Death Thieves

by Julie Wright

  His shadow stopped moving. He faced me—I could tell by his silhouette on the curtain. We stood there, facing each other in silence on opposite sides of the curtain for several long moments. “I’m leaving,” he said finally. The door clicked shut again.

  I inhaled sharply, relief flooding over me that there had been no need for me to defend myself. I rinsed my hands off, pulled the towel from the top of the rod, and peeked around the curtain. True to his word, he’d gone. I tied the towel off around my chest and used the pans to fill the tub until the steam rose up in little curls of comfort. I added cold water so as not to scald myself and got in.

  Everything seemed like they did in my time. The way the tub worked, the mirror in the bathroom, the towels. I wasn’t sure what I expected to be different, but nothing really was. Tag’s words came back to me, “If an idea is perfect to begin with, why alter it?” Bathrooms must have been close to perfect before. The only real differences existed in the curves of the ornate handles on the faucets and the palatial size of the room.

  Once settled into the water, my mind calmed enough to consider the implications of my situation. Tag hadn’t looked—hadn’t even tried. Nathan might have tried. Nathan’s dead. What had our funerals been like? Did the whole school attend the teenage tragedy? Had Winter worn black? Did she put white roses on my casket? I loved white roses.

  Winter, Aunt Theresa, Nathan. Winter.

  How would I survive without Winter? How would I make it in a world where she wasn’t there to read my feelings and thoughts? Where she wasn’t there to understand when no one else could or wanted to? Where no one else knew I liked white roses? How would I live in a world where she wasn’t?

  And how would she survive? Who would get her through college? Who would make her dinner while she studied so she didn’t starve? Who would be there for her?

  I gave in to another bout of misery and sank down in the water. I cried a long time.

  “Summer?” His voice through the door startled me.

  I sat up, the water movement echoing off the cavernous bathroom walls. “What?”

  “Does your head hurt?”

  What a weird question. My head ached. My brain felt like it had been split into a zillion pieces and now those pieces were colliding into one another. “A little.” Even that small confession of weakness bugged me, but my head did hurt. Maybe the headache was a side effect of time travel. Maybe every time we jumped, it scattered our brain cells.

  “Crying usually gives people headaches.”

  So he’d heard me. How long had he been there listening?

  “I have something that will take the headache away.”

  “I don’t do drugs!” The words came harsh and fast—an automatic response to Theresa’s preaching about my mother’s addictions.

  “No, I don’t mean . . . I wouldn’t be allowed to administer them if I had them. Soldiers are never given access to those things. We’re required to build our own defenses against discomfort. When you come out, I’ll show you.”

  Curiosity and the cooling temperature pulled me from the water. I dried off and grimaced at the clothes—dirty, wrinkled, ripped, ruined. I dunked Winter’s shirt in the bath water and rubbed shampoo on it. Carefully, I washed the shirt, working hard to keep it from tearing or fraying further. Much less care was used on the jeans. I hung them both over the shower curtain rod so they could dry, looked at my underwear, and harrumphed. They weren’t as dirty as the jeans, but they’d been through a lot. “Yuck.” I grumbled and then laughed. I’d likely set a world record. I’d worn the same underwear for over eighty years. I washed those, too, unable to bear the idea of putting on dirty unmentionables.

  Going out in only a towel seemed like a bad idea, even if Tag hadn’t looked or taken advantage of the bathroom situation, but the priority of clean, dry clothes drove away fear. And a feeling of trust niggled at the back of my mind. Tag hadn’t behaved like a monster in any way. I clutched my towel and little glow sticks to me as I opened the door.

  The hallway remained empty—Tag likely off in the kitchen. I exited to one of the side rooms hoping to find something to wear for the night while my shirt and jeans dried.

  The closet dwarfed the bathroom, to the point of obscenity. As if flaunting the wasted space, not much hung on the rods in the closet other than a few odds and ends of shirts and dresses. There were several sets of drawers built into the walls.

  One drawer contained silky things that had the look of intimacy. I closed that one immediately. The next one down had regular old underwear. I held a pair up. They were huge and the idea of wearing someone else’s unmentionables made me feel queasy, but today was not a day to be picky. I put them on and tied the sides into knots to keep them from falling off. In another drawer, I found a long blue skirt with beaded fringe at the bottom. The beads clicked against one another as I lifted the skirt up and put it against me to see about size—ankle-length and much too wide, but the drawstring would make it fit.

  I shuffled through more drawers and found a bra. The thing could have been used to hold bowling balls. What poor woman had to bear that burden, I wondered. No knot would make that bra fit me, so I decided to have a feminist moment and go natural. In yet another drawer, I found a gray pullover with nothing weird on it. I tugged it over my head and went back to the bathroom to hang the towel to dry.

  I ran into Tag in the hallway coming out of the bathroom as I was going in. He exhaled sharply. “There you are!” He looked about ready to hug me, like a mother would her lost toddler. “I was worried.”

  “I wasn’t trying to scare you. Just needed clothes.” Why the need to explain? I didn’t owe him anything. If I had run off, he’d deserve it. Of course, running off in an incomprehensible future where I didn’t have the legally required ring probably qualified as a bad plan.

  “Food’s ready.” He nodded toward the kitchen, his eyes never leaving my face.

  “Thanks.” I shifted uncomfortably. “What?” I finally asked under his scrutiny.

  “Nothing.” He averted his gaze and went to the kitchen, expecting me to follow.

  I did.

  Chapter Eight

  The dinner of beans and rice overseasoned with salt and dehydrated onions came as a welcome part of the night. Hunger had set in with a vengeance. Even though Tag had cooked a lot, we managed to consume every rice grain. I stood, pivoted a minute, not knowing what to do, and then went to the sink and started washing the dishes. He pulled the pan from my hands. “No. This is my job.”

  I grabbed the pan back. “Your job? You made dinner. That means you get the rest of the night off. It works that way in most everybody’s family. I’ve been through enough families to make me an expert.”

  “I’m a soldier. You’re my charge. I have a responsibility to take care of you.” He tried taking the pan away again, but I held it out beyond his reach.

  “The only person responsible for taking care of me is me. And who’s dictating that you have to take care of me anyway?” I pointed the pan at him. “Who sent you off to kidnap me from my death?”

  “I didn’t thieve you. You died in that car wreck. I saved you.”

  I waved my hand in front of my face. “Yeah, yeah. I’m saved. Wahoo and hallelujah.” Pain shot through my head as the headache pounded harder. I reached my hand up to my temples and cringed.

  “Your head still hurts. I’m sorry. I forgot. Here.” He pulled out a chair and tapped the back, indicating I should sit. Feeling wary, I sat.

  His hands went to my temples, gently massaging into my skin. I tried to feel apprehension—this was my kidnapper, after all—but my headache almost immediately dissipated at his touch. All the anxiety, fear, and frustration melted out through my toes as his fingers worked my head over. His fingers kneaded their way to the back of my scalp and down onto my neck behind my ears, working to the nape of my neck. By the time he’d finished, I’d nearly forgotten the definition of a headache.

  “Better?” he asked. He didn’t take
his hands away right away but let his fingers trace lightly back down my neck. After a second or two, he abruptly removed them and stepped away from me.

  “Hmm, much better.” I felt so relaxed that I could have slept right then and there. “Where did you learn that? Do all soldiers have part-time jobs as physical therapists?”

  “My mother had problems with crying headaches a lot. She—well, with that, I learned how to make them go away.”

  He stood there for several awkward moments and then patted my shoulder. “Well, I should clean up, too.” He left me at the table while he fetched the pans from the bathroom and refilled them with water. He placed them on the stove burners and left them to start boiling.

  He’d forgotten the dishes, so I went back to washing them. He looked about to intervene again but resigned himself to the idea that I wasn’t moving away from the sink.

  Tag checked his pans every so often.

  “Don’t these people have a dishwasher?” I asked.

  “The dishwasher would work off the flash heater, which you’ve already discovered doesn’t work. I don’t think the electrics have been enabled here, either. We can’t test the lights, but my flashlight isn’t pulling a charge from anywhere. If the electrics worked, the flashlight would be charged by now.”

  “But they don’t even have a dishwasher.” I persisted. “You said the rent here was overpriced so that means they’re rich people. Why wouldn’t they have a dishwasher?”

  Tag stood up, his walk to the cupboards more like a tired shuffle. He opened a cupboard full of plates set out on pretty display racks and closed it again, shining his light in it so I could fully see. “When you’re done using a dish, you put it away in its racks and close the door. Intense heat cleans the dishes and then suction pulls the ashes of any debris into the house’s compost. It wastes much less water and takes much less work than your clunky machines.” He shuffled back to the stove and checked his water.

  The cupboards do dishes? Whatever. He may as well have told me that little men jumped out of the woodwork with dish rags and soap. “So back to the other conversation. You’ve taken me because someone told you to. I want to know why.”

  “Can’t we talk about this in the morning?”

  His tired voice should have made me feel bad for pressuring him, but I had to know. Besides, he should’ve thought about having to deal with me before he kidnapped me. “You have a few minutes while your watched pot doesn’t boil.” I ignored the funny look he gave me. I swear the guy had no concept of humor. “Seriously, I want to know why exactly I was summoned to your precious future. I want to know who’s the brilliant mastermind of this fine disaster we’re stuck in. I’ll finish washing while you explain.” I turned my back on him and scrubbed the starchy residue from the rice pan, ignoring that the water felt like it had been surrounding an iceberg before entering the house.

  “People can’t have babies in the future—”

  “I already know that. Let’s skip to the part I don’t know.”

  “Things got worse after the crazy war. Healthy, normal babies were a premium. Once the crazy law went into effect, people sort of lost hope.”

  My hands stopped scrubbing. “What? I don’t understand a thing you just said. Crazy war? Crazy law? It sounds like Dr. Seuss.”

  “Women are sterile in the future. Men, too. Childbirth isn’t simple like it had been in your time. Entire civilized economies slowed and eventually failed due to the low birthrate. There was no way to stop the depopulation.”

  “But you said the world wasn’t ending.” I waved a soapy hand at him. He’d sat down at the table—likely as tired as I felt. The polite thing would be to let him go to bed, but he’d pulled me into this mess for a reason, and I wanted to understand that reason.

  Tag didn’t take me with the intent to hurt me. If he had, he’d already passed over a million chances to do so. His making sure I had hot water, that I was fed, that I was safe—all this added up to him being honest when he said he took me away for some other purpose. It felt better knowing I could go to sleep without having to watch my back, but also eerie to know that someone else had pulled the strings to change my future.

  “The world isn’t coming to an end, not in the way of population. Scientists discovered ways babies could be created and incubated in public nurseries. The parents donate the necessary tissue samples and the public nursery grows them a baby. The brilliant cutting-edge technology saved mankind.”

  “Didn’t you say I was going to save mankind?”

  Tag smiled, his eyelids drooping with the need for sleep. “You will be the crown jewel in the effort to save mankind. The public nurseries aren’t stable. And for reasons no one can determine, the brain doesn’t develop properly in many cases. But it’s worse if the women carry the babies in their own wombs. The public nurseries at least have some success. The couple picks their baby up when its lungs are strong enough to live outside the birthing fluids. But many of the public nursery babies are mentally unstable, not as many as in natural childbirth, but still too many.” Tag’s voice cracked, and he wiped at his eyes, dragging his whole hand down his face. No matter how tired my body—or his—felt, I needed to hear it all.

  “Go on.”

  “They were allowed to grow up—almost an entire generation of crazies. The world fell into chaos. The government rounded up a bunch of crazies and shipped them off. No one ever saw them again. We assume they were euthanized. The rest of the crazies revolted. There were a lot of them at that time. We went to war with the crazies, and we won. We were completely outnumbered, but their instability made them beatable in spite of their overwhelming numbers.”

  Tag shifted on his seat, looking generally uncomfortable. “Can we finish this in the morning? It’s late. You need to get sleep. I need a shower.” He never mentioned that he needed sleep, too. “We can finish this in the morning. Maybe we’ll figure out the electrics and let the flash heater wash dishes.”

  “But—” I was almost done with dishes.

  He shook his head. “Tomorrow.” He led me away from the kitchen down the hall to the room with the big closet. The bed sat like a gaudy centerpiece in the middle of the room. It would take half the night just to remove all those opulent fluffy pillows placed like the tower of Babel at the head of the bed. “You can sleep in here.” He pressed the glow sticks in my hands. “In case you need light.”

  “Where will you sleep?”

  “There’s a room across the hall.” He moved to leave. I snatched at his jacket.

  “But what if the people who live here come back?” The question sounded ludicrous even as I asked it. The house carried every appearance of being a vacation home only—a place people paid too much money for and spent too little time at. My mind couldn’t wrap around that kind of money, not that I didn’t dream it one day could.

  “Did you look in the fridge?” He didn’t wait for a response. “No perishables. People who plan to return soon would plan for meals. They only come here on holiday.”

  I held his jacket tighter so he couldn’t leave. “What if tomorrow is a holiday?”

  He smiled and gently pried my fingers loose from his sleeve. “It isn’t. Go to sleep. We have several days to talk before we have to make the jump to your future.” I noticed he didn’t say our future, or even my future in a way that indicated it felt like home to him. He’d simply said your future.

  He put a hand on my shoulder to give me a little shove toward the bed. The pressure of his hand soaked the cold water still dripping from the ends of my hair through my shirt and against my skin, causing me to shiver involuntarily. He hurried to remove his hand, his smile completely erased from his face.

  He cleared his throat. “Sleep will do us both a lot of good.”

  Before he could get out the door, I called out to him one last time. “Tag?”

  He didn’t turn. “Yes, Summer?” His voice carried a hint of frustration that I wouldn’t let him leave.

  “I’m sorry about the
volcano.”

  “You will never have need to apologize for anything to me.” His quick strides from the room indicated he would not allow me to detain him any further.

  I edged toward the bed, feeling the cavernous room’s darkness close in around me. The glow sticks were awfully poor substitutes for light switches. I shoved aside the pillow mountain with one great push and forced myself to climb into the blankets, gripping them tight to my chin.

  Sleep wouldn’t come. My mind stayed active, alert, and afraid. I searched back through my memory and tried to think of one night I had slept in a room alone. Not one instance came to me. The few times when Winter had left for cheerleading camp, I’d spent the night at a friend’s house. Other than that, Winter had never left me. My fingers twitched at the blankets at my chin, feeling the foreign texture of cloth. Not once since I’d been taken into state custody and our case worker, Alice, handed us our quilts had I ever slept without mine. Even when I went to sleepovers, the sun quilt went with me.

  I rolled over in the bed and tried to force my eyes to stay closed, tried to force my mind to focus on being tired rather than the fact that I was lost in the future without my sister and without my sun quilt.

  Tag’s noise from the bathroom stopped, meaning he’d finished cleaning up and had gone to bed himself. I rolled over again and tried to sleep.

  With Tag finally in bed, too, the house’s quiet added to my distress. Every noise felt like impending doom. What if the house had been vacated because it was haunted? What if ghosts trailed down that long hallway? I snorted. Ghosts? I didn’t believe in ghosts, even in the dark when my imagination felt overactive—even when I now believed in time travel. Besides, the only time I’d ever seen anything that looked like a ghost, it ended up being Tag.

  Several long minutes passed while I mused over ghosts, time travel, and the scary things I truly believed in. I believed in ax murderers and psychotics. My mother had dated enough psychotics for me to have no delusions there.