Scavenger Hunt

by Michaelbrent Collings

  Noelle spoke, and the sound of her voice stunned Clint almost as much as had the sight of Claire’s desecrated grave. Her voice changed, the coarse tones of lower-class Boston slipping away and being replaced by something much more elevated and elegant. “I’m glad you didn’t want to bury him, Clint. I knew you were a good person.”

  Then she reached behind a nearby tombstone, and withdrew something that Clint’s over-stressed mind literally couldn’t process.

  She held the implement in both hands, arms straight ahead of her. She moved slightly.

  The Taser lurched in her grip, and Clint heard a sound familiar and dreadful. The noise that had marked his entry into the night’s game.

  Buzzzzz.

  Clint jerked in place. Then he fell. A new and much thicker veil dropped over his sight. He saw nothing, then he heard nothing, then he knew and was swept away into darkest dark.

  5

  The darkness rent in bits and pieces, like a threadbare blanket that wore through in some spots before others.

  Clint hid under just one of those blankets. Stared at the girl under the blanket with him. They had stolen – no, just borrowed, really – a flashlight from the emergency kit in Mr. Higgins’ office. And now Clint was reading to her.

  “… were disposed as follows. The lost boys were out looking for Peter, the pirates were out looking for the lost boys, the redskins were out looking for the pirates, and the beasts were out looking for the redskins. They were going round and round the island, but they did not meet….”

  The threadbare strands of memory shifted, and the darkness fell and then rose again and now he was not huddled with Claire under the blankets, not reading in a rare moment of bliss. Now he was staring at the director of the orphanage. The man looked at him with a blank, bland face as Clint tearfully said that something had happened to his Claire. The man shrugged. She had gone to another home, he said. She was lucky to have people who would love her, he said.

  But his eyes were lying.

  Darkness fell, and light came, and now Clint was in the back of a police cruiser. He had stolen out of the home, and had gone to the nearest police station he could find. He had told them of Claire. “She wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye,” he said. “She wouldn’t leave in the middle of the night.” And the desk sergeant nodded kindly and called another man who looked scary and frowned at Clint a lot as he put him in a car and took him back to Eighth Street Children.

  Dark. Light. Dark. Light.

  Getting out of the final home. Not to a new family; he was just eighteen and it was time to leave. Adult, but he still felt like that little child. He still missed his Claire.

  Dark.

  Then, finally, light again. He had caught up to now, it seemed. He saw flashes, just like he had at the beginning, when he woke in bits and pieces in the white room.

  He saw Noelle, grabbing duct tape from behind the same tombstone where she had secreted the Taser she used on Clint. She wrapped his hands and ankles. No rope binding feet to wrists to neck, but she tied the tape so tightly he knew there was no use struggling.

  Darkness.

  Light.

  Flash, flash, flash.

  He thought he saw Claire’s eyes in one of the flashes.

  Then he woke to Do-Good’s screaming. Noelle shoveling dirt into the grave where he still lay helpless. The shrieks turned to whimpers as the dirt covered more and more of the man being buried alive. The whimpers became gagging. The gagging became nothing at all.

  Clint screamed, “Help! Someone help!”

  Noelle put the shovel down. There was still a huge mound of dirt beside her: she hadn’t filled in the hole. Just covered Do-Good. “No one’s coming,” she said to Clint.

  She looked down into the hole. “I can see one eye,” she said, not to Clint, but to Do-Good. “I wonder if you’re finally seeing the mistakes,” she said. “You probably think even now that you’re going to get out.” She shrugged. “That’s what being rich means: you can make anything happen, can’t you?” Her eyes went to someplace far away. “I remember hearing someone say that,” said Noelle quietly, her tones still rounded and rich. She pushed her shovel into the mound. Lifted away a tall pile of dirt, then dropped that final bit of earth onto Do-Good.

  She turned to Clint. Grabbed his ankles and with surprising strength began dragging him down the hill. He struggled, and actually managed to kick free and roll a few helpless feet down the hill. She stared at him with sorrow. “Why do that, Clint? I’m trying to help you.”

  Then she brought out the Taser again – maybe the same one, maybe a different one. Clint didn’t know and it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she pointed it and pulled the trigger and the blanket fell over him again.

  6

  Higgins stares at him.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she? My little sister is dead.”

  “She’s not dead. She was placed with a family.” Higgins opens a file. “You’ll have to be punished for sneaking out.”

  “I snuck out to go to the cops, since no one here cares –”

  “She was placed with a family.” Higgins stares at him over the top of the open file. It is a thick file. It has Clint’s name on it. “Hardly a matter for the police.”

  “She wouldn’t have gone without saying goodbye. It ain’t right. My sister –”

  “She wasn’t your sister. And she’s better off wherever she is.”

  Higgins puts the file down and smiles. The smile does not touch his eyes.

  “Besides, good news comes in pairs, it seems. You have a new placement, too – easier with the two of you apart, as I continue to tell you. And if you go without a fuss, that punishment I mentioned could be… forgotten.” The false smile disappears, replaced by the only sincere look Clint has ever seen grace the man’s face: disdain, like the look a venemous snake would give a mouse caught in its cage. “I’d pack quickly if I were you.”

  In the reality of what happened so long ago, Clint does not say anything. In that reality, Higgins nods and a woman who started working here about a year ago and is usually nice to the kids she calls “her lambs” comes in and glares at Higgins and says, “We have to talk. Soon,” and then takes Clint away.

  That is what happens in the reality of the memory.

  But this is not the reality. And in this version of memory, before the woman can take him away Clint opens his mouth and screams louder and louder and every moment his mouth opens wider to let the scream out and the scream gets louder and louder and his mouth gets wider and splits his head in two and opens up his brain and Higgins reaches in and pulls Claire out of his mind and Clint cannot remember why he is screaming but he still screams and he –

  7

  – didn’t realize for a good five seconds that he wasn’t screaming anymore. He wasn’t in Higgins’ office, either. No office, no woman coming to take him away and help him pack his meager belongings.

  He was, instead, back where this night had started.

  He was in the white room.

  8

  There was the iPad on the wall, dark now, hanging behind its mesh like a closed eye. Clint wondered if Do-Good’s eye had looked like that as it closed. As Noelle dropped that final shovelful of dirt over his last inch of flesh.

  The same water cooler sat on the floor, though the Dixie cups were gone.

  Noelle was in here, and that was as it had been at the beginning, too. Only she wasn’t talking to Clint, coaxing him back to wakefulness. She had her back to him, speaking to a camera that sat on a tripod a few feet away from her. A red light blinked above the long lens of the obviously-expensive equipment. Recording as Noelle stared at it and said, “I’ve shown you how it can be done. Whether you do it is up to you.”

  Clint tried to sit up. He couldn’t. He looked to the side and saw he was still bound. Not with duct tape this time, but padded straps. They didn’t hurt at all, but they left him nearly no room to move.

  As he shifted, Noelle reached forward and
turned off the camera. She turned to him and smiled wanly. “No fun to wake up in a place like this, is it?”

  She picked something up from the floor. A Do-Good mask, covered in dirt and blood. She stared at it for a moment, her expression unreadable. Then, as Clint watched, she dropped the mask. She lifted her hands to her ears, and removed the bangly earrings from her lobes, then ran a hand through her hair. The feathering fell away, revealing something that was still far from high-fashion… but with the tacky earrings gone, the feathers combed away, she looked like a different person. Less trashy. More in line with her voice.

  “I take it you were never a waitress?” said Clint.

  “No. I do own several restaurant chains, though.” She shrugged. “Close enough.”

  She dropped the earrings. They tinkled as they hit the metal floor. Then she reached down again and picked up a knife. Even confined ten feet away, Clint could tell that the six-inch blade was honed to a razor edge.

  “Noelle,” he said, as calmly as he could – which wasn’t calm at all. “Please tell me what’s going on.”

  She smiled, half at him, half at the knife. “How much do you want to know?” she said. Her eyes flicked over, totally focused now on him. “How much do you really want to know.”

  Clint didn’t speak. But he stared at her, his gaze never wavering from hers. All of it was what he knew his eyes were saying.

  She nodded, then looked around. “I woke up in the white room.”

  “We all did.”

  “No, this was a different one. A long time ago. I hurt all over. My chest….” She put a hand on her chest, her eyes gazing upon something that Clint could not hope to see. Then they hardened and she looked around again. “These aren’t exactly the same beds I woke up in. But they’re close.”

  Clint’s brow furrowed. “I don’t underst –”

  “Neither did I. I knew I’d been sick. But I didn’t know more than that. Of course, there were obvious signs of something major. But Dad never talked about it. I knew something was wrong. So I looked. He tried to stop me, but… I’ve always been very good with computers. I can hack into just about anything, from dark web sites to off-the-book ledgers.”

  Clint shook his head. “You’re not making sense.”

  Noelle turned a bright grin on him. “It’s pretty simple. Most things are, when you have enough money. Even things that would kill most people….” Her hand went to her chest again. “Your heart gets sick, deathly ill, and most people would just die. Most people would just end there. But I’ve never been most people. Not my fault; I was just born to it.”

  She approached Clint. As she did, she absently ran the ball of her thumb down the knife. Blood welled instantly, dropping down the side of her hand and in a thin trickle over her wrist and forearm.

  “My dad didn’t want his little girl to die. So he made it happen. He called the right people. The broker was careful, and Dad was always careful, too.” She frowned. “Not careful enough to keep them from me, though.” She brightened again, though Clint now saw deep sorrow below the brightness. A dark patch on her soul. “After he decided to save me, it was a done deal. That’s what being rich does. Things just happen. Dad contacts people, who put him in touch with a man who runs an illicit website that specializes in putting together buyers and sellers.”

  “What does any of that have –”

  “It was Chong, of course.” Noelle laughed. “Daddy paid Chong, Chong paid the man with the goods.”

  “What man with the goods?” Clint asked quietly. “What did Chong buy?”

  “Chong had friends everywhere. Most of them he didn’t know at all. But some of them he did. He knew, for instance, a guy named Two-Teeth. And Two-Teeth knew a guy named David Higgins. And David Higgins would answer Two-Teeth’s calls and send out a child – usually to a woman named Dee-Dee, who was on paper quite the saint.”

  “Dee-Dee?” Clint shook his head. “She was a foster parent?”

  “Sort of. More a waystation. She’d keep the child – or the baby, like you saw tonight – for a day or a week or a month, then the child would be brought by Two-Teeth or one of his men to a point Chong designated.”

  “One of his men,” Clint said, and swallowed. “Like Solomon Black?”

  Noelle nodded. “Him and a few others. And no one the wiser. Except one little boy, and no one was going to listen to him. Not even when he went to the police. Because powerful men can buy anything. Even corrupt cops who –”

  “The cop, the one who got killed tonight,” said Clint. His eyes widened. “I remember. He was the one who took me back to the home.”

  Noelle nodded. “Detective Pattinson’s lies took so many people away. So I thought it appropriate that he end with Solomon Black, and that he end by having his lying mouth blown to pieces.” She paused, then leaned in close and whispered, “Do you want to guess what a human life – a rush order – costs?”

  Clint began weeping. “Two-hundred and fifty thousand,” he said, remembering the piles of bills on the bed, the baby in Dee-Dee’s house. Trying not to think of Claire, and whether she had been taken to that place all those years ago, or if she had just been spirited away for the “rush job” Noelle was talking about.

  “Actually, it’s how much part of a life cost. Not all of it.” She pulled at the neck of her t-shirt. The cotton stretched easily, pulling halfway down her chest, the “v” of the edges not exposing breasts, but more than enough to show the long scar that bisected her chest. “Just a piece,” she said. “Just a little girl’s heart.”

  Clint wanted to scream. For a moment he thought about the dream scream, the one that opened his mind and allowed Higgins to pluck away the very memory of Claire. Instead he said, “Why would you do all this?”

  Noelle smiled, and unlike Higgins’ lying grins, her smile was sincere. “Don’t cry over any of them. Everyone who died was part of what happened to your sister.”

  “So why not just kill them? Why do this to us? To me? What did I do to you?”

  Noelle touched her watch. The iPad on the wall blinked to life, and Clint blanched, part of him expecting to see Do-Good staring out at him. Instead, a series of vignettes appeared. The group of contestants running from the white room. The run across street after street. The cop’s face disintegrating along with Solomon’s hand and wrist as the explosive there went off. Two-Teeth and Chong, disappearing in a flash of light and smoke and spattered flesh.

  All of it.

  “Cameras along our routes, and secreted in some of the houses, caught everything we did. Recorded it all.”

  Clint still didn’t understand. “Why?”

  “Because you weren’t the only one they did it to. Claire wasn’t the only one taken. Even after the Eighth Street Children closed, it just reopened. Different name, different management.”

  Clint understood instantly. “Elena.”

  “She just moved into the space that Higgins had occupied. He is dead, by the way.”

  Clint jerked in place. “How?” he asked, morbid curiosity momentarily overtaking his fear.

  “Elena did it, years ago. I wish she hadn’t. I wish he’d gotten something better. Something more befitting.” She shrugged, a “what’s a girl gonna do?” gesture.

  “And Do-Good?”

  “Thaddeus ‘Tad’ Sterling. Billionaire, mover of mountains. I just called him Dad.” She chuckled. “He was the easiest to grab, and the easiest to manipulate.”

  “Your father? And what, he just went along with a plan that ended in his death.”

  “No. But shoot a man in the knee, then work him over with brass knuckles for a few minutes before aiming the gun at his other knee; then ask him to read a script, and believe me, he reads.”

  Clint remembered the jittery, halting way Do-Good had spoken. He remembered, too, the way Do-Good had laughed. An insane laugh? Or pain as he was made to deliver lines that would be given at points in a timeline crafted by his daughter?

  He remembered, too, Chong attacking
the iPad in the white room. The iPad glitching – only was it a glitch, or a change to a different video file?

  He remembered the strange way Do-Good flinched. And now Clint thought: Not flinching from Chong. From his daughter. From Noelle.

  And then Do-Good whispering, “Stop. Please just stop! Stop, stop, STOP!”

  Then another glitch on the screen, and Do-Good saying, “When I give an order, I expect it to be obeyed.” And finally, toward the end: “The nature of the game starts to change a tad at this point.” And Do-Good laughed his pained laugh and said, “Did you do that on purpose?” before clearing his throat and saying, “Right. Back to the script. Where was I?”

  Clint shook his head, stunned. “All him talking to you? Recorded?”

  Noelle nodded and put her hand in her pocket, withdrawing a slim keypad. “And it wasn’t hard to key in instructions, to activate audio and video. Even to trigger explosions when it was time for the game to end for certain people.” As she spoke, Clint remembered all the times her hands had been in her pockets. Had it been every time Do-Good spoke? Every time someone died?

  He thought it had.

  Then he shook his head. “No,” he said, talking mostly to himself. “He spoke to us. He didn’t just say things in a vacuum, he answered the things we said.”

  “The things we said, or the things I said?” asked Noelle. She laughed at the expression on his face. “I thought it would be a bit less… organic to just have him talking at us, so of course I prerecorded parts that required a bit of back and forth. Which was easy since I had written the dialogue, so I knew when the pauses came and how to answer them.”

  Clint gaped at her. “And you did this to your own father.”

  Noelle nodded, then laughed long and hard. “But want to hear the fun part? I know it’s not a big thing, just a detail, but I was rather proud of it.” She leaned in toward him again and said, “Who do you think dug the hole he was buried in?”