by Hodge, Brian
“More of what they’ve already found crawling around loose. Like hairy snails as big as a banana. I don’t know what they are, but they’re poisonous. They killed two maids on the twelfth floor.”
His wariness seemed to rekindle. Maybe the truth sounded implausible and she should’ve told a lie about viruses. You know that air you’re breathing? Be careful.
“Whatever your situation is here, I don’t care,” she said. “It’s none of my concern. I’d just like to go on my way and keep looking for my friend.”
How long had she been here? Ten minutes felt about right. Not long enough yet for Barrett to start thinking she should have finished another one and checked in by now. Soon, though.
“Will you let me do that?”
But the Russian was a portrait of hesitation. Agitation. The more she looked at him, the more she saw a man unused to making decisions. He did as he was told, or he did what he wanted to in the moment. His only security came from holding the knife.
It was getting harder to see from her right eye. It was still throbbing where he’d hit her, and starting to swell, the puffy skin of the lids creeping into her vision.
“You probably think you’re the first person to do this to me,” she said. “You’re not. You’re not even the first person this winter.”
That seemed to intrigue him.
“You know, you take the wrong step years ago, and you don’t even realize it, it’s so small. ‘Okay, sure. I’ll talk to this guy for a few minutes. What can it hurt? I’m here with four friends and I always feel like the least of the bunch, and it’s still me he’s interested in, so that’s got to count for something, right?’”
It felt good to talk, even if it hurt to say the words. These words. If she couldn’t control anything else, she could control that much.
“You don’t stop to think maybe he’s the type who’s willing to settle in the looks department if he senses a way he can get control. A five-minute conversation, and it’s the worst mistake you could’ve made. It’s such a tiny deflection from the way your life was going, but it ends up changing everything.”
The longer she kept him listening, the longer Barrett had to realize too much time had gone by.
“The first time he puts you down, I mean says something that really hurts, you make the excuses for him. He didn’t mean it. He’s just had a bad day. He’s got pressures. He says nice things too, sometimes. Then when it keeps happening, you’ve already got the excuses lined up, all you have to do is pull one out. He’s having another bad day. Even though he’s only been up an hour.”
The only reservation: Did she even want Barrett coming up here?
“Then the first time he hits you, you really find out what you’re made of then. Because all along, you’ve been telling yourself that’s the line you won’t put up with him crossing. ‘If he ever does that, I’m out of here.’ And now that he has, it’s the moment of truth. But it surprises him too, you know? He acts like he never knew he had it in him. So it’s a good thing this happened, because now that he knows, he’ll be extra special careful to keep it in line. He promises. It’ll never happen again. He’s practically crying, begging you to forgive him, he has to mean it, right?”
Barrett coming in…it seemed just as likely to turn the situation into a bloodbath.
“So you start negotiating with yourself. ‘I know what I said, but this didn’t really count. It was just a backhand. It could’ve been worse. If he ever hits me with a clenched fist, though, that’s it, that’s for real. That’s the line.’ You can probably guess how that went.”
No reason for both of them to die up here.
“Then before you know it, you’re bargaining on frequency. You get so good at moving that line. It’s like, if you didn’t know better, you’d think you’ve been in training for it all along. And then by the time he forgets to pretend to feel bad, you’re not even all that surprised. ‘Well…at least he notices I’m around.’”
Now that she’d started, it was more than a gambit for minutes. There was no stopping it now. He’d need the knife to turn it off.
“Have you ever heard that phrase ‘the new normal’? No? It just means pretty soon you forget things were ever any other way.”
She could tell he believed her. If he knew anything, he would know liars, and recognize how much she wasn’t one. It was probably a vital job skill in his line of work.
“‘He’ll outgrow it’…that’s the last lie you tell yourself. You can keep feeding yourself that one for a long time. You’ve got years for it to happen. Years, if you’re lucky. I almost wasn’t.”
Over on the table, her phone came to life. No ringer, she’d set it to vibrate, and it buzzed and scuttled along the tabletop with a mind of its own. Her captor tensed, as if he had three ideas how to react, and no clue which to choose. The phone went dead after five rings, his indecision waiting it out. Finally he looked at the screen.
“Barrett,” he read. “Who is Barrett?”
“He’s the asshole I’ve been telling you about.” The Russian relaxed, and she moved on like nothing had happened. “I was right about one thing. He had pressures. He was having bad days. That’s not to say he wasn’t an asshole to begin with, but now he had some real pressures. See, what he thought he was was a hotshot day trader in the stock market. He wasn’t. He made good money in data system sales, but he was the type who had to prove he was better than everybody else at everything. Like I said…he wasn’t. And I guess when you’re trying to keep something like that to yourself, it colors everything you see. They’re all out to get you then.”
And did the Russian connect with that? Maybe. She’d never seen anyone with more distant eyes. For all she knew, she was painting a portrait of a kindred soul.
“The thing about being that stressed out is, it has to hit a breaking point. For us, it came after a holiday party. If you’re in the mental state he was in, I guess it’s not all that hard for you to misinterpret one look, or one remark, I don’t even know what it was, and build a whole story around it. ‘Hey, my wife’s fucking that guy. Maybe she’s fucking that one too. I better get to the bottom of this.’ So that’s what he did. Not five minutes after we got home from the party. There I was with the wind knocked out of me and handcuffed to the wrought iron towel bar on the island in the middle of our kitchen. I didn’t even know he had handcuffs. It’s not like he bought them on the way home. I guess he must have been keeping them back for a special occasion. But then, I didn’t know he had the gun, either.”
She nearly started laughing. She hadn’t connected the irony until now. Things had come full circle so perfectly, so cruelly, that she could almost believe in destiny.
“You Russians, did you really invent Russian roulette?”
He nodded. “It was old game in military.”
“Thanks for the export, then. Beluga caviar and Russian roulette, well done, really.” She didn’t feel like laughing anymore. “Twelve rounds of that, we went. Six for him, six for me, he kept going back and forth. Not that I was playing, he was playing for me. Three or four inches around from where you hit me in the eye, that’s where he’d press the gun. Then…then he said he was sorry. So. That was my Christmas Eve. Christmas morning, he woke up to an empty house. I went to a women’s shelter and started making plans from there. I’d finally hit the point where I wasn’t willing to move that line one more time. I had some standards after all.”
Since her discovery of the dream journal, not a day had gone by that she hadn’t wondered where Maisie’s line would have ceased to budge.
The Russian gave her a perplexed look, his eyes cold and uncertain. “Why you tell me this?”
She realized that stalling for time didn’t have to preclude other reasons.
“At first it was because I wanted to let you know I’ve been here already, big deal, I wasn’t scared. That’s not true, though. I am scared. But scared is all right. There’s no shame in scared.” She glanced out the windows at all that fluffy white
, the color of the dullest notion of Heaven. “Really, I just needed to get it out, tell it once, exactly like that, and I thought what if you’re the last person I have the chance to tell it to.”
Finally, she began to get a sense of how he’d received it. He’d enjoyed it.
She could see him weighing everything. Life didn’t seem to matter to him as much as expediency. What would be the greater risk to him—letting her go, or having to get rid of her body? That’s what it really came down to.
Maisie again. She was never far from mind. How would she handle this?
Maybe what Maisie would do was take a better look at that tattoo on the Russian’s bony chest. See one crucifix, you’ve seen them all? Not this one. It wasn’t Jesus on that cross. The figure was female, and a fire had been kindled at its base. Who didn’t like to talk about their tattoos?
“I’ve never seen one like that before,” Wendy said. “What does it mean?”
In reflex, he looked down at his chest, pulling his shirt aside to better reveal the image, and she got a clearer look at some of the other designs. Up near his shoulder, a small devil’s head snarled across his collarbone. His ribs on that side were covered with a garish montage of a man brandishing a machine gun while standing before a cluster of skyscrapers in a rain of dollar bills.
He touched a finger to his breastbone. “It means bitches took my freedom.”
She hadn’t considered he might have a third alternative. Leave her right where she was and have some fun.
She tasted metal again, but it didn’t last this time, only as long as the flick of a wrist. She was aware of something flying away from her, and the soft spitter-spatter as it made a line of little red dots across the tabletop, onto her phone and the satchel full of keys. Her cheek was so cold, as if a crack had opened in a window and let in a wintry gust, then a flowing warmth descended the side of her jaw and filled the inside of her mouth, and when she probed with her tongue, something was wrong. It wasn’t supposed to feel that way. Her mouth wasn’t that wide.
The Russian stepped back, a painter seeking a wider view of his canvas. Then stepped forward again to flick a little line across her cheekbone, an inch below the outer corner of her eye, and a matching one on the other side. Tears of blood? Because the clear ones weren’t enough?
She was too shocked to make a sound, then began to tremble, with no control over any part of her as it amplified, as if she’d been dunked below the ice of a frozen lake. A moment later she couldn’t utter a sound no matter how badly she wanted to. There was only her breath. The shallow, ragged panting of her breath.
The distant rumbling sound, though—what was that about? Thunder didn’t happen during snowstorms. Everything was going wrong today.
Not if you were Russian, though. Now he was in control. Now he could think. Now his head was clear. He must have decided her traumatized silence couldn’t last, and went for a rag in the kitchen. As for securing it in her widened mouth, she’d done him the favor of bringing the tape right to him.
Except…
He hadn’t seemed to question why she’d been carrying it in the first place.
The day had tantalized her with moments when Maisie seemed close enough to touch, a presence just behind a gauzy curtain, and never more so than now. And if she wasn’t close enough to touch, maybe she was close enough to hear a cry from the heart. The yearning had never been so potent.
I wish I’d met you. I wish I’d known you. I wish you’d told me you were going and asked me if I wanted to go there too. I wish you’d seen me the way I think I see you. Because if you had, that’s where we’d be right now…
The rumbling sounded again, closer now, less distant, then the entire building seemed to shudder. What, had a plane hit it a few floors above? Must have. This was New York, the place where planes took out buildings.
Or maybe it was Barrett. Could he have really slammed the door that hard? Just listen to him. She’d never heard a cry of such feral anguish. It had to come from some deep reservoir of primordial strength, and the building kept on trembling as he rushed across the room, every footfall the pounding step of a colossus. He clutched a stubby black stick in his hand, and against the Russian’s knife it didn’t look like much—poor man, he’d brought a Magic Marker to a knife fight. But then, with a sharp clack, it grew instantly, telescoping out two feet, with a flared knob on the end.
He swung it, and swung again, and the Russian was only lucky the first time. A crack like that coming from someone’s arm had to mean a broken bone. He held onto the knife, though, slashing and swinging, and if she could’ve covered her ears, she would have. The animal sound of men fighting to kill each other was a terrible thing.
As they fought, the strangest event began happening outside, as if the blizzard forgot itself and became something else. Torrents of water came gushing down the side of the building, washing past the windows, then freezing over the glass in translucent layers, as if the top of the building had become a waterfall and they were caught behind it. The swimming pool had ruptured somehow. It couldn’t have been anything else. Yet the water just kept coming, surely no pool held that much, the volume pouring down the side of the building like a river.
The sound of it came from within, too, roaring through the tower’s circulatory system, louder, closer, until water began to spew from the ventilation ducts high upon the walls. The force of it wrenched one of the grates loose, and it crashed down onto the dining table, the flow behind it now unimpeded. The air grew humid, and she smelled both chlorine and salt. It was more than just water, the deluge bearing greenery like the skimmings of a swamp, and living creatures—scuttling crustaceans like great insects in primitive armor, and oh dear god, these things, like giant slugs, dull maroon and speckled with rows of pale blue spots.
The flash flood swept Barrett and the Russian off their feet, while in the chair she missed the worst of it, splattered and splashed without being drenched. On the floor, they slipped and floundered, then the water ebbed as the flood continued to descend through the tower, the roar below them now, and growing fainter.
Barrett…he’d been slashed across the back of one hand, the blood streaming and watery, but it was the other hand he was looking at, his face slack with an expression of stunned surprise. Beside him, one of the speckled mollusks wriggled as though hurt, squashed and smearing an iridescent trail behind it. Only when their eyes met did she realize he must have fallen on it, spiny toxic hairs and all.
When he tried to get up and slipped back with a splash, Wendy didn’t know if he would ever get up again. His baton was nowhere within reach. The Russian, though…while worse for wear, battered and on his back, bleeding from pulped lips and grimacing with shattered teeth, he groped for his knife and found it, and struggled to sit up.
He would make it up first. Of that, she had no doubt.
The dining table chair he’d wrapped her in was thin and spindly, all dark metal with a padded leather cushion, not heavy. Wendy found she could tip forward onto both feet and take it with her, enough give in the cling wrap securing her legs to let her shuffle toward him.
When she was almost to him, she spun and backed the last tiny steps of the way, looking over her shoulder to guide herself. She leaned forward and strained, lifting onto tiptoe, doing anything she could to tilt the chair enough to clear its back legs off the floor by inches.
The chair trembled beneath her as the Russian swatted at it. He deterred nothing. When her aim looked right, felt right, she let the chair drop, and was rewarded with the sound of a rasp and a choke and a wheeze. The chair was still tilted, even as she sat hard into it. She heaved upright and let herself drop again, grinding the tip of one chair leg deeper, skewering whatever she could—the side of his neck and the center of his throat, trachea and voicebox, skin and gristle and bone. Once more, and once again, putting all her weight into it. When she could no longer manage to lift the chair, she bounced in place until the thrashing stopped beneath her and the chair leveled
out, its leg as close to touching the floor as it ever would.
Then all was still again, quiet enough to hear the last drips and dribbles from the ducts to the sodden floor. The windows steamed and crackled.
All she could see of the Russian was below the waist, motionless now. She wanted to see the rest of him. Wanted to see his face. His eyes. She wanted to see the expression he’d died with, and know she’d done that to him.
Because whatever else was to come, owning that much might make it a little easier to look into the mirror.
Barrett crawled across the floor to the knife and sawed through the cling wrap to free her legs, then made it to his feet to get the rest. She peeled away the X of masking tape that crossed her mouth from cheekbones to chin, and pulled out the bloody wad of cloth. He stood before her on unsteady legs and looked at her as if she were the only thing that existed or ever had, and cupped his cut hand to the intact side of her face.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He looked near tears. “Forgive me. I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner.”
She held him close, tightly, in case he fell, but he only swayed, although each breath wheezed in his throat and deep down in his chest. Then she held him steady with one arm while wrenching the chair free of the Russian. She spared a glance down, and what she saw on what remained of his face was everything she’d hoped for. At his unseeing eyes she spat a thick gobbet of the blood he’d drawn.
Her cheek no longer felt cold. Now it burned like a line of fire.
She steered Barrett into the chair, and he let her, even though she was sure it was the last place he wanted to be. He cradled the stung hand to his chest, and what she saw of the palm looked angry and inflamed.
“Are you…?” She couldn’t find the words to finish.
“I don’t know what I’m doing. Nothing good.”
“We need to get you help,” she said, but found that the air duct grate had landed on her phone, now bent in the middle and the screen cracked to shards.