by Chad Huskins
He started weeping.
“Oh, fuck, you’re gonna cry now?” The gunman sighed. “Look, I gotta be outta here in like ten minutes. So could you just not…?”
“P-p-please…please, I have money! Lots of it! You see what I can afford! I can pay you! I can pay you enough to…to…to fix your face!” he rushed to say. “T-to run away from these people at Interpol! Enough m-m-money to find these men from Bangladesh! I can gi—”
“Money to find them,” said the gunmen. “Meaning you don’t actually have anymore info about where they are, and you don’t know how to find them?”
“I-I-I didn’t mean—”
“I’m just tryin’ to be specific here. Do you know where these men are, right now, right this very instant, or not?”
“N-not right this—”
“So you’re tryin’ to buy yourself some time.”
“N-n-n-no—”
“No? You’re not trying to buy time? You don’t wanna live?”
“I-I mean da! Da! Yes! I mean…I can help you. I can…I can help you.” Remember your training, Zakhar told himself. Breathe. Just breathe, and stay calm. Remember your training. You were a soldier. Zakhar’s tears stopped at once, he dammed them up and bit his tongue to reinstate control. He listened to the gunman take a few footsteps around to his right side, then around to his left. “Th-there’s money. Thousands of rubles in my drawer, as well as other currencies. U.S. dollars, too!”
“Which drawer? Where?”
“My armoire,” he said, breathing a sigh of relief. I have him thinking rationally. “Top drawer. It’s in a large steel suitcase.”
“In case you ever had to hit the road fast, huh?”
“Yes…yes, it’s true. Everything you’ve said. It’s all true. But you said you don’t care about the merchandise, so you can take the money. It’s all yours.” No more stuttering now. Zakhar was back in control, and he believed the gunman was on track, too. His tone sounded more equitable now.
“Steel suitcase. Top drawer.”
“Da.”
More pacing from behind. Then, the gunman started speaking again. “Ya know, in Derbent, I got a hold of this one fucker named Andrei. Andrei Ankundinov,” he laughed. “He wasn’t a brother to Dmitry or anything, not even blood, but he was family through marriage some kinda way. Anyhow, Andrei was into boostin’ cars, like me. He’s the one I approached first when I started to peg which Ankundinovs were which—they’re not quite like Johnsons or Joneses over there in Derbent, but the last name is popular enough. I hooked up with Andrei, found out he was an alcoholic, an’ I know the quickest way to an alcoholic’s heart is to buy the rounds, drive him home an’ don’t tell the rest of his family.
“So I did just that, an’ enough times that he introduced me to some o’ his pals. In less than two months, I’d already met everyone involved in Northeast Siberian Shipping, even if I hadn’t shaken their hands. Got invited to a poker game—that was the first time I heard your name bein’ tossed around. Along with a bunch o’ other bullshit about La Eme and The Court of Lepers. But I took note, and kept playin’ my cards. Later that night, though, Andrei was all set to head to a neighborhood outside o’ town, to do a dead-drop and a pickup for some cats owed him and his family money. That night, as he was hopping in his Jag, Andrei said, ‘You come with me, Yank.’ That’s what they called me for the three months I was in Derbent: The Yank.
“I rode with him outside o’ town, and this is when I made my move. See, it’s not always about rushing the moment, or trying to force a moment to happen. Nah, see, sometimes it’s about waiting for that right moment. This was that night. This was that moment. Andrei was shitfaced drunk, I mean just fuckin’ hammered, and so I took the wheel for most o’ the drive. I pulled over under the pretense that I needed to take a piss, an’ I knew he wouldn’t argue.” Behind Zakhar, the gunman continued to pace. “So we get out, we both take a piss, and then I smash the back of his head with the butt of my Beretta. He was so drunk he went down like a daisy.
“An hour later, Andrei wakes up upside-down, tied up by his ankles by some cords in his trunk, hanging from a tree. He was confused as well, o’ course, and I just kept beating him with my pistol. Like a fuckin’ piñata, get it? I’m just hammering away. I took a few shots at him from ten feet away, an’ I intentionally missed. An’ he’s screamin’ an’ screamin’,” said the gunman, laughing. “He pissed himself! You ever see a man hanging upside-down and pissin’ down on his own face? Comical don’t begin to describe it!”
More pacing, more silence, a touch of wind from outside. The gunman chuckled, cleared his throat, continued. “I wanted to know about Dmitry’s people. His family, where they’d gone, all that. I was getting a little, ah, impatient with not finding Dmitry’s daughters. I shot at Andrei a few more times, he blubbered and prayed to God, all o’ that. He dropped a few names, most of them were nobodies, people I knew from my time in Derbent, ones that had no connection to Dmitry Ankundinov or his brother Mikhael or sister Olga. He was coverin’ for somebody. But then he mentioned your name again, and so I was intrigued.
“It seems that you, Zakhar Ogorodnikov, are a bit of a connoisseur. You never order the same piece of merchandise twice. That really, really frustrated Andrei and his peeps, because it meant they needed to keep a variety of merch in stock—blondes, brunettes, red-heads. And younger and younger, too, eh? ‘Insatiable.’ That’s a good word to describe you, innit?”
Zakhar swallowed, still trembling, still shivering like he was naked in the cold. And how he did feel exposed. “I’ve already confessed to you.”
“Shit, Zak, I ain’t your goddam priest. I’m not lookin’ for a confession. I just wanted to let you know that after all of Andrei’s begging and pleading, his bargaining and more begging, I cut him down and told him to start running. I told him he was free to go, that he only needed to promise not to tell anybody. I let him get about twenty feet before I took aim and blew his goddam brains out.”
“I-I don’t…I don’t understand…”
“I’m sure everything I’ve said here sounds like I’m just lording things over ya, or that I’m just ramblin’. But some people play chess to win. Others play chess to instruct. I play chess to instruct.”
“Ch-chess? I-I…I don’t under—”
“Like a said, Zak,” he said, and pressed the cold steel against the back of Zakhar’s head. “There’s a hole in Arizona that I could fill with shit I know that you don’t.” Zakhar finally started to react, his old military instincts kicking in all at last. Here came his defiance, his rage at the insolence of the intruder, the indignity of it all, but just as he started to turn the bullet snapped through his skull and pitched him forward. His head hit the side of a stand that served no other purpose but to hold up pictures. A tiny family portrait fell beside him, in the pool of blood that began spreading outward from his cranium.
Paralyzed, dying, and blind. Yet by some anomaly, he was still able to hear words floating all around him, floating down from the gunman. It was a song, nice and even lovely. “The love we share…seems to go nowhere…and I’ve lost my light…for I toss an’ turn, I can’t sleep at night…”
He also heard the kettle on the stove starting to squeal. Tea’s ready, was Zakhar Ogorodnikov’s very last thought on this earth.
2
“Once I ran to you,” Kaley sang, stepping onto the bus. “Now I’ll run from you. This tainted love you’ve given…” The song was still stuck in her head. A weird song. An even weirder music video, if she remembered correctly. Kaley’s mom’s ex-boyfriend had liked all that old 80s music, bands like Tears for Fears and Men at Work. Kaley had picked up on some of it, a bit like someone near a pot smoker getting a contact high. It was odd though, because even while the lyrics played in her head, she thought she heard someone else singing it, too. Just a faint voice, a little far away to distinguish.
The bus driver, Miss Devereux, nodded amiably to Kaley and her sister as they stepped aboard. Shan sl
ipped stepping up, and Kaley reached back to grab her hand and pull her up. There were a few snickers. Probably not because of Shannon slipping, but because of the bullshit that had transpired in the last few weeks at their new schools, Cartersville Elementary and Middle.
Shannon was the victim of a violent crime, and for victims of rape, and especially for victims under a certain age, a name couldn’t be printed in newspapers or spoken on the TV news. But that did nothing to stop people from talking. Somehow, somebody at CES and CMS knew the Dupré family and some of their extended family and acquaintances. Word got around. You couldn’t stop that. And now elementary school kids—those marvelous, well-behaved angels that they always are—had somehow discovered that Shan had vaginitis. Why this could ever be the source of other people’s amusement, Kaley would never know.
Actually, that wasn’t true. She did know. She knew because she couldn’t help but know. She felt their reasoning—the inadequacies of each boy and girl, the need to belittle rather than praise. Kaley understood the ugly way people thought. It was easier to say someone was somehow worthy of mockery, because, by inference, it meant that the person doing the mocking was better. If you called someone ‘a great person,’ then by inference you were saying that you aren’t as great as that person. People can’t have that. They can’t allow themselves to be diminished, not when mockery comes so easily.
It was a despicable facet of humanity, one that Kaley wished she’d never been made privy to. She wished the charm had skipped another generation. She wished it on any of the other kids, so that they could feel what she and Shan felt. Kaley and her sister were forced to live in everyone else’s shoes, but nobody was required to live even a day in theirs.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Mrs. Krenshaw, the counselor for both CES and CMS, had talked with Kaley and Shannon days before they started their first classes. Mrs. Krenshaw had been brought up to speed on what the two girls had suffered through, and she had gone about long, patient interviews with each of them separately. The counselor was a nice enough woman, with a great deal more humanity than most people Kaley had met, but her questions had been probing and frustrating. “Are you often irritable, annoyed, intolerant or angry these days?” she would ask. “Do you experience an ongoing sense of isolation from yourself or others? Is this grief starting to interfere with relationships with others? Do you feel you are continuously preoccupied with what happened, Kaley? Are you afraid of becoming close to new people now?”
All of Mrs. Krenshaw’s questions were, of course, well-intentioned. However, they had only driven Kaley deeper within herself. She didn’t like the feeling of being probed; it felt too much like a violation. She’d had enough of someone seeing into her mind. What Kaley liked least of all, though, was how her and Shannon’s story about what happened that night were all dismissed as just that, a story. A story conjured up out of trauma, their frail little child minds trying to cope with what they had seen and experienced. Mrs. Krenshaw’s theory to their mother was that Shannon had suffered the most, probably started the story first, and then Big Sister had corroborated it out of pity for Little Sister.
Nobody believed their story. They wouldn’t hear. They wouldn’t listen. And who could blame them?
What had surprised Kaley most of all about Mrs. Krenshaw’s questions, though, was just how dramatically they had affected Shan. One evening, while waiting in the hall outside with her mother, Kaley had heard her sister screaming through the door. Shan had come running out of Mrs. Krenshaw’s office, holding a picture frame that she had torn off the wall, and was set to fling it at the counselor until her mother snatched her by her wrist, twisted her around, and screamed, an inch from her face, “You outta yo damn mind, girl?” Very unlike Shannon. Also unlike her were the waves of anger that Kaley sensed churning inside of her during each session with Mrs. Krenshaw.
They took their seats presently near the front of the bus, as always. All the bad kids liked to stay in the back, herding back there and scheming and snickering and trying to do it all out of Miss Devereux’s sight.
As Kaley and Shan moved to their seats, though, two girls sitting in the seats behind them pinched their noses and waved their hands in the air, as though getting rid of a putrid odor. There was some kind of myth going around that Shannon’s infection made her privates stink so bad that no one could stand to be around her. No one did any fact-checking—after all, why fact-check when that would only ruin your fun?—and instead they giggled and pointed and reinforced the rumor.
The two girls doing the mocking were Nancy Boyle and Laquanda Everest, both of whom had made fake Facebook accounts and were starting up some stories about Shannon. Kaley had told both her mother and Principal Manning that she suspected Nancy and Laquanda of being behind the plot, but there was no way to prove it. So the girls went on, wallowing in their delight, and both Kaley and her sister were forced to imbibe their hateful little glee, empathizing with it thanks to the Charm, and thus feeling even worse about themselves.
Ward yo’ heart, chil’. That was Nan’s voice, and whether or not it was manifested by her imagination, it didn’t matter. It had helped once before, and it had worked more and more every day she and Shan went to school.
Shan kept her head down, mortified, trying to pretend the mockery wasn’t directed at her, that it wasn’t even happening. When they took their seats, Kaley reached over and touched her sister’s hand. Gave it a squeeze. But she couldn’t be there for her sister all day. Kaley was in the seventh grade and Shan wasn’t yet out of elementary school. With their age gap, they wouldn’t ever be in the same school at the same time. “Hey,” she said, shaking Shannon’s head. Shan had cast her gaze forlornly out the window. “You’re gonna be all right.” Shan swallowed, nodded. Kaley felt the wave of doubt, sadness, and above all fear. “Say it.”
“Peee-yew! You smell that, Laquanda?” said Nancy from behind.
“Sho do, Nancy. Smells like somebody got a raw crotch. Yuck!”
“Say it,” Kaley pressed her sister. She squeezed Shannon’s hand tighter, reinforcing the Connection.
Shannon nodded, but she was trembling. “I’m gonna be all right.”
“And you’re gonna give me the names of anybody that messes with you, ain’t that right?”
Shannon nodded again, but she neither looked nor felt convinced.
“It’s just another day.” That was what Kaley said to her every day. It’s just another day. Only it wasn’t.
Kaley had already started to detect the tickling. It was strange, because it started at the back of her tongue, then spread to the roof of her mouth, and then to her olfactory nerves, where she began to smell…What is that? Smoke? She took a few more whiffs, but the odor was gone. The scent had been familiar. After a few seconds, she knew where she’d smelled it before. Gun smoke. She’d smelled it in the air on That Night.
“Does your crotch itch, Nancy?” asked Laquanda.
“Kinda. How ’bout yours?”
There was something else to it. Something even more familiar. A tangible fear, and not Shannon’s. It was coming to her from some place far away. It felt remote, the same way that somehow shouting in a tunnel sounds remote. Kaley swallowed, tasting fear. Sweaty palms. What’s happening? The fear was hers, yet it wasn’t. It belonged to someone else. A child. She felt that as innately as she felt her own identity, her femaleness, her name. There was a connection there, but one unlike what she shared with her sister.
The bus lurched forward. The two older boys from her street walked past them, to the back to the join the bad kids. When the bus started moving, Kaley did not. It moved forward, all of the kids moving past her, but she remained exactly where she was on Bentley Drive.
Another kind of lurching, like in her dreams—like when she was escaping the clambering arms. Oh God, oh no oh no no no. “Kaley?” It was Shan’s voice, teeny and tiny, so far away, barely a whimper.
Kaley blinked, and she was back in her seat, looking at Shannon. But…but she wa
s also standing on Bentley Drive, watching the school bus head towards its next stop. Kaley looked to her right, where she saw both Shannon seated next to her, and the lane leading up to their apartment. I’m in two places at once, she thought, no longer very surprised. This had to be another form of the dream. Something else that—
This was partially confirmed when she looked down, and watched the foamy water collecting around her feet. And something churning beneath the surface…
Without any warning, arms came up out of the water, and started groping about, slowly at first, but with increased interest, like prisoners who had just found a hole in their cell, and were testing the dimensions. The long, tenebrous appendages touched her. She tried not to panic…
She felt fear, but it was not hers. Someone else’s fear, so far away, but maybe not quite as far away as it had been moments ago. Then, Kaley heard whimpering. She turned and looked behind her. In one sense, she was looking at the girls seated behind her on the bus, Nancy and Laquanda, the Mondo Bitches, and in another sense she was looking into…what…a basement? Whose basement? Kaley was unnerved. There were whispers in the walls, the sound of hands clawing to get out, and children crying. A man’s sexual satisfaction…a child’s terror…
The last time she’d been in a basement like this, bad things had happened. Very bad things.
There was another lurching. She almost felt like vomiting. It was like her vertigo returning from childhood to get its revenge on her. Remember me? It was saying. After the vertigo had past, the dream world seemed suddenly clearer to Kaley. The arms were gone. She looked down. No more foamy water.
She was in the cool basement—not cold, just cool—and smelling…Pine-Sol again? Something’s bleeding through, she thought. There was furniture, and a TV screen high up on the wall, mounted behind some kind of protective glass. And whimpering in the corner…
“It’s a boy,” she said. At this, the boy gasped and looked up suddenly. So small, so frail, and naked except for his whitey tighties.
