Silverwood

by Betsy Streeter

  “Want me to open it?” Rosie asks.

  “You don’t know the combination,” Henry says.

  “I bet I do,” Rosie says. “I drew a lock just the other day and there were three numbers…”

  “Don’t, okay? That’s just creepy,” Henry says. “Let’s pretend you don’t know everything before it happens.”

  “Alright,” Rosie says, with a small sigh and shrug of her slender shoulders. She tosses back her dark curls. “Go ahead.”

  Henry does know the combination, so he turns the dial right, then left, then right, and it clicks open. He lifts the lock out, and pulls on the handle. It’s stuck fast, probably got bent out of shape when the trailer did its dive into the canyon. It gives, just a little, but doesn’t come loose.

  “Let’s both pull,” Henry suggests.

  They stuff their small fingers into the door handle and yank on it, Rosie digging her boot heels into the dust. The door makes a groaning, metal-on-metal sound, and pops open. Henry and Rosie let go and stumble backward. The opening looks like a dark square in the bright sunlight. They peer in.

  “Wow,” Rosie says.

  They creep inside cautiously, even though Henry knows the contents. The smashed state of the trailer makes it seem unfamiliar.

  Everything inside is covered in a layer of desert dust; but it seems intact. Henry pulls open a cardboard box to reveal a waffle iron.

  “Well, it all seems to be here, but I’m not sure what to do with it,” Henry says.

  “You can keep it locked up until your… parents get back. Then you can go through it together,” Rosie suggests. She realizes too late that she’s probably hit a big nerve. She’s talking to a kid whose parents appear to have abandoned him. She watches Henry’s face fall.

  Henry works hard to keep himself together. This is no time to blubber like a baby. There’s work to do. “Okay,” he says, “let’s lock it back up.”

  They come out into the sunlight and Henry swings the door shut, only to come face to face with a Mrs. Woods. Henry and Rosie both jump nearly out of their skin.

  “Um, hello, Mrs. Woods,” Henry says, hastily turning and sliding the lock back into place. He pushes a little too hard on it and bangs it into the side of the trailer in his haste, but he gets it locked.

  “Hello kids,” Mrs. Woods says. She looks strange. She squints at them, and then at the trailer. She puts her hand up to her forehead. She’s doing that a lot today.

  Then, she just stands there. She seems stuck, like someone hit the “Pause” button.

  “Mrs. Woods?” Henry says.

  Mrs. Woods snaps out of it, looks at them again as if for the first time, and says, “Oh, sorry. I’m afraid I’m not… not myself currently. I’m feeling a little scattered.”

  “I’m very sorry,” Rosie says.

  “Me too,” Mrs. Woods says. “I can’t help thinking there’s something I’m supposed to be doing—but I just can’t figure it out.”

  Mrs. Woods turns and walks back toward the porch.

  “I am sorry,” Rosie says again. “I hope you feel better.”

  “What’s that humming?” Henry asks. There’s a low hum coming from somewhere. They look around, up, down.

  “It’s coming from inside the trailer,” Rosie says.

  Christopher comes out onto the porch. He looks at the Mrs. Woods, who is walking in.

  “Another one?” he says, exasperated. “Man, what is going on? There are copies of this lady all over the place.”

  “Chris!” Henry cries. “Look! It’s our trailer! Someone dropped it off. It’s got all our stuff!”

  “Cool, kid,” Christopher says. “Hey, any ideas on what’s going on with Mrs. Woods? I really need to talk to her. All of her, not just one copy of her all spaced out like that. I just had the world’s most frustrating conversation with the one in the lobby.”

  “She’s scattered,” Rosie says.

  “Yeah, I can see that,” Christopher says. “It’s like she’s in a million loops at once and none of them work. Or, maybe none of them are her, and that’s why she can’t complete a sentence.”

  Chris runs his hand through his matted mohawk of hair. “This presents a problem.” He turns in circles like a guy who needs directions, but doesn’t know whom to ask. He is not going to mention that Helen is missing, too. Not to Henry. Not until he’s had a chance to sort out what’s going on. Mrs. Woods is supposed to know where Helen is, but it looks like Mrs. Woods is compromised. He’s got to figure out what to do.

  “Okay, well, right now, there’s a weird noise in the trailer,” Henry says. “It’s probably coming from my mom’s stuff, so we’d better check it out.” He reaches up and opens the lock, again. The door swings open more easily this time, and Henry and Chris climb in to investigate.

  “I really am very sorry that Eleanor is scattered,” Rosie says, quietly.

  Helen stands at the edge of the lake, turning the portal from Daniel’s notebook over and over in her hand. She takes a step into the water, then back out. Her boot remains dry. Finally she can find out what is going on under there, and what was so important that her mom took off without saying anything.

  She considers what she might find. What if she walks into a war zone? Better keep her head low and look for cover right away.

  She hears footsteps in the sand behind her. Has Clarence come along? She hopes not. “Go home, boy,” she calls. Nothing.

  Helen turns around. Silly dog.

  Ten people in white lab coats are standing, shoulder-to-shoulder, a few feet behind her.

  Before Helen can react, the lab coats simultaneously raise their right arms in the air and fire some sort of ray into her chest. Stunned, Helen drops to her knees. She gazes down at the rocks under the water, dazed.

  “Don’t let her go in!” someone yells, and the lab coats are upon her, pulling her up and toward the shore. Someone presses a piece of metal into her hand; it’s hot and burns her skin. The tops of the trees spin around her head.

  Now Helen sees nothing.

  Helen lifts her face off a cold, white tile floor. Blurry, watery shapes shift around in front of her eyes. The room rocks back and forth. She keeps both of her hands in contact with the floor to steady herself and attempts to sit up. Her hair hangs in pieces over her face, matted to her forehead. As she tries to reach an upright position, she realizes that she can’t move her foot.

  “Ah! She’s awake,” a voice says.

  Helen’s eyes clear a little bit and she can make out a big square. It looks as if one wall of the blindingly-white room has been cut away. She tries to move her foot again, but it remains rooted to the floor. Why can’t she move her foot? She reaches for the pocket where she keeps her knife; it has been confiscated.

  Helen leans against the white wall. She can now tell that there are four people in lab coats standing in the square, which is probably a doorway. Two of them hold up light boards displaying lists and windows of data—she can see the information backwards through the wrong side. Helen can make out photos of herself, and diagrams that resemble medical charts and chemical compounds.

  “Thank you for coming,” a nasally male voice says. She still can’t make out faces.

  “Who the hell are you?” Helen says, keeping her eyes down. Her head throbs in the blinding light.

  “How charming. You and your family have always had such a—charming attitude. I can see why you’ve never made anything of yourselves,” the voice says.

  Helen’s eyesight clears a little more, and she scans the periphery of the room. Looks like she’s in a small holding cell or cage, like an animal waiting to be adopted. That’s why everyone in the white coats remains in that square. She is in; they are out.

  Helen tries to recollect how she got here. She knows she was on the shore of the lake, the portal from the back of Daniel’s notebook heating up in her hand. She had what she needed, finally, to go into the lake and see if Henry was right about what was happening under there. But since then, som
ehow she has gone from standing with her boots sinking in sandy mud to lying on an antiseptic white floor.

  She looks around at the walls for any kind of control panel, light fixture, opening, anything. The dimensions and features of the space encode themselves in her mind, and begin to come apart under her gaze. She can see the wiring and technology all around her, just below the shiny white surface. She can hear tiny beeps as the white lab coat people enter data into their light cards.

  “You won’t find anything to play with in here, Miss Silverwood,” nasal man says. “I’m afraid there’s nothing here to rewire, or blow up, or take apart. I’m so sorry. But you understand we can’t have you messing about while we’re getting what we need from you.”

  “What you need from me?” Helen’s head hurts. She puts her hand on her temple.

  “Ah, such creative thinkers too, the Silverwoods. You repeat whatever people say right back to you. That’s very creative.”

  “Shut up,” Helen says. Where has she heard that annoying voice before? She turns her head to the side to look straight out. Her foot remains anchored to the floor. With her black boots and hair, she is a dark shape in an otherwise white space. She cools her face on the wall.

  Something clicks into place inside Helen’s head. She recognizes the voice.

  “It’s you,” she says. “Doctor Dimple, is it? Diddle? Diddly?”

  “Dinkle,” Doctor Julius Dinkle says. “You have a good memory, seeing as how we met only once.”

  “Yeah, but I never forget an annoying face. How’s it hangin’, Doctor Diddly?” Helen tries to remember when she met this man. She was small. Her mom was there, that’s certain. She remembers tense voices, unhappy faces. There were terse words, and then her parents talking. Council member. Annoying. Bowler hat. The rest of it is a jumble.

  Doctor Dinkle crosses his arms across his narrow chest and his white lab coat. This child will not get the best of him.

  “Aren’t you going to inquire as to why you are here?” Dinkle asks.

  “No,” Helen says.

  “Oh, because I thought you would be interested,” Dinkle says.

  “I’m not,” Helen says.

  “Right. Well then I won’t explain how you just helped us to create a vaccine to your own blood, or how the Tromindox will now be immune to your stupid little self, or how maybe to prove it I’ll feed you to one of them later,” Dinkle says.

  Immune? Tromindox immune? Why?

  “Wait, you’re a human, right?” Helen says. “Well—a sort of irritating, sniffly human. But you are human. Right?”

  Doctor Dinkle gives her a look of disgust.

  “Okay, I’ll take that as a yes,” Helen says. “So, you understand that Tromindox prey on humans, right? Or didn’t they teach you that in biology?”

  “I see: You’re wondering why I would help such vile human-eating creatures such as the Tromindox become more powerful than they already are? Why I would take away one of the last remaining human defenses to their venom?” Dinkle says.

  “Um yeah, that’s exactly what I was wondering,” Helen says. “That’s a truly stupid idea.”

  “Ah but it’s not, Helen Silverwood,” Doctor Dinkle says. “It turns out, given the right circumstances, humans and Tromindox can live quite nicely together.”

  “Really?” Helen says. She rolls her head back and forth a couple of times against the nice, cool white wall.

  “You’re a moron,” Helen mutters.

  Helen hears a sequence of beeping noises and in a flash Doctor Dinkle is there, grabbing Helen by the shoulders, pulling her up and slamming her against the wall. Apparently whatever anchored her foot to the floor has been turned off.

  “You have no idea, little girl, what you are dealing with,” Dinkle sneers in her face, spitting out his words. “You are a child. The only reason you are here at all is because we needed a sampling of your precious blood. When we’re done with you, and we’ve tested our vaccine, we’ll cast you aside like the rest of your useless clan. And you’ll see. You’ll see the world change. This will happen without any participation from you and your pathetic little family.”

  He throws her to the floor. Ow. Headache.

  “Do you know why I do this, Helen Silverwood? Because I can. Why does anybody do anything? Because they can. It’s all about power, isn’t it? Power to control your destiny. You, on the other hand, you’re a tool. A little girl tool.”

  Oh great, he’s on a roll now, Helen thinks.

  “Do you have any idea what your mother is doing right now? Or maybe your father? What, have they run off without you again? Has it occurred to you that maybe you’re just not first on their list?” Dinkle kicks Helen in the shoulder, sending her sprawling.

  “Where I am on my parents’ ‘list’ is none of your business,” Helen says.

  “Maybe you’re right, but I’m going to spell something out for you anyway,” Dinkle says, extending a bony finger at her. “You’re nothing. You don’t even know how you got here, do you? You are nothing but a selfish little girl, running around without the slightest idea of what’s going on. I’ll tell you what’s going on. You belong to me now. You, and your special little anti-venom, and your lousy attitude.

  “It’s your own fault that you’re here, you know. You don’t listen. I suppose that’s what they say about all teenagers, isn’t it. They don’t listen. You’re just another example, I suppose. Teenagers are nearly as stupid as—as, say, nine-year-old boys.”

  Helen’s eyes narrow. Henry? Why is he bringing Henry into this?

  “You didn’t listen when your dear mother abandoned you,” Dinkle continues. “You didn’t see what was right in front of your face. Didn’t you even notice that it was your brother—your own brother—who gave you away. You’re just stupid children. You Silverwoods have always been that way. It’s how you lost control of the portals in the first place. You got too wrapped up in yourselves, and didn’t pay any attention to what you had. Well, now you and your pathetic little clan can go hole up in a cave somewhere and hope somebody throws you a scrap every now and then. You know, before we feed you to the Tromindox.”

  Helen pulls herself up to a sitting position. She glares through matted hair straight into Doctor Dinkle’s face. She stands up, slowly, swaying a little.

  “Actually, I listen pretty well,” Helen says.

  She darts forward and in a single motion relieves Doctor Dinkle of his access card and the fountain pen from his pocket. From behind him she leaps up and pushes off the wall, leaving a boot mark on the shiny white surface. She swings her other foot around and rams her heel straight into the backs of Dinkle’s knees, knocking his legs out from under him and rendering him temporarily paralyzed. As he flails with his arms on the floor she wraps her arm around his neck, places a knee in the small of his back and aims the fountain pen right at his jugular.

  “In fact, I’d like to thank you, Doc. I was listening to you very carefully. You’ve been extremely helpful.”

  “Gllrrughghh,” Doctor Dinkle gurgles. The white lab coats outside the cell begin to back away slowly. One lifts his light board…

  “Don’t even think about closing this cell or calling anybody,” Helen says.

  Helen knows she needs to get these three out of the picture before the Doc regains feeling in his legs. She rears back and jams the fountain pen clear through Dinkle’s hand. She pulls it back out, releasing a spray of blood from Dinkle’s veins and a blood-curdling scream from his mouth. She somersaults out of the cell and grabs the light board out of the hands of the nearest white coat.

  “That’s right, we Silverwoods are barbarians! Barbarians! Graaaaaaaaa!” Helen screams in their faces. She lunges at them, and all three take off running down the shiny white hall, slipping in the blood on the floor.

  Helen slaps the Doc’s card onto the wall next to the cell. A keypad appears and she takes a close look at it.

  On the floor, Dinkle’s face contorts as he clutches his wrist and tries vainly to
stem the flow of blood. “You wouldn’t want to tell me the code, would you?” she says, with a smile. He’s starting to look woozy. He’s losing a lot of blood, there.

  “No, I didn’t think so,” Helen says. “But you know, I’m a very good listener, it turns out. And the human hand, it’s a particular size—and based on that, and the size of this card, and the distance between the buttons, the angle of your arm, and the rhythm of how the buttons were pushed, I’d say the code is… . this.”

  She pokes at the card, creating a series of beeps. The field reactivates on the front of the cell, locking Dinkle inside. Helen backs away and looks back and forth, at Dinkle, and at the blood smeared on the floor and all over the hallway outside the cell.

  “I guess technically you’re both in and out right now, huh?” Helen says. “Too bad you can’t make anything interesting out of your blood, like anti-moron vaccine.”

  No one is listening. Dinkle has passed out in the pool of blood spreading across his new cell. She peels the card off the wall and the cell disappears into the filing system. All that is left of him is a smooth, white wall. That, and some red bloodstains on the floor of the hall, is the only reminder that anyone was here.

  She holds the light card up and peers at it. What are all of these chemical bits about? Compounds, microscopic particles… probably the molecular components of the vaccine. But where is this vaccine? Where are they manufacturing it? It can’t be far, since her own body is the source of the anti-venom. Helen flips around amongst the displays, looking for some sort of a map or identifier—anything to indicate where the lab might be. She can hear alarms going off in the distance. She’d better get moving.

  Perhaps she could start with a room number, or a floor? Where should she start? Here’s a list of compounds, a directory of various scientists—ah, a directory. She pulls up that window and focuses in on Doctor Dinkle’s entry. Helen’s eyes flip back and forth, searching for an office number, anything.

  She takes off running down the hall. She sees no doors or other features, just long shiny expanses of white. She’s got no landmarks, no way to tell where she is, or how to get out. The alarms in the distance are multiplying. Time feels like it is shortening.