Then the blast hit. Zachary’s body arched on the floor. Pain tore through his body, deep down inside. He was on fire. Every muscle in his body tensed. He saw nothing but red. And it went on for an eternity.
The stun belt was exponentially more painful than the phase-two device.
When it ended, his voice stopped screaming and dissolved into slobbering wet sobs. Clarissa stood over him, her eyes wide. Zachary tried to make sure he was breathing, not sure he remembered how. The mechanics of it all seemed too complex. Clarissa’s nose wrinkled, and she waved her hand in front of her face.
“At least we can make sure our residents using a phase-three are diapered,” she mocked.
Zachary was too overwhelmed to even care.
Clarissa looked around, as if she were waiting for someone. An accomplice? Of course there was an accomplice. Someone who had given her the security password. Someone who had helped with kidnapping Tirza; maybe acting as getaway driver, maybe just sampling the goods. But she had suggested that the security guard who had helped her was no longer there. Had she given him access to the building? Or had security been too lazy to change the outside door codes either? She was expecting the ex-guard to come and help Clarissa dispose of Zachary’s body.
“Where is he?” Zachary asked, when he could get enough breath to get the words out.
“He’s…” Clarissa’s head jerked up as she stopped herself. She looked at him, eyes narrowed. “You really are devious, you know that? You have a way of worming yourself in…”
A compliment to the man on the floor, lying in a puddle of his own fluids. So clever, Zachary. So very clever.
She continued to stare at him, her expression gradually changing to a smile again.
“What does it matter?” she asked. “Who cares what you know now? It’s too late. You were too slow in putting together the pieces of the puzzle.”
“You were very good,” Zachary whispered. “Good at covering up.”
She preened at that. She was proud of herself. Of being able to operate right under the noses of the administrators at Summit Living Center. Routinely changing videos to cut out anything she didn’t want them to see. Getting around any security measures. Trafficking Tirza almost right in front of them, everyone completely blind to her deception. Except for the security guard. Was anyone else in on it? The unit supervisor who had shed tears for Quentin? Ego-driven Dr. Abato? Who else had known?
Clarissa played with the remote for the stun belt. Unlike the sharp-edged boxes that housed the buttons for the phase-two devices, the remote was small and sleek like the one Zachary had on his keychain to unlock his new car. He watched her with wide, worried eyes, afraid she was going to slip and hit the button again. Or do it on purpose. Zachary’s own breathing rasped in his ears. Was it supposed to sound like that? Had she damaged his lungs or his heart with the stun belt? Zachary wasn’t a big guy. The belt was designed to restrain two or three hundred pound muscle-bound men. Not someone like him. It was like putting too thin a slice of bread in the toaster. It was going to cook him. Burn him to a crisp.
“Quentin was his fault,” Clarissa sneered. “No one was supposed to be… damaged. No scars or evidence of what was going on.”
Zachary swallowed. His mouth was dry as cotton. He nodded, encouraging Clarissa to go on. “Just… business,” he suggested.
“Well, not just business.” She chuckled. “I mean… to start with, it was just for fun. But we thought… why not expand? Why not make a bit of money out of it?”
She disgusted him.
Clarissa saw him shudder, but just smiled, probably attributing it to the aftereffects of the shock.
“It wasn’t just Tirza… and Quentin… was it?”
“Of course not! Tirza wasn’t even here most of the time. That’s why we had to… get access to her using a different method. She’s such a pretty little thing. And very cooperative. There was demand, so we had to find a way to supply her. Usually it was one of the others.”
“How?”
“Watch the security checks and shift changes and find the right times to remove them. Security doesn’t go into the rooms, so a shape in the bed is all they need to see.” She shrugged. “Out for a few hours in the night. Back in bed by morning. No one knew the difference.”
“They knew.”
Clarissa considered this for a long moment. “I don’t know if they did,” she said, lips pursed. “They’re so removed, so disconnected. Did it really make any difference?”
Clearly, she had no intention of stopping, even with her partner no longer working there and the slight wrinkle of disposing of Zachary. Zachary had to find a way to put a stop to it. To save himself and to stop her from continuing to victimize the residents of Summit.
“Then what happened… to Quentin?”
He hesitated to try to take off the shock belt again. But how else was he going to be able to get up off of the floor? Every time she shocked him, he got weaker. Slower. Less able to get himself out of the situation. It was like the shock was killing off brain cells, making him stupider and stupider with every shock.
Clarissa scowled. “Why do you have to keep going back to that? He’s better off, you know. He wasn’t happy. He wasn’t ever going to get out of here. He was getting too used to the aversives, and once Dr. Abato started using the phase-threes…” She ran her fingertip over the red button. Zachary tensed.
“He’s never going to get permission to use them,” he countered.
“He will. He’s very good at getting what he wants. And even if it doesn’t get approved… I don’t think that will stop him for long.”
Zachary felt a chill. Probably just the aftereffects of the shocks. Or lying there wet on the cold floor. Would Dr. Abato really just go ahead and use the stun belts on children like Angel?
“It’s not safe… They’re not like the phase-twos.”
“No?” She waved the remote teasingly in front of him. “You’re saying you wouldn’t want me to shock you again?”
“They’ll cause… permanent damage.”
She returned to the previous topic. “What happened to Quentin was a mistake.”
“What happened?”
“Stupid Steiner meant to shock Abilene. She was being too noisy, resisting. So he shocked her. But he hit the wrong button. Hit it a few times before he figured out why it wasn’t working. The idiot.”
Steiner. Zachary filed away the name for when he got out of there, so he could tell the police. Tell them the whole story.
If he got out.
That wasn’t looking too promising.
“So after we got her out of there, Steiner checked Quentin’s room to make sure he was okay. Saw that he was lying on the floor.”
Zachary cleared his throat. “Dead…?”
“No…” Clarissa stared off into space. “On the floor. The blanket wrapped and twisted around his neck. He was tangled up, choking. He had wrapped it around his neck and he got stuck when he was shocked.”
Zachary nodded, waiting breathlessly for the details. Or maybe he was breathless from the shocks or from imagining Quentin lying there in his cell, trying to breathe.
“I told him to get the blanket off of Quentin. Do CPR. Get the portable defib…”
“Nothing worked…? Why didn’t you call medical? Pretend you were there for something legitimate and get him help?”
Clarissa shook her head. Her expression was dark. She was no longer giggly and laughing about the whole business. How fun it was to shock, molest, or sell defenseless children. The lines around her eyes became more prominent.
“Stupid pig,” she said angrily. “He didn’t even try to help Quentin. He said Quentin was just a troublemaker. Better if he was replaced by someone else.” Clarissa turned burning eyes on Zachary. “He twisted the blanket tighter!”
Zachary felt his mouth drop open. “What?”
“Steiner killed him!”
“No.”
“Gave it another twist and crouched th
ere over Quentin watching him choke to death! Men!” Clarissa railed. “They never know what’s good for them. Always have to push it too far. Everything was fine until then. But he had to get the police there investigating. And then you. The police came and were gone in a couple of hours, but you…! You have to talk to everybody. Look at everything. Ask about things that have nothing to do with his death. You couldn’t stop at investigating Quentin’s death, you have to dig into every nook and cranny, all of Abato’s dirty little secrets.”
And her dirty little secrets. She was ranting on about the injustice of Zachary’s investigation instead of Quentin’s death. How he had inconvenienced her.
If she had just left him alone, Zachary would have closed his investigation. She could have had her institution back, to play whatever games she devised. But she was too impatient and had to take things into her own hands.
“You need to learn to just mind your own business,” Clarissa said, pointing the remote at him accusingly. “Why don’t you get a life?”
“Why don’t you?” Zachary snapped back, stung.
Impulsivity was one of the hallmarks of Zachary’s behavior, a psychologist had once told Zachary’s foster mother. The trouble was, there were no drugs that would reliably reduce or eliminate impulsivity. Zachary knew. He’d tried them all. His impulsivity would be the death of him one day. And it looked like that day had come.
Clarissa seemed to suddenly remember what the remote was for. She looked straight at Zachary, her eyes deep pits of blackness, and she pressed the button.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Z
achary couldn’t think and yet he knew he was dying. He couldn’t reason or evaluate his body objectively, he just knew that the stun belt wasn’t meant to be used multiple times like the ESDs, and the fire racing through his nerves toward his heart was going to kill him when it got there.
He’d read about the stun belt. He knew objectively that the shock lasted eight seconds and delivered 50,000 volts of electricity. But that didn’t equate to the agony that stretched out interminably.
And then there was a light.
Zachary blinked.
He couldn’t see anything, but there was a light.
And if there was a light, that meant he was alive. Didn’t it?
Zachary tried to swim toward consciousness. The pain wasn’t the same anymore. It wasn’t burning its way through him. There was a dull ache deep down inside his bones and tissues. But that meant he wasn’t dying anymore, and if he wasn’t dying, he needed to wake up and figure out how to get out of the engineering lab.
He blinked again. There was a light. It was closer than it had been. Not close enough to reach, but getting closer.
It was a long time before he was able to really see anything. A light on the ceiling. Closer than he expected. And the floor was not as hard and cold as it had been. He tried to figure out where Clarissa was. She had to be close by and he had to figure out how to get out of there before she could shock him again. Maybe she had gone to the bathroom. Or to let the ex-guard in. Wherever she was, it gave him a few minutes to figure out how to get free.
He reached behind his back, trying to find the closure on the stun belt. He couldn’t feel it. He grew more desperate, his fingertips burning as he searched for it.
Zachary heard approaching footsteps, heels on tile, and panicked. He had to get out. He couldn’t get the stun belt off, so he would have to run. His legs were still weak and shaky. He tried to roll over and push himself up.
“Zachary. Hey. Stay put. Don’t move.”
He fought through a few moments of terror before processing that it wasn’t Clarissa’s voice. It was someone else. A woman’s voice, but not Clarissa. A voice he knew.
Her voice hovered over him, her hand rested gently on his chest.
Kenzie.
What was Kenzie doing in the engineering lab at Summit?
“Hey. How are you feeling?” Kenzie asked.
“What… why’re you here…?”
“I’m here to see you. To make sure you’re okay.”
Zachary frowned, trying to sort it out. He blinked and scanned the part of the room within his vision. It didn’t look like the engineering lab.
“Where…?”
“You’re in the hospital.”
Zachary closed his eyes and opened them again. Tried to make sense of the inputs. She was right. It was a hospital room. The bustle of voices and footsteps. The paging system. The smell. He’d been in enough hospital rooms he should have recognized it.
He wasn’t sure why he didn’t figure that out right away. Was his brain permanently scrambled?
“What happened? How?”
“You should just relax. Take your time. The doctor said that you need time to recover.”
“No, tell me how.”
Kenzie boosted herself up to sit on the edge of his bed, her leg warm against his.
“I’ll tell you about it if you’ll be quiet and stay still.”
“Yes. Okay.”
“You should have told someone where you were going. If you’re going to investigate cases alone, you have to at least let people know where you’re going to be.”
Zachary nodded a little. “Suppose,” he agreed. “But what happened? How did I get out?”
“You set up your phone to record your meeting with Clarissa.”
“Yeah.”
“Not just to record it,” Kenzie said. “To live broadcast it.”
“Right. I thought… it would be the fastest way to get the word out… to show people what was happening at Summit.”
“I got an alert that you were broadcasting. I didn’t check it right away… I feel bad about that; I should have.”
“Why?”
“If I’d checked your stream right away, I could have helped you faster… you wouldn’t have had to go through all of that.”
Zachary closed his eyes. “Did I get all of it? Everything she said?”
“Yes. All of the sickening details.”
He breathed out. “Everything. About shocking kids for her own gratification. Kidnapping Tirza. Killing Quentin.”
“Yes. Only she didn’t kill Quentin. But she did help cover it up, so they can charge her as an accomplice.”
“Good.”
“It was horrible,” Kenzie said. “It was awful to see her torturing you like that. Not to be able to get there to stop it. I called Mario, got him to open up your computer and have a look. He knew where you were and got in contact with the local police. Every second that ticked by… trying to convince them about what was going on, that you were at Summit, waiting for them to get there and get into that engineering lab… it was awful. It didn’t take long objectively—seventeen minutes from the time we called them—but every second was an eternity.”
“Wasn’t so great for me either,” Zachary admitted. He gave her a rueful smile.
“I guess not.”
“I didn’t know if anyone was watching. If anyone would see what was happening before it was too late. It’s not like I have a lot of followers. I could have just been broadcasting to empty air or people might think it was some kind of joke.”
“You have a few more followers now,” Kenzie said. She tucked her hair behind her ear and laughed. “It sort of went viral. A bit late, but it’s been shared all over the world now.”
“Yeah?” Zachary was both embarrassed and pleased. He’d never had anything go viral before. He was proficient with social networking, but he’d never hit on the secret formula to actually have a post spread like that. He felt for Kenzie’s hand and she grasped his in hers. Everything hurt, but he was happy to feel her touch. “If the police had gotten there sooner… they might have been too early. Before she’d had a chance to tell the whole story. At least this way… we have the answers.”
“I suppose. But maybe the police could have gotten it out of her, instead of her continuing to use the stun belt. You’re lucky to have survived. You’re lucky they got there
in time to treat you.”
“Lucky me,” Zachary murmured.
Kenzie snorted.
Zachary took a deeper breath than he had attempted before, trying to analyze his body, to see how badly he was injured.
“Is it bad?” he asked. “Or… is it okay now… is that it? I mean… what about permanent damage?”
“Those belts are not meant to be used more than once. They’re much higher voltage than the ESDs at Summit. If they were used as an aversive like the other units, kids would be dying. Dr. Abato wanted to re-engineer them, to come up with something that was somewhere in between. Stronger than the phase-twos, but not as strong as the stun belts.”
“So what does that mean? Is there permanent damage…?”
Kenzie hesitated. He squeezed her hand a bit tighter, trying not to wince.
“Only time will tell,” she said finally. “Right now, it looks like you could make a full recovery… but your body will need time to heal, and we won’t know for a while if there is any permanent damage.”
“Like what?”
“She kept shocking you. They’re only supposed to be used once. The belts are positioned to send a shock through the kidneys, not just deliver a skin shock. Your kidneys are working, but not at full capacity. The doctor isn’t sure whether there will be scar tissue, or whether it will all heal up. It’s like a burn, only internal.”
Zachary had dealt with enough burns before. He gritted his teeth, focusing on the feeling of Kenzie’s hand in his, trying to avoid slipping into the past. “Okay. What else?”
“Well, of course, with electrical shocks, there are concerns about whether there is any damage to your heart. And to your body’s own electrical impulse system. Nerves. Movement. Brain.”
His Hands were Quiet Page 24