Then the boyfriend everyone thought was dead burst in and shot the killer in the back, but when the credits rolled, the killer’s body was gone.
After the movie they played Colony 17 again. Long, rum-drenched stretches where Eli didn’t think about Gabriel, didn’t picture the red dark, but then others where he found the red dark clinging all around, imagined Gabriel coming for him, the footsteps up the stairs, the light as the door creaked open. The silhouette. Imagined shooting Gabriel in the head, in the crotch, then ten more times, his body tearing apart in chunks like the aliens they blasted in the game.
Other times he thought about Maya. What was she up to? Dark outside now. Too late for a beach walk.
“Take that, bitch!” Graham shouted at the screen. “Come on, Eli, get in there!”
A few more levels, another rum and Coke, an entire bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.
Around two a.m., they crept up through the dark house to Graham’s room. Graham flopped onto the bed. Eli sat on an air mattress, arranged with some blankets and a pillow on the floor. He pulled his knees to his chest. His vision swam.
“Look.” Graham rolled over and swiped open his tablet. “It’s Mateo’s profile page.”
“You guys are still friends?” said Eli.
Graham laughed to himself. “I set up a dummy account. Mike Ballsakovich. Good, right? And dumbass took my friend request. So did a couple hotties, although I think they might be fake accounts. You know, like with the Russian girls. But check this out.”
He opened a search window and typed tiny penis. The screen filled with results. “This one is perfect.” He clicked on an image of a blond girl holding her fingers an inch apart and making a shocked face, while two friends laughed. He posted it on Mateo’s wall. “What should we write?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, I got it.” He typed and showed it to Eli.
It read: Guess we know why Janice likes you.
“Awesome,” said Graham. He belched and hit post.
“He’ll definitely unfriend you now,” said Eli.
“Yeah, but I can just make another profile. Whatever, it’s boring. Hey”—he sat up—“wanna go to his house? He lives like a mile from here. We could take a sortie and, like, throw rocks at his windows, or toilet-paper his trees.”
Why? “I’m pretty tired.”
Graham leaned back on his elbows and yawned. “Ah, me too. Little shit would probably call the cops anyway.” He swigged off the rum bottle, spilling some on his chest. Offered it to Eli.
“Nah,” said Eli. His stomach was listing sideways, his head starting to pound.
“I should go put this back, just in case,” said Graham, swirling the rum. “Not like my parents would ever notice. They’re so oblivious.”
They seem nice.
Graham was gone—Eli watched the ceiling spin—then he dove over Eli and flopped onto the bed.
“Shit, I think I’m gonna pass out.”
Eli lay back. When he closed his eyes, the darkness looped.
“Don’t wet my sheets thinking about Maya.”
I don’t—
“Just kidding. I get why you like her. All homely and damaged. A real fixer-upper.”
“She’s nice.”
“No, I know. Sorry, I shouldn’t talk shit. I wonder what she’d say if you ever talked about blowing up the school. Like, would she be into it.”
“About what?”
“Nah, I’m just kidding. Jokes.”
Eli felt like he was swimming around in thoughts. “Sorry about Janice,” he ended up saying.
“What? Nah, it’s cool. She doesn’t like dick anyway. It’s her loss. I got other girls…online…a few…” It sounded like he was dozing off.
“Good night,” said Eli. He swallowed, a sour taste. His tongue felt swollen. Still weird tremors in his stomach.
“You okay on the floor?” Graham asked a minute later.
Yeah. Then: “I’m kinda used to it.”
Graham popped up on his elbow. “Oh man, you mean like when you were—”
“In captivity.” That was one of the phrases Dr. Maria had suggested he try to use. He never had before, but it wasn’t so bad to say it, he found now. Maybe a relief.
“Fuck,” said Graham. “What, um…what was it like? I guess people probably ask you that all the time.”
“Nobody ever asks me.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“Yeah.”
“Did he, like…rape you?”
“Yeah.”
“Dude.”
Taps against the window. It had started to rain.
Eli swallowed. Felt the ache in his ribs. “He had this piece of garden hose he would hit me with. Other stuff too, but that hurt the worst.”
“Holy shit, man.”
Eli closed his eyes. Saw the blur of the hose through the air. Smack! The welts after. He was glad for the rum. It made the impact distant, like watching it on a screen.
“So you were like a child soldier,” said Graham. “Like one of those kids in the Congo that have to kill their own parents.”
The rain beat harder, sheets across the window.
“He called it the Purpose.” As soon as the words were out, Eli wanted them back.
“The Purpose? What’s that, like, his manifesto or something?”
It…um…
“You totally don’t have to talk about this.”
“No, it’s okay. He said that we had to follow the Lord’s purpose. That America had been corrupted by money and power. The bankers and the politicians were Barons who controlled us. Like royalty. But they were really devils. He said we were going to start a revolution. That I’d reveal what the Barons were doing to the oppressed.”
“Riiight,” said Graham, “so, like, the mall was a symbol of capitalism, and the DOL was the state being in league with these Barons. I get it, I get it.”
Eli wasn’t used to people getting it. They usually called Gabriel a lunatic and a psycho. “He was crazy,” he said.
“Well, maybe, but also kinda right. I mean, it’s true, what he said. Don’t you think?”
Yes. Eli saw things on the news, around the city, that reminded him of Gabriel’s teachings. Don’t call them that, Dr. Maria had said. It wasn’t teaching. It was coercion, manipulation. It was a crime. But wasn’t some of it true? The way he and his family had less than other families. The way some people seemed to have all the money. And how some commentators said Eli’s disappearance would have been a bigger deal if he’d been white.
But the message was wrong. Killing innocent people.
Sheep. All are complicit.
Shut up.
They were quiet for a while. Graham belched. Eli’s mouth was stale and dry.
“Did you ever want to kill yourself?” Graham asked. “You know, when you were in there?”
Eli listened to the rain for a moment. “Yeah.”
“Did you try?”
“I don’t think he would have let me die, and I didn’t want him to hurt me if I tried.”
“But you were going to die at the end.”
“To escape.”
“It seemed like the only way,” said Graham.
Yeah.
“To stop all the pain.”
Eli rolled on his side. “Have you ever thought about it?”
“Sometimes. When the world just seems so pointless, I’ve imagined taking Jules’s gun and shooting myself, or slicing my wrists. Watching the blood slide out. Knowing all the noise and bullshit would be over.”
Oh. “I’ve thought about how if I had blown up, at least everything bad would have stopped.”
“That’s what I’m talking about.”
“But you don’t really…”
“No,”
said Graham, “totally not. Because then I think, why should I be the one to go? Why should I have to die just to escape, when it’s not the world that’s stupid, it’s all the people? It’s like, if everyone else was gone, and it was just me, and you, and the natural world….”
“No one hurting,” said Eli. He thought of his mom and her wineglass, and wondered what online den she was in now.
“What this world needs is a good apocalypse,” said Graham. “I’d be ready. You know, like, a nuclear war, or plague or zombies, and then we’d be out there, on our own, like with a posse, except eventually they’d turn on you and you’d have to put them down too.”
“What if it was lonely?” said Eli.
“It wouldn’t be. We’d have each other.” Graham yawned and lay back, lacing his fingers behind his head.
They were both silent in the thrumming rain.
“We’d keep some hot ladies around too, obviously.” Graham’s words slurred toward sleep. “We’d be kings.”
His breathing settled to a slow, steady rhythm.
Eli watched the ceiling spin. Watched the rain hit the window, refracting the streetlight.
He tried to imagine a world without people. Not the red dark. One with mountains and trees. And Graham. And his mother and sister. It had to be okay to bring their families along, right?
And Maya. Would she be allowed?
He pictured being high up in the alpine, like where they’d gone hiking one time when he was in fourth grade. Peaks all around, the silence, the peace, maybe a deer trotting across a meadow. A campsite where they sat around a fire and played games, and ate the berries they’d foraged.
His eyes fluttered shut.
* * *
***
Slippery hours. He wasn’t sure when he’d been awake or asleep. Slid in and out of the red dark, heard Gabriel thumping upstairs, but then it was the Metrotroopers from Colony 17, storming in and taking him, except when they left the room they were on a spaceship. The ship hurtled toward a crimson planet, where they were to be left to die. Maya was in chains beside him, her clothes tattered, wearing that lavender bra. “Stop it, perv,” she said to him, fiddling with her chains, her eyes like daggers. “We’ll get out of this.”
He woke and saw the rain streaking the window and wondered where he was. Back in his old bedroom? How old was he? Had the red dark ever even happened? But there was the sickly tangy taste in his mouth, the rum and the Coke gone sour. All of it welling up. Surging—
He stumbled to the bathroom, closed the door, hit the light—blinding—collapsed, and retched into the toilet. Searing pain behind his eyes. Three more times, then he flushed and sat against the wall, sweating and shivering.
Maybe passed out there for a while.
Then wobbled to his feet. Opened the door and flicked off the light. Echoes of rain. Graham’s room to the left.
Eli turned right.
Gently opened the door. Streetlight in dancing streaks from the tree outside Jules’s window. Eli moved to the closet. He pulled the sliding door open slowly, its runners making a squealing sound. His heart pounded. Had to stay quiet. But also be quick.
He pulled the chain to turn on the light. Neatly hung shirts, a hanging shelf of sweaters. Pairs of sneakers on the floor and some high black boots. Stacks of boxes on the shelf above the clothes: clear bins of comic books, letter-sized file boxes. Eli reached for the box that looked most like it was from a girl: a teal blue shoe box. He slid it from between a stack of comics and a brown cardboard box. On his toes, everything tipping…it slipped free. Pulled off the lid: a pair of cleats inside.
He put the shoe box back, looking for any clue. On the floor behind the shoes was a large black box with a lock, one of those trunks like you took to camp. The lock hung open, the key welded into it by rust. Eli knelt, flipped the latches, lifted the cover, and pushed it behind the hanging shirts.
There were clothes inside, notebooks, magazines, and a gift box that had been carefully wrapped in crimson paper so that the lid would still open.
Inside: a dried peach-colored rose, a skinny champagne glass with ELLIOTT HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR PROM etched in blue letters, handwritten notes of all shapes, a can of mint-flavored whipped cream.
And the gun.
Eli sat cross-legged on the floor. Slipped it from its holster and wrapped his fingers around the cool, quiet metal. Tested the weight in his palm. Ran his thumb over the safety, careful not to move it. Aimed at the window.
I’ve come to finish the Purpose.
Not today.
Not bait.
BANG.
He’d been hurt, scarred. He’d been tricked and used. But he’d survived. He’d healed and he could keep healing.
But this could do more. End a threat. Keep them safe. For real.
Energy surged through him, a strange memory of walking toward the DOL, the wobbling view through the wolf’s mask. Fear, but also power. Power to destroy.
He switched the gun to the other hand. Aimed again.
Nearly a smile. Happy anniversary.
His heart raced. He wondered what Maya would think of it. The power. The control over fear. Maybe the three of them could shoot it sometime.
Graham probably wouldn’t like that.
Eli’s arm started to ache.
Yawned. Fresh throbbing in his skull.
He holstered the gun and put it back in the box, in the trunk. Latches, light off, doors closed. Tiptoed to his bed and huddled under the blanket. Graham was snoring. The rain falling harder. He closed his eyes, still flexing his fingers, feeling the metal there, imagining the bullet finding its target.
* * *
***
Sometime later: a sound.
He may have been sleeping. Blurry dreams, but the sound dug through the spaceship hull and the red dark and the Burke Park trees and the bedroom walls. Something vibrating the floorboards, the small area he had managed to warm with his body. A grinding, humming sound, followed by a squeal, like of forced air. The whir of something beginning to move, then a banging. It sounded like…
Eli’s eyes flashed open.
Graham’s room. A trapezoid of rain-streaked window light on the ceiling.
Now, not then.
But outside—
A sound he knew.
Another whine and hiss of air. Eli sat up. He leaned over Graham, palms on the window, forehead against the cool glass. Rain sheeting against it. His breath making a disk of fog.
Yellow lights flashed and whirled. Up the street, a green-and-white garbage truck had backed into the driveway of a pool club they’d passed on the way here, its motor rattling the windowpane, the bones of the house.
Late at night.
This. He knew this.
“What is it?” Graham looked up groggily.
“Nothing,” said Eli. He watched the truck. Hydraulics hissing as it lifted a trash bin, the banging as it emptied. Whir of its compactor. Revving of its heavy engine as it pulled out of the driveway and rumbled away.
He’d heard it so many times before.
And he knew from where.
* * *
***
“So,” said Mom as Eli got in the car the next morning. “How did it—”
“We need to call Detective Pearson,” said Eli, his guts trembling from more than just his hangover.
“What is it? What happened?”
“I remembered something. About where Gabriel kept me.”
October 13
“Everything all right?” said Dad.
He’d been in the long Saturday-morning line ordering their coffees and muffins when the alert had popped up on her phone. You have 23 new updates! See what your friends are talking about.
She’d clicked over and found that her mentions were full of comments. She scroll
ed to find their source, but her glimpses of what they said already had her heart racing.
At the bottom:
Jcs_moon47 tagged you in a post.
Janice.
Maya’s stomach clenched, adrenaline spiking.
Don’t click on it.
No. She could do this. Because who cared? There was a thousand percent chance that this was some sexy shot of Janice and that girl Marni she’d been hanging out with all week, or her and Mateo and Marni, meant to taunt her, show her what she was missing.
She tapped it.
It wasn’t that.
Oh God.
The photo was through a partially opened door. The view of a bathroom. Of a girl standing there considering herself in the mirror, her head turned so you could see the mangled, deranged, sickening sections of her scalp. Bald and scabbed with the occasional tuft still dangling there. The girl looking at herself forlornly, almost fearfully. A damaged girl. A sick girl.
When Maya had been getting ready for the dance. When Janice had gone to get the schnapps and makeup. Maya had been alone, she’d thought, but she’d been drinking and the music had been on loud….
There was a caption beneath the photo:
TFW you realize you’ve been wasting your time. #cantfixcrazy #havesomeselfrespect
“You said skinny latte, right?”
Maya did her best to keep her cool, to rip her eyes away, but she’d already seen the first comment.
Ewww get out of that mess, girl!
It had twenty-three likes.
And the second:
I’ve seen her around school. Such a lost cause! You can do so much better. (Nineteen likes.)
Her eyes swam up to her dad. He’d put her drink and her blueberry scone in front of her. “Yeah,” she managed to say, fighting tears. “Thanks.”
Sipped the latte. Put it down and pulled her hat lower on her head.
She’d been doing better all week. Competent during extra rehearsals for the upcoming jazz concert. Shockingly aced a math test. Wrote notes to Eli, and had only two serious flashbacks that she could remember. It had been over a week since the breakup, and it had really seemed like all Maya would be getting from Janice were the leering gazes in the hallway, the way she was all over Mateo and also Marni, the childish whispering to one another whenever Maya passed by. Janice had also skipped bio lab, but Maya had done the assignment better without her anyway.
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