Hit

I scooted closer to her, laid my head against her shoulder.

  “Is it true, Mama?” I said as quietly as possible. It should have been a private moment, not one acted out in front of the government’s new robotic grim reaper.

  She laid her head against mine and whispered, “Oh, Patsy. I should have told you.”

  I wanted to be angry at her. I wanted to pitch a giant fit, slamming doors so hard that things fell off the thin walls. But I couldn’t. All that hugging herself, hiding in her robe. I thought it was just the pain left over from her broken clavicle and busted ribs. But she’d been keeping it from me. The money, the gun, the terrifying wax robot man in our beat-down living room—none of that mattered compared to what was going on under her worn terry-cloth collar.

  The gun twitched in the man’s hand. “Look at it this way. If I shoot her, she won’t be in any more pain, right? That’s better than a long, slow death by cancer.”

  “You know I won’t let you do that,” I said, low and deadly.

  “The algorithms indicated you would feel that way. And you will be compensated for your time. Your mother’s debts will be released. You’ll receive all the supplies you need. As long as you satisfy the terms of our contract within the time frame specified while meeting certain prearranged criteria, this could possibly be the best thing that’s ever happened to you. You might even get a bonus.”

  “So I should thank you for ruining my life?” I asked.

  He put the gun in my lap and smiled. I didn’t touch it. But I already hated it, cold and heavy on the pile of bright yellow yarn.

  “You can thank democracy and greed for that,” he said.

  After he left, my mom showed me her scans, pointed out the lump cradled by broken bones that even a blind person wouldn’t have missed. She showed me the printouts from the oncologist, how much it was going to cost to have surgery and undergo chemo without insurance. Even with the best insurance around, it still would’ve been impossible on our budget.

  I sat there on the threadbare couch, shaking my head. On the coffee table in front of us, the gun rested on a thick envelope of crap I was supposed to read but couldn’t. The robot man made me sign something before he left, and after everything I’d learned, I should have read the fine print. Maybe it was suicidal, but leaving my signature without bothering to read the document first felt like my last act of freedom.

  They pretty much owned me anyway.

  “I’m so sorry,” my mom started, but I just grabbed her hand like a kid being torn away in a crowd, like holding on to her puffy fingers was the only thing I had left.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “It just sucks, and it’s happening, and talking won’t change it. You’ll get what you need. Don’t worry.”

  “But they want you to kill people.” She tried to pull her hand out of mine, but I wouldn’t let her.

  “Better them than you,” I said. “Better them than us.”

  She nodded. I don’t think she agreed. But my mom has always tried to be a good person and play by the rules. She goes to church and leaves something in the offering plate. She pays her taxes—or she used to. Mama taught me from a very young age that if I worked hard and pulled my weight, I would eventually succeed. We scoffed at people who got evicted and at our neighbor, who sometimes chose a new phone over paying her water bill and had to borrow our shower.

  Turns out we were screwed either way.

  Now I’m more practical, more ruthless. I’ve always liked little rebellions and sticking it to the Man, whoever he is. And if I can solve all our problems in five days, then I will do whatever it takes to live through it and keep my mom safe.

  Or so I told myself two nights ago.

  The next morning, I pulled the yellowed scrap of notebook paper out of my locket, uncurling it and running a finger along uneven, childish script.

  I want to find my dad.

  More than anything, that was what I’d wanted every day since he left. Just to see my dad again. For every birthday, I didn’t want a party—I just wanted him. I asked Santa and the Easter bunny and even left a note for the tooth fairy. He’d become this mythical, larger-than-life figure of my imagination, and I was too faithful to give up the dream, even after thirteen years without a single card or phone call.

  But the suddenly grown-up version of me had bigger problems than wanting love and answers for childhood abandonment, than wishing for a picture of my dad to put in the locket he left behind for me. I scratched out my old dream and turned the paper over to write something new.

  I want to survive the next five days.

  Now here I stand, on the doorstep of Eloise Framingham’s house. I kiss my lucky locket and tuck it back down my collar. The welcome mat I’m standing on is worn, but the small porch is swept clean. There are two cars in the driveway, a minivan and a compact, both with ghosts on the hood. I shift the fake fruit basket to my hip, check the gun in my waistband, and ring the doorbell. It feels like three years pass by the time a shadow darkens the window glass. I pray for the hundredth time that she’s ancient and nearly gone.

  A guy in his twenties answers in a ratty sweatshirt. “Can I help you?” he says. He looks like he’s forgotten what sleep is.

  “I have a delivery for Eloise Framingham.” My smile is so big he has to know I’m screaming inside.

  “Jesus, who would send that?” he says, voice raw. “She can’t even eat anymore.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m just . . . I just deliver them.”

  “So leave it on the porch or whatever. I don’t care.”

  He turns to go inside and is about to shut the door in my face. I can’t let that happen.

  “There’s a message, too,” I say, desperate. “A singing telegram.”

  I don’t even know if they have those anymore, or what you would sing to someone who’s dying, but I’ve got to get to Eloise. Now.

  “A message? You can give it to me.”

  I shrug in apology. “Sorry, if it’s not in person, I don’t get paid.”

  “Fuck your getting paid!” he shouts, his face screwed up. “Just let her die in peace. She deserves that much.”

  “Who is it?” a reedy voice calls from inside the dark house. “Is it Stephanie?”

  I shove the guy aside and shoulder my way through the door, using my big plastic basket. He shouts and follows me, but I’m too fast. Grief makes people slow, like moving through water. My mom was like that when my dad left. I was just a little kid, but I remember.

  I barrel down the hall, toward a room where machines hiss with quiet rhythm. An old woman huddles in the center of a swaybacked bed, surrounded by pillows. The smell of urine and worse lurks under the cheap air fresheners lined up on a windowsill. I slam the door shut and twist the lock, and the guy curses and yanks it from the other side.

  “Stephanie?” she says, squinting.

  “Are you Eloise Framingham?” I ask, breathless, before I lose my nerve.

  “Yes,” she rasps. She’s got tubes cascading down her face, and a pink silk scarf struggles to stay tied around her bald head. She’s nothing but bone, just paper skin collapsed around a flat, hollow frame. Her smooth, well-manicured hands are the only sign that she’s much younger than she looks, that she’s being eaten inside by disease. One hand flutters to her concave chest, the nails fake and thick and a beautiful, rosy pink. “Is that for me?” she asks.

  I smile and nod, my lips wobbling. “Could you sign this, please?”

  Her signature is just a jerky line, and she falls back against her pillows with a gasp of pain at the effort. I have never pitied someone so much in my life. And I hate myself for being grateful that what I’m about to do will be as much of a mercy as it is a murder.

  I hold the first button of my shirt up to my mouth and whisper, “By Valor Congressional Order number 7B, your account is past due and hereby declared i
n default. Due to your failure to remit all owed monies and per your signature just witnessed and accepted, you are given two choices. You may either sign your loyalty over to Valor Savings as an indentured collections agent for a period of five days or forfeit your life. Please choose.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  I’ve read it so fast and low that there’s no way she could have heard anything over her machines. I walk across the worn carpet and hold out the card, and she takes it, her beautiful fingers trembling. And there’s no way she could do what I’m doing because there’s no way she can even stand up.

  “What the hell did you just say to her?” the guy shouts through the door, his body slamming against the wood. I just need it to hold a little longer.

  Eloise looks over the card, and my heart wrenches in my chest at how spastic and yet elegant her movements are. She must have been a dancer once. She’s like a dying queen, like a deer struck by a car trying to stand on severed legs. Her carved ivory eyes scan the card from purple hollows, and she meets my gaze and nods.

  “I don’t mind.” She holds her chin up. “And I forgive you.”

  She closes her eyes. I sit the basket gently on the ground. The flimsy door is banging and slamming behind me, the lock about to break. Just as it flies open, I whip out the Glock and shoot Eloise Framingham in her bird-bone chest. She falls back onto the pillows with every bit of grace I imagined. Her lips curl up in a smile. I’m trembling, but she’s not. Not anymore.

  “What did you do?” the guy shouts. “What the hell did you just do?”

  He runs past me to the bed, holding the woman’s broken body to his chest and sobbing.

  “What was that?” a worried voice calls from the hall, and a college-­age girl in a tracksuit appears in the doorway.

  “Call the police!” the guy yells. “She shot my mom!”

  The girl gasps behind her hand and disappears, running down the hall.

  “The police won’t come.” I stick the Glock back in my jeans and pick up the basket, a thousand years older than I was when I walked in the door. “Read the card. It explains everything.”

  “Read a card? The police won’t come? What the hell is happening?”

  He takes the card from Eloise’s limp hand as the girl shouts from far away, “The police aren’t answering. It was just a message, like for a bank. For Valor Savings. But I called 911, like, three times. What do I do, Matt? Tell me what to do!”

  He doesn’t answer. He’s reading the card. Tears are slipping down his cheeks, he has one arm around his dead mother, and still he’s reading the card.

  “What does this mean?” He looks up into my eyes like I’m a priest, like I’m God, like I know anything. Like I have power.

  “It means you need to start paying off your debts.”

  I can’t stay here a second more, watching a son mourn his dead mother. I can’t watch her head flop against his shoulder as he tries to keep her upright.

  “I’m sorry,” I mutter, and I hurry down the hall, the basket in my hands.

  The girl in the tracksuit is nowhere to be seen. The front door is still open. I jog back to the mail truck and pull the Postal Service shirt off over my head and throw it onto the floorboards so it doesn’t record my sobbing. My hands are shaking as I put the truck into drive, and I swerve around a cat and nearly hit a mailbox. I can barely drive through the tears, and my mind won’t let go of her beautiful hands holding the card as everything else fell away to nothing.

  I know she said she didn’t mind. That she forgave me. Hell, it was probably a mercy for her. If she was in hospice care, trapped in a bed, strapped to those machines, it’s not like she was living a great life. He said she couldn’t eat. Eloise Framingham wasn’t just going to miraculously recover. That woman was already dead. It was just a matter of time before her brain realized it. Maybe I did her a ­kindness, doing it quick like that.

  But what about her son? Now he’s got a dead mom, and he’ll probably go into debt just to hold her funeral, and that little paper card isn’t going to be much comfort to him. He’s probably already ripped it to shreds. If you’d asked me yesterday, I would have said better him than me. But now, seeing the reality of another kid watching his mom die of cancer and then the senseless, cold-blooded government murder in the back bedroom, I’m not so sure. Maybe they weren’t ready to let go yet, either of them.

  Less than five minutes ago, I stood on her doorstep, wishing she would be ancient. But seeing Eloise Framingham die there, in her bed, with as much dignity as she could muster—now I wish she had been mean or a drug dealer or something, anything that I could hate. I wish she had been like that nasty creeper in the big coat who comes into my work on Kids Eat Free night and rubs himself under the table and tries to corner little boys in the bathroom. I wish it had been someone who deserved to die, instead of someone who simply couldn’t afford proper medical care or who never had a chance to beat her disease. When she racked up her debt, Eloise Framingham didn’t want a bigger TV or a fancier purse. She just wanted a few more years of life. I’ll never even know if she got what she wanted. If it was worth it.

  I back away from the mailbox I almost hit and turn around, and my mail truck is stuck right in front of Eloise Framingham’s garden gnomes while I frantically try to escape. The guy in the sweatshirt steps onto the porch with a rifle in his hands. He opens his mouth to shout something, but I slam my foot on the gas before I find out what it is. He must fumble the gun, or maybe it’s not loaded, or maybe he’s too sad to pull the trigger, because the shots I expect never come. I’m down the street and around the corner on two wheels as fast as a mail truck can go, my heart pounding in my chest.

  I want out of this tidy, happy-looking neighborhood, fast. Back on the main road, I pass the fallen grandeur and yellowed, empty yards of the Preserve and aim for the place where I parked the mail truck last night as I counted down the hours until the clock started blinking and I had to knock on Bob Beard’s door. It’s in one of those subdivisions they started before the economy got bad, where they half built three gigantic houses and abandoned the property to grow wild between fancy streetlights. Like the Preserve’s equally self-­important sister, they call it the Enclave. But it’s empty now and has become the sort of place where kids park to make out or smoke weed and drink beer where no one can see them. No one ever lived in those three houses, and they’re covered in graffiti tags now.

  There’s this paved lot behind the most finished house, all screened in by those thick privacy bushes that rich people put up so they don’t have to see their neighbors. I guess they were going to have an RV back there or something. But now it’s just a convenient, private place for me to park.

  The clock resets itself, the red lines blurred through my tears. Before I give in and punch the shit out of it, I slip between the seats and into the back of the truck. Some of my stuff flew all over the place when I was turning around and speeding away from Eloise Framingham and her son and his gun, and I try to put things back in order. I tuck the pillows into place, shove yarn balls back into my tote, and push the fast-food bags farther under the bed—after trolling for leftover croutons. They’re clammy with old dressing, but I’m starving and still overcome with emptiness, so I swallow the few chunks I can find and then cough them right back up into the bag when they won’t stay down.

  Hating myself completely, I shove the gun under the pillow on my bed, a narrow cot with a thin mattress that came welded into the back of the truck. When I first saw the setup, I thought it was kind of cute. Homey. Now I see it for what it is: a prison.

  I sit down on the carefully made bed and realize that my hands are still shaking.

  I just killed someone. I killed two people in one day. Eloise was dying in the same way my mom might die. I’m living in the back of a truck. All I’ve eaten today was fast food, and I puked most of it back up. My blood sugar’s probably low, or maybe I’m in
shock. I’ve got eight more people to kill, and one of them is a guy around my age.

  I don’t know why killing Maxwell Beard should be any worse than killing anyone else. A life is a life, right? It’s not like Jesus thought there was a big difference, if I remember what little I learned when my mom still made me go to Sunday school. For what I’m doing now, age and attractiveness and goodness and great taste in bands don’t matter.

  Still, I’m dreading seeing him again, putting the gun to his chest and actually pulling the trigger this time. Deep down, I know it’s worse because he’s my age and we like the same music. Maybe he’s just another keep-up-with-the-Joneses douchebag, like his dad. But I saw the fear in his eyes, the devastation. He’s just a kid, like me, and kids should be allowed to make their own mistakes. Whatever he did, we’re both victims of our parents’ weaknesses and bad decisions. And that strikes a little too close to home. I hope I can convince him to do what I’m doing, work off the debt in a horrible but surprisingly quick way, and be done with it. He might believe me if I tell him it’s not so bad.

  I snort. That’s one big lie to swallow.

  I yank up the back door of the truck so I can stare at the high grass sloping down to a forest. Maybe some fresh air will help me relax, make my stomach stop churning. I just need a nap. I ­haven’t slept since the man in the black suit showed up. When I found the list in the envelope yesterday morning, I tried to Google these ­people, to find out more about them, but our Internet was mysteriously down. Was it just ours, or everyone’s? Is Valor Savings taking over the media, too? Do they now own the television stations, the news, the radio? Are the phones even working? Have they shut down the cell signals? I know the police aren’t answering the phones, but what about the hospitals? Has a bank really taken over the entire country overnight, just like that? Out here, in the backyard of an unfinished house in an abandoned neighborhood, I have no way of knowing what’s happening in the real world, whatever that is now.

  I set the alarm on my phone for four hours from now and toss it back into my yarn bag. Other than making sure I’m awake in time to visit the next victim during Postal Service hours, my smartphone is now completely useless. No bars anywhere, all day. I’m more alone than I’ve ever been in my life, and if I don’t eat something, I’m going to barf acid, so I open the mini-fridge that’s bolted to the back of my truck. It and the tiny microwave are both run by thick cords that snake through the truck, and I’m not even going to try to understand how all that works.