“Hey!” He coughed, trying to catch his breath.
“What do you think?” Clarissa asked, laughing.
“I can see why giving an unexpected shock is so effective,” Zachary said, trying to keep his voice steady and not give away how much it had hurt.
Dr. Abato and articles Zachary had turned up on the internet had said that it felt like a bee sting. Zachary, never a big outdoorsman, had never actually been stung by a bee. But he couldn’t imagine a bee sting would be quite that painful. His skin was still tingling. It had been more like a hundred bee stings, all at once. He had expected, when he was trying to imagine what it was going to be like, that he’d be able to resist the pain. He might flinch, but he’d be able to keep his body still. He wouldn’t shout or cry. It would be like an accidental shock when touching both contacts on a battery or doing some home wiring. But the split-second before he dropped a screwdriver was nothing like the full two-second shock.
“Have you ever felt that?” Zachary asked Clarissa.
“Yeah. I tested it out on myself. I wanted to know exactly what I was doing to the kids that I was treating. That it wasn’t going to cause them any permanent damage. Nice and quick, and then the pain is gone. But it’s a good jolt, isn’t it?”
Zachary breathed in and out. It didn’t hurt anymore, but he could still feel the effects. Racing heart. Stunned senses. Feeling like the air around him was buzzing. It wasn’t an experience that he would want to repeat. He could understand aversion therapy and how it worked. He wouldn’t want to do something that would cause that shock a second time. He might forget just how bad it was in a day or two, but an occasional jolt would be enough to keep Zachary on task and toeing the line.
Clarissa moved closer to him and started to remove the electrodes. “Are you okay?” she asked, her voice still shaky with muffled laughter.
Zachary offered his arms and legs to her in turn. “Sure. I’m fine. No permanent damage, isn’t that what everyone says? It was just one shock.”
“They get accustomed to it over time.”
“That’s what I hear.” Zachary tried not to let Clarissa see how his legs were shaking. He wondered in passing whether she had accidentally given him a phase-two device rather than a phase-one. Could she tell them apart? Had one been put on the wrong shelf?
Clarissa put the equipment away, and then picked up the next one.
“How much stronger is the phase-two than the phase-one?” Zachary asked, leaning on the counter behind him for support.
“Three times,” Clarissa said brightly.
Three times.
Zachary again stood still as Clarissa again rigged up electrodes. She positioned them slightly differently so that they weren’t right over the same patches of skin as the first time. He wondered if she did it that way on purpose. How many times would it take before the shocks started to leave marks on his skin?
“This is going to be bad, isn’t it?” Zachary asked, trying to prepare himself for the next shock.
She didn’t answer, making some minor adjustments. She straightened up and grabbed the remote. Zachary’s stomach clenched. He could understand why even just seeing the remote could be a deterrent. He’d only been shocked once and just the thought of her pressing that button made his heart start to race, sending another surge of adrenaline through his body.
Clarissa gave a little salute with the remote and pressed the button. Zachary let out an involuntary yell. If the phase-one had felt like a hundred bee stings, the phase-two was like a thousand. Clarissa said it was three times as strong, but there really wasn’t a comparison. He found himself thinking of the first shock as if it had been a slap on the wrist. The phase-two made his head spin. If he hadn’t already been leaning on the counter, he would have toppled over. As it was, he arched into the countertop, bruising his back.
It took Zachary a few minutes to catch his breath and find his voice again. “Holy crap. That’s the shock you’ve been giving these kids? That’s what Quentin had sixty times in a row the therapy session before he died? If anyone even kept a correct count and the log wasn’t a complete fiction?” He took a few more deep breaths. “They’re getting accustomed to this level?”
Clarissa nodded. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
“Wow. I don’t believe that they don’t feel pain. But I can understand why Abato might think so. I can’t imagine getting used to that.”
Without warning, Clarissa pushed the button again, activating the electrode on his right calf. Completely unprepared, Zachary flailed, tried to catch himself on the counter, and landed in a heap on the floor. He stayed there after the shock stopped, muscles quivering.
“Okay,” he said weakly. “So that’s how it feels to get shocked a second time. I think I’m done. Help me to get these off.” He reached for the Velcro strap of one of the armbands.
A third shock made Zachary slam the back of his head into the floor. Tile over concrete was not a friendly floor-covering. Zachary groaned. For a few minutes, he just lay there, his whole body like jelly.
“Normally, we’d insist that you get back up,” Clarissa said in a friendly tone. “No lying around in therapy. We’d get you back on your feet or in your chair, sitting properly, and then continue with the lesson.”
“That’s cruel,” Zachary said. He tried to figure out what he was still doing on the floor, his thoughts as scrambled as eggs.
“You know…” Clarissa’s tone was conversational. “I didn’t think you were going to be a problem at first. You’d come in, take a look around, see what the police saw, and come to the same conclusion as they did. That Quentin Thatcher committed suicide. Why not, trapped in a place like this? Dr. Abato is so proud of his reward rooms, loves showing off the videos of the kids who progress so well with ABA, all of those happy faces on the website and posters and all of the other promotional material. He just loves showing everyone what a wonderful place Summit is. But would you really want to live here?”
“No.”
“No, of course not. The parents say this is what’s best for their kids. Really, they’re just glad their kids are off of their hands. They are somewhere they are safe and everybody else is safe from them. It isn’t an institution, it’s their home. And the children are all happy here, aren’t they?”
“They’re not all happy,” Zachary disagreed, trying to get his arms under him to push himself up into a sitting position.
He couldn’t see Clarissa very well from his position on the floor, so he didn’t see her reaching for the button, but he knew when she had pressed it again, because the bees stung and he went crashing back the floor. He tried to make sense of why she was shocking him. She had offered to help him. She wanted to show him what it felt like to be one of the residents at Summit. Was that it?
“No, they’re not happy,” Clarissa said. “You can get them to smile. You can get them to laugh and to pretend to be normal, but they’re still not really happy. They eventually come to accept this as their home. They stop asking to go home with their parents, and they say they’re happy here. But it’s not true!” She said it explosively. “They’re just saying what they’re told to say. What we train them to say.”
“Uh-huh.” Zachary shifted his arms to prop himself up, then thought better of it. The last time he had tried that, she had shocked him. See how quickly he could be trained? “What about Quentin? Was he happy?”
“Of course not. Quentin had given up on being able to go home to his mom and brothers. He had settled into the schedule here and did pretty well with the therapy and routines. But then Tirza happened.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“Tirza was staying in Quentin’s unit now and then when her mom needed a babysitter. Quentin’s hormones must have started kicking in, because he was noticing her. Starting to get friendly with her.” Clarissa moved closer to Zachary and nudged him with her toe. “Can you get up?”
Zachary wasn’t sure. He shifted and tried to roll over and then push him
self up. As soon as he’d levered himself up a few inches, another shock hit him. He collapsed to the floor, landing on his face this time.
“What…? Why…?” he couldn’t finish the thoughts, let alone the sentences.
Clarissa bent down and started to remove the electrodes. Zachary was so relieved he couldn’t hold back a flood of tears. No more shocks. He could go home and sleep. Write his report. Whatever it was he had planned to do.
He stared at Clarissa’s face as she worked over him. She was pretty. She smiled at him frequently, but her smile was like a shark’s. Predatory. Like she had enjoyed hurting him.
As she removed he electrodes, his eyes moved from her face to her hat. A baseball cap with a green crest on it. He had noticed it before, when she had first let him into the building. He tried to focus his eyes on the words. It felt like his eyeballs were twitching back and forth, bouncing around in his head. He forced them to focus in on the words, but they didn’t make any sense. Even when he could make out the shapes of the letters, the words themselves didn’t make any kind of sense. Then he realized that he was looking at a school crest. He didn’t understand the words because they were the school’s motto in Latin.
But he could make out the words around the crest, with the name of the school on them.
St. Damien High School.
Chapter Twenty-Three
D
amien.”
She raised her eyebrows questioningly. Then she glanced upward, toward the bill of the hat, as if she could see the crest on the front.
“My school,” she said.
Zachary lay there, wondering what to do next. What was she planning? Just to let him go home? None of it made any sense. If she was Damien, why had she asked him there? It hadn’t been to give him more ammunition against Summit. She didn’t want them closed down. Not if she was running some kind of sex trafficking operation.
His thoughts buzzed around in his head, trying to settle on one thing, one explanation that tied it all together. He should get up. But the aversion training was working. He didn’t want to try getting up again. Not while there was still a single electrode left on him. And Clarissa didn’t remove the last one, nestled against his back.
Instead, she brought over a black girdle.
“Elegant, wouldn’t you say?” Clarissa asked. “So much simpler than the phase-one and -two devices. No messy cords, no backpack. Everything is self-contained and just goes under the shirt. Out of sight, out of mind. People don’t get so worked up about what they can’t see. Of course, this one gives you more than skin shocks. It passes the electricity through your body.”
She pulled up Zachary’s shirt and started to wrap it around his torso. Zachary fought back. His motions were sloppy, and his arms felt like spaghetti, but he didn’t want the phase-three device on him. He couldn’t let her put it into place. Clarissa just reached down and pressed the remote, activating the one electrode still on his skin. Zachary tried to protest, but it just came out as a Zzzz sound and he bit the tip of his tongue. While his ears were still ringing, Clarissa wrapped the girdle around him and did it up at the back, where Zachary could feel the hard boxy shape of the built-in battery pack. Once it was in place, Clarissa slid her fingers up under it and removed the last electrode of the phase-two device. She rolled him onto his back.
“Comfy?”
“Don’t,” Zachary protested.
“You be a good boy and I won’t have to.”
He waited for her to hit the button anyway. She didn’t.
“Why?” Zachary asked, his voice weak.
How was he going to get out of there? He was at her mercy in a locked room and no one knew where he was. He tried to calm his frazzled nerves to come up with a strategy.
TV detectives never got in that kind of trouble. Or if they did, they had some kind of brilliant escape plan. Using the device against her or building one of his own like MacGyver. Talking her down. A backup team in the next room, just waiting for the point at which they could arrest her for everything she had done.
Which was what? Kidnapping Tirza? Killing Quentin? Zachary didn’t even have any proof she was involved in Tirza’s kidnapping. Just a ball cap with the word Damien on it. Suggestive, but not proof of anything. It might just as easily have been what had given runaway Tirza the inspiration for a fictional kidnapper’s name.
“Why what?” Clarissa asked.
“Why are you doing this?” Zachary croaked out.
“Hmm. Good question. Because I want to hurt you? Because you are getting in my way? Because I’ve been wanting to see how the phase-three works?”
Zachary lifted his hand to rub his forehead and she stiffened, hand on the remote. Zachary decided he didn’t need to rub the sore, tense spot on his head, and rested his hand back down.
“But… your PTSD… You don’t like shocking…”
“Well, I might have fudged a little on my symptoms. For dramatic effect. You can just look the symptoms up online, you know.”
Her face was close to his, close enough to see the puffy bags under her eyes and the fine lines of fatigue around them.
“But you… look tired.”
“Yeah,” Clarissa agreed. “I tend to stay up too late at night, watching recordings of the therapy sessions.” She sighed. “The videos don’t give me quite the same thrill as actually shocking them in real life.” She glanced over her shoulder at Zachary’s phone, the red dot indicating that it was still recording. “Nice of you to provide me with a nice high-def video of your therapy session. The pictures from the surveillance cameras can be pretty grainy.” With a nod, she indicated one of the cameras mounted in the corner near the ceiling.
“Aren’t you afraid of them seeing you here?”
“No. Nobody checks the video until the next day, or if an alarm goes. Night security just keeps an eye on the entrances and does a walk-around a few times a night. By the time they look at it, I’ll have it taken care of.”
Zachary was baffled. “How?”
“One of the first things they taught me when I started working here was how to edit digital video. Cut out what we don’t want a record of. Repeat frames if we need to fill the timeline. Surveillance video is so simple; empty hallways and empty rooms to replace whatever you cut out.”
“But… how can you access it?”
“It’s all in who you know. Make friends with someone who knows the password. They never change it. Too lazy. So even if your friend has to leave…” She shrugged. “No problem.”
She hadn’t just acted on impulse when she’d invited him. She knew exactly what she was doing. She’d done it before. Zachary closed his eyes, trying to focus his thoughts. The effects of the shocks were wearing off, but he didn’t want her to know that. He stayed still and didn’t try to get up. He talked slowly, as if he were still stunned. His brain wasn’t quite up to speed, but he was starting to work through the scenarios.
“You kidnapped Tirza. You’re Damien.”
“Damien doesn’t exist. Just like the police said. There’s no one by that name working here or at the school. There were no strangers lurking around. Just students and teachers, just like normal.”
Clarissa might have done some outreach therapy program at the school. Or she might have pretended she was a student. She was small and slim enough that no one would take a second look at her. Not without a reason. It was the perfect camouflage. One student among hundreds.
“Why didn’t Tirza say who you were? Why didn’t she name you? Say that you worked here?”
Clarissa laughed lightly. “What do you know about prosopagnosia?”
“What?”
“Many people with autism have some level of prosopagnosia. Face blindness. Tirza might be able to describe my hair and what I’m wearing. Some of my features. But she can’t recognize me out of context.”
“Context?”
“If I’m supposed to be her aide in the therapy room, she knows who I am. If I show up at the school without my lab jacke
t in a baseball cap? She doesn’t know me from Adam.” Clarissa chuckled at this. “Literally.”
“Didn’t she say… Damien was a man? A man took her?”
“Maybe she did. Or maybe they misunderstood or just assumed. She did meet a lot of men.” Clarissa smothered a laugh. Was she even aware how depraved she sounded? “Differentiating gender and using the right pronouns is difficult for Tirza. She’s used to being corrected. If she said ‘she’ when talking about Damien and her mother or an advocate corrected her to say ‘he,’ Tirza would think nothing of it.”
“You knew she… couldn’t identify you.”
“That was never a concern. A hat and a gruff voice, and I was somebody totally different to her. A stranger.”
Zachary tried surreptitiously to undo the stun belt behind his back. The more she revealed to him, the more certain he was that she never intended for him to get out of there. She hadn’t just brought him there to try out the ESDs. To entertain herself with shocking him a few times. Zachary wasn’t Tirza. He could identify Clarissa. The more she explained, the more certain he was that she never intended for him to get out of the engineering lab alive.
“What about… Quentin…?”
“What about him? He’s dead. He’s not going to identify anyone.”
“Is that why…?”
“Is that why I killed him? What do you think this is? Confession time?” There was an irritated edge to her voice. She was happy to talk about shocking, or about victimizing Tirza. But Quentin was another story. “Quentin’s death had nothing to do with Tirza’s… disappearance.”
Her eyes went to the side, avoiding his. Zachary wondered why she was bothering to lie about it. She had essentially admitted to kidnapping and trafficking Tirza. To tampering with video recordings. That she was addicted to causing others pain. Why was she stopping short of admitting what had happened to Quentin?
Obviously, it wasn’t just an accident.
Zachary took advantage of Clarissa’s gaze being away from him to try to unbuckle the stun belt. His fingers still felt like they were buzzing. They were clumsy and weak. Nothing felt right. How many thousands of times had he unbuckled a belt in his life? Why couldn’t he remember how to get the tongue out of the hole just because it was behind his back? He couldn’t remember which way to pull the strap to free the tongue enough to push it back out through the hole. In his head, he cursed in frustration. Why couldn’t he undo a simple buckle?
His Hands were Quiet Page 23