Unleashed

by Carolyn O'Doherty

  I turn in a full circle, searching for a likely spot. People fill the sidewalk and cars clog the streets. No hidden corner offers shelter.

  Jack drops to his hands and knees and peers under the truck. “How about under there?”

  I squat down next to him. The truck offers less than a foot of space between it and the pavement. “We can’t fit there.”

  “Sure we can.” Jack starts squirming his way forward. “If you don’t want to, you can go back to the stairs and wait there.”

  I consider Jack’s offer. Going back would certainly make me less tense than crouching under an idling truck. It would also mean I was only an accessory to a robbery, rather than the thief. But going back means trusting Jack to be discreet, and as I watch his feet disappear, I realize how much I don’t.

  The asphalt bites into my hands. Knobby metal things attached to the bottom of the truck scrape my back as I crawl forward. There isn’t really room for two. I have to scrunch myself against Jack to make sure our arms and legs are all hidden.

  “Gee, Alex.” Jack grins. “I never knew you liked me that way.”

  “Shut up,” I say. I’m crammed so close to Jack I’m practically lying on top of him. “Let’s get this over with.”

  With the return of time comes the chug of an engine way too close to my head. Exhaust, merely a faint whiff when frozen, turns into a heady stench now that the air is moving. The effort to not cough makes me gag.

  “Can you see anything?” I whisper into Jack’s neck, realizing too late that I haven’t positioned myself in a way that lets me see the security guard’s feet.

  “A little,” Jack says. A car roars past us, followed by another. The traffic light on the corner must have turned green. I try to appreciate the way the cars shield us from passersby, rather than imagining myself getting squished under each passing tire.

  There’s a rattle from the rear of the truck, followed by a metallic bang somewhere over our heads. My ears are still ringing when the sound abruptly stops.

  “That’s it,” Jack says. He slides away from me and out into the frozen traffic. I wriggle myself over to the sidewalk and meet him at the back of the truck, picking gravel out of my palms as I walk.

  One of the truck’s back doors is wide open. The security guard is leaning forward, one hand still resting on the trolley he’d slammed down over our heads. I peer past his shoulder. Three metal racks are bolted on each side of the truck’s interior. On the bottom shelves lie neat stacks of plastic trays like the ones the guard loaded into the ATM. Above them are piles of bags—big gray things with locks holding them closed at the neck, as well as slim, purse-like ones with no protection other than zippers across the top. All, presumably, hold money. Lots of money.

  “Wow,” I say.

  “Yeah,” Jack agrees. He’s already stepping up on the truck’s bumper, moving carefully so that he doesn’t nudge the guard. I pull on the gloves I wore at Barnard’s and climb up beside him.

  “Let’s choose the ones that are easiest to open,” I say. “And don’t touch anything without covering your hands. We don’t want to leave any fingerprints.”

  “We can’t take those, then.” Jack points toward one of the large bags that’s cinched at the top with a thick wire coil and a heavy lock.

  “How about some of these?” I pick up one of the purse-like pouches. It’s blue vinyl, with a zipper running the length of one side. I grab the slim metal tab and slide it open. Inside is a tidy one-inch stack of bills. I run a finger over the pile, rifling the edges to release the musty smell of dollars. For all the talking we’d done about stealing cash, I hadn’t quite imagined what it would actually be like to do it. I thought I’d feel guilty or scared, but here in the perfect silence of a frozen world, all I feel is powerful. “Who do you think these belong to?”

  “Some store,” Jack says, covering his hands with his T-shirt so he can open a pouch. “They probably requested cash from the bank and it’s safer to get it delivered than to carry all this yourself.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “much safer.” Our eyes meet, and Jack and I both start laughing. Once started, I can’t stop. I laugh so hard tears fill my eyes. Jack laughs so hard he has to lean against the racks for support.

  “Stop,” he gasps. “I can’t concentrate. This would be a terrible place to lose the freeze.”

  “It would,” I agree, still giggling. “Here, this’ll help.” I take off one of my gloves and place my hand against the bare skin on his neck. Jack’s shoulders straighten. It’s not my freeze, so I can’t feel it, but I know my own time skills are surging into him, strengthening his hold.

  “Thanks,” Jack says. We stand there a minute, letting our giddiness subside and Jack’s power stabilize.

  “How much money should we take?” I ask him.

  Jack fans the cash in the pouch he’s still holding. “There’s probably two, three grand in this one. What if we take three of them? That should last a while.”

  “OK.” I’ve never had more than twenty dollars, saved up from months of the tiny allowance the Center gives each spinner, and now I’m holding maybe five thousand? Fifty thousand? It hardly matters how much, since we can so easily get more.

  Jack and I empty the money out of three pouches, shoving the bills into our pockets and then lining our shoes when we run out of space. I even tuck a few stacks in my bra.

  “Next time,” I say, using my T-shirt to give the pouches Jack touched a precautionary wipe before putting them back, “you should wear gloves.”

  “You think the police have our prints?” Jack asks.

  “I’m wanted for murder, remember?” Rather than worry me, this reminder only sparks a new round of giggles. Jack starts to smile, then winces and touches a hand to his forehead. My merriment fades. Jack has frozen time a lot this morning. We need to go.

  * * *

  We spend the rest of the morning shopping. First, we buy two backpacks and a pair of wallets. Jack gets more coffee while I lock myself in a restroom and distribute our money among the wallets and inner pockets of the packs. We buy credit for the cell phones I’d charged last night and spend an hour trying to figure out the phones’ features. Jack manages to link to the internet and find a nearby music store, where he promptly drags me so he can buy a guitar. Finally, we pick out new clothes. All the stuff we have is dirty, and buying new is easier than doing laundry. Neither of us checks the price tags. Jack buys himself a vintage leather jacket. After discovering that lots of money does not make it any easier to find a pair of jeans that fit, I pick out an absurdly overpriced cashmere coat instead. Paying for all our acquisitions with cash—even cash acquired under such dubious circumstances—makes me much happier than just taking them.

  At noon, we get sandwiches, reload our already depleted phones, and grab a bus heading back to the squat. Even with Jack, I don’t like taking the bus, especially since he insists on picking out chords on his new toy, which makes everyone stare at us. I shrink down in my seat and try not to think about how right now, while we’re moving, I can’t stop time and escape. As I proved in my car wreck, freezing time in a moving vehicle stops everything except my own forward momentum.

  “Hey, Alex,” Jack says, when we finally escape the bus. “Check this out. It will make you less of a spaz about freezing.” Jack hands me the crumpled newspaper he’d picked up at the coffee shop.

  I transfer all my shopping bags to one hand so I can open the wrinkled pages. It’s the kind of paper sold near checkout counters that features pictures of three-headed alligators and rumors about which celebrities are drug addicts. Yuki used to beg Charlie for a copy whenever he brought one in for his shift.

  “Is this what I’m looking for?” I point to a headline that screams: Mideast’s Spinner Population out of Control: The Real Reason We Bombed Iraq!

  Jack looks over my shoulder. “Not that one. Top of page three.”

>   I flip the pages, folding the sheets back so they don’t flutter. The headline on this page reads:

  Man’s Bicycle Stolen While He Was Riding It!

  Sept 13 Harry Roades wasn’t expecting anything unusual. He was heading home after his shift at Bagel Mania. He’d stopped for lunch with some friends, then grabbed his bike and started pedaling.

  “It was a regular day,” Roades said. “I was just riding up the street, listening to my music and then wham! Suddenly I’m sitting on the sidewalk. It was really weird. One minute I’m riding, next I’m sitting.”

  Eyewitness Lucas Emerson confirms the story.

  “I was napping in a doorway when this guy starts screaming. I open my eyes and he’s sitting there beside the wall yelling his head off. I know he wasn’t there a few minutes ago ’cause I’m a real light sleeper.”

  Roades admits he had a beer with lunch but points out that if he’d been so drunk he’d blacked out he’d have had bruises from the fall.

  “At least it was the bike that disappeared and not me,” Roades said. “My friend works at the hospital and they said a girl disappeared from there around the same time. Must be some kind of time warp or something.”

  Emerson offered an eerier explanation.

  “I think it’s aliens. I’ve seen them around here before. They’re invisible, but they have a kind of blue aura. Things were definitely bluer than normal when I woke up.”

  I close the paper. “I took that bike. When I ran away from the hospital. I’m also the girl who disappeared.”

  Jack nods. “I know.”

  “This story sounds ridiculous. Aliens?”

  “That’s the point.” We cross Elmer’s empty parking lot and check that no one is looking before slipping around to the back of the building. The blackberry bushes welcome us with their usual thorny embrace.

  “What we can do,” Jack says, “is so impossible no one believes it. So if anybody sees us disappear, they’ll just shake their heads and move on. It’s either that or tell someone and end up in there.” He points at the paper in my hand.

  “I guess.”

  Jack picks a particularly aggressive blackberry branch off his pant leg and takes my arm. “Can you freeze? I’m tired.”

  I nod, still thinking about the article. Is Jack right? Are there spinner-related events happening every day that the Norms just dismiss? The world stills as I stop time. Jack puts down his guitar and reaches for the ladder at the bottom of the fire escape. Metal screeches in protest, sprinkling us with rust flakes as the ladder slides toward us.

  “Even so.” I hand all our stuff to Jack before climbing up after him. “If we start disappearing too obviously, they’ll eventually have to believe it.”

  “Makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it.” Jack yanks up the ladder and wipes paint chips from his fingers. “You think all the alien abduction stories are really about spinners? Or what about the ones where people spontaneously burst into flames?”

  We clatter up the stairs. “How many spinners do you think there are out there?” I ask. “Not living in Centers, I mean.”

  “Good question.” Jack pushes the squat’s door open and we walk in together.

  The musty air of the squat settles around us, warm and slightly rotten. I follow Jack through the unnatural quiet toward KJ’s corner, weighed down with questions and packages. We can’t be the only spinners in the world who managed to escape. If there were no free spinners, the government wouldn’t have passed new banking guidelines that replaced potentially rewindable PIN codes with fingerprint ID. What are they like, the free spinners? Do they hide their powers? Or have they found ways to use them without getting caught? If we find some, would they help us?

  We turn the corner into KJ’s room. The sight of him squeezes my heart. I’ve been so distracted, I forgot to melt time, so the scene before me is spread out in a gut-wrenching tableau. Sweat flattens KJ’s dark hair against his forehead, and his nose stands out sharply over sunken cheeks. Shannon kneels with her usual devotion by his side. KJ’s arm lies outstretched, freed from the blankets. The freeze seems to have caught Shannon in the act of washing it, or tucking it back in for warmth. It’s hard to tell, since all I can see of her is her back. Her braid droops across the red cotton of her sweater like a wilted branch. A familiar wave of guilt rushes through me.

  I release time with a heavy sigh. “Hey, Shannon.”

  She whips around. When she sees us, her face turns almost as sickly as KJ’s.

  “It’s just us,” Jack says.

  “Sorry,” I add, “we didn’t mean to…” I stop. Shannon has shoved her arms behind her in an obvious effort to block our view of whatever she’s holding. I slide the backpack off my shoulders and let it hit the floor with a thump. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” Shannon says, too quickly.

  I cross the space between us in three steps and yank Shannon’s hands out in front of her. In one, she holds a swab of cotton, the white puff wet with the stink of alcohol. In her other hand, she holds an empty syringe.

  09

  A SURGE OF DIZZINESS DARKENS MY VISION.

  “What are you doing?” I repeat.

  Shannon lifts her face. All the nervousness she’d shown when we walked in has vanished, replaced by a desperate defiance. She lifts the syringe in a gesture of triumph.

  “I’m saving him.”

  Cold settles against the back of my neck, an icy patch that inches its way along my spine. I drop to my knees beside Shannon, nearly knocking over the bottle I knew I would find. I snatch it up and stare at the black letters stamped on the label, begging them not to spell the one word I can’t bear to read: Aclisote.

  “You idiot,” I say.

  Shannon makes a grab for the bottle. I jump to my feet, raising the Aclisote out of her reach.

  “Give it to me.” Shannon lunges. I whirl away from her, leaping over KJ to get to the window. “No!” Shannon shrieks. “I need that.” Her fingers close on my new coat, jerking me backward.

  “Let me go!”

  Jack dives across the room, and I hear Shannon grunt as he yanks her away from me. The tension on my coat abruptly loosens.

  Dust billows around me as I clamber over a pile of rotting boxes to reach the window. Wrenching it open as wide as I can, I fling the bottle of Aclisote outside. Shannon screams. The clear plastic sails over a line of parked cars and hits the street below with a distant pop.

  “You’ll kill him,” Shannon sobs. I turn around. Jack has both arms locked around her waist, although she’s no longer fighting him. She hangs limply in his grasp, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “No,” I say. The coldness tracing my spine sinks deeper, filling my whole body with ice. “You’re the one who’s killing him. How much Aclisote have you been feeding him?”

  “Enough to keep him alive.”

  “Jesus,” Jack says. “No wonder KJ’s not getting better.”

  “Shannon.” Terror makes it hard for me to form words. I’m shaking as I face her over KJ’s inert body. “Tell me everything. I want dosages, frequency.”

  Shannon pushes herself free from Jack. Her lips are trembling, but her voice is firm.

  “I told you. I’ve never tended anyone this sick by myself. All I know is that the staff increases your dosage. KJ was getting five and a half cc’s twice a day for the last six months, so I’ve been giving him six.”

  I force my brain to calculate. I got sick after Dr. Barnard raised my dosage to five cc’s, but KJ outweighs me by at least forty pounds, so he can handle more, right? Then again, I have naturally higher chronotin levels than he does. How much Aclisote does it take to kill someone? If Shannon had given him his usual dosage, would he have recovered by now? Or did the initial blast Barnard forced on him before we escaped weaken him so much that any amount after that is fatal?

&n
bsp; “He won’t be getting any more now,” I say.

  “Then he’s going to die!” Shannon yells. “We both will.”

  “He won’t,” I say. “Look at me. Look at Jack. We’re fine.”

  “You’re not fine,” Shannon says. “You’re freaks. You freeze time and move things around. It’s not supposed to be that way.”

  “Yes, it is,” Jack says. “You’ll see how natural it feels when it happens to you.”

  Shannon ignores him.

  “Alex,” she begs. “We have to get more Aclisote. Even if you’re right, KJ’s not strong enough to take a shock to his system. We need to wean him off it slowly.”

  I look down at the boy lying at our feet. Even all our shouting has failed to rouse him. What if KJ is too weak to recover? Years ago, in the Center, we all watched a video about heroin addiction, meant to teach us about the signs we might see in our police work. Former users talked about quitting, and one said withdrawal felt like the lowest circle of hell. Another said she felt like she had the flu for months after she quit, her body weak and shaky, her skin sensitive to touch. Aclisote isn’t addictive, but what if the effects of stopping it are similar for someone this sick? In the state KJ is in, he’d never survive a cold, much less the flu.

  “If you won’t take him back,” Shannon coaxes, “at least go and get more Aclisote. I won’t hide what I’m doing anymore. We’ll decide on a dosage together.”

  My hands are coated with dust from the window. I rub my palms on the thighs of my jeans, leaving behind streaks of dirt. What if weaning him slowly is the best way to save him? What if KJ dies because of my decisions?

  A visceral memory of the night we kissed comes back to me, and for an instant, I can taste his lips against mine, hear the rumble of his voice, and feel the brush of his breath against my skin. It’s like KJ himself stands beside me. Not the KJ stretched like a gray lump under dirty blankets, but the KJ who smells like spring grass and wants to know all about my day. That KJ believed in me. He’d wanted to stop taking Aclisote then. He’d still want to now, if he could choose.