Death Thieves

by Julie Wright

  That news bothered me. If Nathan was a level one and I wasn’t, how had Nathan contracted the infection? Which infection did Nathan have? I almost asked but didn’t really want to know.

  Tag must have warmed to the topic because he kept talking. “I actually assumed because of your relationship status that you were poisoned, too, but Professor Raik insisted every individual be tested separately.”

  “So if I’d been a level one infected, you would have left me in the car wreck like you left him?”

  “Letting him go was a mercy. A lifetime of disease is hardly one to look forward to.” He scooped up more rice.

  “I bet if you asked him, he’d feel differently.”

  “You’re angry.”

  His observation only served to make me angrier. “You think? Of course I’m angry. He’s dead! I could be dead, too! I’m getting hauled into a world that kills babies and you’re sitting here stuffing your mouth with rice and acting smug and self-righteous over your choice to let Nathan die. And you’re judgmental, too! What makes you the grim reaper who decides who lives and dies? Nathan was great! You don’t know anything about him! You don’t know anything about me!”

  I moved off the bed in disgust and went back to the kitchen to eat by myself, but not before I heard him whisper, “I know everything about you.” The gentle, yet sorrowed, whisper washed over me like an embrace begging forgiveness. I shrugged it off and sat down hard at the kitchen table. I finished off my food quickly, went and found the pots we’d stowed under the bed, and filled them with water. The house still didn’t have any electricity, so I’d have to boil my bathwater. I searched the drawers for matches to light the pilot, but couldn’t locate any.

  Unwilling to ask Tag for a match, I went to my room and dropped down on the bed that was not mine, covering myself in the blanket that was not my sun quilt. This camping out with the kidnapper routine had grown old. Even being in a future with running water and regular normal meals would be better than the nightmare I currently suffered through.

  Tag could be heard bumbling around in the kitchen. I’d have gone out to help with the dishes and the cleaning up if I hadn’t wanted to strangle him. The idea that Nathan could have been here with me, instead of dead, filled me with a whole new loss. Had Nathan been with me, we could have overpowered Tag and his Orbital. We’d be home again in no time. At the very least, I wouldn’t feel so entirely lost—so entirely alone.

  But Nathan was dead. I mourned the loss of him all over again. Crying until my head ached worse than ever before. I curled up in a ball and hugged a pillow to my chest. Everyone I knew was dead. The only way to get them back was to go back to them. And I had no idea how to make that happen.

  Tag’s dark shadow stood in the door frame. I felt his presence long before he spoke. “The water’s hot and already poured into the tub should you need it.” He stayed only long enough to deliver his message and then disappeared like the shadow he seemed to be.

  I hated him.

  Chapter Eleven

  I didn’t use the bath water he’d prepared for me, even though every part of me screamed for the relaxation a bath would bring to my body. When he entered my room and asked if my head hurt, I snapped, “It’s so none of your business!”

  He stood in the doorway for a moment before saying, “Just so you know, I had already decided to pull you from the wreck before I administered the test on your blood sample. From my observations of you—your kindness, your generosity to your sister, your ability to endure—you were worth saving no matter what the cost.” When I didn’t respond, he went to his own room and stayed there, which led me to believe he’d gone to sleep.

  For a long while, the sound of my uneven broken breathing mingled only with the sound of my sniffling. What had he meant by, “You were worth saving no matter what the cost?” Would he have really pulled me out if I’d had a disease? Nathan had been worth saving. Why hadn’t he seen that? Nathan with his desire to make the world beautiful and his absolute love for life. Nathan would have saved the world if he’d lived long enough. Tag pulled the wrong person out of the car.

  For a fleeting moment, I wished I could have talked, or even forced, Winter to come with Nathan and me to lunch. If history had recorded her as dead, Tag would’ve pulled her out, too. Going to the future with Winter wouldn’t have been any different from moving to a new foster home. Even leaving our sun and moon quilts behind would have been okay so long as we were together.

  I slapped my hands over my eyes. Was I insane? Would I want Winter in this future where toddlers were walked to their deaths by their own parents? Where a crazy person could gouge your eyes out just because you looked at him?

  No. Not for even a minute would I want her with me in this. Even being alone in her past, she had Aunt Theresa and all her friends, and her amazing talents of acting and her ability to get scholarships and do something great with her future. And even if Nathan would have passed Tag’s “test,” I wouldn’t have wished this on him, either.

  Would Tag have really pulled me out? I thought about how careful he’d been with me, how he worked so hard to keep me comfortable—safe. Maybe, just maybe . . . he might have pulled me from that wreck.

  Could I blame him for the casual way he discussed infanticide when he’d been raised with crazy people hurting everyone? Could I blame him for taking me out of that wreck when he’d been sent on an errand he believes will save the world?

  Tag was a victim of brainwashing, of a society gone mad. And if I looked hard enough at my own feelings, I found myself respecting him for his perseverance. I found myself respecting all those golden opportunities that he’d had to hurt me, that he’d let pass—where he protected me instead. I found myself respecting that he acted more like a gentleman than most of the adult guys I knew—even more than Paul had with Aunt Theresa. I found myself grudgingly grateful to still have a pulse.

  I hated that I couldn’t hate him.

  So I shoved my need to hate someone onto this mysterious Professor Raik. Who snatched teenagers from time to start his own super race of clean-blooded humans?

  Yet, if things were as bad as Tag had said, if people really did refuse to have more children and mankind really was dying out, did the professor’s mad methods make sense? And wouldn’t it make sense, since I was dead and all anyway, to do something to help?

  Questions marched through my mind like battle-weary soldiers as I lay in the dark on a tear-soaked pillow. After I’d exhausted my ability to analyze my situation and Tag’s part in it, the night became suffocating. No matter how much my body needed sleep, sleep wouldn’t come. The rhythm and habit of falling asleep to the sound of someone else breathing made sleeping any other way impossible. The house creaked softly in the wind that had picked up outside. My heart rate increased even as I tried to breathe evenly and force it back down to the restful state where I might find sleep. I imagined the shadows from the trees’ movements playing against the wall to be the strange and twisted form of Professor Raik. He was coming to get me—coming to—

  With a low growl, I stripped the blanket off the mattress again and hurried to Tag’s room. I looked at the floor between the wall and his bed. I moved to lie on the floor but hesitated. What might be hiding underneath the bed?

  You’re being stupid! But my body wouldn’t budge toward that space between the wall and where Tag slept. There are no monsters under the bed!

  Repeating that logic to myself didn’t change my mind or my ability to lie on the floor and let whatever was under the bed suck me under with it. What is my damage? I do not believe in monsters, ghosts, aliens, or possessed clowns.

  I wanted to feel safe and protected. Tag would protect me—whatever else. The decision was made before there was time to realize a decision needed to be made. I climbed onto the bottom of Tag’s bed, careful not to make too much movement, staying at the edge at the foot of his mattress. Tag rolled over and stretched a little, likely disturbed by my presence. His toe touched my arm. With a sigh
of relief, I listened to his breathing and fell asleep to its cadence.

  I awoke to the first patters of rain, realizing Tag was again on the floor. He bolted upright as the first sound of thunder tore open the sky. “Janice!”

  “Whoa there,” I said, shocked to see him look vulnerable and terrified. I’d have been amused by me soothing him instead of the other way around except his alarm sent a shiver of panic through me as well. “It’s just a storm. You’re okay.”

  He took several deep breaths before his white knuckles released the edges where they’d been gripping the blanket.

  “Did you have a bad dream?” For him to yell the name of a girl . . .

  “No.” He staggered to his feet and took his blanket into the room I’d vacated the night previous.

  No? He was a bad liar. He looked like the boogey man had been after him. Maybe Janice was an enemy he’d once fought. That thought cheered me for only a moment before my face fell into a scowl. I’d heard the caress over the name as he uttered it—the worry that hid underneath that one word for that one person. Janice meant something.

  I followed him into the other bedroom to find him making the bed.

  “In case they come back,” he said as he tucked in the corner.

  The explanation made sense. I went back into his room, pushing my irritation with Janice out of my mind, and made his bed. Thunder rolled around the mountainside outside the house. Every few moments, lightning flashed white light through the window. Rain pattered over the rooftop and slid down the panes of the windows.

  Tag had moved to the bathroom to clean. I went to the kitchen to see if I could find us better food than beans and rice for breakfast. The pantry had everything stocked in those huge cans. I found powdered eggs and bacon flavored textured vegetable protein. Aunt Theresa had been big on food storage supplies for when Armageddon fell upon us. I knew that vegetable protein tasted like real meat if you used your imagination. I took out the cans and set them on the counter.

  Tag had left his bottle of matches on the stove. I didn’t think he’d done it by accident since he seemed pretty aware of his surroundings and his stuff at all times. His leaving it felt like a sort of peace offering to me—as though by leaving the bottle, he offered me a small piece of my independence. I could heat my own water.

  Appreciation for the gesture came along with the regret of not using the water the night before. My muscles all ached and a hot bath would have been so welcomed. It probably would have helped sooth my storming headache, too. “Stupid pride.” I muttered the admonition low enough to be heard only by me, just in case Tag lurked anywhere nearby.

  Cold air chilled the entire house. I wished the heating in this place worked . . . If wishes were ponies . . . I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but it was a favorite saying of Aunt Theresa. It was her way of saying, “You can wish until you turn blue, but it isn’t going to change anything.”

  I made breakfast. The heat from the blue flame on the stove actually took the cold bite from the air, making the kitchen preferable to the rest of the house.

  Tag followed the smell into the kitchen and offered a cautious smile. He’d cleaned himself up—wetting his hair and slicking it back away from his face. His face shone as though it had been freshly scrubbed and shaved. I wondered where he’d got the razor since I hadn’t seen one while snooping through the bathroom drawers. I startled myself when I said the words I hadn’t even been thinking. “You look nice.”

  I bit off the end of the word nice realizing I had been thinking he looked nice. I went back to making sure our powdered eggs didn’t burn, feeling my own cheeks burn.

  He cleared his throat and hurried to pull out dishes for the table. We sat down, each of us acting overly formal and uncomfortable. He picked up the ladle and spooned clumpy yellowed chunks onto his plate. He topped it off with the vegetable protein and a sprinkle of salt. He moved to dish me up a plate, but I hurried to do my own. Any more of his serving me and I’d scream.

  “It tastes good.” He took several more bites and nodded approvingly. “This spins wild shrooms any day.”

  “Spins?”

  “Yeah, it’s good—you know, spins.”

  I hid my smile at the compliment in my glass of water. The food wasn’t bad, definitely better than wild mushrooms, and in spite of the headache I felt better. I took several bites before clearing my throat and asking, “So who’s Janice?”

  His eyes widened. “No one.” He shoved the food in his mouth and looked away. He did that a lot when I started questioning him. I didn’t want to end up spending the whole day fighting, so I shrugged and let it go.

  We ate in beat to the rain on the roof and the thunder rolling around the bowl of the canyon. We both did the washing up. I opened the cupboards after drying the dishes to put them away and looked at the racks and the hard plastic material the cupboards were made of—like those permanent vinyl decks that are made to look like wood. The dishes were made of the same sort of material. “So if the flash heaters worked, we’d just put the dishes away in the cupboards, close the door, and come back to clean dishes?”

  “Yes.”

  “So every time you close it, it turns on?”

  He shrugged as if to say, yeah, so?

  I closed it and opened it. “What if I’m only taking out a cup? And everything in there is clean already. That’s a waste of energy.”

  “The sensors know when something is being removed or replaced. It doesn’t go on every time.”

  “But you just said it did.”

  “Summer, trust that it just works without explanation. Your dishes would be clean, and you would only have to put them away to get them clean. Think of all the loading and unloading of your machines your time does. That’s a waste of energy. This cuts out several interim steps. The whole world lives like that now. In everything, steps are cut out. Life is less complicated, less messy . . .”

  “Except for your crazy population going off to their deaths when they’re just toddlers. Other than that, your world must be as unmessy as a scrambled egg.”

  He sighed and turned back to the sink of water.

  After we cleaned up the place, we lost our feeble grip on avoiding real conversation, so we avoided each other instead. The rain chased the warmth out of the house, so I went back to searching through the closets in all the bedrooms to find a jacket or a sweater. I also did a search to find my shoes. I found them under the bed I was supposed to sleep in at night.

  With nothing left to entertain me, staying away from him proved impossible. I wanted to know where he was, what he was doing; I wanted to see him.

  Tag sat in a big fluffy sort of chair that looked like a shaggy dog. The shag chair sat in the corner in front of the bookshelves. A book laid open, spread over his lap. One hand sat on the book, his fingers spreading the pages apart. His other hand fidgeted at the back of his neck, where his fingers pulled at the short dark hair. The Orbital had been snapped into place on his wrist.

  “What are you reading?” The idea of there still being books made of paper and bound covers in the future intrigued me. I instinctively ran my fingers over the dust jackets on the line of books—some of which had familiar and well-loved titles.

  “A Sliver of Midnight, by Romania Brown.” His fingers gave a final tug at his hair before he dropped his hand.

  “Never heard of it.” I plucked a leather-bound collective works of Jane Austen from the shelf. The heavy volume felt good in my hands. Familiar, normal, like I might just be doing a little reading for my class on classic literature in school. The rain outside felt familiar, too, the constant spattering lulling me into complacency.

  “You wouldn’t have. It hasn’t been written yet in your time. Of course, few enough people in my time have ever heard about it. It’s a little-known classic. I wonder if I’m the only one in the world who’s ever read it. Really, classics are all we have for decent reading. Not many people grow up with talent in any of the arts anymore.”

  “Pr
obably because most artists are a little crazy, and you’ve culled art in all its forms out of humanity.”

  “Artists aren’t crazy.”

  I snorted. “Van Gogh cut off his ear. Writers are the worst schizophrenics around, hearing voices all the time and writing down what the voices tell them. Musicians are more tantrum-throwing, drugged-up lunatics than they are anything else. Totally crazy.”

  “I doubt that.” His brow furrowed though as if he’d contemplated my theory and worried there might be some validity to it.

  “What’s this book about?” Keeping the subject on the book and not on future human conditions seemed wiser. I settled into the chair across from him.

  “It’s about a man who stands at the point between two days. What’s behind him is a mess of misery and despair; what’s in front is something unknown and feared. What happens in the day to follow all hinges on that one moment at midnight when he decides how he will handle what he learned from the day prior. It’s about our choices and what we learn from our choices. The metaphors of life, betrayal, honor, trust, rebellion—it’s all in there—even love.” His eyes met mine briefly and flicked away as he nodded to the book on my lap. “You an Austen fan?”

  “You’ve read Jane Austen?”

  He smiled. “She’s a classic, too. My mother loved her Persuasion even though Pride and Prejudice remains public favorite.”

  “She’s Winter’s favorite. I like her well enough, but she’s not my favorite.”

  His smile broadened. He took a deep breath. “You remind me of—” Thunder pealed and he cut off whatever he was about to say.

  The noise made me cringe as my headache pulsed behind my eyes.

  “Does your head still—” He broke off again, likely unsure of whether or not I’d snap at him like I had the night previous.

  I nodded to save him from needing to finish his sentence.

  “Would you like some relief?”

  I felt instantly stupid. He wasn’t my butler or servant boy waiting around for me to command him, but I nodded again.