“Not anymore,” Q said. “Never again.”
They started in the basement of their Turret. At first, some of the girls ran from what K and Q did. But the bloodletting revealed more than the colors running through the veins of the Parenthood staff; with each office they entered, the Letter Girls saw more and more evidence of the lies K, B, and Q were convinced of. A thing called a “Burt Report” removed more doubt. And the paltry marker for their sister J (in the Corner!) took the rest.
With the other Letter Girls on board, the job of killing the adults went much faster. But it wasn’t without its emotional repercussions.
Crying, Q and P slit the throats of two women who worked in a room labeled PRINTING. In ACCOUNTING, F and H held down a much older woman as B stabbed her repeatedly in the chest. A whistling janitor was clubbed in the nose by a shrieking R. Z strangled a nurse with her bare hands. Then shook for the five minutes following.
They chanted as they worked, unified by a mantra K had given them, their voices marred by terror:
“Take…it…back.”
The three words could be heard in almost every hall of the basement, as the staff was swarmed by Letter Girls armed with everything from knives to paperweights.
Blood erupted in the offices, the women who were yet unaware that the Parenthood had been sliced open. Blood on the cobblestone walls. Blood on the supply-closet doors. Bloody handprints on every door.
On Floor 1, they slaughtered the cooks, the teachers, the cleaners. B gutted a nurse with a billhook. Q half-beheaded Professor Ullman with a spade. They spent a lot of time hiding. Waiting in the shadows of the halls. Hiding in the corners of doorways. Listening to the otherwise everyday movements and motions of the Parenthood.
They searched, too.
K found Inspector Krantz in the same staff bathroom they’d passed through on their way up from the basement.
She recognized the boots under the stall door and didn’t hesitate to kick that door in. The flat metal cracked the Inspector’s nose, bringing K the immediate satisfaction of immediate blood. As Krantz brought her hands to her face, K shattered her skull with a hammer. Then she shattered it again. And again. Until the woman had completely fallen to the side of the toilet, squeezed between it and the stall wall.
Q slammed Inspector Rivers’s head in a classroom door until Rivers stopped crying out for help.
K used a saw on Judith Nancy.
The leisure writer was asleep in a bedroom not far from M.O.M.’s quarters. She woke to a prickling sensation, then all-out pain, as K broke the skin on her belly, the saw going back and forth, digging, digging.
“What’s going on?” Nancy cried. Then, “You.”
As if, even under unfathomable duress, she’d admitted to having seen this moment coming.
B and Q stabbed Nancy in the eyes. The ears. The mouth. K broke her fingers and, crying, said, “You’ll never write again!” But the woman was already dead by then.
So much killing done, the Letter Girls congregated outside the Body Hall. For the first time in their lives, they felt the power of numbers. K sent B to release E. To tell G to let the other four out of W’s room. There was nobody left for the Letter Girls who weren’t involved to warn.
Let M.O.M. know. Let her come looking for K.
Twenty minutes later, just as the first slash of gray interrupted the sky and sent word through the glass hallway that the sun was on its way down, M.O.M. exited her quarters to find a band of Letter Girls, armed and bloody, their eyes unfathomably without innocence. But Marilyn knew better. Her girls were looking at her, for the first time, out the front of their eyes, having been shown the light by someone, someone who had unearthed the truth of their lives.
She didn’t need Richard to have told her it was K. That was clear when K spoke to her first.
“Upstairs,” K said.
M.O.M., twelve years used to giving commands, twelve years used to molding their minds how she deemed fit, did not make to move. Rather, she made to scold.
“Who do you think you are?” she said. “Conduct yourself like a lady this instant.” Then, perhaps because nothing changed in the eyes of the girls, and certainly not in K’s, she made to turn back to her office, but B sliced her hand to the bone with a tool Marilyn recognized as being used often in the Yard. As the blood spilled to splash the outfit she’d picked for a game of Boats with the very girl who’d cut her, she screamed. A brief and horrible sound the girls never expected to hear from her lips.
“Upstairs,” K repeated.
* * *
—
THE SEVERITY OF the situation was self-evident, but Marilyn was still thinking of her hand. Thinking of B, who had cut it. B, who should have been in quarantine. B, who should have been sent to the Corner last night, when she confessed. Had she and Richard lost their minds? Had they been blinded by the very children they’d worked so hard to raise?
“A,” K said, addressing her sister that had the most mature voice. “You stay in the office. If the phone on the desk rings, pick it up. Pretend to be M.O.M. Okay?”
“Okay.”
A, covered in blood, entered M.O.M.’s office and, after a moment’s hesitation, sat in a big chair at a big desk. Some of the other girls stared into M.O.M.’s quarters—still, even now, awed.
Then K had a knife to M.O.M.’s back. Marilyn didn’t need to be told again. She let the girls lead her to the elevator. Q pressed the button. When the doors opened, M.O.M. removed her glasses and turned to smile at her girls. Her eyes looked much older than even the last time they’d seen them.
“What’s upstairs?” she asked.
“We can lie to you,” K said. “For twelve years if you’d like. We can make up something that’s up there. We can hide words from you and pretend we’re not going to do what we’re going to do. Or you can get in now and get it over with.”
M.O.M. scowled. “And who do you think is responsible for you being so smart, K? Who made it so you can plan at all? Your mother, your real mother, was prepared to butcher you.”
V held the elevator doors open.
“In,” K said. “To the roof.”
“The roof?” M.O.M. asked. More than one girl gasped at the fear in her eyes. L even pointed at it. “And why the roof, dear?”
B slashed at her belly. Blood rose to the surface of her white pantsuit. M.O.M., still gripping her hand, screamed again.
Then many girls shoved her into the elevator at once. But only K, B, and Q rode up with her.
As the doors closed, the remaining girls’ stoic expressions vanished and Marilyn knew this had all been planned. Even this. The three girls and herself. Riding up.
“It’s been a long time since you’ve been in an elevator,” she said to K.
An eleventh-hour attempt at diplomacy?
It was Q who had pressed the highest floor and it was Q who got out first, holding a long blade to M.O.M.’s chest as K and B forced her out of the elevator.
“Upstairs,” K said, acknowledging the ladder at the end of the hall.
“The roof,” M.O.M. repeated.
“You can see the Placasores from there,” B said.
“Don’t get cute with—”
Q slashed M.O.M.’s ankle with the blade. M.O.M. cried out.
“Upstairs,” K repeated.
Marilyn attempted to walk with dignity, her shoulders square, her chin level with the floor. But her ankle, her wrist, her belly, all brought her to stumble.
B climbed the ladder first.
“I want you to think very hard about what you’re doing,” M.O.M. said. Q made to slash her again, and she slapped the girl’s hand away. “I’m going. I’m going.”
K and Q followed her up.
On the roof, the sun’s descent was even more evident. K thought, Meet me in the tunnel after dark.
“To the edge,” she said.
“No,” M.O.M. said, her chin higher than level now.
Q slashed her thigh.
Marilyn fell to the roof floor. She tried to grip her leg with both hands, but the one B had cut simply wouldn’t work. She cried out, eyes to the sky, as Q slashed her chest.
Then, perhaps born of an instinct greater than her breeding, Marilyn tried to crawl for her life. The girls did not marvel at her will to live. Rather, they nodded as she got closer to the very place they wanted her to be.
Once there, M.O.M. seemed to recognize, distantly, that she’d reached the furthest point she could. She smiled. It was perhaps the warmest expression the girls had ever seen on her face.
She had crawled to the Corner.
“Spoiled rotten,” Q said. The other girls did not laugh. Below, however, voices could be heard, some more lively than others.
When M.O.M. looked over the edge of the Turret, her one good hand gripping the corner where the two ridges of concrete met, she saw the faces of the other Letter Girls staring up. They were standing around a hole in the ground, a big one, and her first thought was, Would you please look into this, Krantz?
But it was M.O.M. who looked into it, as some life remained in her head, even after K had severed it from her body with an ax.
She could almost count the bricks of the Turret as her head fell down to the Yard.
The last thing she saw was a makeshift marker in the hand of one of the girls—which girl she could no longer tell. It was certainly an unworthy tombstone for a woman such as herself. The marker had three lowercase letters and no more upon it:
m.o.m.
She had just enough time remaining to attempt an understanding, to sound the three letters out, before the life finally left her, her brain run dry, and her head landed with a wet thud in the dirt. Had she one more half minute of thought, she might have noted the perfect arc of the fall, the precise depth of the grave.
All a perfectly executed experiment, conducted by her brilliant, precocious, and undistracted Letter Girls.
Revenge
After J was shoved into the Corner, Richard, flanked by both Inspectors, returned to the tunnel’s entrance, where the phone was set in the stone wall.
The Letter Girl K had been on the other side of the glass in the tunnel. Covered in blood.
Whose?
This is not a mutiny, he told himself. It’s an isolated incident and J has been dealt with. Now K will be dealt with, too.
The other boys were on lockdown. Confined to their rooms. J’s telling him that nobody else had seen the girl wasn’t good enough. Even if it did register as honest with the game. J might not have known who saw what. Richard would find out.
But first, why wasn’t Marilyn answering her phone?
He considered aborting the whole experiment. Considered rounding up all the Alphabet Boys, lining them up against the Turret bricks, shooting them one by one.
Should he panic?
He hung up the phone. He didn’t want to panic. J was in the Corner. Surely K had escaped her own Corner. Surely she’d been put back in by now.
He considered sending the Inspectors to the second Turret. But no. That would jeopardize all of Marilyn’s girls.
What else to do but go up? Call Marilyn again from his office?
“Watch the Corner,” he told Collins and Jeffrey.
He’d already put together an explanation for J’s absence by the time he reached the first floor. He refined it in the elevator to the third. J simply didn’t fit in. He was sent to a new Parenthood, where boys like him might thrive. Life was about overcoming sadness, boys, my boys. Lose and live. Live and learn.
He wouldn’t tell them about J in the Corner. Not yet. He needed more information from the others before he froze them with living nightmares.
No man can withstand this much guilt.
Warren had said that to him earlier, as Richard walked him from quarantine to the Corner. But it was something else the fat troll had said that really irked him.
Women don’t distract, Richard. They inspire.
As the elevator rose, Richard reminded himself that he was indeed a big thinker. He cited the speeches he’d given, the events he’d planned, the boys he’d raised.
Oh, how the staff must revere him! All he’d done for them! All they’d seen him do.
He had no way of knowing that both Collins and Jeffrey were killed by the Letter Girls Q and B outside the Corner that harbored Warren and J.
He had no way of knowing Gordon had a garden fork in his belly, that he lay flat on the white carpet of the Body Hall.
You can’t consider yourself remarkable, Richard thought, without being disappointed by the people around you.
And, ah, what a disappointment J was in the end.
When the number 3 lit up and the bell announced his arrival, Richard had convinced himself the Parenthood would be stable once again. Perhaps it would even grow stronger for this.
He stepped off the elevator and entered the hall.
He paused.
The hall looked the same. The doors and the floors.
So what was different?
Richard sniffed the air. Possibly it was the floor shift, boxes of belongings moved about, strange scents rising.
He waited. He didn’t like it. Whatever it was. He didn’t like it.
He went first to F’s door and opened it. Inside, F the boy and F the girl stood side by side, facing him.
They held knives.
A vision as impossible as A and Z, risen from the dead.
An Alphabet Boy and a Letter Girl.
Together.
“Hi, Richard,” F said. He wagged the knife.
Richard fled the room. Went to X’s, opened it.
X the boy and X the girl.
Holding knives.
Do not panic. Do NOT panic. If one boy is secure, JUST ONE BOY…
Richard moved to G’s door and kicked it open. Before he could register that G the boy and G the girl were walking toward him, carrying axes, the door to the stairs opened down the hall.
W the boy holding hands with W the girl.
D the boy and D the girl.
“D,” Richard said, the authority in his voice irrevocably lost, “you have been a bad boy!”
Ruined, Richard. Every one of them.
No…just this floor…just this floor…
What are you going to do? Start again?
“Unclean! You’re all unclean!” he cried, inching back toward the Check-Up room door. “You all have Placasores! Are you happy, F? STOP SMILING! STOP SMILING AT ME!”
Richard charged and F stuck him with a knife.
Gaping at the blood from his gut, the blood on his fingers, Richard looked to Q, his Q. When had Q arrived?
“My boy…”
When had they all arrived? The floor was full of them. And only more were coming through the stairwell door.
“Inspection,” B the girl said.
Richard looked to her.
She’s covered in blood. Where’s Marilyn?
“Inspection.”
They were all saying it. All the boys and girls.
“What do you mean to do?” he said.
“INSPECTION!” they yelled.
From the far end of the hall, the elevator doors opened. When had it gone back down?
In it, J. The Letter Girls K and Q.
Warren Bratt.
“Warren,” Richard said. “No no. You can’t be a part of this. This is…this is murder, Warren. You did not sign up for this! Think of your life! You’re throwing your life away!”
“INSPECTION!” the boys and girls yelled.
Forty-nine of them.
“Get in the Check-Up roo
m,” B the girl said. But it might have been any one of them.
“Marilyn predicted you’d revolt at age twenty,” Richard said, trembling, one hand on the Check-Up room door. “But here you’ve done it at twelve.” Then, a smile. “See how advanced you are? My boys…?”
The kids stepped toward him. Armed. All of them.
He opened the Check-Up room door and stared down at the handle.
“This door has never opened from the outside,” he said. “Who reversed the locks?”
From the crowd of them, nobody raised a hand.
Tears in his eyes, Richard nodded.
“That’s my boys.”
He entered the room. He turned to face them.
“What will you do without me?” he asked.
But they gave him no response.
And J closed the door. And K locked it.
Out
Two days after locking Richard in the third-floor Check-Up room, Warren and the forty-nine kids discovered a shack a mile through the pines behind the girls’ Turret. Inside, they found three sleeping men. The cabin smelled of alcohol and smoke. Warren recognized them as classic Parenthood employees: ex-cons with a real need to hide.
He woke them as the kids stood outside the cabin door. He told them their employers had been killed, that they would want to pack up and leave if they didn’t want to meet the same end.
The only question they asked was how to get their money out of their individual accounts. Warren told them how. Then, with only a bag of clothes each, they left the cabin, the pines, and the Parenthood.
The boys and girls spent a month in the two Turrets. Warren told them they had to. Had to eat. Pack. Plan. They couldn’t just leave this world and enter the next one. They needed some guidance. Some wisdom. They needed to know the rules of the real world, no matter how unreal it was going to feel.
They all read Needs. Cover to cover. Boys and girls.
Most avoided the third floor of the boys’ Turret, but not all. In the early days of their stay, some enjoyed listening to the starving man moaning on the other side of the metal door. And when those moans became weak utterances, a few boys and a few girls snuck inside. Just to see.
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