by Tara Brown
“I am aware of that.” I nodded. “But let’s not even whisper that. She won’t hesitate in killing you.” I pulled from his embrace and hobbled down the long hallway. We passed several rooms, all of them seeming to be half finished. “The eleven million didn't cover the dungeon.”
“Nope.”
He hurried ahead as another scream tore through the dank space. I tried to hurry, but my bare feet on the ancient tile floor wasn't a great feeling.
When I rounded a corner I hoped would be the last, I stopped, seeing Luce and Jack peeking in a doorway left ajar. Coop must have already gone in.
“Get out, Cooper! We will know everything we need to in no time!” my mom snapped. I hurried inside the room that might have been a storage space before my mom had turned it into a torture cell.
“No!” I turned, looking at it all, groaning when I saw the blood dripping from Janice’s face. “Mom, stop!”
She turned. “Darling, you’re awake. You look terrible. Go back to bed.” She scowled at my feet. “Are they bleeding?” She grimaced at me—my mom who had blood spatter on her face and arms grimaced at me.
“You can’t torture her. She hasn't done anything wrong.” I looked at Janice and knew immediately that wasn't quite true. “She has secrets, Evie. Everyone has secrets.” My mom sounded like she was reminding me to do my homework or that if I didn't tuck my tooth under the pillow the fairy might not come.
Seeing the cuts and marks on Janice’s skin, I knew this was not my mother. This was the thing she became when she detached. I knew that thing well enough. I too became something in the heat of the moment.
“Can I have one chance to try to talk to her?” I asked softly, staring into Janice’s eyes.
Mom sighed. “Fine, I need to get some other tools anyway. These are really terrible instruments.” She hurried from the room, scolding Jack the moment she got out into the hallway. “You really ought to keep a better torture cell, young man. How is anyone meant to get answers with these? A corkscrew only goes so deep; you need wider instruments. Do you have any thin hose?”
“Gross.” I shuddered and glanced at Coop. “Give us a moment?”
He wanted to say no, I saw that, but he didn't. He nodded at the hall. “I’ll be right there.”
When he closed the door I looked at Janice. “I am sorry. She doesn't trust anyone.”
Janice started to shake and sob as tears streamed her face, clearing away some of the blood from her pale cheeks.
“What have you told her?”
When she didn't speak I sighed. “She is going to tell me everything you told her. That's how we work. So spill.”
“No-nothing. Just that I knew why he wanted them.” She scrunched up her face and shook her head, but the words came out past her tight and trembling lips, “I knew about the Organization and their goal to save the planet from us. I didn't disagree with their manifesto. They came to me with their plan. Dr. Drusack, he said it would be simple. They-they would utilize it only on Third World Countries, already too far gone to fix, and lower the population and crowding. It is only a matter of time before the whole world explodes in sicknesses we cannot cure. The bubonic plague was back this year, in Colorado. They had an actual plague outbreak in Madagascar. The Ebola crisis isn’t over, and it isn’t near to being over, but they have stopped showing everyone in the developed countries the scenes of the rising death tolls in the news. It was making people sad. They were writing in to the newspapers and complaining.” She laughed and cried and made bubbles out of spit and blood as she dangled from the ceiling, barely touching the floor with her tiptoes.
“And you agreed with the culling of the population?” She disgusted me. “There were children in those hospitals, and Saudi Arabia isn’t a Third World Country. It’s the largest oil source in the world. You see the difference, right? Who’s the next target? Western Canada? Very Third World there, let me tell you. All that free health care is horrid.”
She laughed again. “I know what you’re saying is true. And I agree. I didn't know he would use it for evil. I thought he meant what he had said. He would use it to free the people in terrible places, living under horrid circumstances. He lied to me.”
“So you didn't program the nanorobots to bomb?”
She shook her head. I believed her. But I had also believed her when she had looked so shocked.
“Where is the research?”
Again she started to laugh.
“Is there research or did you steal it?”
Her eyes widened and the smile left her blood-coated lips. “It’s my bloody research! I wrote every bit of it!”
I hobbled to the corner where an old wine bar sat and lifted myself gingerly onto it. It took effort I didn't really have but standing was hurting more than anything. I sighed and tried very hard to not say the thing I had to say, but it was no use. My mother didn't care about the research. “She’s going to kill you.” I nodded. “It’s her way. You’ve been tortured and seen the castle and all our faces. She’s going to kill you and your research will be found eventually by someone else, and they will take the credit for it. If you tell me where it is, I will destroy it.”
Her eyes filled with tears as the last shred of hope faded away. “I won’t ever tell anyone what I have seen or said to you.”
“Like you told Drusack you wouldn't tell anyone about his evil plan?”
Her lower lip trembled as she nodded. “I swear.”
“She won’t believe you, she never does. She doesn't have compassion and she doesn't care if the research is found. She has no loyalty to anyone but me. I am sorry though. When she starts peeling your skin off, I won’t be able to see you again. I can’t bear to see it.” I slumped and waited for my mother to return. Janice sobbed until she lost her footing and from what I could tell from the screaming, she had dislocated one of her shoulders. I didn't get up to lift her. I didn't move. I forced myself to hold tight to the wine bar, even to the point one of my nails broke.
“There is no research!” she sputtered. “It’s all-all in my head!” she stated as she tried to get back on her tiptoes but slipped again in the blood and urine. Her feet slid on the stone floor. “No one will ever find it! I have it memorized! Catalogued! I do the work and burn or hide the evidence! I leave only the parts I need, the ones no one would be able to retrace my steps with!” She pleaded, “Please don't kill me!”
Piss poured down her legs, and I knew she was telling the truth. She wasn't a hardened spy like the rest of us. She was a scientist. She had protected her baby for as long as she could. I slid off the bar as slowly as I could, grunting from the pain in my feet and ribs as I hobbled to the door. When I opened it, Coop stared at me with a confused look on his face. “What did you do to her?”
“She slipped in the blood and piss, dislocated a shoulder. She’s telling the truth. The secrets will die with her.”
He clenched his jaw and stared me down before pulling his pistol from the back of his jeans and handing it to me. He grabbed the magazine from his pocket and slapped it into my hand, squeezing me and maintaining eye contact. I took both and turned back for the room, closing the door. I shoved the mag into the gun and loaded it, taking the safety off.
“Please!” Her dark eyes darted to the piece as she shook her head desperately. “I swear, there is no research. I used the lab Dr. Drusack built for me in that Bad something place, but I never told him what I was doing, and I destroyed the machines I used. The notes in my apartment are decoys. I won’t ever tell anyone anything.”
I lifted the gun, not a single tremor in my hand, and placed my finger on the trigger. “I know you won’t ever tell anyone, Janice. I know that.” I lifted the gun as she squeezed her eyes shut and screamed. I pulled the trigger, hitting the rope above her head, releasing her arms and letting her fall to the ground. She cried out in pain from the fall as I walked to her, my bloody feet stinging from her spit and blood and piss on the floor. I grabbed the arm that was okay and lifted her off the
ground. “But now you are dead, you do not exist, and you can never leave this house. You will be part of our team. Agree to that or die. That's all there is.”
“Okay.” She nodded, turning her head and vomiting on the floor next to me as I dragged us both from the room.
Coop looked even more confused as I hobbled the two of us out of there. “Janice will be needing a doctor, one who will not speak to her.”
Coop shook his head but didn't say anything. I had to imagine it was the look on my face convincing him to stay silent. I handed him the Australian and leaned against the wall as my mother found her way back downstairs.
“What the bloody hell is going on?”
“She has never written it down. She has an eidetic memory, the same as Coop. She doesn't have research. She knows how to make nanorobots and she knows everything she needs, and when she was done building them for Drusack she destroyed the work. She doesn't have a real lab dedicated solely to this or evidence anywhere. If we kill Drusack and destroy his house, no one will ever be the wiser. He used the bots he had. Maybe not all of them, but most of them. She has the methodology in her mind.”
“This is a foolish notion, Evie. She has the ability to kill the world off with very little effort and no detectability. No one would ever see her or her little monsters coming. She has the power to kill everything, Jules and Mitch, you and me. That is too much for one person to have.”
“I know.” I nodded. “But I fear the Burrow and their motives far more than her. I think we need her. Drusack is one of the Burrow and part of the Organization. I recognized him right away.”
Mom nodded. “I know. I knew who he was the moment I saw him when Jack told me the story. This is exactly the one area your father and I disagree on. I would never work for the Burrow in the manner they want me to. I don't agree with population control. I don't agree with playing God. And they are famous for thinking they are helping the world. I knew it was only a matter of time before all those weapons and inventions would become a temptation.”
“But you and everyone have said that the Burrow is helping the world be free of the radical inventors and scientists who come up with ways for the Organization and their likes to misuse creations meant to heal the earth.”
“That is true, my dear. That is what the Burrow has long been intended for. But the power is in the hands of old people, people like me. People who have lived their lives and seen how the world has changed. They’re old school and afraid. And now in the last decades of their lives, they feel they have insight young people do not. They think differently than they used to. You have to remember this cache of weapons and brilliance has only ever been protected by one generation. Now that that generation is old, they do not quite feel the way they used to. In fact, most of them feel differently than they used to. And they are sitting on a mountain of possibilities. I knew this would happen.”
“So we are back to destroying the Burrow?”
“This has confirmed it for me, my love. Drusack is a founding father. He lived in Germany during the Second World War. He was a small boy watching as the German army led the Jews to camps. He saw the horrors and the pain and the chaos it all created. He was a German who suffered for no reason. No one ever thinks of the Germans who were just people of a country and had no say in what was done. But after the war everyone in Europe hated Germans. Everyone in the world hated them. His grandfather was a scientist, like him. He was forced to work for the Nazis. Vincent’s grandmother was taken to a concentration camp. She died there as a hostage, held as ransom to force his grandfather to work. No one ever thinks of the people of this great country who suffered under a madman and his dream team of torturers.” She sighed. “The point I am making is that if someone like Drusack can see the point in the Nazi propaganda, then it is time to destroy the Burrow and we need to do it fast.”
“Can you stay here with Fitz and the kids while we do this?”
She nodded. “This is the safest place for us. No one but Coop knew this place existed. Jack has managed to fool the staff into thinking he’s a playboy who likes to party and play with computers. The staff never leaves the house. Food and supplies are ordered and delivered. It’s an isolated castle in the middle of nowhere in Germany. No one is going to look for an ex-British spy and her grandkids here.”
“What about Fitz and the list of people from the Organization? What about his plane?”
“We landed in France and drove here. We didn't steal a car the way you children did, but we came in under the radar. The plane has gone home to Nevada. Besides, this house is a fortress with the most advanced security system I have ever seen. Jack spies on the help.”
“Don't call them that. It’s Este and—I didn't catch the butler’s name.”
Mom’s eyes sparkled with humor. “Oh, it’s your favorite name—James. Of course. A very English name. He’s been a butler for thirty years. His father was a butler and his father before that. They have served royalty and believe they still are.”
“Creepy. What don't you know?”
“Who you will pick out of the two gentlemen vying for your heart.”
I rolled my eyes. “I pick a vibrator who won’t punch me in the ribs and break them.”
She linked her arm in mine and nestled into me. “He must love you an awful lot to punch you.”
I started to laugh. “You sound like one of those abuse commercials. He only hits me because he loves me. Right?”
“Something like that, I suppose. But when a non-violent man is forced into a corner where he has to hit the woman he loves, it hurts him, a lot. Your father and I played this game once; it was terrible for him. I was fine at first, but he had a haunted look in his eyes for a very long time.”
“Oh, it hurt him.” I grinned, remembering the way Servario’s body had fallen like a huge tree in the forest. “It hurt him loads more than it hurt me.”
And that was the sad truth of the matter. I hadn’t wanted to hurt Servario, but I had done it to stay alive. My survival instincts were much more extreme than even Janice suspected. I couldn't even imagine how bad it might get, but I knew there was one thing that would trigger a full-scale meltdown in all reactors, and that was the safety of my kids being compromised.
Chapter Eighteen
Fifty shades of crimson
The view from the shower in my room was breathtaking. Across the narrow valley and above the adorable town of Gernsbach there was a castle, another one. Clearly they weren’t as rare here as they were in the US.
I assumed it was much more noticeable than ours as it was closer to town and above what appeared to be a vineyard, whereas we were located above a forest. The town was just visible to us, which wasn't a bad thing.
I leaned back and let the shower dump water on my head. It massaged my scalp and distracted my brain from contemplating the fact that I had chosen to spare her life at a cost to us all. It was the wrong choice but I had made it. Not that it mattered; if Janice even blinked the wrong way my mother would kill her. But the whole thing troubled me. I wasn't comfortable leaving her here with my kids, but I wasn't comfortable killing her because she was too smart. She couldn't come with us without being a weight and we couldn't take her to the Burrow.
At least I understood the reasoning for creating the Burrow first hand. It was a tricky decision to kill someone because they were a genius. I lowered myself gently to the bench and sighed, letting the water nearly drown me.
“Mommy!”
My eyes popped open to see Jules holding up her middle finger, not giving me the bird but showing me the obvious boo-boo she had sustained. I opened the door and let her waltz into my shower in her flippers and swimsuit with her goggles still on. “Uncle Fitz let you walk up the stairs in flippers?”
She shrugged. “He said I should take them off, but I said I could do it so he bet me five dollars I couldn't.”
“Did he?” I squeezed my eyes shut and breathed through the annoyance. “And what happened to your finger?”
“Of course.” I laughed and nodded. “It certainly does.” I kissed the finger with an exaggerated muah.
“Thanks.” Her bug eyes in her goggles didn't even take notice of the fact I was naked. Back home, between her and the cat, Ralph, my time was rarely my own. She turned and walked out of the shower but paused in the doorway. “I like Uncle Jack’s family’s house the best I think. Even if he said I have to call him Walter and he talks weird. He says he’s trying out for a movie and wants to get the part so we hafta call him Uncle Walter.”
“Is he? Well, we better help him then. And yes, it’s a pretty nice house.”
“Swanky!” she corrected me.
“When did you join the Rat Pack?”
“I didn't.” She cocked a dark eyebrow, saying it matter-of-factly and not knowing what the Rat Pack was. “It’s what Uncle Fitz says this house is—it’s swanky.” The way she said it with her missing teeth was about the greatest thing that had happened to me in a very long time. “How long are we staying here? I don't wanna miss hockey!”
“Not long. Just a short vacation.” It was a promise. I would have this cleared up in no time flat. She waved and flippered out of my bathroom. “Take those off on the stairs or you won’t be allowed in the pool!” I shouted after her.
It was met with a groan, but I knew she would take them off. She was my good girl.
Seeing her cleared up the one issue I was having. I was no longer conflicted. I knew exactly what to do.
I hurried and dressed, again pulling on some of Jack’s leisure clothing. My nipples would start to chafe if I didn't get a bra on them soon and I was missing wearing underwear. It was nice to have things like ass sweat contained to a single compartment, not just running amok in my pants.