Girl Minus X

by Anne Stone

  Completely oblivious. Stumping ever closer to the redhead, there, at the place where the perimeter lights are brightest. From its nest in the kid’s backpack, Mac’s doll peeks indifferently out at Dany, head lolling to one side. Little wooden eyelids descend lazily over glass eyes, only to rise again with each step the kid takes.

  As Dany watches, Mac sits down cross-legged in the dirt, just a few feet from Ceci. Oblivious to the guard and the kneeling prisoner, Mac carefully pulls half a dozen pieces of metal from the paper bag and lays them out in the dirt.

  Dany drops the chain. Takes one step, another.

  The guard, at least, has no idea what those little metal pieces might amount to. It’s obvious to Dany that he has no idea why a five-year-old has wandered off in search of light. No, he’s staring wide-eyed at the kid, his eyes a pair of blinking question marks. The soldier loosens his grip on Ceci’s arm, his eyes on the kid, who is just sitting there, completely focused on all of those metal bits.

  “Go,” Aunt Norah says. “Jesus, go.”

  And then Dany’s eyes catch the glint of metal – there, on the ground at the gate.

  “The keys,” Dany whispers.

  She sets off at a jog and then, by force of will, slows her pace. She won’t run. Because she will have to pass directly into the guard’s line of sight. Now, more than ever, she needs to be invisible. For a little longer, she needs the illusion that the plague jacket will give.

  Dany makes her way to the gate, slowly, as if her legs and hips are fossilized.

  Ahead, there is Ceci, kneeling, one arm drawn up behind her back. And there is the guard, his grip on her looser now as he leans forward, looking at Mac.

  “Hey, kid,” the guard is saying. “Hey you, kid.”

  Dany scoops up the keys, and with a backwards glance, tosses them to her aunt in a long loose arc. Without waiting to see how they land, she makes her way to the small gap in the fence. Dany squeezes her head through the gate, but the metal fence pinches and holds her at the shoulders.

  As she struggles through, Dany’s gaze takes in the kid once more.

  Mac sweeps up each of the tiny pieces and, like a tiny magician, fits them into place. The girl’s hands move fast. Dany hears it clearly, hears it travelling on the crisp night air – the sound of metal clicking home. And, those tiny hands moving so quickly that they are no more than a blur, the child makes a gun out of all of those disparate parts.

  The gun is in the child’s hand – only she isn’t pointing it. For a moment, she dangles the thing by the grip, holding it out from her, like a dead frog, and then she takes it into both hands and opens the chamber. Mac has no idea of the danger she is in, because there is a grin on her little face, and she’s laughing – well, huffing, but yes, her whole face is lit up with pure delight as the first bullet clicks into place.

  Before her magic trick is finished, the guard’s smile has wavered and died. He lets go of Ceci’s arm – palms raised before the kid.

  Dany’s shoulders are through the gate now, and she’s working on her hips.

  “Easy, kid,” the guard is saying. “Just take it easy.” He lifts his mag cell light from his belt and looks at Mac warily, blunt instrument in hand.

  But in that instant, the redhead is moving. Pinned in the gate, Dany has no choice but to watch as Ceci launches herself forward, grabbing up the kid’s gun. Ceci roughly grabs hold of Mac by one arm. In her other hand, she holds Faraday’s revolver.

  The barrel zeroes in on the guard’s forehead.

  “Kneel,” Ceci tells him. “Look, I’m sorry. I know how awkward this little role reversal must be for you. Now, kneel on the ground, like a good dog, or I’ll put a hole in the place your brains should be.”

  Dany is through the fence. She stands there, in the light, knees bent – a cat, intent on her prey.

  Ceci flicks a casual glance Dany’s way. “Nice of you to join us, princess,” Ceci says, and the gun swings round to point at Dany.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 27

  Dany’s eyes are on her kid sister, taking in how small Mac’s arm is, held in Ceci’s grasp. So she doesn’t see him at first.

  Faraday, her history teacher, steps out of the shadows, and slowly makes his way towards the redhead. He’s coming up behind Ceci, holding up the flat of his palms.

  For a moment, Dany feels a flare of hope. The redhead hasn’t seen Faraday. So, he has a chance. Coming up on her, from behind, he can take down the redhead before she’s even seen him, before she can hurt her sister. And if the gun goes off, well, it’ll only take out Dany.

  Faraday catches Dany’s gaze and nods, as if to say, Don’t worry, I’ve got this, then he turns his attention back to Ceci. “Let the children go,” Faraday says, “and everything will be okay.”

  Dany’s heart sinks in her chest.

  Her teacher’s words may be calm, measured, but they do not have a calming effect. Ceci leaps back – yanking Dany’s sister with her. Her gun swings wildly from Faraday, to the guard, to Dany. Then a smirk crosses her face and she lowers her pistol – to Mac’s temple.

  “We can work this out,” Faraday says. But Dany can hear it, uncertainty. He darts a nervous glance from the prisoner to Dany, and Dany sees that his eyes are filled with alarm. “Let the kids go. Let both the kids go. We can sort all of this out.”

  “I’ll kill her if I have to,” the redhead says dryly. “I mean, I won’t like it. I’d rather not kill a kid. That won’t end at all well for me. Or her. Or my jumpsuit.”

  Dany can’t think of anyone or anything but Mac. The kid is held by one arm, her body taut, and that gun, that gun is aimed at her temple. Ceci’s grip on her sister’s arm is firm, but measured. When Dany sees that grip, she knows that the redhead is being careful not to hurt Mac, and all at once, she wonders if Ceci is bluffing. Even so, it’s a dangerous, wrong-headed bluff, a bluff that could go wrong. Still, maybe she doesn’t mean to hurt the kid.

  “You best take a step back,” Ceci tells Faraday. “Move.”

  Behind her, Dany hears the rattling of the fence. And there, pushing her shoulders through the gap, is Aunt Norah – the chain gone from her wrist.

  Turning back to the kid, Dany sees one thing and one thing alone: her sister’s eyes. The kid has a faraway look. Then, Dany knows. Mac no longer sees the prisoner, doesn’t feel the grip on her arm, doesn’t see the perimeter lights above her or even her sister, Dany, rooted to the spot. The kid has an absent look, the kind of look that sometimes comes over her when she is about to bolt. She’s always been a bolter, only her arm is held in the prisoner’s grip. For now, the kid is held in place. But Dany sees it. The girl’s taut posture. Her legs, trembling. The kid will bolt the second the prisoner lets go.

  If the prisoner lets go.

  If the prisoner doesn’t accidentally kill her first.

  “That isn’t a gun,” Faraday is saying. “It’s a historical relic. A museum piece. A one-hundred-year-old service revolver from the Boer War.”

  The redhead raises an eyebrow and, sighing heavily, looks at Dany’s history teacher.

  “Shoot that thing, and it’ll take your hand off at the root,” he tells her.

  And what will it do to her sister’s face, so close to the redhead’s hand?

  Aunt Norah lays a hand on Dany’s shoulder. She’s made it through the fence. But Dany doesn’t look at her, because she can’t take her eyes off her sister. Finally, the redhead swivels on the ball of one foot, and makes her choice. She aims at the guard’s head and pulls the trigger.

  Dany thinks her heart will stop beating – she reaches a hand out for her little sister, but nothing. Nothing happens. Panicked, Ceci turns the gun on Faraday, clicking again and again. But nothing.

  Dany hasn’t realized it, but she’s been holding her breath. All at once, the air expels from her lungs. The redhead, cursing, throws the gun at the guard. T
he gun rebounds from the guard’s face, hits the dirt at his feet and, a beat later, Dany hears it. A single gunshot.

  Dany’s gaze is riveted. A small and inelegant hole has opened in the redhead’s neck, and spits out a jet of red. There, just above Mac’s head. The rough little hole in her neck is a ragged valve, ugly lipped and raw. Like a faucet, it pours out a stream of red paint.

  Dany’s gaze drops to the gun.

  No puff of smoke. No telltale whisper of dust, raised from the earth. And then she knows her mistake. It wasn’t the revolver that went off. That was the sound of a rifle.

  Dany hasn’t done the math.

  She hasn’t thought about the guards, plural – the other guards – who run this place. The guns, she knows, are kept in a single locked trailer, Jasper told her that much. But by now, the guards must have retrieved their guns and, confined to shadows, come creeping up on the gate.

  That wasn’t Faraday’s gun. But a soldier’s rifle. They know. They know and they are armed. Dany hasn’t thought. She just hasn’t thought.

  In that instant, Mac’s sneakers kick up a puff of dirt from the ground.

  For a long moment, it is too slight, too little, the kid can’t break the redhead’s grip – but those little legs are pedalling and the kid is tugging. And it’s then, while Mac is still held in the prisoner’s reflexive grip, that the second shot rings out.

  Ceci’s head is a water balloon, bursting. One filled with red ink.

  The blood showers the orange track suit, drizzles the dirt at Mac’s feet, freckles her hair and face. Dany’s mind is opened up so wide that it’s impossible not to see, not to witness all of it, not to take pictures with her eyes, no matter how much she wishes she wouldn’t.

  And the kid, released from the redhead, is running – straight for the six-lane.

  Dany acts on pure instinct.

  She doesn’t think of guards. Doesn’t think of guns. Doesn’t think of her aunt. Doesn’t ask who is shooting and who is being shot. Because her eyes are on Mac, running from the bloody thing that is, even as she watches, falling to a crumpled heap in the dirt.

  The kid is running. She is the sole point of movement in a still and dead world. And then Dany is running too.

  Only someone has painted the child’s hair red.

  But it is only when she’s caught her sister up in her arms, when she’s kissed the sticky crown of her head, that her brain can formulate the question.

  How is it that blood can be so red?

  Because the blood is unnaturally red. Red like a child’s crayoned picture of a tulip. Red like a cartoon flower. Redder, even, then the redhead’s bottle-red hair. Later, she’ll wonder if it was a trick of the perimeter lights, because all of everything about that night is set into such stark relief, Mac’s face most of all, freckled with all that red. But now, she presses the kid into her arms, kisses her bloody hair, and Dany feels it, she feels it, the fluttery-beat of the kid’s tiny rabbit heart.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 28

  A beat after Dany pulls her sister into her arms, the world erupts around her.

  A volley of gunshots sets off a world of chaos.

  She doesn’t hear the screams. But she sees the open-mouthed prisoners.

  One pair of prisoners is working their way through the fence, bound at the wrist. Another pair, angry and gesticulating, is stalled behind these two. And in the murky distance, she can just make out two others as they tackle an armed guard from behind. And all the while, a voice is crackling on the loudspeaker, telling everyone to lie down on the ground, though the words sound like gibberish, as if she is translating from pig Latin.

  And that’s when the old VW Bug materializes in front of her.

  The Bug doesn’t roll onto the scene so much as leap from the shadows, landing on all four wheels in the light, right there, between Dany and Faraday. The car leaps into place, and the engine stalls out.

  Eva leans out the driver’s window, wild-eyed.

  Small dust clouds detach from the ground, exploding outwards from each wheel – all of it playing out in the filmic white light of the perimeter panels – all of it unfurling so slowly that Dany can trace the path of each individual dust mote as it eddies and floats up from the ground to dance with fireflies.

  Suddenly, the volume comes on, and now Dany hears the screams.

  She hears screaming and gunshots and time is moving forward, moving fast. In all of the world, in every last place around her, people are screaming. As she is pulled into the car, Dany turns back. Sees the guards with their rifles, straining forward. A dozen gunshots ring out in close succession, the sounds coming closer and closer together.

  But the world is a sea of red, and time, time has finally found her, time has caught her up again. Dany finds herself shoved into the rough shelter of Faraday’s old VW Bug, and she presses her little sister down low, into the footwell in front of her feet.

  She turns to Faraday, beside her, but the back window is exploding, and Faraday, looking out the back window, is suddenly awash in a spray of broken glass.

  Dany looks around her wildly.

  And when it’s done, when those bright splinters have fallen like stars, her history teacher slumps forward, and though the car is speeding into the dark night, somehow, the screams follow them, because something dark is leaking out of Faraday, the night is leaking out of him, and it’s spreading across the back seat, a puddle of it, not as red as a child’s tulip but as black as the night sky.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 29

  Dany looks at her aunt.

  There is a goose egg rising on Aunt Norah’s forehead. A cartoon circle and stars revolve around her head. Mac is curled up in the footwell, and Eva, hands gripping the steering wheel, is pale with panic.

  Only then does she dare to look at Faraday, beside her.

  Dany sees the dark blossom of blood on the teacher’s pale blue shirt. Too high for the heart. Too low for the throat. His chest is rising and falling. Breath. Life. But there is blood dripping from his open mouth too.

  The wave of panic dims – and she feels it, the descent of dead calm. With calm comes reason. First, she pulls her mask out of her pocket, and slips it on her face. Her fingers, practiced at the motion, reform the seal. “Knife, scissors. Something sharp, now,” Dany calls out, holding her hand out towards the front seat.

  “Manicure scissors,” Eva says. “You have them.”

  Cursing, Dany grabs the nail scissors from her pocket and forces Faraday upright.

  And then the nail scissors are the letter opener and Faraday is the envelope. She slices his shirt away. Dany can see it now, the wound, a deep fissure in his shoulder. She breathes. For the first time, she breathes. He must’ve bitten his tongue, that’s all. A little investigation and yes, that’s all it is. And yes, there is a little hole in the skin of his shoulder, and it will not close. Out of that deep black wound pours blood.

  “You have to stop the bleeding,” her aunt says.

  “Give me something,” Dany tells her.

  Faraday reaches up towards the wound, his dark face is now an ashy grey-green, and he falls back against the seat.

  “Whoa there, Faraday,” Dany tells him.

  Already, she’s cutting up the kid’s blanket with her tiny scissors. She makes a little cut, tears off a strip and, balling it up, jams the thing into place.

  “Can you see me?” she asks, leaning into his face.

  A pair of brown eyes blink back at her.

  “Can you see me, Faraday?” she asks him. “Are you there?”

  Her aunt, meanwhile, has clambered over the console, making her way into the back seat. Dany is on one side of Faraday, and now Aunt Norah is on the other. “Help me,” her aunt says, and together, the two of them ease Faraday forward, so that her aunt can get a look at his back.

  “No exit wound,” she says.

>   “How about a hospital?” Eva asks – her eyes are huge in the rear-view mirror. “You know, like, doctors and machines meant for the prolonging of human life?”

  “They’ll arrest us,” Dany points out. “Any other day, I’d be okay with that.”

  Mac is shaking on the floor of the car – and Dany knows she has to get her sister out of here. “Go up front, little monkey,” she tells the kid. “Be the co-pilot for Eva.”

  The kid wipes her eyes and, after blinking at Dany, nods and climbs into the front seat.

  In the front seat, the kid is still crying, Dany can see that, but her sobs are near-silent things, just the racking of her chest and some tiny hiccups. She’ll be okay. But Dany keeps glancing up front. How much? How much is too much? Where is the line? But if they’ve crossed a line, it was a long time ago. Maybe even years.

  Her aunt, meanwhile, is painting her hands red with ­Faraday’s blood. She’s wadded up another ball of fabric and, pressing it to his shoulder, she’s trying to staunch the unchecked flow.

  Dany looks into Faraday’s face and sees it.

  He’s discovered it for himself now. He’s found that category of pain that Dany once believed had been invented for her alone. But someone has planted a white-hot piece of metal in her teacher’s shoulder and, when Dany looks into his eyes, she can see that it burns, it burns.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 30

  Dany and her aunt spend what feels like an hour getting the bleeding under control, but when Dany glances at Faraday’s watch, it’s only been a few minutes. Already, up in the front seat, Mac is calming down.

  The kid’s eyes, though, aren’t focused, not on anything Dany can see. There are flecks of shattered glass sparkling in the kid’s hair, twinkling in the light of oncoming cars. The kid, she only notices now, no longer has the nose plug on her face. She thinks back. Had the kid even had it on at the prison? But she can’t remember.