by Harley Fox
“I finally got in touch with our contact,” he says. “She said the client is pissed at the delay. He’s talking about maybe canceling altogether.”
“Oh, shit,” I say. I’m reminded of Anton, and how mad Edward was at a single failed mission. “It’ll be fine, Edward. He’ll come around.”
Edward’s mouth works with anger. “I just want to remind you that this is all because of Persephone. If you hadn’t put your cock first, we wouldn’t have been in this situation.”
I look up at him. “You were going to kill her.”
“It would have been easier,” he counters. “We’d have been out of here by now, continued on our way. But now …” He shakes his head. “Now you’re in too deep, Marc. I’m not going to allow it to happen.”
I don’t say anything. Edward’s eyes glance around my corner, lingering on the condom from last night, sitting on its wrapper on the desk.
“She’s going back,” Edward says, his eyes resting on me again. “As soon as possible.”
And with that he leaves. I breathe out a sigh. Sometimes I can’t read Edward, and I have no idea when he’s going to strike. Like with Anton. Rebekka and I should have done something. But Edward got to him first.
Shaking my head, I get up and pull some clothes on. I leave my corner and go to the kitchen area to find Rebekka standing, eating a bowl of plain oatmeal.
“Morning,” she says around a mouthful. “Sounds like you and Persephone were a little occupied last night.”
I don’t say anything as I open up the crate of our stores. But when I look in, it’s significantly emptier than it was yesterday.
“Hey, what happened to the bagels?”
Rebekka swallows the food in her mouth. “They’re gone.”
“What do you mean? Did you guys eat them all? We had another package left.”
“They were moldy,” she says. “You didn’t check in here when we did a humidity check a couple of days ago. Remember?”
I do remember. That was when I’d brought Edward over in the hopes he would let Persephone go unshackled. It worked, but my mind definitely wasn’t on the task at hand. I can’t believe I forgot to do the kitchen.
“So you threw them out?” She nods. “Well, what is there for breakfast?”
“Oatmeal.” She puts another gummy spoonful in her mouth. “Nothing to go on it, either.”
“Is there coffee, at least?”
“Yeah. We still got coffee.”
“Ugh, thank God for small miracles,” I say as I reach for the kettle.
“But Marc?” Rebekka’s voice is lowered now. I raise an eyebrow as I start to fill the kettle. “We’re running out of food.”
I furrow my brow, stop filling the kettle. Snap the lid back into place.
“What? What do you mean?”
“That moldy food really got us. But also … we were supposed to be out of here three days ago. Plus we’ve got another mouth to feed. This oatmeal is actually from our emergency rations. You know. The food that’s only meant for an emergency?”
“Are you serious?” I put the kettle down on the propane burner but don’t turn it on.
She nods. “Yeah.”
Then, scooping out her final spoonful of oatmeal, she places the bowl and spoon in the sink and pats me on the shoulder.
“Hope you two had fun last night.”
And with that she leaves me feeling worse now than I did before. I glance around the kitchen. I don’t feel like eating now. Especially in this sticky heat. But I’ve got to. So I turn the heat on under the kettle and grab a packet of oatmeal and the instant coffee, using only half a spoonful this time for the drink.
The oatmeal is bland and tasteless. I debate bringing a bowl out to Persephone, but I don’t want to risk pissing Edward off any more. Besides, if she’s hungry then she’ll come get her own food. When I finish my breakfast I wash my dishes and Rebekka’s too, leaving them on the rack to dry. I navigate the corridors to the common area where the others are all occupying themselves. Persephone turns in her seat and gives me a weak smile as Julian, beside her, gives a groan of frustration.
“It’s not working,” he says. “This fucking plaster … it’s this heat.”
“Here, try again,” Persephone says, focusing back on him. “You had it yesterday. Look, see the detailing here?”
I approach Rebekka, who’s reading a book.
“Hey. Wanna play some cards?”
But Rebekka lets the book drop into her lap with an annoyed sigh.
“No, Marc, I don’t want to play cards. You know what I want to do? I want to get out of this fucking warehouse and get back to work.”
She looks around at Edward, sharpening one of his knives, and at Julian and Persephone, trying to work in this heat.
“This is bullshit,” Rebekka announces. “We should be in a different fucking state by now. We should be knocking off another museum.”
“I know,” I say, trying to shut her up. I can tell from Persephone’s stiff body that she’s listening. “But we’re just having to play the hand we’re dealt.”
“You mean the hand you dealt us,” she snaps back at me. “None of this would have happened if it weren’t for you.”
I’m not going to have this conversation again, two times in the same morning.
“Fine,” I tell her. “No cards.”
I go to sit down and Rebekka’s still shaking her head.
“Honestly, if this client cancels on us, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
I quickly look up at Edward, who’s looking at me.
“That’s not going to happen,” I say to her, but loud enough for the room to hear it. “He’s not going to cancel. So just stop talking about it.”
To put it simply, the atmosphere around here is tense. Every now and again I hear the air conditioner whine over the top of us. I try to ignore it, flipping through a book, but it’s hard to concentrate. Nobody is speaking, except for Julian throwing some sort of frustrated fit and Persephone trying to calmly explain to him how to do it better.
“Honestly, Julian,” Edward snaps at him after Julian throws down his tools again. “Just shut up, will you? We get it, it’s hard to do. You don’t have to keep whining about it.”
My shirt is sticking to my body, but I’m trying to ignore it. Rebekka closes her book with a snap and gets up to get another one. As she does she leans against one of the crates stacked up, and it shifts, making her cry out in surprise.
“Whoa!”
Everybody looks up, and the crate wobbles. Rebekka grabs onto it, stopping it from falling.
“What the fuck is this?” she asks, and then gives the crate a shove to put it back in place. It finds solid footing on the one below it, stopping its wobble. Rebekka turns to Edward. “Why do we have so many fucking crates around here, huh? This place is like a claustrophobic’s nightmare!”
“We’re keeping our supplies in here,” Edward says in a measured tone. “The replicas, the tools.”
“Yeah, why do we need to keep all the fucking replicas you make?” Rebekka turns on Julian, whose eyes go wide. “Why are we holding onto all your practice ones? We’re never going to use them!”
“They’re for posterity,” he says, sounding hurt. “They’re in case I need to use them for reference.”
“You have them all over the fucking place!” Rebekka says. “If it weren’t for your goddamned hoarder mentality, we’d actually be able to breathe in here!”
“Rebekka!” I shout, making her snap her head to me. “Stop yelling. You’re irritated because of the heat. We all are. Just calm down.”
“Don’t you fucking tell me to calm down,” she spits. But still she grabs a book at random out of our collection and stalks back to her spot, plopping herself down and opening the book to the middle, despite it being a novel.
I look over at Persephone, whose eyes have gone wide. I try to give her a sympathetic look and she shrugs, then goes back to work. I can see sweat stains on the
back of the shirt she’s wearing. Fuck, it’s so hot in here. I try to keep reading, but it’s hard to concentrate. We’ve been here for too long. I think all of us are going a little stir-crazy.
“Fuck this plaster!” Julian cries out, tossing his tools onto the workspace again.
“Oh sure, he’s allowed to get angry, but I’m not because I don’t have a dick.”
“Rebekka, you have no idea what this kind of work is like,” Julian tells her.
“Hey, hey, calm down,” Persephone says. “Look, working with this stuff in the heat is just like doing it in the field. Okay? You just have to be patient and persistent. Here, let me get some more.”
Her chair scrapes back as she stands up, stretching her back, unsticking the shirt from her body. She gives me a tired smile before disappearing around the corner to the crate with the tools.
The air conditioner overhead chooses that moment to give a particularly obnoxious clang and whine, and Edward puts down his knife and whetstone, standing up.
“All right, that’s it,” he says. “I need something to do. I’m going up there to see what I can fix on that thing.”
But before he’s taken two steps, I hear a scared, “Whoa!” and we all look over to see one of the stacked crates near where Persephone is start to tip.
“Persephone!” I shout, standing up just before the thing falls, knocks into one of the other crates, and then crashes on the ground. In a second all of us are running, piling into the tight corridor to see Persephone standing, unharmed but looking scared. She’s holding an unopened box of plaster mix. The crate, which held dozens of Julian’s replicas, is lying in jagged and splintered pieces on the ground.
“It just fell!” Persephone says, by way of explanation. I feel relief flood into my heart at the fact that she’s all right, but apparently I’m the only one.
“My work!” Julian shouts.
“Jesus, this mess,” says Rebekka.
“You knocked this over!” Edward bellows. “Why did you do it?”
“What?” Persephone looks like he’s just slapped her across the face. “I didn’t knock it over! It fell!”
“There was nothing wrong with the way it was balanced,” Edward says, his eyes narrowing dangerously. He’s still holding his knife, I see, and my body tenses. “It wouldn’t have just fallen like that, even if it were. What, did you push it over?”
Rebekka and Julian are looking at Persephone now.
“I was leaning on it to keep balance while I got this,” she holds up the plaster mix. “It was at the bottom of the crate. You should be thankful I’m still alive!”
“Thankful?” Edward barks out a laugh. “If you were dead, a lot of my problems would suddenly go away.”
“Easy now, Edward,” I say, still keeping an eye on that knife in his hand. “Look, it was an accident, okay? It was nobody’s fault that this broke. And she and Rebekka are right. This place is too stacked up. If an earthquake ever hit near here, we’d all be dead.”
“She’s taking liberties,” Edward snarls, his eyes still on Persephone. “Don’t get the wrong idea about your place here, little missy. Just because you’re spreading your legs doesn’t buy you any kind of immunity.”
“Hey!” I say, at the same time that Persephone says, “What?”
“When our contact gets to us,” Edward goes on, “that’s when you leave. And if she won’t take you, then believe me … you’ll be gone one way or the other.”
And with that he turns and storms off down the corridor, leaving his threat of Persephone’s life hanging in the air.
Persephone
I stand amid all the rubble, shocked at what Edward just said. If she won’t, then I’ll be gone, one way or the other. He just threatened to kill me. And he might actually do it, if whoever their contact is decides not to take me with her.
But if he’d gone up to the air conditioner like he just said he was going to, then he definitely would have killed me. He would have found that wrench I left up there, and it would have only been a matter of time before he figured out who left it there once everybody else denied knowledge of its existence.
That’s why I knocked the crate over, to distract him. After what Rebekka said, it was the perfect alibi. It’s just too bad Edward saw through it right away. But at least he seems to have forgotten about the air conditioner, for now.
Marc, Julian, Rebekka, and I are left standing in the corridor. It’s a tight fit with the four of us and the broken remnants of Julian’s hard work. Rebekka lowers herself down and starts picking up pieces.
“Jesus Christ,” she mutters, mostly to herself.
I join her in cleaning, and Marc fits in beside us, although barely. When Julian drops down, wedging himself between Rebekka and the wall of wooden crates, it’s a little too much.
“Here,” he says. “Be careful. Don’t hurt your hands.”
Rebekka suddenly throws down the rubble she was holding.
“Julian, fuck!” she shouts. “Back the fuck off!”
Marc and I stop working to see Julian stare at his girlfriend, looking like a wounded puppy dog.
“I’m trying to help!” he says.
“Yeah, but I don’t need you breathing down my fucking neck all the time! You’re fucking smothering me, Julian. I feel like I can’t breathe when I’m around you.”
His features start to change. He stands up.
“You feel like you can’t breathe when you’re around me? Fine! Why don’t I just go fuck myself then?”
“Yeah, you go do that!” Rebekka replies, but she’s staring at the broken pieces of wood and plaster on the ground. Julian stomps off, disappearing around the corridor. Rebekka keeps cleaning as though nothing happened. I look over at Marc and he looks shocked, confused. The three of us keep cleaning, but soon I hear a wet sniff and I look up to see tears fall from Rebekka’s eyes onto the detritus in front of her.
“Hey,” I say in a soft voice. “Are you okay?”
She sniffs again, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand.
“I’m fine,” she says, sounding like she has a cold.
I’m silent for a moment, in case she wants to go on, and then I say, “You know, you shouldn’t feel bad. This is a weird day for all of us. Julian’s pissed off because of his work. And probably because of me knocking this crate over.”
Rebekka shakes her head, looking up and wiping away more tears.
“But listen,” I tell her. “You can’t be too hard on yourself for yelling at him. He’s got his own problems, and so do you. We all do. You need to take care of yourself, okay? And if that means telling him you need some room to breathe, then guess what? He’s just got to suck it up and deal with it.”
Now Rebekka gives a short laugh, nodding. “Fucking men,” she mutters, and then nods again. “Okay, sure. Thanks, Persephone.”
The three of us keep cleaning. Marc doesn’t say anything, but maybe it’s because he realizes that he shouldn’t. If so, then I appreciate that of him. As shitty as this day is, I’m glad he’s here to help me through it. And I’m glad to have the freedom I have not being handcuffed to a cot in the corner of a warehouse all day, every day.
“For what it’s worth,” Rebekka says, breaking the silence after a time, “I think Edward is wrong.” She looks up at me. “I don’t think you knocked the crate over on purpose. I can’t see why you’d have any reason to do that.”
My heart breaks a little, but I put a smile on my face.
“Thanks, Rebekka.”
She nods, goes back to cleaning. “I think the stress is just making things harder on him. And everyone. Like you were saying, with Julian. This has been a weird day so far. We don’t know how much longer we’re going to be here. And the food situation isn’t looking good, either.”
“I don’t understand that,” I tell her, honestly. “Why can’t you guys just go out and buy more food?”
“Because nobody knows that we’re here,” she explains to me. “This warehouse isn�
�t just a place to hide out. It’s marked as condemned. The nearest town is three hours away, and it’s more like a small village. The people there would notice us, and it would be strange for us to show up, clear out some of their grocery store’s shelves, and then disappear. They would get suspicious. And people in these parts of the state, when they get suspicious? They don’t just leave things alone. They go and they investigate.”
She shakes her head. “Besides, the things they have at their store wouldn’t be good here. It would spoil too quickly. Edward usually gets our supplies from specialty stores, and there isn’t even one in this state.” She shakes her head again. “But that’ll figure itself out whenever we get out of here. Which will hopefully be soon.”
We continue cleaning, finally having cleared the corridor enough to make it passable again. Edward shows up after a time. He seems much more relaxed now than he did before.
“Good,” he says, after looking it over.
“How’re you feeling?” Rebekka asks, likely in an attempt to break whatever ice there may be. But he just breathes a hard breath out through his nose.
“If anybody needs me, I’ll be in my bunk trying to get some rest.”
And with that he leaves. Rebekka gives Marc a raised-eyebrow look and he nods in silent agreement.
We keep cleaning. It takes longer than I anticipated, and there’s a lot of good work that Julian did here that’s now garbage. Rebekka and Marc help each other haul piles of the trash outside, probably to be taken to a dump the next time they leave, or wherever it is you’d take something like this when it’s broken and you don’t want to have it traced back to you. I keep cleaning, at the stage now where I can grab a broom and start to make the corridor floor look like a floor again. My stomach rumbles. It must be past lunch time, and I didn’t have any breakfast. But I don’t say anything to either Marc or Rebekka, who’re doing much more work than I am.
When it’s finally finished Rebekka breathes out a sigh.
“Okay,” she says. “Done. I’m going to go lie down.”
She goes to her corner, leaving Marc and me alone together.
