by wildbow
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Greg stopped scrolling down the page. The computer screen glowed in his dimly lit bedroom.
“A woman of above average height… or a tall teenager,” he mumbled to himself. “North End, lives in the area. Personality… vicious, smart, tough, a little unhinged?”
The image clicked. A girl he’d had classes with, what felt like ages ago. Taylor Hebert.
He’d thought maybe he had a shot with her, once. Only she’d brushed him off. It had bugged him more than it should have. Why couldn’t it be like it was in the movies and on TV? Why couldn’t the geeks band together?
He thought briefly of GstringGirl, felt a pang of disappointment and a momentary digust. She’d refused the offer to meet up, then had turned down his request for a picture, or a webcam chat. The conclusion had been obvious. A creep. A liar.
The name should have been a giveaway, but he’d held on to a shred of hope that there really was a girl out there more into gaming, coding and finding cool stuff on the web than on being ‘cool’ and going out on Friday nights.
Was Taylor a creep of an entirely different sort? A degenerate villain? An upstanding villain? He could visualize her, sitting in class, tense with anger and frustration, the lines of her face hard as she bottled up a million little indignities and more than a few big ones. It wasn’t that hard to imagine. Was Taylor Skitter?
If he’d figured it out, others would too. Or they would soon enough. Her parents—did they know? They had to. How could they not? Others. Who else might have paid enough attention to Taylor to guess? The girls who had been bullying her? Maybe, maybe not. Now that he’d thought about it, it was impossible to shake the idea. But the bullies maybe didn’t know the real her, didn’t see the person.
There was no way people wouldn’t start connecting the dots. Not with the eyes of the whole city, the whole country on her. Leader of a villain organization that had claimed a town and driven out all comers. Ruthless, standing up against Endbringers and the Slaughterhouse Nine.
He wheeled his computer chair away from the desk. His eyes fixed on the bulletin board to his left. A poster for Ransack took up half of it, and other scraps of paper took up more space. A checklist of unlocks to get for the game, the ad for the computer class he was taking, and in a space all on its own, an information sheet. The remaining summer months would feature special arrangements for classes, to make up for the weeks of classes students had missed in the wake of the Endbringer attack.
The eighth of July. Tomorrow.
Did she plan to go? Was she aware of how much attention people were paying to her?
He could imagine himself in her shoes and could almost guess. To actually have some confidence, after having none for so long? To have a second chance?
In her shoes, he’d do it in a heartbeat.
Interlude 19
“Ballet, horseback riding, modeling classes or violin. Pick one, Emma. One.”
“Or, or, or, maybe I don’t pick any, and…”
“And?” she could hear a weariness in her father’s voice. He checked over his shoulder and then turned the car into a side street. A bag with assorted tubs of ice cream sat on the divider between the pair of them.
“Maybe you give a second thought to moving? There’s really nice places just a little way South, and I’d still be going to the same school, and—”
“Nope.”
“Dad!”
“There’s three jobs I absolutely despise in this world. One is matching socks, the second is ironing, and the third is moving. I can foist the first two off on your mom, but the third is a lifestyle choice. My lifestyle, specifically, is owning the house I’m going to live in until I die.”
Emma frowned, turning to look out the window. She pouted a little, “This place sucks. Brockton Bay sucks.”
“What’s so bad about it?”
“Everything’s falling apart. It’s like… show me any house, and I can point out ten things that are wrong with it.”
“Every house has something wrong with it.”
“Not every house! Like, when I went to Chris’s birthday party? I—”
“Chris?”
“Christine,” Emma injected a note of condescension into her voice, “Last weekend? Or did you forget already?”
“Why not call her Christine? Perfectly nice name.”
“Because androgyne is cool, dad. It’s the thing in modelling. Like, I could never have my hair short, but—” She stopped mid-sentence, answering her phone mid-ring. “Hello?”
“Emma!” The voice on the other end was breathy, excited. There was a babble of other voices in the background. She could imagine the other youths lined up to use the pay phones.
“Taylor,” Emma said, smiling.
“Okay I gotta talk fast because I only have two minutes and I need my other fifty cents to call my dad. We rowed across the lake this morning to this waterfall, only it wasn’t exactly a waterfall, more like a water stair, and we were all taking turns sliding and falling down this set of slick rocks, and Elsa, she’s this girl wearing a bikini, she’s been spending the last three days acting like she’s hot stuff, she slides down the wrong part, and it catches on the strap, right? It doesn’t tear it off, but it stretches, so it doesn’t even fit her anymore…”
Emma laughed, leaning back against her car seat.
It was something of a relief, to hear Taylor getting excited about something, to hear her getting excited over nothing. She’d lost her mother a year ago, and hadn’t bounced back, not entirely. Her smiles not quite as wide, she was a second later to laugh, as if she had to wait, to give herself permission to do it, had to hold back. Before, it had been almost no holds barred. Anything went, however they wanted to amuse themselves, whatever they wanted to talk about. Complete and total openness. Lately there had been too many movies, too many activities and topics of conversation, that Taylor preferred to avoid.
It hadn’t been easy, Emma mused, as Taylor yammered on. Sometimes she’d call, they’d do their customary hanging out, and she’d feel like the time was wasted, afternoons and weekends spent with her best friend that she didn’t enjoy.
Not that Taylor was a wet blanket, but, like, maybe she was a damp blanket?
This? This inane, aimless, stupid, one-sided conversation where she’d said one word? This was the good stuff. It gave her hope that things could get back to normal.
“…and I wish I’d listened to my dad, because he suggested at least ten times that I might want to take more books, and I only brought three, and I’ve read each of them twice already. My…”
Taylor’s voice continued over the phone, but Emma felt her dad’s hand on her wrist, lowered her phone to pay more attention to her surroundings.
The car had stopped in the middle of a narrow one-way street. A dumpster had been shifted to block the end of the alley.
She looked over her shoulder, down the other end of the alley. A white van had stopped there, the taillights glowing. There were a group of twenty-something Asian-Americans approaching, sliding over the hood of the van to get into the alley and approach. Members of the ABB.
This isn’t supposed to happen in broad daylight, Emma thought.
Taylor’s voice was faint, “…I could probably recite this one book word for word for you by the time I get back. Maybe if I asked one of the counselors, I could get more.”
Her heart pounding as hard as it ever had, Emma hung up. Some part of her rationalized it as needing to eliminate the distraction, to focus on the more immediate problem.
“Hold tight,” her father said.
She did, and he put his foot to the gas. The car started rolling toward the dumpster, and the gang members behind them began running after them.
Too slow, she thought.
The car barely tapped the dumpster. It was only after contact had already been made that her dad put his foot on the gas, pushing against the blockade instead of ramming or crashing into it.
The dumpster didn’t bud
ge.
They blocked it. Or they took the wheels off. Or both.
There were too many people behind them for the car to reverse. Not unless her dad wanted to hurt or kill a bunch of people. Even if he did want to hurt them, he couldn’t be sure he’d hit them, and where could he go? There wasn’t any guarantee he’d be able to move the dumpster if he backed up and rammed into it.
“Call the police,” her father said.
She barely registered it.
“Emma! Call the police!”
She fumbled with the phone. Nine-nine…
Why won’t my hands work?
Nine-one-one.
The window to her right shattered. She screamed, then screamed again as hands clutched her hair, hauled her partially out of her seat, until the seatbelt strained against her shoulder and pelvis. He wasn’t strong enough to actually lift her, but it hurt. She wasn’t thinking, only wanted the pain to stop. Her mind was flooded with images of what might happen if the person outside tugged in a slightly different direction and dragged her face against the broken glass of the window. The phone clattered to the floor as she gripped her attacker’s wrists, tried to alleviate the pain of hair tearing free from her scalp.
She put her feet flat on the floor of the car, pushed herself up and away from her seat, almost helping her attacker.
Emma regretted it almost as she did it, but in the panic and pain, she undid the seatbelt.
She’d just wanted the pain to stop, and now there were two sets of hands gripping her, hauling her up and out through the car window. Glass broke away against the fabric of her denim jacket, and she fell hard enough against the pavement that grit was pushed into her skin.
I hope the jacket didn’t get torn. It was so expensive, she thought. It was inane, stupid, almost hilariously out of sync with reality. Delirious.
Her father’s screams of almost mindless panic sounded so far away, as he cried out her name, over and over again.
The gang members who stood above her each wore crimson and pale green. There were other colors, predominantly black, but the constrast of red and green stood out. Some had their faces exposed, others wore kerchiefs over the lower halves of their faces. One had a bandanna folded so it covered one eye. She couldn’t think straight enough to count them.
They had knives, she belatedly noted.
Her father screamed for her again.
Stop, dad. You’re embarassing me. She was more cognizant of how irrational the thought was, this time. Odd, how calm she felt. Except that wasn’t right. Her heart was pounding, she could barely breathe, her thoughts were jumbled and irrational, and yet she somehow felt more together than she might have guessed she would.
She wasn’t hysterical, at least. She was oddly pleased with that, even as she wondered if she might wet herself.
“Turn over, ginger bitch,” one of the girls standing above her said. The order was punctuated by a sharp kick to Emma’s ribs.
She flopped over, face pressing against the hot pavement. Hands took hold of her jacket and pulled it off. The sleeves turned inside out, the half-folded cuffs catching around her hands.
If she’d been taking it off herself, that would have been cause for some rearrangement, to get her hands free. Instead, they pulled. It hurt briefly, and then they had the jacket.
“Here, Yan,” one of the guys said, his accent almost musical. “You owe me.”
“Sweet!” The voice sounded young.
My jacket, Emma thought, plaintive.
“We could send this bitch out of town,” one of the guys said. “Stick her in one of the farms and hold her for a while. She’s got tits, could auction her off.
“Don’t be a moron. White girl goes missing, they look.”
Someone opened the car door and climbed in. There was the sound of the glove compartment opening, of items falling to the floor, where her cell phone was.
For the life of her, she couldn’t remember if she had hit ‘call’ on her cell phone before she’d dropped it. It would mean the difference between her phone sitting on the floor of the car, the numbers displayed on the screen, and authorities using the phone to find her location, sending help.
Someone grabbed her hair, again. This time, there was a tearing sensation, and the tugging abruptly stopped. Her face cracked against the pavement beneath, one cheekbone catching almost all of the impact.
They’d cut her hair, and she’d just bruised her face.
“Face,” she mumbled.
“What’s that, ginger?” the girl standing over her asked. Emma twisted her head around to see the girl holding a length of red hair in her hand.
“Not—not the face, please. I’ll do anything you want, just… not the face.”
It was the delirium that had taken hold of her the second her father had seized her arm. It wasn’t really her, was it? She couldn’t be this stupidly vain when it all came down to the wire. She didn’t want to be that kind of person.
“You’ll do anything?” One of the guys asked. The one with one eye. “Like what?”
She reached for an answer, but her thoughts were little more than white noise.
The answers that did come to mind weren’t possibilities. Not really.
“Then it’s the face after all. Hold her.”
Ten minutes ago, she’d never been afraid. Not really. Stage fright, sure. Fear of not getting the Christmas present she wanted? Sure. But she’d never been afraid.
And before the one-eyed thug spoke that last sentence, she’d never known terror. Had never known what it might be like to be a deer in the moment the wolves set tooth to flesh, the rabbit fleeing the bird of prey. It was like being possessed, and the white noise that had subsumed her her thoughts when she searched for an argument now consumed her brain in entirety. She felt a kind of surge of strength as her fight or flight instincts kicked into gear, and it wasn’t enough.
She was outnumbered, and many of them were stronger than her, even with the adrenaline feeding into her. Two held her arms out to either side, and someone knelt just behind her, knees pressing hard against the side of her head, keeping her from turning it. Looking up, she could see a girl, not much older than her, sporting a nose ring and a startling purple eye shadow. She was wearing Emma’s jacket.
Emma could hear her father screaming, still, and it sounded further away than ever.
One-eye straddled her, planting his left hand on top of her hair, helping to hold her head down to the ground.
He held a knife that was long and thin, the blade no wider across than a finger, tapering to a wicked point. What was it called? A stiletto? He rested the flat of the blade on the tip of her nose.
“Nose,” he murmured. The blade moved to her eye, and she couldn’t move away. She could only shut it, feel it twitching mercilessly as he laid the flat of the blade against her eyelid, “Eye…”
The blade touched her lips, a steel kiss.
“Mouth…”
He used the blade to brush the hair away from the side of her head, hooked an earring with the point of the blade.
“Well, you can hide the ears with the hair,” he said, his voice barely over a whisper. The knife point pulled at the earring until her face contorted in pain. “So maybe I’ll take both. Which will it be?”
She couldn’t process, couldn’t sort out the information in the mist of the terror that gripped her. “Unh?”
Again, the knife traveled over her face, almost gentle as it touched the areas in question. “One eye, the nose, the mouth, or both ears. Yan here thinks she has what it takes to be a member, instead of a common whore, so you choose one of the above, and she goes to town on the part in question, proves her worth.”
“Holy shit, Lao,” the girl with the eye shadow said. She sounded almost gleeful, “That’s fucked up.”
“Pick,” he said, again, as if he hadn’t heard.
Emma blinked tears out of her eyes, looked for an escape, an answer.
And she saw a figure crouched on top of h
er father’s car, dressed in black, with a hood and a cape that fluttered out of sync with the warm sea breeze that flowed from the general direction of the beach. She could see the whites of the girl’s eyes through the eyeholes of what looked like a metal hockey mask.
Help me.
The dark figure didn’t move.
Lao, the one eyed man, reversed the knife in his hands and handed it to the girl with the eye shadow. The girl, for her part, dragged the knife’s point over Emma’s eyelid, a feather touch.
“Pick,” the girl said. “No, wait…”
She shoved the handful of hair she’d cut away into Emma’s mouth. “Eat it, then pick.”
Emma opened her mouth to plead for help, but she couldn’t find the breath. The hair wasn’t it, not really. Some of it was the weight of the young man sitting on her chest, crushing her under his weight. Mostly, it was the fear, like a physical thing.
She thought of Taylor, of all people. Taylor had, in her way, been put to the knife, had had an irreplaceable part of herself carved away. Not a nose or an eye, but a mother. And in the moment she’d found out, a light had gone out inside Emma’s best friend, a vibrancy had faded. She’d ceased to be the same person.
If she’d experienced her first real taste of fear when the gang members attacked the car, her first real taste of terror when Lao proclaimed he’d cut her face, then it was the thought of Taylor, of becoming Taylor, that gripped her with panic, a whole new level of fear.
I won’t become Taylor.
I’m not—
I’m not strong enough to come back from that.
The knife momentarily forgotten, she bucked, thrashed, fought. An inarticulate noise tore out of her throat, a scream, a grunt, and a wail of despair all together, an ugly sound she couldn’t ever have imagined she’d make. Lao was dislodged, one hand freed, and she brought it up, not in self defense, but to attack. Her nails found his one good eye, caught on flesh, dug into the softest tissues she could find and dragged through them, through eyelid and across eyeball, through cheekbone and the meat of his cheek.