Tainted

by A. E. Rought

  Crap, crap, crap. This makes no sense. Hailey’s gone mental and nabbed my girlfriend. Katrina’s gone missing and taken elements necessary to my and Emma’s survival.

  “What the hell would Kat do with those?” I’m in full defensive driving mode now, and only have one place left to look.

  “I don’t know,” he says to the clicking of computer keys. “I’m running a computer simulation to try and narrow it down. I’ll call again if I get any hits. Drive careful!”

  “I’m trying.”

  Snow blows and billows, streetlights flicker in the gales. According to the radio, the worst of the blizzard will blow through sometime tomorrow, but it’s being blamed for numerous slide-offs, a five-car pile-up, and possibly a structure fire. In the next instant, the town’s emergency siren peels three times, calling the firefighters and first responders in. Must be for that fire.

  I turn off the main road toward my last destination: Hailey’s little bungalow house close to a little inland lake. It’s a fussy neighborhood full of new money. A few blocks down the street, a yellow, pulsing glow bleeds into the snowfall ahead, colored lights dance behind.

  Black shadows, bright lights and drifting white fill my windshield when I round the bend into Hailey’s fancy subdivision. People in housecoats and winter boots stand on sidewalks, flinging wavering shadows behind them. What did Paul say? Incendiary chemicals. The light and flicking shadows, the glow in the sky…

  Would Katrina set Hailey’s house on fire?

  Whoever set it, the truth licks skyward in tongues of red and yellow flames from Hailey’s house. This is a structure fire, but the uncomfortable dark feeling worming in my guts says the weather didn’t cause it. Neighbors gather yards away, probably not wanting to get too close. The heat washes into my car in a nearly tangible wave, too hot to be normal.

  I park in a neighbor’s plowed driveway, get out and lock the car. Roaring fills the air, buffets my ears. I throw a hand up to shield my eyes from the blaring light. Off to the side of Hailey’s property stand two figures in a narrow copse of trees. It’s impossible to tell who they are in the craze of flame and darkness. The backyard neighbor’s house lights up, and a woman with bushy hair steps out. She holds something up to her face, probably a hand to protect her eyes like me.

  The taller figure turns from the other, gestures at the lady on her back porch and then runs off. The other person stumbles toward the house fire. Before thinking it through, I give chase. A yard away I see the person is short, wearing an ill-fitting coat and hat. I leap the snow-covered ornamental bushes and plow into them, tackling them to the ground.

  She grunts with the impact and drops what she’s holding. A red gas can tumbles end over end a few feet from us. “What the hell are you doing?” I shout.

  “I did it,” she says. Even though the voice is hollow, I recognize it instantly.

  “Emma?”

  “I did it,” she repeats, the same empty timbre, like someone ripped out what makes Emma who she is. She squirms underneath me, one hand grabbing for the gas can. “I did it and I have to stay here.”

  “Are you crazy?” I ask, rocking to my knees, and then standing. “You can’t stay here.”

  This has to be Hailey’s end game. Framing Emma for setting her house on fire. Free, Emma flips over, crawls toward the red container. “I have to hold it, have to tell them I did it.”

  What if she did? Hailey certainly made her angry at the coffee shop. Emma hasn’t been acting right since I woke her, moods swinging wildly, blacking out. What if the formula shattered her into different personalities?

  Have I created a monster?

  She wraps her fingers around the handle, and I smack it away.

  “No, Em!”

  She jumps to her feet, trying to push past me. “I have to!” she shouts back. “I’m responsible and I have to tell them.”

  Liquid sloshes in the plastic container when I kick it out of reach. When Em dives for it, I catch her around the middle and drag the wildcat she’s become to my chest.

  “Stop it. I know you,” I tell her. Even if she doesn’t know herself, I know my Emma wouldn’t do something like this. “You didn’t do this.”

  “Yes, I did,” she argues. The fight leaves her quickly, the way heat from a microwave never lasts.

  The neighbor lady wades through the snow towards us. She’s waving something and shouting. There’s no sense running. The woman saw the two forms and me wrestling with Emma. I grapple Em into an upright bear hug and try to calm her. She stills in my arms, muttering into the shoulder of my jacket.

  “Excuse me!” The woman says. She has a small box in her hand, phone maybe, or a camera. Her huge hair has the effect of making her look like a life-size cartoon of a nervous old housewife. Then I recognize her, Angela Summers, the woman who raises chickens that Hailey always hated. “Excuse me!’ she says again. “What’s going on here?”

  “I wish I knew, Mrs Summers.”

  “I saw the flames,” she says, eyes big and crazy, “and went to check on my chickens. That mean girl was always threatening to kill my birds. The fire was not my coop. I saw two girls in the woods. In case there was trouble, I took this photo.” She holds up the camera for me to see a shot of Emma looking drunk and Hailey with a new coat and haircut, and holding the gas can out to Em.

  “Did you take anymore?”

  “No. The damn thing locked up afterward. It’s working now, though.”

  “Is that camera able to email files?” I can see the icons on the screen but don’t want to push. Mrs Summers was always a cranky woman.

  “Yes, it is,” she says with a hint of pride.

  “Could I use it to email that picture to my phone?”

  “What do you want with it?”

  “The mean girl,” I say, using her name for Hailey, “has been playing a mean game and using this girl, Emma, as a pawn. That picture may just help Emma and make sure Hailey gets punished.”

  “In that case…” she says and hands it to me as the first responders swamp the neighborhood streets. I type my phone number into the proper field and push “Send”.

  “Thank you,” I say, handing it back while Em clings to me.

  I brace to face the onslaught of questions that I know are coming when the police notice us standing here. Then, a woofing kind of boom shakes the area when the gas can Em held explodes beside the flaming porch where I kicked it. Taking full advantage of the distraction, I tug Emma’s hand and follow the path Hailey took to escape. Her little prints weave between the trees toward the small created lake’s edge.

  Passing a pine tree, I rip a branch off and drag it behind, obscuring our steps. It might help Hailey, but I don’t care about her right now. I need to make sure Emma and I get out of here safely with the photograph in my inbox.

  Hailey’s prints run along the lake’s edge, away from the madness of lights and noise, toward a rise that leads to another loop of the subdivision. I push Emma in front of me, cupping her with my body and climbing for us both. She’s less than a puppet now, just stumbling along and keeping her face from hitting the ground. Two red beams stab into the night above us, followed by the sound of an engine being forced into gear.

  We crest the slope too late to ID the silver vehicle, but I would bet half of Ascension that it’s Hailey’s Audi A4.

  “Bitch,” Emma mutters, like she fully agrees with me, then turns her head to the side and vomits. I check the steaming puddle to verify it’s not the same dark substance as the Reindeer Games victims. The clotted mess looks and smells like the pizza we had for dinner. “I did it,” Emma says, her eyes wheeling when I turn her to face me. “I did… didn’t do it.”

  Her blue eyes roll to the whites and she goes limp in my arms.

  Her pulse is steady when I check it, breathing is fine, too. I hoist her into my arms, and find a garage to hide behind where I can see across the ornamental lake and watch the flurry of activity rise, crest and then slowly fade and die in Hailey’s neig
hborhood. Em shivers while she sleeps, but never wakes. Even when I finally leave the safety of the garage’s hillside wall and walk the streets through the subdivision toward Hailey’s cul-de-sac.

  My Acura hybrid sits where I left it. No foot prints around it, no handprints in the snow covering it.

  “We’re at the car, Em,” I tell her, though she’s sleeping and can’t hear.

  I guess my voice must touch the part of her that wants to respond to me. She blinks, lifts her head, and fishes in my jacket until she finds the keys and presses the remote start button.

  “Clever girl,” I say.

  She doesn’t answer, just tucks her face closer to my neck. Before I get her into the passenger’s seat, she’s asleep again. The smell of smoke is everywhere as I drive back to the Ransoms’, filling the vehicle through the heater, accompanied by an odd, off kind of scent. I’ve been through two house fires now and never smelled that chemical odor.

  My first instinct is to ask Paul.

  That thought rips raw every wound I’d salved over while finding and saving Emma from herself.

  Pale dawn light warms the sky to the east. The first full day of me knowing my messed-up, mingled parentage, knowing my mother was killed for revenge and knowing I may have ruined Emma when I revived her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  After Bree let us in through their backdoor, I carried Emma and crept through the house and tucked her into bed.

  Each time she’s disappeared, Em woke the next day with no memory of the night’s events. The first time, she went to my father’s estate. The second time she was photographed before Katrina let the animals loose. The third time was the Reindeer Games with Trent Landry. This last time, it was Hailey. Some similarities, but no true common denominators. And completely random points on the map.

  We’re missing something. There has to be a connection, I just can’t see it. I scrub a hand down my face when I park behind my grandparents’ farmhouse.

  I’ve never been this exhausted, this soul-weary. Yawning, I haul my ass out of the car and into the bitter frost of early dawn.

  Silent shadows fill the house, muffle the family pictures. I’m not sure I can bear to look at them, knowing what happened to my mom. Instead of passing by, I scoop up the last one taken of Mom and me. A few years, dozens of scars and a lot of heartache between then and now. One constant, though. Even in my birthday dinner picture with my grandparents, Paul stands in the background. The memories are nearly whole, just the edges clipped off. Paul had come in my father’s place, because dad had a board meeting he couldn’t miss.

  Cupping the picture to my chest, I skip the squeaky stair second from the bottom on my way to my room. After closing the door and waiting to make sure my grandparents don’t wake, I jimmy the loose floor boards up and pull out the leather satchel with my father’s file and the vials I’m keeping as an emergency supply. I should add more now, because of Em. Not that they would be of much use without the energy needed to activate them.

  The pages look the same, nothing new popping up when I thumb through. Then I notice something about the folder. The back is thick; a fine slit runs nearly the length of the edge where the thick paper folds in half.

  What the hell?

  I pry the edges apart with the blade of my pocket knife. Inside, folded and wedged into the bottom of the pocket sits a sheet of paper. Why would my father keep it hidden?

  Orderly brackets of test results line one side, divided by the boys who were killed in my father’s efforts to revive me. Minute, high-peaked, skinny-looped handwritten notes correspond on the other side. Each boy’s maternity and paternity tests, all blood tests, tissue sample results, even their grades. All the victims, diminished to dry, clinical strings of numbers and surgeon’s notes.

  The last box of results belongs to Daniel. His shredded consciousness gives a weak, sullen stir, like he knows what I’m going to read and doesn’t want to see it.

  We have the same blood type. Each aspect of his physical and mental makeup has check marks, or my father’s script, Perfect! beside it. The only difference is in the paternity test. The first result? Not Nathan Hughes’ progeny. The second? SUCCESS! Stanton’s illegitimate son found.

  And at the very bottom of Daniel Hughes bracket of test results my father scrawled:

  Paul Stanton’s son. Alex’s donor. Recompense collected.

  Scientific evidence is impossible to refute. Paul was his father. My father considered Paul’s son to be compensation, for what I now know happened between my mother and my father’s right-hand man.

  I tuck the paper back where I found it and entomb the leather case beneath the floor boards again. Fully clothed, I drop to my bed and drag my cell phone from my pocket. Renfield leaps onto the bed when I open the message thread with Emma. The white cat paces along my body, then lies by my chest as I type: The truth is, the best thing my dad ever taught me was how to handle disappointment.

  Then I follow it with another text: The truth is, no matter what happens, this heart will always be yours.

  The four of us sit in the Ransoms’ sunken family room the next morning, each wearing a different shell-shocked expression. Bree lies on her back, feet propped on Jason’s legs. Em’s cuddled next to me, her head in my lap, blond hair spilling over my thigh and the cushion. Jason stares at me, disbelief the last recognizable emotion to hit his face, and the one still hanging around.

  “So, wait,” he says, rubbing a hand down his face. “Your mother didn’t die of an illness, and Daniel’s dad wasn’t his dad?”

  “Yeah,” I yawn and toy with Emma’s hair, coiling it around my finger. “My father’s file had tests results of all the stolen boys wedged under a secondary flap. Daniel’s, too. His dad was not his biological father. Paul was.”

  “And this Katrina chick,” Jason continues, “has gone missing with stuff you need for your formula?”

  “Along with chemicals people shouldn’t come into contact with.” Which still puzzles me. I lay awake for hours after finding the DNA results, watching morning rise through the frost on my bedroom window, trying to force the pieces of the puzzle together. I’m sure Hailey intended what Paul told me to be a distraction, and that it has no connection to Katrina’s disappearance and the things she took with her. “Everything but the experimental drugs can be replaced. The question is what are the drugs for and why did she take them?”

  Bree tosses a pillow up, catches it, then stuffs it under her head. “Well, the Reindeer Games victims were poisoned, right?”

  “Yeah,” I answer, and run my fingers down Em’s side. “But Paul didn’t specify what drugs, or if they were the same.”

  “OK,” Bree turns her head to look at us. Her eyebrows pinch. Tension rises in the air. “So we don’t know what drugs, or why. You need to get on that, Alex.”

  “Been kind of busy lately,” I grump.

  “I know,” Bree says. “Sorry. We do know Hailey took Em, though, and tried to frame her for the house fire. Is that bitch in league with Katrina? I mean, you smelled an odd chemical smell, right? Maybe Katrina took it for Hailey.”

  Emma makes an uncomfortable noise, rolls over and hides her face from them. The first hints of the fade show on her, gray shades under her eyes, paler skin. Or maybe it’s a side-effect from her flipping personalities and being up half the night. Does it matter? It’s my fault. I forced her to become this when I brought her back for my own selfish needs. If the rest of the world finds out, like Hailey’s threatened, I will truly have ruined Emma. Keeping that secret is getting harder and harder.

  “Katrina wasn’t there,” I say. “I have a picture of Emma and Hailey, thanks to the neighbor lady. It has the timestamp and everything. But, when I got there, Em was holding the gas can and kept saying she did it and needed to tell them.”

  “Well, that’s bullshit,” Bree huffs. She sits up and pins me with a narrow glance. “Emma would never do something like that.”

  “I know.” Yes, my voice is hard. “We a
lso never thought she would run off into a snowstorm and… do what she did at my dad’s property, either.”

  Em claps a hand over her ear and presses her head into my lap. We keep going around and around with this and the pieces don’t hold together. Em’s reactions get worse every time we rehash it. At this rate, she’s going to get mad and flip personalities like she did in the car.

  “Guys, I think we should leave what happened alone for a while.”

  Before anyone can respond, the front door bell rings.

  “I don’t care,” Bree says, rising to answer the door. “Emma is not an arsonist. My Chick Senses are tingling, and I say your ex is in this up to her designer glasses.” Bree disappears into the living room, then a moment later she calls, “Um. Guys? The police are here to see Emma.”

  Em’s head pops up, her eyes huge blue pools of terror. A tremor runs through her. Her fingers curl to knots in my sweater.

  “They want to interview her,” Bree clarifies, in a tone that says those aren’t her words.

  “Run out the back,” Jason suggests. Despite his muscles and joints stiffening with his disease, he makes a graceful, silent leap up to the main level. I cinch my arms tighter around Emma, drag her onto my lap. She’s more than my girlfriend, she’s my everything. They can’t take her away. She could turn into that dark, vicious Hyde side we saw dispatching the animals on the video.

  Another shiver runs down her spine, then something shifts in Em. I feel it, not just in the change in her posture and tension in her muscles, but in the air between us. She places the palm of her healed right hand against my chest, only a ghost of the broken heart remaining on her skin. My lap, my arms feel empty when she stands.

  “What’re you doing?” Jason asks. He holds the backdoor ajar, motioning to it.

  “Em?” I say. She knows what’s at stake if they lock her up. “No. You can’t.”