molar.

  I fire as he fires. Tessa slides. She’s freakishly graceful, except for that arm. My aim this time was to the Thinker’s genitals, and between my contribution to his botched first shot and Tessa’s momentary resemblance to a star pinch hitter, I’m ninety-five percent sure he didn’t hit her. But she stops and lies so still and so flat on the grass, she seems to become part of it. The Thinker fires and fires, and I let him: he’s leading too far. Mute bullets smack leaves over and around and past her; one travels through nine layers of hedges and puts a perfect “O” of surprise in the gravel beside a policeman, a foot and a half from his shoe. He doesn’t notice. He’s telling his partner about a drug raid this reminds him of.

  The Thinker checks his clip. It must be his last, or he wouldn’t be checking it; he’d simply load a new one. He has four rounds left. I’ve been counting. He approaches the blind corner in front of him with impeccable poise. He’ll round it and see Tessa lying to his left, playing dead. But first he’ll turn right, because he’s not stupid. Brian’s waiting with the scissors from Franklin’s desk. He’s got the blades cocked back like the Thinker is Janet Leigh showering in Psycho. The Thinker takes aim through the greenery, at Brian’s heart.

  Wouldn’t it be awful if I hesitated?

  CAMERA 1

  There is a luminescence setting on the arc lights that’s so bright, it eliminates all shadows, on the off chance a small child decides to hide in the maze.

  There are nine sprinklers within range of where the Thinker stands, but I have maybe a second and a half, so I can’t individually select them. There are four hundred fifteen in total.

  There is a speaker in each of the maze cameras, to give a panicked guest verbal directions to the exit.

  There are occasions when the only route to order is through unmitigated chaos, and no verbal direction can lead the way. So the only direction I shout to Brian is “Go!” when I activate all three systems at once.

  The wall of monitors suddenly blinds me, flooding the twentieth floor with white light. In the maze, every sprinkler fires at maximum pressure, every arc light blazes like an acetylene torch, and my voice explodes at top volume from twenty-seven cameras. The cameras’ waterproof lenses mostly show swirls of water, like I’m looking out the portholes in a submerged submarine. My aerial view is of bright, white, frothy mayhem, lined with interlocking geometric green, the sole motion being these three figures at the bottom left.

  “Brian, now now now now!” My pencil is rolling toward me. I spat it at the counter so I could shout. I have to catch it. It’s moving too fast. I’m moving much too fast, my tongue reaching manically as if I’m Gene Simmons, live, in concert. I surge my face forward and clap my mouth shut. Got it.

  The Thinker splutters and coughs and endeavors to shield his eyes, but Brian does, too. They’re drenched; they’re blinded; they’re drowning standing up. Brian tries to grope forward. The Thinker tries to see enough to aim the .45. Tessa launches up from the grass, her hair a dense black drape from crown to waist; it shields her eyes so she can see. A she-beast, a swamp Wendigo, she plows into the Thinker. He dumps into the hedges, and the pair of them flops onto the saturated grass. Tessa has his wrist. She tackles it away from Brian and gets her finger on the trigger. The gun goes off twice; I can’t hear it through the water’s roar, but two teaspoons of mud hop from the ground. The gun muzzle swerves abruptly to stare Tessa in the face. She’s soaked, choking, not strong enough, and I scream a stripped, cored, fundamental negative that seems to call Brian forth. He materializes in the air above Tessa and the Thinker. He lands on them like a bag of dog food. A puff from the gun takes a Tic Tac – sized piece off Brian’s ear. He grabs the Thinker’s wrist and twists it, fighting for a complete reversal of trajectory, a perfect point-blank into his enemy’s heart. I angle a camera downward so the water sprinkles off the rim, so I can watch Brian spraining the joint patiently, his eyes crazed. The blank offense of an assassin stares back.

  The gun goes off before Brian’s ready. Lack of sound makes the moment somewhat anti-climactic. I can only tell it happens because Brian and the Thinker both jump. The Thinker’s hands fall to the ground.

  Brian pulls the trigger again. Again, again. He looks viciously into the Thinker’s mask and keeps trying to empty the emptied gun.

  The police lieutenant who earlier seemed capable has been having a claustrophobic’s lively and convenient debate with his superiors, via radio, about how regulations dictate a Day-Glo, waterlogged hedge maze that’s hissing with max-pressure sprinklers and alive with four kinds of screams, should be stormed. His superiors agree to send a SWAT team.

  The Thinker shudders. Then he’s still. I’d like his death to take longer. I’d like him to be a sushi platter like his partner in the pool. At the very, very least, I’d like someone to check the bastard’s pulse.

  Brian struggles to get his breathing under control. Tessa, only her limbs visible, bats weakly at his waist. When the sprinklers shut off and the arc lights dim to a soothing brightness level, Brian pops to standing with an obvious excess of adrenaline and hurls the gun. He barks a “Yiiiaaaah!” as he does it—guttural, primordial. The .45 crashes through a hedge an admirable distance away.

  Tessa remains splayed on the Thinker, robbed of her wind. Brian asks if she’s okay, okay. Okay, okay? It’s evident as Tessa stands that she is not particularly okay. She’s limping now. Brian puts her good arm over his shoulder. She says, “I’m okay” in concert with Brian saying, “You okay?” The overlap comforts them as they try to determine which way is out.

  I activate a program I’m especially proud of: an algorithm that senses motion above three feet of height, generates the most efficient path to the maze’s entrance, and illuminates footlights, guiding the lost. The footlights glow a pale, restful blue. They pulse on and off slowly, to slow a panicked heart rate. I theorized the footlights would be crucial in the event that security personnel were occupied by a hotel-wide emergency, and a guest was stranded in the maze, and no one was available to conduct a search or give verbal instructions. An earthquake, say, or a fire. Backup systems of backup systems are indispensable should fail-safes fail.

  And my voice will fail me if I attempt to speak. Because of what she says as she speaks.

  “We have to get to him,” says Tessa. She’s crying. Probably shock. Probably not outsized concern. “He’s hurt—he must be. He’d have killed them both if he wasn’t. We’ve gotta get up there.”

  “We will,” Brian says. “Shh. Shh.”

  “He’s unstoppable. He’s amazing, Bri. He’s a black belt in I don’t even know how many—there’s no way—if he saw me in danger, he’d—those guys would’ve been dead before they touched a hair on my head, so he must—he’s, he’s—” She’s getting hysterical. It’s like music to me.

  Brian stops her and makes her look at him. Dripping wet and disheveled in the pulsing blue light, he cups Tessa’s face, contorted by grief—grief for me, and I’m alive; I’m here. I begin activating the spea
kers again, to tell her what I’ve tried to tell her at least a hundred times in words and deeds she refused to hear or see.

  Until Brian says, “He saved you. He saved both our lives. Wherever he is, however he is, he has that. So he’s all right. It’s all right, Tess.”

  My forehead isn’t paralyzed. It makes ripples like a pond with a pebble thrown in when I’m at a loss for thought. Or when the thought is a terrible thing. I exhale what feels like a weight I never knew how to hold up. Not strong enough, amazingly. I’m not all right. I’m not, but he’s right, I should be. Brian’s right.

  Brian’s telling her, “He loves you, Tess. He forgives you. He understands.”

  In my virtual override diagram, the maze is unoccupied. Every place is unoccupied. I’m standing where they’re standing, but they’re not here, and I’m not there. The pencil twiddles in my mouth. The counter under my head seems softer; it seems like a pillow. Randomly, I think of the creek by the house in Indiana. Watching my brother and sister play. I had no friends of my own, but that never bothered me. I preferred to watch them, make sure they were safe as they swam. My sister wore bright orange water wings. My brother liked to splash her, but I’d tell him to knock it off. Sometimes, I’d tip my face to the sun and close my eyes. I’d think about time, and about how I didn’t need to understand it. He who serves doesn’t always have to understand.

  I reset the override system so that I’m standing in the driveway, and I look up at Manderley, its vacuous inner light. I pass through thirty emergency vehicles. Through the police, who call for Tessa and Brian to halt when they stagger into open space.

  I walk alone through digitally spotless, of-course-unlocked front doors. Through a pristinely clean white foyer with plump sofas and an inviting fireplace, a gratuitous chandelier. Past a marble check-in counter. To an empty office full of steady silence. I enter the dull, beige secret elevator. And I close it behind me.