Shock

by Francine Pascal

 

  To: shred@alloymail.com

  From: gaia13@alloymail.com

  Re: Wish things had been different

  I hate the way things ended between us, but it just has to be this way for now. I have some crazy stuff going on and I’m just not going to be a good girlfriend, and it’s not fair to you. I just wish you had trusted me more. Not that I really gave you much reason to. OH, SCREW THIS.

 

  To: shred@alloymail.com

  From: gaia13@alloymail.com

  Re: Hi

  You were my best friend and I’ll never forget that. Thank you for the time we spent together. It really was the best.

 

  The Flame

  The pungent odor of gasoline hit her nostrils just as she realized what was happening.

  Ash

  IT TOOK EXACTLY TWENTY MINUTES for Gaia to walk across the street, order one of the best falafels she’d ever had, and chew it slowly at a window table. The whole time, she kept her eyes on the travel-agency-slash-Organization-front. The woman from the desk left almost immediately, but Gaia knew not to count on that. She wanted to make sure the woman didn’t come back—either to catch her or to get something she’d forgotten. But as Gaia wadded up the aluminum foil and wiped the last of the tahini sauce from the corners of her lips, the coast seemed as clear as it was going to get. It was time to make her move.

  The first thing she noticed when she walked into the building next door was that the elevator shaft connected the two buildings. That was good news: If she could get in there, she’d have a strong chance of breaking through to the travel agency without alerting anyone on the street.

  The trouble was, she had to get into that elevator shaft.

  “Can I help you?” a voice came from behind her. Gaia turned to see a tall, hefty guy in coveralls. Earl, his name tag read in embroidered script. Standing between her and the elevator.

  “Is this where Casa del Carpets is?” she asked, putting a hand on her hip and letting Earl get a good long look at her. She was wearing a tank top—it was almost guaranteed Earl wasn’t going to remember her face.

  “No, it’s not,” he said to her chest. “Casa del Carpets is down the street.”

  “Ohmigod, sorry to bother you. Thanks,” Gaia said, and left the building.

  Oh, great. That was one of the dumbest moves she’d ever made. Walked right into a security guard, or elevator operator, or whatever he was. She had to get past that guy and into the elevator—and there was no guaranteeing she’d get through the shaft even if she did get in there. Damn it, Gaia could feel time slipping away.

  As if on cue, a huge dump truck, trundling down the street, stopped a few feet away. The driver got out and ran into a deli. Gaia could see him directing the guy behind the counter to pour him some coffee. This was her shot, and she took it.

  In a flash she was up in the cab of the truck, faced with the dashboard. Mostly it looked like the usual car controls, but below the stereo, on the floor, there was a huge black box with an extra set of buttons. If she could just figure out which one…

  CLANG!

  That was it! The back of the truck began rising, lifted by the huge hydraulic cylinders that unfolded from its belly. Gaia pulled back on the lever that made it rise faster. If she was right about her calculations, the pile of garbage in the dump bed was too heavy to stand for much of a—

  THUD!

  Gaia felt the truck pitch backward as its dump bed hit the asphalt behind it, pulling the front wheels right off the ground. She gave a nervous laugh: It felt like an earthquake, the way the concrete buckled under the truck, and the huge load of ash created a choking cloud that gave Gaia just the cover she needed. She whisked out of the passenger door of the truck before the driver could get out of the deli and was safely in a crowd on the sidewalk by the time he ran up to the cab of his truck, frantically tugged at the controls, and waved his arms, as though that were going to undo what Gaia had done. The truck was a mess and would be completely unmovable until all the ash was cleared away. More important, everyone on the street was awestruck by the colossal mess.

  Including Earl.

  With the elevator guy gaping openmouthed and watching as police cars sped onto the scene, Gaia had the opening she needed. She slipped into the building, stepped into the old-school elevator, and yanked a huge metal lever back so that the doors closed.

  “Hmmm,” she said. The walls of the elevator enclosed her, but she wasn’t moving. A huge old crank stood to her right. She turned it and the elevator lurched upward. She rode it too fast up two floors, then brought it gently down so that she was between one and two. Then she yanked open the doors again, exposing the dank shaft in all its concrete-and-metal glory.

  Layers and layers of filth, going back half a century or so, caked the walls. The only things that looked well used were the gears and cables, slick with oil, that kept the thing in motion. Gaia peered down into the shaft. She thought she could shimmy through the narrow hole into the open area below her. But once down there, she had to hope there was some way out. Because if the elevator went into motion, she’d be crushed like a bloody, bony pancake.

  Still, it was her best option. She thought she saw a ventilation shaft opening down there. There was only one way to find out if she was right: She squeezed her legs into the narrow opening between the door of the elevator and the wall of the shaft, then shifted her hips so they hitched through the tiny space.

  “Ow,” she muttered, feeling the uneven edge of the elevator’s lip scrape the button of her jeans. Then the cold metal grated against her chest, and for an awful moment she thought the life was being squeezed out of her as her lungs fought for air. Then she was through, hanging in the dim light of the elevator shaft, peering across to see if she was right about the way through to the other building—the one where the travel agency was.

  There it was. A ventilation hole. She had to make it across the bottom of the elevator somehow. The ventilation system went along the ceiling of the room below, and if she plopped to the ground, she’d have a hell of a time getting back up.

  She hoped the grease of the cables hadn’t pervaded the metal bottom of the elevator car. It hadn’t—but the grime was so thick, it was almost as slippery. She had one chance to get across, and it hinged on one metal pipe attached to the elevator. She reached out and grabbed for the pipe.

  The dust made her hand slip right off. Her hand slid out into space, and she felt her left shoulder socket wrench with the effort of keeping her from falling.

  “Huugh,” she gasped, more from the pain and surprise than from any real concern that she’d fall. She had this under control. She just had to make it happen. And fast.

  “Hello? What the hell is going on in here?”

  Uh-oh. Really fast. Earl was back on the scene, and if he started up that elevator…

  Gaia wiped the thick layer of dust off her hand and onto her jeans and reached for the pipe again. Not a great grip, but it was all she had, and as she swung across the bottom of the elevator, she felt herself slipping slightly.

  “Easy,” she told herself. No need to grab too hard.

  Gaia swung her legs across and tested the metal door of the ventilation hole. It was as old as the building—older than her father, probably—and it didn’t want to give.

  Gaia heard Earl come out of the landing on the second floor. He’d obviously taken the stairs up and was looking down into the empty elevator.

  “Hello? Damn kids! Who’s down there?”

  She heard him swear a blue streak as he kicked at the elevator. It shuddered above her, making her already tenuous grasp feel even less secure.

  “Damn it,” she hissed.

  “What? Is somebody down there?”

  This was getting ridiculous. Gaia tightened her grip on the pipe. She heard Earl’s feet hit the floor of the elevator just above her, and it shuddered again. Earl was not light. The elevator shifted at lea
st two inches lower and began to rock. She had to get into that ventilation crawl space—now.

  Gaia lifted her legs and kicked. Once. Twice. Three times. And then—“Jaah!” she yelled, feeling the metal door give as she gave it one last kick. The elevator shuddered again as she heard the machinery start up, high above her. With no time to waste she kicked the door out of the way and shoved her legs into the dark, musty tube. She pulled herself all the way in just as the elevator dropped past. A hunk of her hair got yanked along with it, and she grabbed at it, forcing it to break rather than pull her along its deadly track. Then she just breathed, feeling her racing heart, pumped full of adrenaline, try to return to normal.

  She assessed her surroundings. She could feel that she had just inches of steel through which she had to shimmy backward to reach anything close to the travel agency. Behind her she could hear the alarmed skittering steps of water bugs and maybe even a rat or two. Gross. Gross, but not life-threatening. She began her slow journey backward. “I must look really pretty right now,” she said to herself, feeling dust coat her skin as she pulled herself through it. But once she got started, she found herself making good progress—below her, through the slatted openings, she could see a hallway, and then, a few minutes later, the dim interior of the travel agency.

  Bingo.

  She held her face close to the thin opening, trying to see what was on the various desks below her. Ugh, it was no use. She jimmied her fingers under the edge of the covering and yanked it up. The place was empty; she didn’t care about the noise. She remembered how dank the place had smelled when she’d walked in before—funny how after ten minutes in an elevator shaft, it smelled as fresh as a springtime meadow.

  Now she could see. But she needed to be down there, going through the desks, finding the files that Dmitri needed.

  Dropping to the floor, Gaia wasted no time. The gate covering the front window was down, so she had to work in near darkness. She had two things to find: the travel folder, which had an exact location, and the file on her father, which had only an approximate location. She knew that no matter what her emotional priorities were, she had to look for the one she was assured of finding first. She went to desk FF and yanked open the drawers on the right side until she found a yellow file folder labeled Places of Interest.

  Seeing that folder fired her impatience. Adrenaline shot through her veins, and some unholy combination of joy and vindication filled her heart—she had the right place; the directions were correct. Now all she had to do was find the Moorestown folder and she’d be on her way out.

  She shoved the yellow folder down the back of her pants for safekeeping and turned to file cabinet A. A quick search of the drawers revealed a lot of cardboard accordion folders wrapped with thick brown string—but none of them had a red label marked with anything akin to Moore, Moorestown, or Moore—anything.

  Okay. No problem. Gaia set her jaw and turned to the next file cabinet, moving systematically through the drawers in search of the Tom Moore folder. Then she moved to the next one. With each failure and each opening of a new drawer, her movements became slightly more agitated. In her experience, if something wasn’t where it was supposed to be, the chances of finding it were pretty much nil. But she had to try. Dmitri had warned her that the location was approximate.

  She had worked her way through most of the file cabinets, yanking and slamming through them like a secretary on steroids, when something made her freeze and stand in absolute silence. A sound. The sound of someone opening the door of the agency even though the gate was down. There was no time to wonder how the hell that could happen. With lightning speed she leapt up to the top of one of the file cabinets and climbed back into the ventilation system, peering out to see what would happen next.

  The woman who’d been behind the desk came into the room, along with two men. All of the woman’s spacey disorganization was completely gone. She even looked different—she moved with athletic agility as she went to her desk and cleared a few things out of the top drawer.

  The two men with her were of average height but were also powerfully compact. One sported a mustache, the other wore a baseball cap, and all three moved silently to separate desks. They were almost choreographed, their moves were so organized, like they had trained for this moment.

  “I don’t know how this happened,” Gray Lady muttered in irritation. “This location has been under the radar for so long. I don’t know how our secrecy got compromised.”

  “It lasted longer than it was supposed to,” Mustache Guy said, moving a heavy object—Gaia couldn’t see what—to the center of the room from just outside the door.

  “It’s just part of the deal,” Mr. Hat said. “I hate when this happens, though. It gives me the creeps. I feel like someone’s watching me right now. Let’s get the stuff we’re supposed to save and get the hell out of here.”

  “Keep your shirt on,” Gray Lady said. “Okay, I’m ready.”

  Before she even completed the sentence, Gaia heard something being poured methodically around the room, and the pungent odor of gasoline hit her nostrils just as she realized what was happening. These Organization operatives were destroying this front as part of a random cleanup operation. In other words, the place was about to go up in smoke. She had to get out of there!

  The agents left through the door, letting themselves out whichever way they had come, and Gaia heard the whup of the fire as the gasoline flamed under the match they dropped.

  Loki

  Tubes in and out of my body. An upside-down bag hung next to my bed. Faces of women. Concern. Where am I?

  I think I hear sobbing. Is it real or in my head? Television. I hear a television. Canned laughter rolling in waves. Over and over again. New jokes, old laughs. Hahaha.

  Someone’s finger moves. I see a ring finger flick upward in a sort of spasm. Is that on purpose? It’s mine. That’s my finger. This is my body. I’m in a…

  Everything is so streamlined. My vision is dim. Is it a spaceship?

  I can’t move. Even my eyes—I can’t seem to move my eyes around the room. They stare out from beneath drooping eyelids, neither open nor closed. They blink automatically. My throat swallows at regular intervals. The nurses come and go.

  Nurses. I’m in a hospital. I’m in a hospital and I hear nurses. They sound like they are at a great distance.

  Everything is at a great distance.

  I see my brother, Tom. I see his beautiful girlfriend sitting with me on the steps of Low Library. There is a place we go to eat, the West End.

  Katia. Her face is so sad, as if she knows something that is going to happen to me. As if she knows what has happened to me.

  I seem to be in a coma. I can’t make sense of any of this. Who is Gaia? Why does her name float around and around in my mind like a mantra?

  I become tired easily. I make an effort to speak. I feel like I am shouting, but nobody hears me because my lips stubbornly refuse to move, my vocal cords frozen, cut off from the words my mind screams out.

  Some of the nurses are kind. They treat me like a beloved houseplant. I’m not.

  I’m Oliver Moore. I want to wake up, and I can’t.

  Failed Mission

  Maybe he was surprised just to see her without a body bag and toe tag.

  Steamy Bathroom

  DESPITE THE YELLOW FOLDER IN HER lap, Gaia sat on the subway as it lurched through the tunnels, feeling like the lowest form of life. She’d been given an assignment and had only completed half of it. Worse, the assignment had been integral to her finding her father; she had totally failed him already, and her search had just begun. She tried not to let it get her down—even Babe Ruth didn’t always hit a home run, right?—but it was no use. Maybe if she’d searched the drawers quicker, or started from the other end, or stopped to think logically about where else it could have been…

  She knew where it was now. In a pile of waterlogged, smoking ashes being shoveled out of a busted-up storefront by the NYFD. Fat lot of g
ood it was going to do her.

  As her train pulled into the Grand Street stop, she began to worry. She was angry at Dmitri for not giving her more detailed information. How could he have been so right and specific about the Places of Interest folder—and so grossly wrong about the Tom Moore folder? What was it about the travel folder that was so important? And where was he getting his information?

  But she squelched her questions. The fact was, she didn’t have what she had set out to get, and he could easily be angry with her for not finding the folder, with or without his directions. She was in a knot of worry and tension over her failed mission. It was all she could think about as she made her way to Dmitri’s building on Forsyth Street.

  As she lifted her hand to press the buzzer on Dmitri’s door, Gaia realized that she had made a terrible mistake. She couldn’t go up to Dmitri’s. What if Sam was there? She couldn’t face him. Not after he’d tried to kill her.

  She buzzed again.

  “Yes?” Dmitri sounded impatient.

  “I need to know that you’re alone,” she said. “I want to know that nobody is up there with you. Nobody.”

  “I sent Sam for a walk,” Dmitri answered, as if he’d known she’d ask for privacy. She sighed with relief. Good old guy, she thought. Smart old guy. He buzzed again, and this time she pushed through the door and ran up the four flights of stairs.

  Dmitri’s door was unlocked and open. Gaia walked through it and shoved it closed behind her, flicking the dead bolt. The old man was in the green-walled kitchen, dipping a tea bag up and down in a tall glass, clinking it against the spoon that stood in its darkening depths.

  “Here’s your folder,” she said, plopping it on the table. Dmitri didn’t look up.

  “You are as skilled and powerful as they said you were.” He sighed, shaking his head. “I knew you could do this, my dear girl. Please sit, and I will make you a nice hot tea.”