Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists
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Her eyes though. Her eyes are dull and distracted, still flitting all over the room and avoiding me.
I wonder if there are worries—terrors—regrets—humming through her body like they are mine. I wish she’d talk to me about them. I suddenly want to scream, “I’m here for you!” but I control myself. That’s another important lesson I learned growing up: you can’t force someone to love you.
I try to sit up in bed a little. It feels unmatched to be lying down while Brenna looms over me, dictating these important details of my life. Controlling what I can and cannot know. I push away the nasty thought that suddenly rises to the surface—that she came here to frighten me on purpose.
“So why tell me about it at all? I don’t understand.”
She breathes in deep through her nose, like she’s dealing with one of her children throwing a fit. My hands clench into tightly balled fists. The pain in my chest throbs away.
“I needed to give you an explanation of why we’re moving you to be with Mark. Why it’s better for you to be behind the secured doors.”
“And you couldn’t think of any other reason to explain why you’re moving me?” I counter.
Brenna gives an exasperated sigh. “I don’t need to listen to this,” she says as she turns for the door. “We’ll get you moved sometime this afternoon.”
“Wait,” I call out. Brenna pauses, her back still turned to me. A hot flush of embarrassment rises at how desperate I sound. “What’s happening to us?”
I’m more than aware of the pleading in my voice, but I can’t control myself. This situation—the lockdown, the isolation, being injured and bedridden—I’m more vulnerable than I’ve ever been. It’s ironic, considering the reason I answered Brenna’s ad and actually came here to Granfield. Life can change so much in nine months.
“What do you mean?”
Shards of ice run through her voice.
I swallow, hard. Do it, a voice tells me. Get it over with.
“You and me.” I try to smile, but the muscles of my face won’t work properly and my mouth twists into something else. Something between a sneer and a sob. My vision blurs as I push back tears, and I want to slap myself. “What’s happening to us?”
I choke out the last word.
Brenna’s face is a mask. Unreadable. She’s crossed her arms over her chest and her body stands tall and dark as she leans against the door, framed by the light from the hall.
I wait for it, and then it comes. Just like I knew it would.
“There is no us,” Brenna tells me.
I wait until the door closes, and her footsteps pad down the hallway away from me, before I let the tears out, silently sobbing into my pillow like a child for longer than I’d like to admit.
The rage comes later, like I knew it would.
29
Day 15
Felix
I know I shouldn’t be doing this.
I know that it’s wrong.
But someone needs to do it, and Mom is too freaked out by something she and Tobias found in the woods and Margot’s stuck in her room. I have no idea where Daphne is, which is probably best.
I checked things out from my telescope first. Tobias is in the greenhouse, doing something with the plants. He’s been spending more and more time there, which I figure is probably a good thing, seeing as we’re going to rely on the gardens for food.
I got online last night for a few minutes before Mom came on the intercom and told me to get off. I don’t know how she knew I was on, but she did. She’s been having more and more meetings, sometimes for hours. She goes into that small library that nobody used to use, locks the door (I know because I tried to come in one time), and stays there talking to her screen. I only catch phrases when I press my ear to the door. It’s easier to listen in, now that Margot is laid up with her broken ribs and Daphne is off playing with her imaginary friends. The walls of our house are thinner than you’d think, given that it’s a “historical” home. Early in the morning I’ll hear Daphne’s angel-voice cutting through the air into my brain.
“Now, what did I tell you?” she’ll say. “That’s not how we do things here. Take a sip of tea. Eat your sandwich—it’s peanut butter and jelly…I don’t care if you don’t like it. Now close your eyes, it’s bedtime.” And so on and so forth.
The only imaginary friends I had were kids at school who I thought liked me, but who ended up being liars. It was a whole other kind of pretend.
I walk down the hallway, past the little library where the door is closed and Mom is talking to someone. I have a key card for Dad’s rooms—I borrowed it off the nurse we had before Margot, but then Mom realized the nurse didn’t have her key card and fired her for a breach of security or something like that. I’d felt terrible, but I also didn’t want to be locked out of rooms in my own house. Plus I got to visit Dad whenever I wanted to once I had the key card. I’m very careful about when I go in, so Mom hasn’t figured out yet that I have a copy. Dad won’t tell her. He likes when I visit, or at least it seems that he does.
But I’m not heading to visit Dad. I need to go and check out Darren’s apartment.
I went into the medical wing late last night and got a gown and a mask and some gloves. Besides, when I checked the Centers for Disease Control website last night for those few minutes I got online it said that the virus can’t live on surfaces for longer than twenty-four hours.
Anything in that apartment that was contagious should be long dead by now.
The house feels abandoned with Margot laid up and Mom hiding away. I walk softly in my socked feet, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a point to keeping quiet, because there’s no one around to hear me. That’s something no one tells you about the end of the world—how lonely it can be, even if you’re with your family.
I count the steps as I go. It’s something I’ve started doing, to keep track or maybe just be in control of something. The same science book where I finally forced myself to read virus vectors and the CDC’s “ground-breaking virology research” had a section on the biology of psychiatric illnesses. There was one part that talked about motivation and obsession, and it said that human beings crave control more than anything, and that when we are in situations out of our control we’ll create opportunities to exert influence and power, even in small ways.
It makes sense to me. I always feel calmer after I count my steps. And going from one end of the house to the other makes it seem like I am king of the castle or something like that.
There’s no place I can’t go.
I wonder whatever happened to that nanny who left all her books here in that attic room. Maybe she’s saving lives.
Maybe she’s already dead.
I walk out the front door, passing the two huge urns on either side that used to have massive bouquets of fresh flowers. Now they’re full of drooping husks of whatever was in them before the floral deliveries shut down. Even dead, the flowers are taller than me. Although I’ve been hungrier and hungrier these past few weeks, which usually means that I’m growing, it could also mean that we don’t have as much to eat in general.
It seems strange, that my body could be getting bigger and stronger while everything around me is falling apart.
It feels like spring and the air smells sweet from all the trees and bushes blooming. Everything seems so happy outside that I have to fight the urge to run to the building where Darren’s apartment sits on top. Gravel is so noisy when you rush across it, and I don’t want Daphne catching on to what I’m doing and insisting she come with me.
She’s kind of the worst. That’s what the kids at school would say.
Some days I don’t like having her as my sister. That’s what I would say.
The pocketknife in my jeans tugs at the fabric as I move across the grounds. Dad gave it to me for my birthday last year, and I like to run my thumb against the smooth metal, back and forth like a pendulum. Or a worry stone. I keep walking like I’m some kid enjoying the sunshine.
It’s strange how some things scare you and other things roll off you like they were a dream that disappeared when you woke up.
It’s really easy for me to open the door. The lock is a twisting doorknob lock, which I could probably have picked with one of Mom’s bobby pins, to be honest. There’s a sign taped to the door in handwriting I don’t recognize.
“Stay Out” is written in block letters.
It’s like my mom doesn’t understand us at all.
Of course one of us is going to go in if she tells us not to. Disruption is in our blood. That’s why our family is so rich. Both Mom and Dad weren’t afraid to go against what other people were saying about their businesses. They’d talk about it at dinner some nights, when we still had family dinners. It’s funny how grown-ups will forget that their children are listening, even when you’re right there sitting next to them. I heard all about the lawsuits and the investment risks and some watchdog group saying Dad’s company wasn’t following labor codes overseas. And then I heard about how they’d won, and how much richer we were going to be.
When I open the door the air in the apartment hits me immediately. Musty and stale. I pull the mask and gown and gloves from underneath my sweatshirt, keeping them close to my chest, and step inside.
30
Mark
The day they came for me was the first day that felt like spring. It was the day after Daphne’s sixth birthday. We’d given her a new tea set and a huge stuffed unicorn. That night I read her bedtime story, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, where the princesses disappear at night and fool all the princes who try to catch them.
I was laid up in bed with what I thought was just fatigue or a cold or something like that. It’d started coming on after dinner that evening, and I’d pushed through it until I almost collapsed into bed. I’d assumed it would pass, like all the other times I’d been sick.
I was wrong.
Brenna and I still shared a bedroom, and a bed, although she was already up and somewhere else in the house. I was on my side, huddled under the covers and wishing the pain in my head to go away and for my legs to move. That’s when I felt the hand cover my mouth and the hard coolness of the gun’s barrel pressed into my temple.
“Come with us, and nobody gets hurt,” a disembodied voice said. I still had the covers over my eyes. I couldn’t see who was grabbing at me, and so my instinct was to push out against them, which was a mistake.
I didn’t have the energy to fight this person. I was sick, and getting sicker, although I had no clue my body was going to keep on betraying me, like some unfaithful lover.
Doctors still can’t quite pinpoint it down. I’ve heard MS, Huntington’s, general neurodegenerative disorder. Really, though, none of these damn labels matter. I’m dying. Full stop. I can’t enjoy anything that I once loved.
Not my work, or my children. Not my wife.
But these people didn’t know that at the time. Most people still don’t know it.
And so they came to take me, hold me for ransom, and get their due.
They were trained fighters or some other type of mercenary. Afterwards we were told that they were Chechnyan or Georgian. When they were in my bedroom, pulling at my limbs and trying to subdue me, I only knew that they sounded like they were from somewhere far away. And my mind, foggy from whatever was beginning to happen inside of me, thought that perhaps this meant they had the wrong person. That I could talk my way out of this, like I’d done in so many other situations.
We were in a weird sort of dance, with the comforter caught between me, still in my pajamas, and this man dressed all in black, his face covered in a mask like you’d see in a spy movie. I’d move left, fighting the pull of my body to give up, and he’d move right and grip harder. I’d try to slip through, and his arms would tighten around my shoulders with the curved edge of the gun pressed more firmly into my temple.
Afterwards the doctors at the hospital would have to sew three stitches there, from the tension tearing at my skin.
The FBI said that’s what made them think this was perhaps their first job. They were overzealous, passionate.
I heard that and decided the exact opposite. Maybe these men just really wanted me dead.
We started moving from the bedroom and out into the hallway. I spotted two other men, armed with guns and masks like my dancing partner, who were stationed outside the bedroom door.
I was still very weak, despite all the adrenaline kicking through my system. In the back of my mind was a growing fear that if I didn’t die today from these men then I might be already dying. I knew, underneath my terror, that something was happening to me and I couldn’t control it.
In the moment though, I had to focus on what was most important: I needed to keep my family safe. So I gathered the strength I still had and screamed out into the lavender-scented air of the mansion my wife and I had rebuilt. I screamed as loud as I could, and as hard as my lungs would let me.
“Get out!” I told my family. “Get. Out!”
The men said something between each other that I couldn’t understand, and the one holding me called into a walkie-talkie he had strapped to his chest. At this point we’d dropped the comforter somewhere along the hallway, and our two bodies were pressed even more tightly together. My legs wouldn’t hold me up, and so he had to hoist me over his hip with one hand and level the barrel of the gun at my head with the other. He smelled like garlic and pickled onion, and I gagged at the back of my throat.
The result was exactly what I’d hoped wouldn’t happen. Brenna turned the corner from the front stairwell, running as quickly as her stiletto heels would allow her. She was holding a cup of tea, probably meant for me, which she promptly dropped as she ran towards us.
That’s my wife. Always running towards disasters.
The cup made a sharp pop as it hit the floor, followed by the shower of tinkling pieces as it shattered.
Brenna stopped on the stairs, her hands up in surrender.
The man holding me turned reflexively towards the sound, and I tried to slip from his grasp, maybe grab at his gun, but I didn’t have the chance.
The pressure on me released, and there was the soft crumple of a body hitting the floor and then two more loud pops from the opposite direction.
Brenna screamed as the men around me fell and I stayed standing. Wobbly and weak, but still alive.
Tobias showed himself first, emerging from the shadows of the west wing with a shot gun still poised in the air. Darren came from the opposite side, a handgun hanging from his side.
Then the door to Daphne’s room opened and her bright head of curls popped out. “I called 911,” her tiny voice said, echoing down the hallway like she was asking for a snack after school.
Brenna rushed forward and caught me as I stumbled, almost falling down the stairs.
“Get back in your room,” she half-ordered, half-pleaded to our daughter.
Sirens began to sound in the distance a few seconds later, and another minute or two after that our family home was flooded with police and tactical forces and, then later, with cheap-suited detectives.
I was rushed to the hospital, Brenna holding my hand.
That’s when we learned that there was something else wrong with me besides my business choices. Besides my success, at all cost, mentality.
That’s when Brenna insisted we put in the security measures.
It’s when I insisted we buy a gun, for ourselves.
Because, up until the point where they killed the men attacking us, I had no idea the
men who worked in and outside my home every day had weapons hidden at Granfield Manor.
Because, I also knew there was no way the police could have arrived there as quickly as they did. Not unless someone had called much earlier than Daphne said she did.
Something was very wrong in my home. Something still is.
And now I’m finally getting close to figuring out exactly what that something is.
31
Felix
Darren’s apartment smells like French fries and stale air. It’s the kind of apartment where the door opens onto a stairwell, and you climb up it in order to get to the actual living space above. I take the stairs two at a time, and it feels like I have an extra five inches on my legs as I pop up with each step I take. Another book I read, on physiology and anatomy, says that I’m the prime age for growth spurts of biological males—I’ll be putting on a lot of muscle soon.
By the time we go back to school, whenever that’s going to be, my classmates won’t recognize me. Maybe I’ll actually look like my dad, rather than just having my mom say that I do.
The mask I’m wearing itches on my face, and I have to fight the urge to tug at it. Whenever I get online, every site I go to is blaring the same messages. Wash your hands. Don’t touch your face. Stay away from people.
The gloves I’m wearing are fine, but the gown seems built for someone much larger than me in the shoulders. It flops around my chest like I’m wrapped in a blanket.
I’ll have to burn these afterwards.
Darren’s apartment doesn’t have much in it. There’s a bed in the corner, a little kitchenette to the left with a normal-sized fridge, a tiny stove, and some cabinets. A chair and bookcase are at right angles in the opposite corner. There’s a door leading off the kitchen, which I assume is the bathroom, and a closet sunk into the wall by the bed. I have other things that I need to do, but I can’t help myself. I walk over to the bookcase and read the spines.