Chapter 32. Weirdness Happens
When I woke up I felt even worse than the time before, partly because someone was kicking me in the ribs. Not super-hard, but not gentle nudges either. I pried my eyes open. It was of course one of the twins.
He leaned over me and put his finger to his smiling lips. "Wakey-wakey, sunshine," he whispered. I recognized Yancy in the faint light coming through a window.
He turned and swung his leg back, and I saw he was about to kick Angel.
"Nuh!" I whisper-shouted. He pulled the kick so that he just nudged her and turned to look at me again.
"Igur uh," I croaked.
"What?" he whispered impatiently.
"I'll. Waygur. Wake her. Uhh. P," I managed to articulate.
"Be my guest." He grinned. "Your half hour starts now." He pointed to a wall. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again and managed to make out a white clock on the wall with big black numerals. It read 3:35.
"Don't think you can leave and go for help. We'll be observing. And we'll be back around four, so don't wait too long to take care of Halloway." He turned and walked out of my field of vision.
"Oh," he added softly from across the room. "Don't bother trying to call 911. We've taken the cell phones, and the landline is dead. There's a knife with the lady's prints on it outside by the cut line." I rolled enough to see an open doorway, with Yarnall silhouetted against the lighter outdoors. The two of them left.
I knew I needed to wake up and wake the others up, so we could start making a plan, but I felt so awful that I couldn't do anything but just lie there. Until I heard a soft whimper.
I opened my eyes again and focused enough to see Angel raising her hand to her head. I guess hers hurt too. Without even thinking about how awful I felt, I crawled over to her.
"I'm here," I whispered and then thought how idiotic (and conceited) that sounded—like my presence would solve all her problems, or any of them.
She winced and smiled at the same time—I could tell despite the duct tape, because her cheeks went up and her eyes changed. I guess smiling made her remember the duct tape, because she started picking at the edge of it.
"Want help?" I whispered. She shook her head no emphatically. When she'd raised enough of an edge to get hold of, she yanked it off fast with a faint oww. Even in the dark, across her face where it had been I could see a rectangular mark, probably red, more distinct than the mark where Yancy had slapped her.
"Wow," she said quietly. "I'm glad to get that off. Gosh, I feel terrible. Why does my head hurt so much?"
"The stuff." The voice came from behind me. I'd actually forgotten all about Shep. "That they injected us with," he went on. "Too much. Or else they use different stuff."
Knowing he was probably right did not help any. I sat back and the other two slowly sat up. We were in a kitchen, Halloway's kitchen—I recognized it from our previous trip piggybacking in the Ys. The clock was over the small table in the breakfast nook. It was already almost quarter to four.
"Angel," I said softly, "was all that stuff Kirk said true? About not being able to find us?"
"I don't know," she answered, also softly. "I don't know enough to be able to contradict any of it. It sounded totally plausible to me. Unfortunately."
"So we're on our own," I said. "And we don't have much time. Yancy said they'd be back at about four. And they're watching the door, so we can't leave. And the phones are dead." I didn't mention the part about Angel's fingerprints.
"Which door?" said Shep after a minute.
"Probably both." I shrugged.
"Okay," said Shep. "Here's plan A. You two go to the front door. I'll try to sneak out the back, and you two go out the front. I'll head for the Security Office. You try for one of the houses—or two of the houses, you can split up—across Lincoln Avenue. Ring bells, make noise, get people to call 911."
"What if both doors are being watched?" asked Angel.
"Then we scratch plan A." Shep shrugged.
"What's plan B?" I asked.
"Hey, I just woke up!" answered Shep. "I haven't gotten that far yet."
"At least it's a plan." I looked at Angel. "Any ideas?"
"I don't think whoever's guarding the kitchen door will just be standing outside in plain view," she said. "There are bushes on both sides of the door, but they're not right up against the steps. Are those, those lepton-brained assholes right-handed or left-handed?"
"Golly, Angel," said Shep. "Don't hold back or anything."
I was a little pissed that he'd said it, because it made her giggle, and nobody should do that but me. Then he kind of ruined the effect by saying, "What's a lepton?"
Instead of answering, Angel turned to me. So Shep turned to me too.
"It's um, an elementary particle, with a very small mass," I explained, feeling pretty smart and much better. Angel nodded and smiled.
"So are they right- or left-handed?" she asked again.
I thought about it. Yancy had used his right hand to inject Halloway. "Yancy's right-handed," I said.
"So's Yarnall," said Shep. I figured that he also had a memory that told him and didn't question his answer.
"Good," said Angel. "That makes it easier. The door opens inward, so that won't influence his choice. A right-handed person is more likely to be standing on that side"—she pointed to the side of the door that from inside was on the right—"because he'll want to be able to swing his dominant arm over in front of anyone coming through the door. So when you leave, Shep, cut immediately to the left, go past the house. There's some trees there. Go past them and then cut right. You'll hit the path that goes to the Security Office. Shout and make as much noise as you can all the way." She turned to me.
"The front porch goes the whole width of the house," she went on. "I'll go first, straight out the door and down the steps, screaming and waving my arms. You cut right, down the porch along the front of the house. You vault the railing. Then if you just keep running straight that way, you'll come to Lincoln Avenue. You've got the longest legs—you have the best chance of getting away. With luck, one of those guys will be chasing me and the other one will be after Shep. Both of us will fight as hard as we can if they grab us, to give you more time. I think it's a good plan."
Shep and I looked at her.
"What?" she said.
"Fuck, I mean wow," said Shep.
"Have you done anything like this before?" I asked reverently.
"No! I've been to this house—the one in our world—lots of times, and I just read a lot of thrillers, okay?" I had a hunch she might be blushing.
"It's a great plan," said Shep. "Now. Now it even sounds plausible, instead of totally kamikaze and desperate."
"Let's go, then," said Angel, pointing at the clock. Seven minutes to four. "We'll count together—we've got to get the front door open, and it might have a chain or a deadbolt or something. We'll go on thirty. One. Two. Three."
Shep and I joined in, counting with her so we all had the same tempo. We all got up, and Shep tiptoed to the back door.
She and I headed out of the kitchen, down the hall, past the stairs. There was indeed a chain on the door.
"Fourteen. Fifteen." I raised my eyebrows. Angel nodded. I gently and silently slid the chain off.
"Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty." I peered at the space between door and door frame. Deadbolt. I drew it back without making any noise. Now the question was whether just turning the knob would open the door.
"Twenty-five. Twenty-six." I wiped my hand down the side of my boxers and grasped the knob. It turned, and I could feel the door loosen.
"Twenty-nine. Thirty." I pulled the door open, stepping back, and Angel slid in front of me. Instead of the scream I'd been braced for, she let out a kind of gasping shriek and stepped back into me.
In front of us was a very large man dressed all in black. Not one of the Ys. In fact, I realized, it was Mr. Black, the man from the backyard who'd kept us from saving Jessica. He stepped forward, pointing a gun
at us. I stepped back, Angel stepped back, and we walked backward in front of him all the way to the kitchen. Where I bumped into something, whirled around, and saw Shep. He was backing away from another very large black-clad man—Mr. Nero.
"Sit down and be quiet." Our man gestured to the breakfast nook. We silently took chairs, Angel in a seat against the wall and me next to her, Shep across from us.
Mr. Black and Mr. Nero holstered their guns and conferred quietly in the middle of the kitchen. Mr. Nero nodded, turned, and headed down the hall. Mr. Black came over to us.
"We're just finishing up," he said quietly. "Then we'll take you back to your own world line and reinsert you." He turned to go.
"Wait!" said Shep. "Who are you? Where are you from? How did you know to come here? Are you going to kill Halloway? Where are the Ys—the McDowell twins? What's going on?"
Mr. Black sighed a big exaggerated sigh. "Sonny," he said to Shep, "all you need to know is that nobody's getting killed today, and we've saved your asses, and you're going home to mommy. I am not going to spend the time and energy explaining any more to you. This, this business here that you're involved in, is a tiny, unimportant part of a much larger operation. You are tiny and unimportant. Just be glad it wasn't inconvenient for us to rescue you."
Angel's chair squeaked on the floor as she stood up fast. "We are important to us," she said, "and we're important to the people who love us, just as important as you are to yourself and the people who love you.
"If somebody, someday, should save your ass, I bet you'd want to know what was going on. I bet you wouldn't like being told that you were tiny and unimportant. Well, we're younger than you are and not as, as large, but we don't like it either. And anyway, it's rude." She stood up very straight and looked Mr. Black in the eye.
There was a short silence, then he made a sound between a sneeze and a snort. I think it was part of a laugh.
He came back over and stood at the end of the table and looked at her, then at Shep and me. Angel sat back down.
"I apologize, miss," he said. "You're right. You are not unimportant, and although you, yourself, are physically pretty tiny, you are definitely not tiny in the way I meant."
Mr. Nero came back into the room. "Still sleeping peacefully," he said. "Ready?"
"The McDowells have been—let's say they've been disposed of," said Mr. Black, ignoring Mr. Nero. "The maverick Kirk has been disposed of. We're, well, just think of us as rangers who police the world lines. It's our job to keep things from getting screwed up. And that's about all I can tell you without going into way too much detail."
"What does 'disposed of' mean?" asked Angel.
Mr. Black just looked at her for a moment. "Details," he said finally, shrugging his shoulders.
"So you're the good guys?" I asked.
Black nodded.
"If you're the good guys," I said accusingly, "how come you kept us from saving Jessica? How come you didn't save the other kids?"
"You're the smart guy," said Black. "You figure it out." He waited. I realized that he really did want me to figure it out.
"Um," I said. "Well, maybe you needed for the crime to actually be committed, before you could step in?"
He nodded. "Good. Go on."
"The main thing wasn't the kids, it was catching as many pedophiles as possible, and wrapping up Kirk A's little enterprise." I looked at him expectantly.
"Right. See, I knew you could figure it out."
"But what about Jessica and the others?" objected Angel. "Did you fix that? Did you put them back right at the moment they were snatched?"
"That would have been a very, very bad idea," said Black. "So we put her back a month later—dumped her in an alley in Hibbard."
"Why?" said Angel. "That's cruel."
"It was a safe alley," he said. "We were monitoring her."
"No," said Angel. "I mean it was cruel to make her stay with the Ys and that awful Smith for all that time. Why did you do that?"
"Can't you figure it out?" asked Black again.
Angel shook her head. She looked disgusted and angry.
I suddenly realized why they'd done it. "It wouldn't matter," I said. "Jessica would still have been through what she'd been through, and if she'd been put back a minute after she was snatched, her parents wouldn't know, nobody would know she'd been taken, and nobody would understand what the matter with her was, why she was all weird and different. And when she tried to tell them, they'd think she was hallucinating or something—that she was crazy.
"It's much better if the people who have to take care of her and get her sorted out and back to normal know that she's been away for a month and been through all sorts of terrible things. So they'll know how to help her. So they'll know she needs help."
"I said you were a smart guy," said Black, nodding.
"How does one go about applying to join the rangers?" asked Shep suddenly.
Mr. Black and Mr. Nero jerked in surprise. So did I.
Mr. Black turned to Shep. "Work hard," he said. "Do well in school. Keep your nose clean."
"And?" persisted Shep.
"And maybe someday we'll meet again. Given the circumstances, it was actually a pretty good plan." Mr. Black took a small canister out of his belt and sprayed it around the table in a curve, catching the three of us in the face. Oblivion happened again.
Epilogue
Why was I surprised that my folks knew the Kirks? Maybe because neither Andrew nor Heather had mentioned it, even though I'm sure in retrospect that they knew who I was, I mean whose son I was. I was kind of pleased actually when I thought about it afterward, that they hadn't gone all "We know your parents, young man."
But they did know each other, our parents, and in fact it would have been weird if they didn't. Not only did the Kirks live nearby, they were roughly the same age as my folks and had a lot of the same interests. Turns out they'd all been to many a New Year's Day reception at the Halloways', and my dad and Andrew Kirk were on the same advisory board for some part of the university. They didn't know each other very well, but luckily they also all liked each other.
And Andrew Kirk knew Uncle Will too, because Uncle Will had volunteered to be an advisor for digitizing stuff and for setting up several websites, to do with projects that Andrew was involved with.
That meant it was really easy to introduce Angel to my parents. It would have been easy anyway, because I knew Mom and Dad would love Angel and Angel would like them too, but our families knowing each other made it all seem a foregone conclusion, like they already almost knew each other.
So I told Cammie that I had to have the car one evening, picked Angel up, and brought her home for dinner. I'd cleared it with Angel that she liked sesame, and at my request Mom fixed sesame chicken, sesame noodles, sesame green beans, and a salad with sesame seeds. And sesame seed rolls. I love that dinner. The neat thing is that even though everything has the same theme, all the variations are totally different.
There was also pinot grigio, and we were allowed a glass. Mom had asked me if Angel's parents let her have wine, and I said they did, but I think Dad checked with Andrew just to be sure.
It wasn't until I was introducing Angel that I realized that I hadn't really thought how Cammie would react. She brought guys home for dinner all the time, and I was perfectly nice to them, but I was Cammie's younger brother, and Angel and Cammie were both girls, and it suddenly occurred to me that girls are mysteriously different, especially when it comes to other girls.
As it turned out, they really seemed to like each other. There weren't any of those smiling comments that sound perfectly okay to a guy but make tears come to the other girl's eyes.
It was a very good evening. After I took Angel home (before her curfew) and brought Cammie's car back, I decided I probably needed a car of my own. I decided it was going to be a great summer. And I decided to work hard, keep my nose clean, and ask Andrew Kirk to keep Shep and me in mind if he happened to have any more jobs he ne
eded help with.
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About the Author
"Elizabeth Molin" is a user-friendly pen name. She is double-jointed and can stand on her head and wiggle her ears but has not learned to juggle. She does not say "holy wow" but knows someone who does. As readers will know, she is a fan of great food. She wishes she had a TSA to slip into when deadlines loom. You can visit her at https://www.elizabethmolin.com/ for samples of her other work and strong opinions regarding syntax and semantics.
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