Natural Selection

by Amanda Lance

  She swallowed hard, her eyes instinctively looking for an escape and finding none. Andrew stood in front of the locked door and stared with narrow eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  He ignored her question by tilting his head and staring as though he could see through her shirt. To Emilia, there seemed to be a strange hybrid look of interest and disgust, not unlike how a chronic dieter would gaze at a piece of chocolate. “Shame about what happened to your friend.”

  “Yes.” She gulped. “It is. I guess she’s doing okay though—more of a few scratches and bumps than anything else.” She would keep him talking, she decided, distract him with mindless babbling and factual anecdotes if she had to. As her nervousness hit full bore, she somehow decided it was the best way to keep him occupied.

  He laughed a little then, the cold, harsh sound making him seem more devious than ever. What was more startling though was the thing he said next.

  “In my defense, I thought she was you.”

  Emilia scoffed. If this was his idea of a joke, she wasn’t finding it humorous. “T—that’s a messed up thing to say, Andrew. It isn’t funny.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny,” he said “I’m trying to enlighten you. Do you know how lucky you are that I didn’t find you last night?”

  “Andrew—”

  “Though I suppose that was my fault. I was so intent on finding the woman in that black dress, I hardly paid attention to anything else. When did Claudette take her dress back? If I had known, I would have rethought my plan.”

  “You?” Suddenly, she was struggling to breathe again. This had to be a joke, right? Just one really bad, poorly timed joke? “You hurt Claudette?”

  “Yes, you imbecile. Didn’t I just say that?” He rolled his eyes and sighed. That malicious attitude was much too familiar to be foreign.

  “Why?” she managed. “You don’t even know her.”

  “As I said, I thought she was you, you half-wit. Honestly, I don’t know what he sees in you—” He paused as if musing on a private joke. “Well, that isn’t exactly true…”

  “Andrew, you’re scaring me…”

  “Am I?” He laughed with his new accent. “Good! If you’re afraid of me then you understand what I am capable of.”

  How much longer would it be before someone came to use the restroom? Should she scream now, or wait until then? “What is all of this about?”

  He took a slow step forward and smiled deviously. “It is about revenge…no, no,” he corrected himself. “It’s about justice.”

  She looked around for something to hit him with, a mop, a toilet plunger, anything! Would it be possible to rub soap in his eyes if he got close enough?

  Emilia’s mind searched for an escape route. Should she just have locked herself in a stall and screamed her lungs out? Would the vent be locked? Could she even hoist herself up through it if it wasn’t?

  A half dozen ideas went through her head, ceasing only when she saw what his hands were doing. Andrew withdrew a dark metal object from his back pocket, deliberately, as if to scare her. And suddenly, Emilia’s plan of throwing a urinal cake at him didn’t seem so brilliant.

  She had never seen a gun before.

  “Don’t do anything hasty now, Em. We don’t have much time here, and I would prefer to get through it without shooting you. Now, where is he?”

  “Andrew, w—what are you doing with that?”

  “Where is he?”

  “He who? I have no idea who you’re talking about!”

  “That heyvoon lover of yours, that’s who!” He quietly raged on in another language, but Emilia’s head was spinning with a fresh course of fear, and the adrenaline that came with it. She never would have guessed Andrew was an angry person, let alone a violent one. Hadn’t she repaired her damaged sense of judgment after everything that had happened with her mother? What happened to that new sense of distrust that she had prided herself on? And—she startled as the awareness hit her. Was he speaking Farsi?

  “Kasper?” Then, the terrifying possibility hit her. “What do you want with him? If you hurt him, I’ll—”

  Andrew erupted into laughter then, and even if he didn’t have a gun, the sound alone would have been enough to make her blood curdle. “You’ll do what, eh? Throw a book at me?” He stopped laughing enough to settle himself, returning to his serious demeanor and stare threateningly. “No. No.” He shook his head. “You can’t do anything to me. Besides, I’m not the one who will be hurting him.”

  Chapter 13

  Lessons

  Despite her attempt to signal those who walked by them, Andrew managed to get Emilia outside through the cafeteria doors and into the strange vehicle she didn’t even know he had—maybe however, it was easier for him, considering he was holding her arm with a death-like grip and digging the small pistol into her back.

  “Get in the driver’s seat and don’t do anything you’ll make me regret.”

  Emilia looked around the crowded parking lot. There seemed to be cars in every spot but not a single human being. Where was a cop when you needed one? A security guard? Hell, she would have even settled for a noisy paramedic.

  “What did I just say? This is the employee parking. No one will be around if you try to run away.”

  If nothing else, Emilia hadn’t told her where Kasper was—in the underground parking lot. Probably waiting for her and starting to worry about why she hadn’t answered his calls…

  “Give me your phone.”

  She buckled her seatbelt slowly. “I don’t have it with me.”

  He pushed the barrel into her side. “Do you know how long it would take you to bleed out from a gunshot wound? How much pain it would be?”

  Emilia glared at him, narrowing all of her hate and building anger into a single glance. “I have seen Reservoir Dogs.”

  Andrew smirked. “Then give me your phone.”

  She looked away from him and shifted her weight to retrieve the phone from her back pocket. The moment she did, she could feel Andrew’s eyes on her backside and she shivered in the summer heat.

  He practically licked his lips.

  “Good,” he said, yanking it from her hand. “Maybe you’re not half as dumb as you look. Now drive.”

  “Piss off.”

  When his fist found her abdomen, she nearly became ill—the combination of wind being knocked out of her and the injury to her stomach making her just as nauseous as lightheaded.

  “Drive to the apartment. Do it and don’t give me any more attitude about it, or so help me, God…”

  She reached her hands up and gripped the wheel as hard as she could. Telling herself that if she could focus on that action alone, then maybe it would be easier to breathe again.

  Emilia coughed throughout most of the drive, which wasn’t helped by Andrew pushing the gun harder against her at each stop light and intersection. If there was someone who even looked their way, the gun would prevent her from alerting anyone.

  Despite history lessons, news reports, and common sense, Emilia had remained slightly oblivious to the power that a single device could wield. Guns had the ability to hurt people physically, sure, take their lives, definitely, but the fact that they could so completely dislodge an individual’s free will had never really sunk in to Emilia until now. And while that familiar feeling of ‘that could never happen to me’ had dissolved the day her mother’s boyfriend had attacked her, there had somehow remained the dissociation between violence and her own mortality.

  If Andrew really wanted to, he could kill her at any moment and there would be nothing to stop him.

  Even though she was desperate to regain her breath and drive as slowly as possible, the terror of her situation still managed to sink in. What did Andrew plan to do with her? What if she couldn’t get help before he hurt her or someone else? If he had attacked Claudette, then what other kind of mindless violence could he do? Andrew had said he thought Claudette was her, and
given the confusion of costumes and with the darkness of night, she could maybe see how she and Claudette could be confused for one another. But why was he after her in the first place when they had been nothing but friendly neighbors? Surely it had something to do with Kasper, yet what exactly it was she didn’t know.

  Though her palms and brow began to sweat, Emilia still held strong to the wheel. What if she went to turn on the AC and he shot her right then and there?

  Despite the fear for herself, there was still that anxiety for Kasper’s safety that persisted. If Andrew knew Kasper—knew him from when he lived in Iran, then he must have been lying to her all along. Months of the occasional hello turned to friendship only to have it be a means of getting at Kasper. If he was determined enough to keep that lie up for the last year, then what other sort of masterminding was he capable of? And more importantly, what was his interest in Kasper? If Andrew was kidnapping her for ransom—even for justice as he called it, what had Kasper done to inspire such hate?

  “Get inside and don’t make a sound,” he said when they pulled into the building’s parking lot. “If you ask someone for help, I’ll shoot them first.”

  Emilia hesitated before slowly opening the car door, hoping that by chance someone walking by would see her distress. Where was that woman who was always illegally using the building’s dumpsters? That old man who fed the birds? Where were the IT guys and joggers? The delivery men and the religion pushers? She looked for them inconspicuously and found none. Frustrated by her speed, Andrew forcefully took the keys from her and stepped out of the car.

  Why did this have to happen on the one day she didn’t have her mace?

  Knowing her steps by heart, Tut began barking almost as soon as they walked in—his yelps and cries to go out getting louder by the second.

  “I have to—”

  “Not a chance. Get upstairs and shut up. We’re going to my apartment.”

  Sorry, Tut, she thought, strangely grateful in her fear that her dog would be safe.

  He shoved her inside the unlocked apartment, causing her to stumble as she tripped over the debris. The one time she had really seen Andrew’s apartment it had been so clean, so tidy—what happened?

  But that wasn’t the only thing that had changed about Andrew’s apartment. During Emilia’s solitary visit, it had reminded her slightly of her own apartment with the same basic structure and covered with Cornell school memorabilia, books, and cheap electronics. Now however, Emilia saw the overflowing recycling bin and flies buzzing above the dishes in the sink, a stained puddle of something on the floor, broken pieces of china on the table and the padded entrails where a lounge chair used to be. The plant he once put in her care over a long weekend away was dead and wilted.

  As startling as the change over the last few months was, none of it was as frightening as the bulletin board.

  A bulletin board with pictures of her.

  Yet, it wasn’t just her. Along with pictures of her, there were pictures of Claudette, pictures of the community service kids who cleaned up the dog droppings, pictures of her Saturday study session leader, and pictures of Tut.

  There was even a picture of Kasper—grainy and obviously taken in the shadows of night.

  The pictures themselves were clustered together with articles from the newspapers, printed pages, and tokens such as a brochure from her favorite Chinese place and a business card from the shelter. Emilia only had a second to glance at it before Andrew followed in behind her, but she did catch the headlines “Local Architect Donates New Children’s Wing” from the Weston Town Crier and “New York shelter seeks adoptees” from Pit bull Monthly.

  “Apologies about the mess bringing you here wasn’t part of my original plan and then things progressed more rapidly than I thought.” He snickered at some private thought. “Know of any housekeepers I could hire?”

  Emilia straightened out her posture and stopped herself from crossing her arms over herself. At a minimum, she didn’t want him to know how intimidated she really was. “Original plan?”

  “Didn’t you even wonder where that rose came from?” He chuckled warmly. “It was the beginning of my efforts to lure you away so I could kill you and plant the evidence on him. Can you imagine how awful it would be for him? To have his disgusting face on every news and television network and be called a monster by the world?” Andrew’s sigh expressed a longing that made Emilia shiver.

  “Oh well.” He shrugged as if her murder and the potential ruin of Kasper’s life was as inconsequential as getting the mail.

  “Anyway, I would have done this right at his hotel, but with more people around, you’re likely to cause someone to get hurt. And you don’t want that now, do you, Em?”

  She nodded her head. She would have agreed with him that Elvis was an alien as long as it kept him complacent.

  “Good. I didn’t think so. Now go on, take a seat over there.” He gestured with a move of his gun toward what remained of a love seat. “Go on.”

  Emilia did as she was told, walking slowly and carefully as to not make any sudden movements. She could very easily imagine herself sneezing violently and the gun going off as a result. Like when he first grabbed her in the hallway, maybe she could keep him talking, bide some time until someone complained about Tut’s barking and came to knock on her door. Maybe when they did, Emilia could create a distraction and call out for help.

  “Andrew? Is this about money?” The vision came into her head as naturally as anything else. If this was a kidnapping for ransom, and with his feelings for Emilia, Kasper would have given him everything he had.

  Somehow, that thought terrified her most of all.

  “If this is about money, I’ll write you a check. I don’t have a lot of money in my checking, but you can just have my ATM card, too. I’ll give you the key code and you can take whatever you want.”

  He seated himself in the chair across from her and scoffed. “Well, as appealing as that sounds, I’m going to have to decline.” He continued to laugh lightly while he took her phone from his pocket. While she wanted to see what he was doing with it exactly, Emilia couldn’t avoid looking at the barrel he held so casually in his lap. She stared at it as if hypnotized.

  “Which one of these numbers belongs to your lover?” He spat out the word like it was something dirty and immoral. Emilia looked away and tried not to listen to Tut’s pleas to be let out.

  “What do you want with him? What is he to you?” Instinctively, she tried to inconspicuously search for another exit. If she tried to jump out the window, would she kill herself or maybe just break a couple of bones?

  Amused by her question, he looked away from the phone and back at her. A gleam of revulsion seemed to make his eyes brighter. And if Emilia wasn’t so terrified, she might have thought it was ironic how such a dark emotion could make someone seem lighter, carefree, and at ease.

  “What?” He laughed again. “You don’t see the resemblance?”

  Emilia looked at Andrew closely—perhaps for the first time. Her neighbor had the light coffee-colored skin for someone of his supposed background, with the same dark hair and strangely blue eyes of a Caucasian. He was tall and his hands were large. Maybe, just maybe, if she stared at him hard enough, she could see a forehead similar to Kasper’s.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Cyrus Zafar.” He said “and I am the only legitimate son remaining of the Zafar Khaanevaade.”

  “You’re related to Kasper.” She breathed the statement more to herself than him, taking the situation out of the surreal. Kasper had family? Relatives? Emilia knew, of course, that his parents were deceased, that he had spent portions of his childhood between hospitals being experimented on and group homes—yet, his life before her was something he so rarely spoke of, she knew it was a forbidden topic. After awhile, she had merely assumed he was the remainder of his tribe, as alone in the world as she had found him.

  “It shames me greatly,
but DNA doesn’t lie.” He turned his attention back to her phone and began skimming through the numbers once more. “Now, which one of these—”

  “You still didn’t answer my question: what is he to you?”

  “What is right,” he mumbled. “He is the disgrace of my family, an abomination and a traitor.”

  “A traitor?” She swallowed hard and closed her eyes, an abomination an unacceptable way of describing Kasper. “How?”

  “When my poor mother learned of his existence, she insisted on taking him into our home. She clothed him, fed him, provided shelter for him, and in return he betrayed my brother so terribly that our mother died of heartbreak. He can, and will be punished for it.”

  Before she could stop herself, Emilia scoffed at the idea that Kasper could damage his own family like that. Despite his own claims, he had been the kindest man she had ever known, and was often the most gentle. And even if he had not always been, Emilia had never seen him in any other circumstances unless strongly provoked. In her eyes, that was the only perspective that mattered.

  Cyrus, however, took her disheartened laugh with personal offense and his eyes went wide, sinister with something brewing just beneath. He called out, knocking the coffee table against the wall, all the while shouting names at her she recognized from Kasper’s tantrums when he watched soccer on TV.

  Now, she could see the resemblance.

  “Do you think this is a joke? That atrocity destroyed the lot of us with his lies! Sent my mother to perish in her sickbed while my brother died in jail! He deserves little more than death!”

  Emilia attempted to control her fear by concentrating on the vein that pulsed from his neck. As quickly as he had become enraged however, Cyrus managed to simmer himself down with a laugh.

  “But I have a better idea.”

  She tried to keep her expression unreadable. Maybe if she could do that, then he wouldn’t see her fear. Emilia didn’t want to give him that much satisfaction.

  “What are you going to do?”