His—Shane’s—father and brother had called him crazy for blowing every cent of his Christmas money on trip after trip to the hardware and fabric stores to procure rectangles of foam rubber, sheet metal, and wool, along with spools of string and twine of various thicknesses and tensile strengths. The only redeeming aspect of the whole project, in his father’s eyes, was that Shane wanted to learn to weld, affording Shane and his dad their quota of “male bonding” time for pretty much the decade.
And when, after five weeks—having put in hours’-long work sessions every afternoon after school, abridging his usual reading schedule, excusing himself early from the dinner table on the rare and regrettable occasions the three of them actually broke bread together—when, after five weeks of this dedicated effort, he showed the fruits of his labor to his family, marching out in full regalia, a not-quite-authentic-but-still-cool fanfare he’d downloaded playing over the Sonus Fabers in the living room, their reaction had fallen somewhat short of what he’d hoped for and expected.
They had, in fact, laughed at him. Loudly. Mercilessly. Tears forming in their eyes as they chortled like unruly children.
Well, who’s laughing now, Shane wonders. The garment he’s built is the most perfect combination of stealth and defensive functionality ever conceived, as evidenced by the central role it played in helping Arun’dh’aile overcome the marauding Pangh’ears in the near-apocalyptic Battle of F’thars. Now, it’s finally being put to use here on the planet Earth. And what better use could it enjoy than its participation in the anointing of a new hero, such as the city of Great Falls and the surrounding region have never seen? Tonight, this suit, along with the mysterious figure encased within it, will become a thing of local legend.
Admittedly, though, Shane wishes he’d worn a different undergarment. The foam rubber chafes a bit on his groin, and a pair of his brother’s boxers would have provided better protection than his tighty-whities.
He stands at the side entrance, where the couple had entered the house several hours earlier. He looks the door over. He can’t tell if the alarm is armed. He glances up at the surveillance camera above the door. A small red light tells him it’s working; Jay and his friends are no doubt watching, wondering who in the world this masked interloper could be.
Watching… and trembling. The fools.
He reaches out to the doorknob. It turns. The door is unlocked. May as well go for it. If the alarm goes off, so be it. He’ll just have to be especially stealthy. He hasn’t tested the armor against bullets, but if it can withstand Pangh’ear darts, then human bullets shouldn’t be anything to worry about. And if he can manage to cut the lights and work under cover of darkness, then he’ll really have the drop on them.
He pushes the door open. Silence. No alarm. He steps into the darkened mud room and finds an embarrassment of sporting goods arrayed on shelves and in bins along either wall—skis, snowboards, lacrosse sticks, bicycle helmets, tennis racquets, basketballs, baseballs, footballs, volleyballs, even a couple of pairs of boxing gloves. Supplies, in other words. While his armor is sound, he has no means of attack apart from his self-taught implementation of the ‘ngarhach grappling protocol (which, to be fair, he has yet to deploy in a live-combat situation); and while his hope is to keep this mission entirely covert, he cannot rule out the possibility that violence may become necessary.
After testing the various striking instruments—baseball bat, hockey stick, badminton racquet—he settles on a lacrosse stick; it’s lightweight enough to handle easily but with sufficient reach to keep his foes at bay.
Armed and ready, he goes into the hallway beyond the mudroom and turns right. According to the mental map he’s made from the black-and-white footage he saw earlier, this should be the way to the great room, which connects all the other sections of the house. The central hub, as it were. From there, he’ll be able to assess the situation and determine how to proceed. Gripping the shaft of the lacrosse stick tightly, the inner thighs of his Throndice battle suit squeaking as they rub together, his heart heaving with equal parts excitement and (like any good warrior, he can admit it) fear, he makes his way down the corridor.
After an hour of struggling, working his way first to his feet and then to the door, John has managed to get his hand on the doorknob. But it’s no good. The door is secured from the outside.
He sighs and lets his chin drop to his chest. He needs to regroup, to reassess the situation. He’s bound in such a way that he’s virtually immobilized. Even if he could get the door open, it would be a tall order to scoot and roll all the way down the hallway to the staircase. And even if he made it, he might break his neck going down the stairs. He’s got to get free of these ties.
He looks to the medicine cabinet. There are nail clippers in there. There may even be a pair of shears left over from Matthew’s brief self-reliance phase.
Keeping a shoulder against the wall, John hops over to the sink. Leaning over the sink, he takes the handle of the door to the medicine cabinet in his mouth, the cool metal harsh on his canine teeth. He bends his neck to the side, working the door open a sliver, then releases the handle and wedges his forehead into the opening, swinging it wide.
The nail clippers sit atop a box of Q-tips. (No matter how many times John has told Val that she shouldn’t put anything narrower than her elbow in her ear canal, she just can’t seem to break the habit.) He leans his head into the cabinet. His lips come up an inch shy of the clippers.
He tries out different angles, sticking out his tongue until his throat aches, but no dice.
He stops and thinks, then bites the edge of the box of Q-tips and yanks it out. The box tumbles into the basin of the sink, along with the nail clippers. He dips his face into the sink. Plowing through the pile of cotton-tipped shafts, he ferrets out the little metal object. He stands up and looks at it in the mirror, its sharp teeth gleaming between his own.
He pauses for a moment, gazing at the Q-tips scattered about. It has never, until now, occurred to him how much the little cotton-tipped shafts of paper look like tiny double-headed lacrosse sticks. How could he have missed that? How could Matthew never have used these as accessories for his action figures? Perhaps he had, and John was too busy with work to notice.
He shakes his head, wrenching himself out of his reverie. He’s got to keep his head in the game. The only imperative now is survival. There’s no room for the kind of indecision that stymied his earlier efforts to escape. He bends over, placing the nail clippers on the edge of the sink. Then he turns around and feels for them with his hands.
On the third attempt—having knocked them twice back into the sink—he has the clippers in hand. Contorting his wrists and fingers to get them positioned around the zip tie, though, is another matter. He’s performed enough surgeries to be able to visualize the task at hand from the sensory information his fingertips give him, but when he is able to get the clippers positioned on the zip tie, his hand is bent at such an angle that he can barely apply any pressure, certainly not enough to make more than a small indentation in the high-grade plastic. It would take him an hour or more to eat through the tie like this.
He twists his hands, trying to get a better grip. The nail clippers spring out of his sweaty fingertips, plopping into the toilet bowl with a small splash.
So much for that.
He takes another look in the medicine cabinet. The shears don’t seem to be there.
There’s got to be another way to do this. Perhaps if he can catch the zip tie on something, he can use his body weight and whatever strength he’s got left to yank it off. It’ll hurt like hell and the plastic will probably take a patch of skin along with it, but it’ll be worth the damage if it works. He’ll be able to fish the nail clippers out of the toilet bowl and go to work on the tie around his ankles.
Now, what to catch it on? He tries the corner of the sink, but it doesn’t provide a good enough grip.
The nobs in the bathtub might do the trick. It’s an old-fashioned, ru
stic design with a pair of four-handled wheels controlling the hot and cold water. If he can hook one of those handles into the tie, it should hold.
Leaning his shoulder against the wall, John slides down to his knees, then pitches his torso over the edge of the bathtub, tumbling into it like a sack of potatoes. His face plastered against the inside of the tub, he works his arms up and back, straining his triceps and lats, searching for the handles.
He finds them and starts to work the plastic tie over one of the nobs.
Wait. He has the handle for the hot water. If it turns while he’s pulling, he could end up pouring scalding water on himself. He pushes himself back, feeling for the handle to the cold water. He finds it and threads one of its branches into the narrow crevice between the plastic tie and his wrists.
Planting his feet against the far end of the tub, he takes a deep breath and pushes hard, like a swimmer taking off from the wall of a pool, his weight and the strength of his quads going head-to-head with the soundness of the plastic restraint.
The pain and pressure in his hands are immediate and fierce: blood pools in his fingers, capillaries rupture, the plastic rips the hair out of his skin. But the zip tie doesn’t come loose. He relaxes, shifting his weight into something like a demented child’s pose to release the pressure from his hands. He’ll have to try again. The hundreds of times he’s told a delirious mother to give it ‘just one more push’ loop through his mind, and he suddenly has a fresh perspective on the apoplectic looks they sometimes give him.
He takes some deep breaths, closes his eyes, and presses again. Harder this time.
Through the howling pain, he feels the plastic shifting, approaching the widest part of his hands. If he can just get it to slip over the ridge of his knuckles—
His body slams forward into the base of the tub. He hears a rush of water, feels a cool blast on his hips. He looks down. The handle has broken clean off, and water gushes from the pipe, but his hands are still tied.
God damn it.
This night. This fucking night. Why should he keep going, keep struggling? Everything he attempts to do seems to make the situation worse, to bind him further. Why not just sit back at this point and let the water overtake him, make this claw-foot tub his final resting place? Sounds better than getting executed by the two wackos out there who are…
Who are what? What are they up to now? Where is Val? What are they doing to her?
The blood dripping from the wound on his head swirls and spreads into the water pooling in the tub. That blood means there’s life in him yet, and so long as there is, he’s going to fight to protect his wife from those men.
He scoots and shimmies his way onto his knees, taking in gulps of pinkish, iron-tasting water as he does. The horizontal geyser spraying from the exposed pipe is hitting the edge of the tub, half of it falling back into the basin, the other half spraying out onto the floor. A small stream is forming, heading toward the door.
Shit. If Stanley sees the water, he’ll come back and discover what John has been up to.
New step one. Get a towel to stanch the flow of water before it reaches the door.
John leans his upper body over the edge of the tub and somersaults onto the floor. His elbows and shoulders make a sickening crack as his body hits the tile. His vision goes blurry. He feels nauseated. Either the symptoms of a concussion are finally coming on or he’s dislocated something and he’s starting to pass out. Either way, it’s not good.
The water sprays over him as he flops like a fish on the wet floor, trying to work his way onto his belly, the pain in his head, arms, and hands making every movement almost unbearable.
There’s a sound like coins rattling, just beyond the door. The doorknob turns. Shit. It’s too late. Stanley’s come back. He might just take him out at this point, ending his pathetic escape attempt once and for all.
The door swings open.
Standing in the hallway is what looks like a five-foot-tall, heavily padded flying squirrel. Has John passed out already? Is this a dream, some inscrutable vision from the liminal space between consciousness and oblivion?
If this is a messenger coming to take him to the other side, then he’s clearly made some questionable decisions in his life.
“Hello,” the creature says, and hearing the high-pitched, inflectionless voice, John realizes what he’s looking at. It’s a kid, wearing a costume. A costume that has the rough-hewn look of something homemade, stitches showing, pleats folded unevenly. “Don’t be frightened,” the kid continues, “I’m here to help.”
Jesus. Whatever the hell he thinks he’s doing here, this kid is liable to get someone killed, most likely himself.
“Listen,” says John, “you’re in danger. There are some very bad men here.”
“I know. I have seen.”
John is struck with an indistinct but forceful suspicion: this kid’s presence in the house has some connection with Rich slamming the door in his face. A wave of nausea sweeps over him.
“I know what’s happening here,” the kid says.
Out of the mouths of babes…
John shakes the water from his face and lifts his head in the boy’s direction. “What’s your name, son?”
The boy hesitates. “Fa’hrouq. Protégé of Arun’dh’aile.”
“Listen, Farook—”
“Fa’HROUQ.”
“Fa… listen, this is what you need to do. Pay close attention. Downstairs in the kitchen—do you know where the kitchen is?”
The boy nods.
“In the kitchen, a few feet to the right of the sink, there’s a breadbox. Inside it is a button that will send for help. I want you to run downstairs—as fast as you can but quietly—and I want you to press this button. Then I want you to get out of this house and go home. Tell your parents what’s going on, have them call the police.”
The boy pauses again, seeming unsure of John’s advice. He reaches to his right and picks up an object resting against the wall. It’s one of Matthew’s lacrosse sticks. He brandishes the piece of sporting equipment. “I am prepared to defend you.”
“And I appreciate that. Very much. You are a very brave young man. But the best thing you can do right now is to run downstairs and press that button, then run home as fast as you can.”
The boy looks at John’s bruised and bloodied body, then past him at the aquatic mess forming in the bathroom. “Are you sure this is the action you would like me to take?”
“I’m sure,” says John, nodding painfully.
The boy reaches down and places a gloved hand on John’s shoulder. “I shall not fail you.”
“Thank you,” says John. “Now hurry. Hurry!”
The boy disappears down the hall. John sighs, resting his head for a moment in the narrow stream running from the bathtub to the door. He closes his eyes against the current, trying to block out the starbursts of pain in his head. He takes a few deep breaths, then looks up through the open doorway.
Oh shit.
He forgot to tell the kid to close the door. He’s got to get it shut before Stanley returns.
No, that won’t do it. With those coins scattered about, he’ll know the door was tampered with. He’s got to get outside of the room and try to play it off like he worked the door open on his own. Stanley mustn’t know the kid was there, and that he’s going for help. If these guys know the police are on their way, it’ll up the ante. The first thing they’ll do is make sure there are no witnesses.
John writhes and bucks and kicks, working his way toward the door, ignoring the pain blasting through every quadrant of his body. He makes it to the doorway, then into the hallway. Should he wait here?
No. Keep going. There’s no clear plan, no objective, no hope in it whatsoever—but the only option he’s got is to keep going. Keep the torch lit and hold it up against the darkness.
Just. Keep. Going.
Tamping down his impulse to stay and protect the helpless man, Shane (a.k.a. Fa’hrouq) ignores the light
at the end of the hall and makes straight for the stairs, intent on the task he’s promised to complete. It may not be the course he would have chosen, but the man may possess information about the ‘situation on the ground’ that he lacks. He has no idea what’s gone on in the house in the hours since his brother kicked him out of his room.
Of course, he possesses plenty of information about the situation that the captives, along with their proximate captors, aren’t privy to. Even if Jay was a bit stingy with the details, he knows more about what’s actually going on here than anyone else in the house does. Nevertheless, he gave his word, and it would besmirch the dignity of the Throndice garment he has donned to do anything short of following through on his promise.
He darts across the floor of the great room and passes through the archway into the kitchen. The center of the room is dominated by the wide kitchen island, the spilled wine from the wife’s scuffle with the big guy now dried into a syrupy lagoon, flecked with islets of broken glass. On the far counter stands the breadbox. He goes left around the kitchen island to avoid the shards of glass and dried blood that mar the floor where the woman shattered the bottle on the man’s head. He reaches out to the breadbox and draws up the sliding lid. Inside are some boxes of crackers and a few pastries, barely concealing a small grey panel with a round button in its center.
This is it. Much like when Arun’dh’aile, wearing the same garment, was charged with sounding the fabled Horn of Thrakos from atop the highest peak of Mount Va’hramilon—a sound not heard by the F’tharians, or anyone else for that matter, for three-hundred star cycles prior—once Shane has sounded the alarm, there will be no going back. He will disappear into the inky darkness outside, allowing the authorities to sort it out, leaving them to speculate (unsuccessfully, to be sure) on the identity of the enigmatic stranger who swept in, wraith-like, to put an end to the night’s terrors.
He reaches out, hand quivering within his black polyester glove, and places his palm atop the button. Three. Two. One. He presses down.
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