Security

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  Brian’s telling her, “He loves you, Tess. He forgives you. He understands.”

  In my virtual override diagram, the maze is unoccupied. Every place is unoccupied. I’m standing where they’re standing, but they’re not here, and I’m not there. The pencil twiddles in my mouth. The counter under my head seems softer; it seems like a pillow. Randomly, I think of the creek by the house in Indiana. Watching my brother and sister play. I had no friends of my own, but that never bothered me. I preferred to watch them, make sure they were safe as they swam. My sister wore bright orange water wings. My brother liked to splash her, but I’d tell him to knock it off. Sometimes, I’d tip my face to the sun and close my eyes. I’d think about time, and about how I didn’t need to understand it. He who serves doesn’t always have to understand.

  I reset the override system so that I’m standing in the driveway, and I look up at Manderley, its vacuous inner light. I pass through thirty emergency vehicles. Through the police, who call for Tessa and Brian to halt when they stagger into open space.

  I walk alone through digitally spotless, of-­course-­unlocked front doors. Through a pristinely clean white foyer with plump sofas and an inviting fireplace, a gratuitous chandelier. Past a marble check-­in counter. To an empty office full of steady silence. I enter the dull, beige secret elevator. And I close it behind me.

  A minute and four seconds later, Tessa’s pounding on the office wall with the one arm that works. Brian’s beside her, pounding with her, but looking askance at her, worried. A duo of paramedics waits by Franklin’s desk with tackle boxes of stuff Tessa badly needs. She’s sheet white and can hardly stand. She screams my name at the top of her lungs. I mutter, “Brian, you idiot, get her out of here,” but the words come out mush, because I’m weeping.

  “He must be unconscious!” Tessa says. “He might be bleeding out! Help! Help us! We have to help him!”

  One of the paramedics loads a syringe, eyeing Tessa with concern. Brian gets Tessa in a bear hug from behind and sits on Franklin’s desk. The paramedic administers a sedative to Tessa’s neck. Brian speaks in Tessa’s ear. I can’t hear what he says, but I can hear Tessa’s arguments to what he says: “He’s alive. Help, help’m.”

  Several dozen patrolmen crowd the foyer, their voices a wreck of echoes, discussing how vital it is that they don’t contaminate the crime scene while they tromp through blood, turn around, and request that the crime scene photographer take pictures of their shoeprints for evidence. A beefy cop slips on Delores’s liver like it’s a banana peel and falls on his butt by the mantel. It shouldn’t be hilarious, but I laugh. The pencil slips from my mouth, and I let it. I watch it roll down the counter and listen to its progress—it reminds me of the playing cards in my bicycle’s spokes when I was a boy. It nears the counter’s edge. I blink and it’s gone.

  Two more paramedics wheel a stretcher into Franklin’s office. Brian lifts Tessa onto it. The police lieutenant tries to help, but Brian snaps at him, “I’ve got her.” The lieutenant asks Brian a question, taking a piece of paper and a pen off Franklin’s desk. Brian glances at Tessa, whose eyes still show slips of awareness. He slaps the paper on the desk, draws a crooked rectangle with twenty compartments, and slashes “Xs” here and there. When the medics begin rolling Tessa out, he hands the map to the lieutenant like he can’t be bothered. He holds Tessa’s hand, escorting her to the corpse-­strewn foyer, through the busted-­in front entrance, across the cruiser-­packed driveway, into an ambulance. They load her cautiously. I have a strange, flustered reaction—the ambulance is malevolent. It’s being driven by Killers; it’ll crash on the way to the hospital. But as Brian climbs in after her, looking around in a similar paranoid fashion, he notices Camera 3 above the main doors. He holds there, his weight on one foot. Lithe and young. Capable.

  He nods at me, once. I grin, almost hearing him say it: I’ve got her.

  I nod in return, and he ducks inside.

  A policeman shuts the ambulance’s rear doors and pounds on the roof. It drives away. No siren, but its lights whirl, painting the hedge maze’s tall exterior in smaller and smaller swatches, until it reaches the highway and merges. I lose track of it momentarily when it’s passed by an armored van doing at least eighty. Then it’s an ember glowing red to blue. Then it vanishes.

  The SWAT team arrives. Twenty-­two men in full gear pour out of the vehicle. Their CO looks at the maze with the affected wisdom of a wretched leader. He starts his stratagem speech by shouting, “Listen up!” and it only gets worse from there. The men nod, smack their helmets lower, and charge into the maze single file. They split at each turn so they’ll cover more ground. They lead with their rifles around turns, see dark-­clad figures with guns, and shout, “Freeze!” repeatedly, while the dark-­clad figures with guns likewise shout, “Freeze!” repeatedly, until both parties realize they are attempting to disarm and arrest a fellow SWAT team member. It takes “Freeze!” said an average of four times for both dark-­clad figures with rifles to realize this. I’m laughing so hard, my tears are streaming onto the counter and forming puddles.

  I stop laughing instantly when a trio of SWAT team members successfully corners a fourth SWAT team member. Their boots are trampling a patch of muddy grass recently churned by a life-­or-­death brawl. But no dead man lies there.

  I’m oddly relaxed, perusing monitors for him. A distant smudge of average stature skulks toward the ocean, far past the pool. He’s able-­bodied, still; Brian must have missed. When the Thinker gets to the shore’s soft sand, he kneels. He labors at some task. The navy blue of his clothing becomes flesh. So does his face. He’s taken off his mask and his coveralls. He’s too far away for me to distinguish any features, but I can tell he’s digging. He rolls up his clothing, deposits it in a deep hole, tips sand on top, and packs it tight. He adjusts his sling-­cum-­bandage into exclusively a bandage so it won’t get in the way when he swims. I remember the sting of salt water in open wounds, and the memory reassures me. What a professional. He’ll collect his fee and leave the country for a while. He won’t kill Brian and Tessa, because he won’t be paid to.

  The Thinker dives into the ocean and disappears.

  The police lieutenant is walking into the foyer, holding Brian’s crude sketch. “Everybody shut it! We’ve got a diagram of where the bodies are. Where’s Johnson?”

  “He’s puking again, sir,” says a sergeant.

  “Fine, Wisnewski’s on point. We’re going floor by floor. We’ve got eyewitnesses saying the perps are dead—one in a pool out back, the other in the maze out front. I’ve sent SWAT in there, so they might find the guy by the time we’re all on our next birthdays.”

  “It’s my birthday today, sir,” says the sergeant.

  “That’s great, Wallace. Shut your damn face.”

  Charles Destin, Destin’s girlfriend, and Delores are in the foyer. Sergeant Wallace opens the dryers, finds Franklin, and has to breathe into a paper laundry convenience bag for ten minutes. The police search each floor, but not each room (they don’t have card keys), so Henri remains in the dark of Room 1408 and Twombley in the dark of Room 1516. Brian knew where Jules was, so the police find her, and Wisnewski makes the intuitive leap that another body might be across the hall. He finds Justin. Brian must have described the nineteenth-­floor entrance to the secret elevator, since the police knock on the shelf with the juice concentrate, with no result. Behind the wall in Franklin’s first-­floor office, Vivica stares at her handprint with eyes that are flattening and beginning to cave in.

  The coroners drew straws for who had to retrieve the Killer from the pool. A sad old man with heavy jowls works with what looks like an insect net. He’s making a pile of bite-­sized pieces near Tessa’s boots.

  SWAT team members continue freezing one another in the maze until their CO declares, via comm link, that the area is secure. He’s lying—he has no clue—but it’s dawned on him how risky this is. His men try to find their way out. One attempts to crash through the fol
iage and gets stuck. Another shoots at the hedges until he creates a hole, steps through it, finds he spatially misjudged, and scratches his helmet inside another dead end. I almost die of laughter. I’m red faced and covered in tears by the time they’re clear.

  It’s five twenty-­eight a.m. A subtle burnish has appeared above the mountains. Police scurry across the monitors like ants. They obtain a card key and search the guest rooms floor by floor. They find Henri in Room 1408. An officer takes photos of Henri’s contorted position while a coroner’s assistant waits with a body bag. A detective squints at the dirty dishes in the kitchen, then at the meal laid out in the dining area. He goes back to the kitchen. When he thinks no one’s looking, he steals a spoonful of cold cherry coulis from the stove and nods appreciatively.

  A few patrolmen continue with the room-­to-­room, but they’re far slower once reduced in numbers: Twombley will be waiting awhile in 1516.

  Officers chatter about how they’ve never seen a case this grisly, this awful. They discuss the killers’ probable motives—parental abandonment, socialization in the penal system or the foster system or both, cruelty to animals, bed-­wetting, and a fascination with fires. They state obvious facts. They can’t wait until it’s a story they tell one another, in some future where it isn’t a smell thick in their nostrils, where it’s not people sprawled in various exotic methods of murder but victims: the victim in the dryer, the victim in the penthouse hall, the victim on the fourteenth floor, the victims in that gorgeous lobby. I hear them rehearsing what the story will become.

  We become what we become by accident, a lot of us. We find a method of being and be that. Even if we think we’re thinking about what we’re becoming, we’re often thinking around it, because there doesn’t seem to be enough time.

  It’s five forty-­nine a.m. They’ve arrived at the hospital by now. Brian’s refusing to leave her. If Tessa were to awaken tomorrow and learn I was alive, right down the hall—or in another ward, the ward where nurses turn you to prevent bedsores—she’d become confused. She would feel she owed me something. She would come to my room, apologizing.

  Or, she wouldn’t come to my room, and I’d wonder why. I’d think: Last I saw her, she was screaming my name, afraid for me, and regretful, and Brian was saying there was no need for either her fear or for her regret. I might ask myself, Why didn’t I end it there?

  I could be a motivational speaker. I have the suits. I merely need a wheelchair I control with a mouthpiece, or—by dint of a miracle—the minuscule range of motion I’m able to regain in a few fingers. There I am, wheeling across a stage, telling weary drones with disposable income how happy I am to be alive. While somewhere, Tessa and Brian live the truth of what I’m lying about. I could remain a security expert, but only in a consultative capacity. I’ll never again sit and stare at a bedlam I cannot prevent.

  Or, that’s all I’ll do.

  It’s a beautiful morning. The pixels change from green and black and white to the colors of morning. You reach out and seize the future, or you become the sum total of your past, and I’m sick of it already, my future, my tenancy inside this broken body, my thoughts, my philosophies, my empty observations. I see the years spinning out before me, sure as I see the highway like an adder waiting to strike. I wish I had a star so I could wish myself brave enough to face—

  Five fifty a.m. I choke on a sob that waggles the knife in my neck. A bone called the atlas holds up the head. It is named in honor of Atlas, who held up the world. It’s also called C1. It will punch into my brain stem with the mildest impact, so I stop the motion, but not the sob. Motion is life. For how much of my life—even if I was running, swimming, driving, flying—for how great a portion of it was I sitting still? What I see—the cars on the highway, two of them a few miles out, a white sedan and a blue sedan, unassuming but well tended, the vehicles of men dedicated to order, to protocol, dedicated to the rule that early is on time and on time is late—what I see is not life. It’s high-­definition color confetti.

  It’s Bowles, arriving first, followed by Larson. Good men. They park in the lot, get out of their cars, and run for the main doors. Bowles is green, but he’s improving all the time. Someone must have watched out for him when he was a SEAL. That’s bad when you’re a SEAL, but Bowles no longer is. He’s a civilian. He’s security, and that’s nothing; there’s no such thing. There never was.

  A sergeant stops them at the check-­in counter. They show their ID. It’s a process. It takes a few minutes. They shift from foot to foot, taking in the splattered state of the foyer and glancing nervously at the ceiling, as if trying to see through it, to the twentieth floor. But they follow the rules.

  The rules are: people will tell you you’re brave. When you’re bedridden, or you get a chair you control with a mouthpiece, “You’re a brave, brave man,” is what they have to tell you, according to the rules of etiquette when interacting with a quadriplegic. Especially one who was tall and broad, proud of it, vain. A man who exercised hard to look like Captain America. That was who he thought of, secretly, when he exercised. He was born in the late sixties in Indiana, and he thought Captain America was the best superhero. He was a strong kid, but he became so much stronger, through mental toughness, through discipline. And when someone like that has his spine severed and gets to watch his strong body atrophy underneath him as he wheels through life—if he’s lucky—by scraping a fingernail clumsily along a control panel, people will tell him, “You’re so brave.” And he will hate them. He will be wrong to hate them, but he won’t be able to help it. He is not a brave man, not in that way. Not in a lot of ways.

  Tessa knew that, and she waited for her knight to come for her, and he did. And I’m glad. I’m nothing but glad and grateful. They’ll be here in seconds.

  People will think I died after aiding Brian and Tessa. After those antics in the maze, they’ll say, He must have passed out from the strain. Tessa thinks this is true already. Brian doesn’t, but he’ll keep his theories to himself. The medical examiner won’t bother with a specific time of death. When Bowles and Larson check my pulse and find my neck warm and my body pliable, they’ll take the truth with them to their graves. They’ll erase the twentieth floor’s camera feed. They’ll say, His chair must have rolled.

  No one else will guess I pushed my left cheek along the counter, back and down, away from the monitors. Thinking, not altogether flippantly, I’d better go get that pencil I dropped.

  Bowles and Larson are showing the police the secret elevator. They use Larson’s controller. They goggle at the sight of Vivica.

  I move another half inch, hurrying.

  A policeman holds Bowles and Larson back. “We need to get the body out of—”

  “You don’t understand. There’s no other access to the twentieth floor. We have to check if our team is alive up there.”

  I move. Movement is life.

  They move, past the second and third and fourth floor. I am nearing the edge. On the monitor, the sun winks over the mountains. It shines in my eye. The fountain is still on in the center of the maze, spraying at least ten feet high. Someone should turn that off, it’s a horrible waste of wat

  ACKOWLEDGMENTS

  NODAK

  Mom

  Dad

  Ya

  Brock

  Aubs

  NOLA

  Erin

  Des

  NODAK

  Sara

  Sarah

  JAX

  Jen

  MSP

  Dani

  Steve

  Sally

  C-VILLE BN

  Roy

  Stewart

  Tammy

  UVA

  Scott

  Ann

  Henry and Alex

  Michael

  the Survivor Types

  Cecilia and San Judas Tadeo

  ESA

  Emma

  Serena

  ALG

  Chuck

  Jane and Br
unson

  Brooke and Craig

  OTH

  Daphne du Maurier

  Stephen King

  Shirley Jackson

  Czeslaw Milosz

  Alain Robbe-Grillet

  Joss Whedon

  John Carpenter

  GINA WOHLSDORF lives in Colorado. Security is her first novel. (Author photo by Rachel Sundheim.)

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