by Nancy Bush
Liv walked toward the gathering slowly.
“The government plans these things,” one of the men in the group was agreeing with Hague. “They don’t see us as individuals. We’re like crash test dummies. No feelings! No thoughts! Available and expendable.”
“The government keeps a lid on this stuff so we can go about our daily lives,” Hague stated. “But it’s the hospitals you have to worry about.” He wagged his finger at his listeners. “That’s where the mindbenders are. That’s where experimentation takes place. Hi, Livvie.”
She hadn’t thought he’d even noticed her. “Hello, Hague.”
“This is my sister,” Hague told his followers and all four of them gave her a hard once-over. She was glad for the baseball cap and the jacket. Did they watch the news? Maybe. Maybe not. This was dangerous territory, but she desperately needed to talk to her brother.
“You’re the one who works for the government,” a woman with a long face and stringy gray hair said.
“No,” Liv answered, surprised.
“War games,” the man next to her said knowingly. He had eyes that didn’t quite focus properly.
“It’s that company,” another man, younger and rail thin, said, clearly rolling the idea over in his mind.
Liv’s anxiety level spiked. If they came up with Zuma Software . . . “Could I talk to you for a minute alone?” she asked Hague.
He slid a darting, birdlike look at her. For a moment she thought he was going to refuse, then he gestured to a chair while his four listeners reluctantly scooted their own seats back and walked a few steps away. They perched just out of earshot, apparently waiting to return at the first indication that Hague and Liv were finished.
“What?” he asked.
“I’m in trouble. Someone could recognize me.”
His gaze narrowed on her, cataloguing the way she was dressed. “What kind of trouble?”
She leaned toward him. “There was a shooting earlier today . . . did you know about it?” Hague shook his head, so she quickly brought him up-to-date on what had taken place at Zuma, finishing with, “I know it sounds crazy, but I think they were after me.”
“We’re both crazy, Livvie. Everybody says so.”
“And as a result, I’ve done something—irresponsible.” She lightly tapped one fist against her teeth, seized with anxiety.
“What?”
“I’ve . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to tell him about Auggie. How she’d kidnapped him and tied him up. Every moment she spent away from him and out in public felt like an eternity.
“Who did the shooting?” Hague asked in a low voice, matching her tone. His eyes darted around the room suspiciously.
“I don’t know.”
His eyes came back to hers, holding her gaze tautly. “Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You know who they are,” he insisted.
She shook her head. “Really, Hague, I don’t. But this has got something to do with the package from Mama. It’s about my past. Our past. Yours and mine.”
“Our past,” he repeated.
“I’ve had this feeling for a while, that someone’s stalking me. And then when I got the pictures from Mama yesterday and then today. . . .” She swallowed hard. “I just want to know what you think. Have I got this right? Do you believe me?”
His eyes were dark pools of an emotion she recognized as fear. “It’s us,” he agreed. “They’re after us. Could be any one of them,” he added, glaring tightly at his disciples, who were still waiting for Liv to leave.
“Not them.”
“I told them about the package. I told them yesterday.”
“You weren’t here yesterday.”
“I was. I came later. They said you’d been here . . .” He glanced over to Jimmy and Rosa and the bar. “I told them. I told all of them.” Now he looked at his four listeners. “There were more here last night. They knew.”
Liv’s heart clutched. Though she felt his paranoia as if it had jumped to her like a spark of electricity, she didn’t agree with him. It wasn’t these people. Quixotically, and like always, the more he agreed with her, the less she felt certain of herself.
“I think it’s the Mystery Man who knew Mom. He’s at the center of it.”
“It’s not these people?” He glared at them, turning his head suspiciously as he looked at all their faces individually.
“I think it’s about the zombie,” she said.
“The doctor,” he said.
“The doctor?” she repeated. He nodded, waiting for her to continue and she questioned him, “The man in the picture? The one who’s stalking to the camera?” She drew the picture from the envelope and slid the photo to him again. “He’s a doctor?”
Hague pulled back from it, as if the paper were covered in germs, but his gaze was zeroed in on the man. “He looks like . . .”
“Who?” Liv asked when he trailed off. “I got the same hit. Like I knew him.”
“We both know him. From when we were kids.”
She gazed at him helplessly. “How can you know him from when we were kids? You were so little.”
“I grew up though,” he said, his eyes starting to lose focus.
“No, Hague. Don’t leave. Please.”
“He’s always there . . . out of the corner of my eye.” Slowly his head turned and he focused on the bar and Jimmy and Rosa and the red pepper lights looping around the glasses hanging upside down.
His hand shot out and grabbed her upper arm and Liv yelped in surprise. “Don’t let him get you, too.”
“The stalking man?”
“He’ll drill holes in your head. And he’ll put receivers inside the folds of your brain. And you’ll be a zombie, too.”
She saw his eyes start to roll.
“Wait. Hague, wait.” He was going into one of his fugue states again. “Don’t . . . don’t . . .”
“We saw him again, didn’t we?” he asked in a drifting tone.
“Hague!” she hissed harshly.
But he was gone. Into that distant place. His eyes becoming slits and then closing altogether. Liv looked around for help and the four acolytes rushed back.
“What’d you do to him?” the woman with the long face and straggly hair asked.
Liv edged away. “He does this sometimes.”
“But you sent him there!” the younger man accused her.
She shook her head vaguely as she backed toward the door. Della had been right: she wasn’t able to get Hague back to the apartment. Especially not now.
With thoughts of letting Della know about Hague, she stumbled toward the cantina’s entrance but when she got to the door Della was already there, blocking her exit. She glanced past Liv to Hague, muttered something furious, then pushed on past her.
Liv didn’t have time to care. She was filled with wriggling eels of anxiety herself. She needed to get back to Auggie and away from places and people who might recognize her. She needed a place to hole up and think. Time.
How long would it take? How many hours, or days? Or weeks?
She’d embarked on this crazy journey and now she didn’t quite know what to do next.
“Groceries,” she said aloud, halfway back to his place.
Exiting Sunset Highway, she wound the Jeep down Sylvan hill and toward a strip mall with a Safeway as the anchor store. Keeping her head low, she hitched her backpack over one shoulder, grabbed a shopping cart and headed inside the brightly lit grocery, winding through the aisles, grabbing items for more sandwiches, her mind far away from the errand at hand.
In line at the checkout, she heard the checker behind her talking over the Zuma massacre with a male customer.
“Two of ’em are dead,” the female checker was saying in a conversational way. “They’re not saying who yet. Gotta inform the family first and stuff.”
The man answered her: “How many were shot?”
“Half a dozen, maybe?”
Four. Liv swallow
ed hard and carefully perused the rack of magazines at the end of her checkout stand. Her mind’s eye flew through the faces of her coworkers: Paul, Jessica, Kurt and Aaron. Aaron . . .
“Are you all right, miss?”
Liv’s checker was looking at her with concern and Liv realized she’d made some kind of whimpering sound. She swallowed, shook her head, and said in a forced rasp, “Dry throat. Got a cold.”
“Yeah. Been going around.” Liv focused on the woman’s name tag: JEANNIE. She kept her eyes lowered so Jeannie wouldn’t spend too much time looking at her face, then reached in her backpack for her wallet, careful not to let anyone see her gun. She then counted out the cash for the groceries, and watched as a helper put the sacks in her cart. He insisted on wheeling the cart out toward the Jeep, though Liv would have preferred to do it herself. A scream was building up inside her head, one she just managed to tamp down as she thanked the young man and climbed behind the steering wheel, letting out a pent-up breath.
It took another fifteen minutes to drive the rest of the way to Auggie’s house. She’d left the garage door open, but once parked inside she leapt from the vehicle and ran around to the rear, yanking the door down behind the Jeep, cutting off the view from prying eyes, throwing herself into pitch dark. She stopped for a moment, gathering her bearings, then she opened the driver’s side back door and hefted out the two bags of groceries, noting how clean his car was except for the gray hoodie flung across the other back seats.
Juggling the bags, she was closing the Jeep’s back door when her brain kicked in. Setting the bags down, she kept the door ajar to keep on the interior light, then she circled the front of the vehicle and opened the passenger door. Punching the button on the glove box, she held her breath, expecting . . . what? Some big reveal about him?
The glove box was locked.
He’s careful, she thought. But then so was she.
Still, she was disquieted. Quickly, she sorted through his keys but the one for the glove box wasn’t there.
What are you doing, Liv? What are you doing?
Shutting all doors to the Jeep, she waited until the interior light switched off, grabbing her backpack and leaving the groceries in the garage for the moment. Then she cautiously slipped into the breezeway and across to the back door, unlocking it and stepping into the kitchen. It was dark, but she could see Auggie still tied up to the chair by the oven door. Moonlight filtered in and touched his face, glistening on his open eyes.
“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded.
Chapter 8
“I got groceries,” she answered automatically, setting down her backpack on the counter. “It took a while.”
He made a big show of looking all around her. “Huh. I don’t see any.”
“They’re still in the garage,” she said.
“Afraid to walk in here carrying something? Cause I might be free and jump you?”
“I get that you’re upset,” she stated flatly.
“You go off for hours and leave me tied up and you ‘get’ that I’m upset? What if there’d been a fire? I could be dead. Then you really would be a killer.”
“Shut up,” she muttered, heading back to the garage. She returned a few moments later and thumped the grocery bags down on the table. Then she switched on the overhead light and they both blinked in the sudden onslaught of illumination.
His blue eyes were stormy. He may have been a somewhat willing captive earlier, but that moment had passed.
“I just need a little time,” she said, mentally cringing at the faint pleading tone in her voice.
“Take all the time you need,” he said expansively. “Be my guest. I’ll just wait right here.” He glanced at the bags. “Planning on making us dinner?”
“I picked up a few things. I’m not much of a cook.”
“A ringing endorsement,” he said. Then, “How long do you intend to keep me here? Or, have you figured that out yet?”
“Not really.”
“Honest,” he stated. “Unhelpful. But honest.”
She opened her mouth to retort, but there was nothing to say, really. Instead, she reached in a bag and pulled out the wheat bread, deli turkey and roast beef, Havarti cheese, romaine lettuce and two different kinds of mustard that she’d picked up. Even though it was after nine P.M. she started to make two sandwiches, one of roast beef, one of turkey, until he said tightly, “I’m not hungry. Thanks.”
Instead of responding she finished making the turkey sandwich and ate half of it before her appetite died completely away. She could feel his eyes on her with every bite and it was unnerving, as no doubt it was meant to be.
“I have to use the bathroom,” he said when she’d finished putting things away and cleaning up.
She gazed at him, starting to feel overwhelmed. “I’ll untie your legs from the chair again.”
“Better give me use of my hands, too, unless you want to get really personal,” he pointed out.
“Okay, but I’ll have to follow you in.”
“Hell, no. You can leave the door cracked if you want. Keep the gun on me. But I’m going in alone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry,” he repeated on a strangled note.
“Will anyone stop by?” she asked suddenly.
“I told you already. No.”
“Nobody? No one?”
“No one,” he said. “No one will stop by.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“They haven’t stopped by yet. They’re not stopping by later. Because no one knows I’m here, but you.”
“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” she muttered, more to herself than him.
“You can still get out of this,” he said after a moment. “No harm, no foul. And, if you’re as innocent as you claim—” he started to suggest.
“If?” she cut in.
“—then you should contact the police right now. Let them take care of this. They’re good at it.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “I can’t even make you believe me!”
“I believe you. I do.”
“Oh, bullshit.”
“I believe you think someone’s after you, and that’s why we’re here now,” he corrected himself. “You might even be right. The police could help you. Or, if you’d let me, I could help you.”
“You could help me,” she said without inflection. “And why would you do that?”
“Because I think you need help.”
“You’re not a very good liar, Auggie.”
“I’m a very good liar,” he disagreed with an edge, as if it were a matter of pride. “But I’m not lying to you.”
“What kind of name is Auggie anyway? A nickname? Is it short for something?”
His lips compressed. “Are you going to untie me? Take me to the bathroom?”
She pulled the .38 from her backpack, looked at it a moment, then walked his way. He laid it back at the sight of the gun, but she merely laid it on the counter before untying his chair from the oven handle. When she released his feet, she quickly stepped back, snatching up the gun again and leveling it at him. His hands were still tied behind him and he gave her a look that said she was half-crazy if she thought he was a threat. She felt dark amusement at that but held it inside. After a moment, she undid the twine wrapped around his hands, then, sweeping up the gun again once he was completely free, she took five steps back.
Rubbing his wrists, he eyed her thoughtfully. “You’re not going to shoot me.”
“I don’t want to,” she said.
“You won’t.”
He sounded so positive it rankled her. “I think I could shoot you. It’s just a matter of displacement. I’ll pretend you’re a wall, or a rock, or a bull’s-eye I’m shooting at. Pulling the trigger would be easy.”
“You can do that? Displacement?” When she didn’t respond, he said, “Been through some therapy, I guess. Displacement. Got any other psychobabble buzzwords?”
“How about crazy, wacko, nutso, psychotic, borderline personality, breaks with reality, delusional, paranoid. . . .” She trailed off. “Dr. Yancy tried to help me, but most of it didn’t take.”
He nodded, not quite certain whether she was putting him on or not, she could tell. “Dr. Yancy is your therapist?”
“Was my therapist.”
“What would he say about this?” He motioned toward the weapon she had leveled at him and the bonds she’d just untied.
“She would try to get me to think about the trigger,” Liv said, realizing it was the truth.
“The trigger of the gun?” he asked cautiously.
“The trigger that set this all in motion.”
“Ahhh . . .” he said. “Fear. You saw a horrible scene.”
Images flashed behind her eyes of the Zuma slayings. Blood. Sprawled bodies. Then she saw her mother. Hanging. Eyes closed. Tongue out.
And then Mama slowly lifted her lids and stared at Livvie.
I’m done.
“Hey!” Auggie called.
Liv snapped back to the present. She blinked, realizing she was fast losing control of the situation. “The trigger’s something else,” she said, licking her lips and feeling slightly faint. “From way back in the past.”
When she didn’t go on, he said, “I’m listening.”
“No . . . No . . .” She shook her head. She wasn’t going there with him. Deciding it was time to return to safer subjects, she asked, “What’s your real name? I can’t keep calling you Auggie.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too . . . personal.”
“Somehow I think the worry about ‘too personal’ is way over,” he said dryly.
“Then give me your last name. Something.”
“Planning on sending me a Christmas card?”
She gritted her teeth. “It’s pretty convenient that you lost your wallet.”
“Convenient,” he repeated, annoyed, as he got to his feet.
His size alarmed her a little and though she refused to retreat another step, she couldn’t help leaning back, away from him. Lips tight, she kept a steady grip on the .38. He was tall and lean and muscular, and damnably good-looking. And dangerous, she decided.