Scavenger Hunt

by Michaelbrent Collings

  She lobbied for – and got – a name change as soon as possible after getting the job. Again, no one much protested. There was a board of directors, but their titles were more vanity than reality, and they deferred almost every major decision to Elena. She was, after all, the one who had come on at just the right time to save the place. She had taken over from the disgraced previous director, and had overseen a sudden uptick in anonymous donations.

  The name “Eighth Street Children” had overtones of what she came to think of as Higginism, and she wanted none of that. “St. Jerome’s” was a much better name. The board did balk a bit at the suggestion, worried that people might misconstrue the home as some kind of religious haven, but Elena reassured them. St. Jerome was a patron saint of orphans, but she told them that was just a helpful branding, and that none of the logos or other identifiers would give the slightest hint of religion.

  Only a small fib there. Elena was a good Catholic, and she liked the idea of working for the saint who had himself cared so selflessly for so many orphans, just like Elena herself.

  That was years back, and she had thought of Eighth Street Children not a single time since. She was busy with St. Jerome’s, managing finances and overseeing “donations” that came in every six months or so. Sometimes it was as far as a year between the times when she got a list of needs and looked at her children – her lambs, as she came to think of them – to see if there were any who fit the bill.

  There almost always was.

  Still, because she was careful, the lean times did come. And they had come again in the last month or so. She couldn’t dictate demand, only supply. Even so, she felt more and more the urge – the need – to reach out and see if there was anything she could do. She knew the lambs who disappeared from her flock were lost, but she continued to console herself with the knowledge that they were going to a greater reward, in service of others.

  So she sat at her computer – still in the same office as before, because she was a person who had not the ego of someone like Mr. David Higgins, and so had not the need for a large office at the corner of the building – and mused. Reaching out was dangerous. It wasn’t something she liked doing, not only because it was a breach of procedure, but because the anonymous broker at the other end of the chain disliked it and had told her that doing such things opened them both up to needless risk.

  And yet… the ledger sheet was dripping with red. It had been over a year since the last “donation.” St. Jerome’s was on the verge of having to make some very hard choices, and that meant the directors were breathing down Elena’s neck. Sometimes it bothered her that she relied so much on her “extra” work. She passed money to the people who volunteered for foster work, knowing that they would never have to take care of a child and could simply pocket the money sent by the state and by Elena herself in return for a few days or weeks of little or no work followed by a cursory investigation by police and social workers who saw so much in the way of runaways that they hardly blinked at the event.

  So she finally opened her email and typed in the gmail account she’d been given. A simple query, and one she didn’t really expect an answer to: “Any needs?”

  She clicked over to the accounting reports. She knew what they said, but couldn’t help looking. The reports showed a total available funding in the amount of $666.17. She couldn’t help thinking of the first part of the number as a bad omen, and even murmured, “Bad luck.”

  A low knock sounded at the office door and Lettie walked in. She had taken over Elena’s old job when Elena rose to the throne, as it were. She was bright – bright enough that she somehow recognized, or maybe just intuited, that there was something strange about the donations that popped up every once in a while. Tens of thousands of dollars, and St. Jerome’s would have bought itself another few hours of life.

  She figured it out. And Elena worried she might rush to the police – perhaps even to the overly-earnest Detective Ehlers and his partner, the hard-eyed Detective Clay – but Lettie did no such thing. She didn’t even ask for much of a cut, all things considered.

  Now she stared at Elena, lips pursed as she finally said, “You look over the figures yet?”

  “Yeah,” said Elena. She pursed her own lips as she looked at the number again. “Bad luck.”

  “Hopefully your benefactor shows up,” said Lettie. Her eyes were sad, as though the fate of St. Jerome’s were all that mattered to her, even though Elena knew the younger woman had been eyeing a new car and probably needed a bit more cash to make it happen.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” said Elena. “Besides, we sent the last one out just a few weeks ago.”

  “Well, something’s got to happen,” said Lettie, and left the room. “The last one just got us current, and we’re already behind again.”

  The door clicked as it shut behind her, and Elena realized abruptly that she couldn’t remember the last one’s face, or age, or anything else about the child. She couldn’t remember any of them, really.

  Not my job. I don’t think of the lost lambs, I think of the ones who are saved.

  And that was as it should be. She was saving so many, and surely she would be allowed to turn her mind from those who had sacrificed for the greater good.

  Shouldn’t she?

  For a moment she didn’t know. For a moment a dormant part of her mind started to claw out of the box Elena usually kept it in, and scream for attention.

  (What are you doing?)

  Then the thought fell away as Elena’s computer beeped to announce an incoming email.

  The sender was blocked, as always. But the message was easy enough to discern: “You’re in luck.”

  As always, there was a website link – a long series of numbers and letters that Elena knew would lead nowhere at all if typed into a web browser like Explorer or Chrome.

  She opened instead the TOR web browser she had been instructed on soon after taking over – in every aspect – for David. She hadn’t liked the thought of going onto the dark web at first, and the first few visits had sent her into a cold sweat until she realized that most of the things on the dark web were actually quite banal, boring. Mostly it seemed to be people who were paranoid about government or big business looking over their shoulder, so ran to the dark web as the last bastion of privacy.

  She copied the address into the TOR browser, and it opened to a website she had grown to know quite well: Portobello Road. The site she had been guided to showed a list of needed items, along with the stats that would be required to fill them.

  Elena opened up the roster of current lambs. She scrolled through it, marking each one internally as either a “pass” or a “possible.”

  The door clicked. Opened. Elena didn’t look away from her work. She just said, “Good news, I –”

  Then there was a sound like a wasp, and pain erupted from a central point in her chest. She had an instant to see what looked like wires trailing off her, then the pain intensified, the buzzzz sound grew… and then nothing at all until the white room.

  6

  As bad as waking up in the white room had been, nearly as bad was the feeling that she had seen several of the people she woke up with. Solomon Black and Clint Walker both looked familiar, and she wondered how she knew them. Solomon remained an enigma, right up to the point where she killed him. A sad moment, that, but necessary. She had a baby in her arms, and had to get moving or she might die… and who would take care of the baby then? Who would take care of all her lambs?

  So he died, and she never knew why she felt a familiarity – and more than a little dread – every time she looked at him.

  As for Clint – he had been at Eighth Street? And called it a hellhole?

  Surely he couldn’t have been referring to her Eighth Street Children. Even when Higgins had been in charge, she hadn’t thought of it in such stark, ugly terms. Unless…

  Of course! He must have been there before her arrival. Back in the bad ol’ days, when money had been much
tighter before her unique and creative way of raising funds to care for the lambs. Of course, he would have had to have been quite young. A baby, even.

  There weren’t many of those passing through the home. But there had been a few through the years. So he must have been one of them.

  But how would he remember it as a hellhole?

  She ignored that thought; told herself that he must be remembering a different place, or that he must be misremembering in the first place, or that he must be wrong in general.

  The thoughts calmed her. She was a good shepherd, watching after lost lambs. She was a good person, taking care of people too young and innocent to take care of themselves. Nor did she feel bad that she didn’t remember him; how could she be expected to remember all the faces of all the children she had helped over the years?

  Not that any of that was much consolation. Not now, stumbling along with the last remains of Chong and Two-Teeth still drying on her clothes; on her hands and arms and even her face. Not now, running through dark streets, diving behind mailboxes and parked cars in order to avoid the police cruisers that hurtled down the street with sirens blaring and lights blazing.

  Not now, wondering if all she had done and all she had made of herself was to come to nothing.

  The latest in a long line of police cars roared past. She stood as soon as it was gone and continued running. Noelle and Clint were right at her side, all of them moving as quickly as they could, all of them knowing that they had to get as far from Heart Street as possible, knowing that to be caught by the police was against Mr. Do-Good’s explicit instructions.

  The communicator on her wrist beeped. “Do-Good says, TURN RIGHT!” She did. Another tone a moment later, more of Do-Good’s instructions as he said, “Do-Good says, TURN LEFT!”

  She followed the prompts, as did her fellow players. She couldn’t think of them as anything other than that: players. Not contestants – they weren’t competing against anyone that she could see, other than Mr. Do-Good’s rules and instructions. They weren’t survivors, either – that would imply that they, that she, might not make it through this. And she could not accept that as a possibility. Not at all. There was too much depending on her; too many children, too many lambs.

  Another beep. Another. Another. Then a quick succession of rights and lefts that ended with the three of them standing in an alley.

  She stared at the device on her wrist. “I don’t understand,” she murmured.

  She had expected another house. Somewhere else to perform some vile act, or to watch someone else be maimed or killed. Instead, they were around the side of a crummy bank.

  She waited.

  “What now?” said Clint.

  He wasn’t talking to anyone in particular, but Noelle answered. She shoved her hands in her pockets – and Elena noticed how much cleaner Noelle had come through the explosion, and thought how very unfair that was – then said, “Maybe we –”

  A voice cut her off. Elena started, jumping a full foot to one side, her head whipping back and forth as she looked around in a panic. But it was just Do-Good, still speaking from wherever he was hiding, still pushing them side to side like a toddler playing with toys he intended to break when finished with them.

  “The nature of the game starts to change a tad at this point.” Mr. Do-Good laughed, a warbling, nearly pained laugh. “Did you do that on purpose?”

  Elena would have thought it impossible for the night to get any stranger or more terrifying. But the sound of that laugh pushed her fear to yet another new level. Mr. Do-Good had sounded cracked from the beginning, like the words he said were a constant fight with something inside him. Now, though, he sounded even worse.

  “He’s losing it,” Clint whispered to Noelle.

  Noelle obviously agreed, but she shook her head and motioned for him to shut up and listen.

  Mr. Do-Good cleared his throat. “Right. Back to the script. Where was I?” Another throat clear. “Oh, yes: the game starts to change now, and this challenge is also a bit more complicated, so I’m going to walk you through it.” He paused, cleared his throat once more, then muttered under his breath. Another unpleasant noise, one that reminded her of some of the kids in the home. They had classes, of course – one of the things the “donations” bought was excellent teachers for the lambs – and once in a while she sat in one to monitor the quality of instruction. A lot of the children were understandably behind in their schoolwork; often she heard even kids in their mid-teens sounding out the words in a story they were supposed to read.

  Mr. Do-Good sounded like that now. Like he was reading from a script of his own writing, but that was still unfamiliar. He was fragmenting; breaking apart as they listened.

  “Walk you through it,” he said again, followed it with another throat clear, then said, “Elena, there’s a wood pallet nearby. Grab what’s beneath it.”

  She cast her eyes about automatically, unsure what this change in the game would mean. The pallet was right there, same as you could find in dozens if not hundreds of Los Angeles alleys. “Go ahead, I’ll wait,” said Mr. Do-Good. Elena didn’t move, though. Terror had rooted her to the spot. “Nothing’s going to bite you,” he added.

  Elena looked at Clint and Noelle. Both stared back at her, eyes wide and unsure, obviously trying to figure out what Mr. Do-Good was about to do and how to keep it from killing them all.

  Elena raised her eyebrows, a silent plea for aid. She didn’t know what she expected Clint or Noelle to do, but hoped for something.

  Clint shook his head.

  Noelle did the same, her head whipping back and forth so her tragically-nineties feathered hair was a blur around her.

  Elena sighed. She went to the pallet and moved it aside. Underneath it lay three large plastic sleeves. She knew what they were, even without the words “AFTER-HOURS DEPOSIT” stenciled in large letters on one side.

  Elena picked them up, holding them to show the others.

  “Is the money supposed to go in there?” asked Noelle.

  For a moment Elena didn’t understand. What money?

  Then she realized that she was still holding the backpack full of the money they had taken from Two-Teeth. She hadn’t even realized it was there, but now she remembered it. Remembered hitching it up on her shoulders, the motion automatic and smooth as she ran and walked and dove for cover.

  She shrugged the backpack off, even as Mr. Do-Good’s voice came from her wrist: “Very good, Noelle! Money in the deposit sleeves, if you please, Elena!”

  Elena started pulling the money from the pack, then cramming it into the bags. There was a lot of money, and she had to really shove to get it all in.

  She actually thought about trying to swipe a few bills. Not much, but any little bit would help her kids…

  And who will help them if you’re gone? Who will raise the money to protect the ones who are left?

  She pushed the last few bills into the last bag. Each bag had a Ziploc-style seal, and she ran her fingers along the seams, hearing the subtle snap as the bags locked closed.

  “What now?” she asked.

  Mr. Do-Good answered so quickly it was like he had been waiting, breathless with anticipation, for just that question. “Now for the fun, Elena. The game is changing a bit. You have a choice between two tasks.”

  “What are they?” she asked quietly. Afraid, but needing to know.

  “Drop the money in the slot and walk away, leaving your two companions to fend for themselves, or you can keep the money and the three of you will keep playing together.”

  Clint stepped forward, his expression cold, obviously about to tell Elena she couldn’t go; couldn’t leave them to the game and to Mr. Do-Good’s continued tortures.

  Elena almost told him not to worry. After all, Mr. Do-Good said she could keep the money if she kept playing. That was a lot of cash, and it would help many of her lambs. It would mean more danger for her, but…

  But isn’t that what I expect of those children who
sacrifice themselves so that their friends may live better, live longer, live well?

  For a moment, she wavered. She might die. But the children would have –

  Nothing. They would have nothing. Even if Mr. Do-Good is willing to do what he says, what will you have to risk, Elena? What if you die? Who will take care of them?

  Clint took another step in Elena’s direction. He reached for her. She didn’t know what he would do if he grabbed her, but she could see the anger in his eyes.

  And for a moment – just a moment – she felt like she could place him. She felt like she had seen him before. Like he was one of the lambs.

  Then the moment fled as Noelle pointed to Clint’s collar, which had begun to flash as he approached Elena. “You want to get in the way of Mr. Do-Good’s game?” she asked.

  Clint paused, looking from Elena to Noelle and back again. He looked around, obviously trying to spot how it was that Mr. Do-Good could see them; how he knew so much.

  Elena felt an insane urge to yell, “Cameras, kid! You can hide a camera anywhere. Believe me, I know! Dave Higgins knows. Everyone knows!”

  Instead, she pulled away from Clint. Held the three packets full of money close to her chest.

  Clint stopped reaching for her. He said, “We get through this, I’m going to kill Do-Good,” but the way he looked at her, Elena suspected he wanted to do the same to her.

  “Let’s focus on the ‘getting through this’ part first,” said Noelle. Then she switched her gaze to Elena. Shoved her hands in her pockets but for once the quiet, fearful girl didn’t look away.

  A long moment stretched out, a moment that seemed to make the air between Elena and the others heavy and dangerous. She worried that Clint would come forward again, would grab at her… and this time, he wouldn’t care about the consequences.

  Her watch beeped. She looked at it. Mr. Do-Good’s electronic smiley face spun on its axis as a countdown started.

  0:30…

  0:29…

  Elena looked at Clint and Noelle, feeling the familiar pain. The ache in her heart that came every time a sacrifice was necessary. The knowledge that she was helping more – many more – than she harmed didn’t mean she felt no pain. She knew that the piper had to be paid, but handing over the payment was still a trauma for her.