by Laura Preble
“Sam, you sound like a '50s B-movie,” Ben says, laughing. He turns to me. “Here's the deal, Chris: we need you.”
“Who needs me?”
“Carmen,” Magnus says without hesitation, as if he knows that will make me care. “Carmen needs you.” I glance at Jana. She told them about me and Carmen? She doesn’t look at me.
I say, “Where is she? Is she in trouble?”
“Oh, she's fine,” Magnus interjects. “I just mean that whatever you do to further the cause will benefit her. And you.”
“Further the cause? I’m not an action hero.” I lick my lips and the taste of Carmen’s skin floats to the top of my consciousness. “I can’t help you. I can’t even help myself.”
Ben motions toward Jana. “To be honest, I volunteered so I could see her,” he says bitterly. “We live in the same damn town and the only time I can bump into her is when we're at the market and she drops something and I help her pick it up.”
“Which, by the way, is happening way too often,” Sam scolds. “People are noticing. You'd better stop it.”
“But the point is,” Ben continues, ignoring the older man, “That it's wrong. We shouldn't have to hide who we love. Don't you wish that you could just ask Carmen out on a date without worrying about the alibi? Or about being taken away in the middle of the night and sent to a camp?”
Jana says, “I don't want to live like this.” She turns to Ben, gazes at Sam and Magnus also, silently pleading for something I don’t understand.
Ben grasps her hand. “We will get out, I promise,” he whispers to her as if they are the only two people in the room. “But we have to do it the right way.”
“What is the right way?” I ask.
Magnus answered. “Our movement is ready to go mainstream. We've been underground for years, gaining strength, gathering resources, making alliances with other, more tolerant, countries, finding recruits. We have the numbers and the weapons—”
“Weapons?” Whoa. “For what?”
Sam shoots Magnus a threatening look, as if he’s said too much, then turns to me. “We need weapons for self defense, Chris,” he says reasonably. “We're not aggressive. We don't want to hurt anyone. But if the Anglicants knew what we were doing, what we were planning, they'd step up their efforts, and we'd need to have ways to protect ourselves.”
Weapons. Self defense. Mainstream. They’d step up their efforts. What does that mean? They’d hunt us down and….do what? I realize I’m standing there, mute, and everyone in the room is staring at me expectantly, as if I’m somehow going to have The Answer.
Ben says, “I know it's all new to you. Jana told us what happened, and it's all happening way too fast. I wish we'd had more time to ease you into this, but we don't.”
“Why not?” My voice squeaks. “Why don't you have time?”
The men look at each other, as if silently negotiating who will be the one to tell me something I don’t want to hear. Jana stares down at the dirty floor, clearly miserable.
“Things are ready,” Sam says slowly. “All we need now is the catalyst. Something to set things in motion. We need you to help us with that.”
Chapter 8
“Catalyst? Like what?”
Jana blurts out, “I had no idea they wanted you to do this, Chris. You've got to believe me.”
“Do what?”
“They want you to get McFarland, and—”
“Jana, let us explain it—” Sam interrupts.
My head starts spinning. I am in the middle of a bad spy movie. “You want me to kill him?”
“No, no,” Sam shakes his head vigorously while Magnus sighs and rests his head against the table in exasperation.
Magnus puts a fatherly hand on my shoulder. “Chris, when Jana told us about you and Carmen, we knew you were ready. The timing is perfect, with McFarland interested in you, too. What we need you to do is to go home, get in good with McFarland. He’s staying for two weeks. All you need to do is to get him to take you for a drive, and we’ll give you the time and location. That’s it.”
A greasy, queasy feeling begins to rise in my stomach. “I don't want to go anywhere with him. It's bad enough that my dad is trying to hook me up with him, but…you want me to lure him into some trap? Isn’t that just as bad as what they do?”
Jana looks defeated and pale. She says, “Chris, this is a great opportunity. You have to think of other people, not just yourself. Think of Carmen. Think of the life you could have together!”
“Why do I have to do that? Why do I have to think about anybody but myself? That's what everyone else does, isn't it? David, you, McFarland.” No one speaks. “For all I know, you sent Carmen to turn me into a Perp. Is she in on this too?”
“Of course not!” Magnus says dismissively. “It’s just a happy coincidence that you two sort of found each other.”
“Happy coincidence.” That sounds like a lie if I ever heard one. “What does that mean?”
Ben puts an arm around my shoulder, and I try to shrug it off. “Chris. Carmen is the daughter of the head of the Perp League. If we can get you two out, expose what’s going on from somewhere safe, that will discredit them and bust this whole thing wide open.”
“Does she know about this?”
Magnus shakes his head. “No. We need you to persuade her.”
“You’re really depending on me for an awful lot,” I say. “McFarland and coming out with Carmen? Haven’t you heard? I’m a screw up. A freak.”
Jana takes my hand. “You have the chance to change all that. Don’t be afraid.”
I gaze into her frightened eyes. “I just want to be normal.”
“Normal isn't what you thought,” she says.
“It's nothing to be ashamed of,” Ben says. “I know, it took some time for me, too. It's I hard to turn off the voices you've heard your whole life, the voices that tell you the Perps are deviants, and diseased, and promiscuous, and that God's cursed them, that the Bible says they're evil. It's hard to make those voices shut the hell up.”
Their faces are so eager and earnest. They believe so much in what they’re doing. But I’m not a brave person. My head hurts. There’s too much information here, too much to do, too many new things. “I don’t understand. What do you want me to do, anyway? You want me to pretend to be in love with McFarland, but somehow get Carmen to run away with me? I'm not a very good actor. McFarland would know I was faking.”
“Don’t worry about Carmen.” Magnus inches forward and stares intently at me with his wolf-like eyes. “And you don't have to be a good actor. It would be awkward, wouldn't it, if you didn’t really know him? That's the beauty of it. An innocent drive? A nice weekend in the country? A piece of cake. He’ll be salivating.”
“A nice weekend in the country?” Nobody mentioned that. “I have to stay somewhere overnight with him? I can't do it. Have you met him? He's a toad, I mean, really, he's just disgusting, and I know he'd be...well...”
“Grabby?” Jana finishes for me. “Yeah, probably. But listen, I've been through this, with the Abbess, remember? You just use the purity/chastity defense.”
“Huh?”
She smiles at me. “You're a good Anglicant boy, right? Clean, pure of spirit, pure of body. You're saving yourself for marriage. He can't very well object to that, can he?”
“I don't know—”
“And after you bring him to the location, we’ll take over. You won’t have to stay overnight with him at all.” Sam glances at Ben. “We’ll take care of the rest, and you and Carmen can get out.”
“What do you mean, get out?”
“You’ll be smuggled out of Ohio, taken to Canada.” He shrugs his shoulders as if it’s no big deal. “Once you’re both safe, we can go public, tell everyone what happened, and use McFarland as a bargaining chip to get recognition. Once people really see what’s going on, once it’s out in the open, people won’t tolerate it.”
“Seriously?” I don’t mean to, but I start to laugh. I
choke on it. “You’re going to whisk us away to an exotic foreign country—”
“Canada’s not really exotic,” Ben chimes in.
“—and set us up as poster kids for your movement? And Carmen…I don’t even know if she’d go along with this. She has family in California, and I have family here…”
“I already talked to her about it, last night while you were downstairs with McFarland,” Jana says. “Don’t be mad. I had to see if she’d be willing before we even talked to you about it.” She puts a hand on my cheek. “She’ll do it. She has faith in you.”
My head is buzzing like it’s going to explode into a million pieces. She believes in me. We could run away together. I’d be part of a secret operation. McFarland…
Magnus sighs impatiently. “Really, your involvement will be limited, Chris. Just take McFarland for a drive. Everyone will be expecting you and McFarland to spend a nice, long weekend together; they won’t even know you’re missing until you don’t come back. By that time, you’ll be comfortably across the Canadian border. We’ll do the rest – you and Carmen can stay hidden; we’ll release the story and go public.”
Leave. Just go to Canada. To be a Perpendicular. With my girlfriend. I glance at Jana, who won’t look me in the eye. Could I just leave my family? I mean, David can be a jerk, true, but he is my dad. And Warren—thinking of not seeing him ever again stabs me. And Jana. We’ve always fought, but now…I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to leave, even if it means my freedom. “What happens to McFarland?”
“Why do you care?” Sam snorts. “If you knew how many imprisonments he’s responsible for, how many people he’s personally assigned to the Cave, how many —”
“The Cave?”
Magnus sighs impatiently. “I guess you should know a little more if you’re going to help us take him out of commission. McFarland is the president of the Anglicant church’s ‘community rehabilitation program,’ a euphemism for the people who run the camps and devise the twisted torture they mete out. Nobody acknowledges what they really do in public, but they quietly and efficiently eradicate Perpendiculars from the population.” Magnus’s words are cold, hard; they hit me and shiver over my skin. “They run facilities in remote areas so no one knows what they really do, funded by the Church. McFarland is running for Senate; if he gets elected…there’ll be no stopping him. We have allies in the House, allies ready to turn to foreign aid to stop the massacres – not everyone believes this is God’s path. But if McFarland is elected, he has enough clout within the Church that no one will question him. Or the Cave. With him in power…the US will only fight harder to keep Perps…inhuman.”
“That’s not…that’s not legal is it?”
After a beat, everybody laughs. They laugh.
Ben claps an arm around my shoulder. “Legal or not, The Cave exists. They throw you in a hole. It’s total darkness, or always light, and you’re alone for as long as they see fit to leave you alone…it varies from person to person, depending on how badly you’ve pissed off whoever you’ve pissed off. They feed you when they remember, sanitation is spotty at best, clean water is often kept from the prisoner, and you sleep on a hard floor.” He shakes his head. “Legal doesn’t enter into it.”
“No.” This cannot be true. I think about my parents, good people. They would never allow this. I don’t want to believe they’d allow it. “I’ve heard they have camps, but…it can’t be as bad as you say. It can’t be.”
Silence. There’s tension in the room too, as if everyone is waiting for something. Sam steps forward, gets uncomfortably close to me.
“You don’t believe it.” His voice, a gravelly whisper, grates against my ear. “You. Don’t. Believe it.” Smell of sweat, dirt, wet wool from his blue cap, all mingle with his hot breath on my face. “I was there. I was there. Two months. I didn’t see another living person for 61 days. They threw food down at me like I was an animal. They hosed me down with ice cold water every couple of days, and I sat in cold mud.” He rolls up his shirt sleeve, exposing a jagged scar nearly four inches long on the inside of his forearm. “I used a rock to open up a vein, bleed to death, make it stop. But I didn’t. They didn’t want me dead. They wanted me to suffer.”
My God. My brain cannot accept what he says, but it’s true. There’s that scar, glaring at me, as cold and hard a truth as Magnus’s facts. That people I know and love contribute to such cruelty is unthinkable. That my own fathers…would they do this to me? Would I be thrown down a pit just because of what I am? I feel panic building up, thinking about all of this.
“So, Chris, even if you don’t believe me, believe that it happens. And you are needed to stop this.”
What do I say to this? How can I answer? Images tumble behind my eyes, images of cruelty and blood and icy water, Carmen’s face, David’s face, Jana’s eyes, the smell of autumn and the scent of decaying flesh, dark void, screams. I can imagine it, and it makes me sick.
“You’re looking a little green. Sit,” Sam says, impatient. He guides me to a wooden crate that serves as furniture. “You’re a bit delicate, aren’t you?”
Jana turns to him, the big sister ready to kick some ass for little brother. “Don’t be such a jerk,” she yells. “He didn’t even know about this until a few days ago. Give him a little air.”
“We don’t have time for him to adjust!” Sam screams. “I understand. It’s horrible. It’s inhuman. But we have a shrinking window of opportunity here, and if we don’t jump on it, we won’t get another one for who knows how long.”
I wipe sour spit from the corner of my mouth with the back of my sleeve, and stand, woozy. “Why is the window closing?”
Magnus jumps in. “McFarland will fly back to California soon. It’s harder for us to move around there…much more fully equipped Perp League operatives in that area, and they crack down on anything they think is slightly rebellious. But here,” he says, smiling, “nobody has really heard much from us. We’ve been quiet and respectful and obedient, and when we strike it will be huge and no one will see it coming.”
Ben adds, “But once we do strike, that will be it. They’ll crack down with a vengeance. So we have to make it count.”
Jana squeezes my arm. “We’ll join you as soon as we can.” She gazes into my eyes. “You won’t be alone, remember. Carmen will be with you.”
The idea is beautiful. To be with Carmen. Freely. Time to explore each other. Whatever’s between us. Her beautiful smile, her fierce heart…so brave…
“What about Dad?” I whisper as if we’re the only two people in the room. “You’re just going to leave everything we’ve ever known and go to Canada? With him?” I gesture toward Ben, who arches his eyebrows and purses his lips, then shrugs.
“What else can we do?” she asks desperately. “Maybe when things change we can come back, but for now…” She lets the answer hang in the air.
I’m far from brave. I’m not even particularly strong. I could turn my back on this, pretend I don’t know anything…go back to how it was. I could forget Carmen…could I? I glance at these faces, tight with worry and conviction. The image of the Cave, the scar on Sam’s forearm, the idea that we’re not even human—how could I not be human? Something suddenly clicks within my chest. Some puzzle piece that was waiting on another piece with just the right dimensions to run into it a synchs up, and creates a coherent map of my life.
This is my normal.
I can’t run away from it. I can’t.
“Tell me what you want me to do.”
Driving home, my cell phone buzzes. It’s David. I feel guilty answering it, which is a great omen of how I’m going to do as some super espionage operative. “Dad’s calling,” I tell Jana.
She keeps her eyes on the road. “So answer it.”
“I can't.”
“Why not?”
“He...he's going to know.” I stare down the cell phone. It seems malicious.
Jana pulls the Escalade over and jams on the brakes, then snatche
s the phone from me. “Hello?” she says calmly.
She nods and rolls her eyes as she listens. David’s voice buzzes from the phone.
“We went to get gas, and were going to go to the store, but we had some engine trouble.” She lies so smoothly. It’s admirable, and horrifying. I doubt that I’ll be as good.
She keeps talking. “Well, you know, the normal kind of engine trouble. It just sputtered and stopped working.” Jana tries her best to sound like the frustrated, stranded driver. “If you'd get the stupid thing serviced by a mechanic—”
More talking from David. Jana grabs my arm, her eyes wide. “Oh, you have an unexpected guest? Mr. McFarland?” She extends her middle finger and shakes it maliciously at the phone.
McFarland is at the house. Maybe even sitting in my bedroom, waiting for me to come home. The knot in my stomach starts twisting in upon itself.
Jana, meanwhile, is chatting as if nothing has happened. “We got some help on the road, so I think we'll be able to drive back,” she’s saying. “We'll probably be about fifteen minutes. We're not far.” She claps the phone shut. “I wish his face would melt off like that guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Nazi bastard. He's no different.”
“Geez, Jana.” Even considering who David is, that’s pretty harsh. “I mean, he is your father.”
She stares calmly ahead. “He's not my father,” she says evenly. “He's the fucking devil.”
We pull into the driveway about ten minutes later and park behind a rented black Mercedes-Benz. Jana pauses for a minute to check her makeup. The tight, angry pull of emotion on her facial muscles contracts; she consciously smoothes the frown on her brow, relaxes her jaw. She is someone else.
Or, more accurately, this is the Jana I’m used to seeing. In the woods, the sister who lit up like a firefly in the presence of a boy, that was someone else, someone I’d never met. It makes me think about what else I don’t see.
“He's in there,” she whispers.
“I’m supposed to meet Carmen after supper.” The memory of kissing her floods back into my brain, and blood rushes to my head. “How am I going to do that if he’s here?”
