Connect

by Julian Gough

  The bullet penetrates the server she holds, with a tremendous, confused, metallic bang that blends with the sharp crack of the gunshot; the server lurches back hard against her ribs.

  For a moment both she and Donnie freeze, shocked by the noise, by the rip the shot has opened up in their everyday reality.

  She glances down, to see if she’s been wounded; but the server’s case has no exit hole. Just a couple of convex dents and bulges, where fragments have struck from within. The bullet must have hit a heat-sink, or the power supply, or some other big chunk of metal, and disintegrated inside the server.

  Donnie says, ‘God damn it,’ and studies his gun, and she isn’t sure if he’s mad at himself for firing, or for missing.

  ‘I can’t decrypt anything if you kill me, you idiot.’

  ‘Huh.’ Donnie’s face tightens at the word idiot. ‘Well, maybe I don’t care about that quite as much as Ryan does.’ He raises his gun again.

  Naomi tugs again on her own gun, but the raised rear sight catches in the lining of her jacket pocket, and her finger slips off the guard and lands hard on the trigger.

  Click.

  Donnie laughs.

  She forgot to load it. The magazine is empty.

  Bullets still in their box, in the other pocket of her silk jacket.

  So here we are, she thinks. Two idiots with guns.

  She throws the damaged server at Donnie as hard as she can, and runs for her office.

  Slams the door behind her.

  Locks it, with a metal key.

  Bolts it.

  Good old-fashioned physical security.

  The door shudders, as Donnie hits it with his shoulder. A moment’s silence, before she can hear him, muffled, swearing, through the door. ‘Hello? Hello?’ The idiot’s broken his wearable. So, no phone now, no nothing. Good. And it’s a big, heavy, high-specification fire door. He isn’t fit enough to break that.

  She steps back before she’s even consciously registered the crisp, tightly packed sound of the pistol shot.

  Again.

  Again.

  The three bullets punch surprisingly small, neat holes in the fire door, each sending a little cloud of fibreglass particles from the insulating layer into the room.

  The first bullet smacks into a lab bench.

  Second sends a little metal trashcan tumbling out from beneath it.

  Third rips a long splinter from the wooden floor.

  The fibreglass particles glitter as they drift across the room.

  If he kills me . . . who will look after Colt?

  No; if he kills me . . . he will kill Colt next.

  The rules have changed.

  She slumps to the floor, to the side of the door, and unsnags the pistol from her pocket lining. Slides out the magazine. Takes the heavy, half-full box of ammo from her other pocket. She takes a cartridge from the box. To her adrenalized senses, it seems weirdly vivid, solid. The brass casing and cupronickel-coated lead of the bullet gleam like jewellery in her shaking hand. Beautifully machined, a tiny, minimalist sculpture. She pushes the beautiful object down into the magazine.

  It doesn’t fit.

  She tries again.

  It’s too wide for the slim magazine. She looks at the figures stamped on the side of the Beretta.

  9mm.

  She looks at the box. Yes, it says 9mm. But . . .

  She turns over the cartridge. Stamped on the brass base, 45 AUTO.

  Imperial to metric; she’s a scientist, she has to do this all the time, come on, focus . . .

  .45 inches. That’s . . . 11.43mm.

  Too big.

  They’re for a different gun. Ryan’s gun.

  She’d never checked. Ryan must have been reusing an old box.

  She stares at the gun in her hand.

  No ammo.

  She could pretend . . .

  That won’t work. Come out pointing an empty gun, and he’ll just shoot her.

  For a moment she is scared by the silence. Is he still in the corridor? Or is he about to appear outside? She spins around, looking for movement, through the windows. Nothing. Hey, maybe I could . . . but of course, the windows don’t open. Sealed unit. Pathogen risk.

  She hears a scrape, a muttered, ‘Shit,’ from the other side of the door.

  Oh, thank God. It hasn’t even occurred to him to come around the outside . . .

  I could break them . . . How strong is the glass? No, it’s industrial-strength; terrorist-proof. And even if I could break it, he’d hear. Takes time, to break through toughened glass. Plenty of time for him to come around, and shoot me as I climb out.

  And if he kills me, he will kill Colt next. Oh, dear Jesus . . . Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done . . .

  She shakes her head. There isn’t time for that . . .

  No. That’s not why she stopped.

  She stopped because something is shifting inside her, at the thought of this man trying to kill her son. Kill her. Something old is waking up. As old as religion. Older. And now her mind feels very clear.

  OK, no bullets. So no gun. So, what can she use?

  Her father used to say, there is always a solution within arm’s reach . . .

  Her father, who is not in heaven.

  Naomi stands, walks to her desk.

  Quietly pulls her desk drawers all the way out.

  Post-it notes, packing tape, stapler, a tiny toy dump truck Colt used to love, paperclips, foreign coins, envelopes, pens, just a mess of stuff . . .

  Huh. There it is.

  The syringe full of potassium chloride. A nice, fat barrel full. Three times the lethal dose for her bodyweight. More than enough for Donnie.

  He fires again.

  Again.

  He’s shooting out the lock.

  This is completely ridiculous. A syringe against a gun.

  Maybe she could tape it to the back of her neck, or the back of her hand. Get close, and . . .

  No, he forgot to check her for a weapon a couple of minutes ago, and nearly got killed. Even idiots can learn from nearly getting killed. She won’t fool him twice.

  From just behind the door, another gunshot, but this time the bullet hits something metal – the frame of the door perhaps, or part of the bulky deadlock itself – and she hears the ricochet scream off sideways down the corridor.

  ‘Shiiiiit . . .’ he says, crazily close, the other side of the door.

  Must have just missed him.

  She holds up the syringe, between finger and thumb. Maybe she could throw it at him, like a dart . . . But it’s a high-friction syringe, designed to not inject too easily, to avoid accidents. It takes firm pressure to push the plunger home. Plus, thrown, it would probably just hit muscle, or fat. No good. She needs to guide it, to hit a vein, or the solution won’t reach his heart quickly enough.

  She studies the debris on the floor.

  No, a syringe is as useless as an empty pistol. She’ll never get close enough, for long enough. OK, can she talk her way out of this? Does he have a weakness she can work on? Huh, Donnie has a lot of weaknesses, but that doesn’t mean . . .

  And then an idea occurs to her that is so absurd she has to choke back a laugh.

  There’s one way to get close enough to Donnie.

  One way to distract him enough to put down the gun.

  Turn the other cheek, she says to herself, in a kind of gleeful disgust.

  Love thy neighbour as thyself.

  No, this is absolutely crazy. Anyway, there’s no way I could hide the syringe. But if I do nothing . . .

  He’ll kill me.

  And then Colt.

  Behind the door, she can hear him reloading.

  He wants to come through the door with a full magazine. And he knows that I’m lying in wait. He won’t believe my gun is empty.

  So he’ll shoot his way in. Covering fire.

  If I’d played more of Colt’s games, I might know what to do . . . She give
s a little laugh which she again strangles straight away. She doesn’t want Donnie to know where she is.

  But couldn’t he just guess where I am, shoot me through the door?

  A surge of fear closes her throat. She picks up the syringe, moves flat to the wall, then along the wall; away from the door.

  ‘You open that door and come out,’ says Donnie. His voice seems so close, inches away, the other side of the wall. And his voice is shaking.

  Oh . . . he’s afraid to come through the door.

  He’s afraid of death.

  ‘Fucking bitch. Wait till I get my fucking hands on you.’

  Fucking bitch? He tries to murder me, and then calls me a fucking bitch?

  She can hear it in his voice; he’s trying to talk himself into something. Justify something he’s about to do. Well, that would fit her plan. Her half a plan . . .

  Yeah, she used to hear that voice, see that shaky bravado, in BDSM darkrooms sometimes, with newcomers, young men, not used to the rules.

  OK. Let’s start working on getting close enough.

  For now, just tell him what he wants to hear.

  ‘I don’t want to die,’ she says. ‘I’ll do whatever you say, just, please, don’t kill me.’ She grimaces at her own words. Whatever, fine, play his fantasy back to him. Let him think he has the power. Just keep talking, keep him busy, while she thinks.

  ‘You’re damn right you’ll do what I say!’ His voice is trembling. The man is hysterical, she thinks drily. And he sounds a little further away. Of course, he thinks she must have loaded her gun by now. He’s afraid she’ll shoot him through the door. Good. That buys her time . . . Yes, she’s pretty sure she knows how to get close to him without getting shot.

  She’s read the studies of the incidence of rape in wartime.

  So incredibly high. Rape the women, murder the men.

  She spent her teens reading everything she could on the subject; fascinated, astonished, repulsed. Feminist theories. Social-learning theories. Evolutionary theories. And histories . . . Two million women raped in East Germany by the Russians, in a few weeks. Men who would probably never rape in their own town, in their own culture. But when they are facing death; when their chance of reproducing their DNA is vanishing . . .

  The subconscious decisions a body makes, that the mind tries to justify after the fact . . .

  And of course, later again, at Berkeley, she studied rape as a reproductive strategy in those poor old Barbary ducks. And in chimpanzees, geese, bottlenose dolphins, orangutans, scorpion flies . . .

  She knows that birth control, abortion, prison sentences, and immense cultural shifts have altered the expression and meaning of rape in her culture. And she knows that Donnie’s a man socialized to exert power, in order to dominate and control. And she knows Donnie thinks he’s just an individual, making personal decisions. All of those things are true, at their different levels.

  But the way he was trained to act, in the Big Bend, by his cop dad and his nurse mom – while he watched every Fast and Furious movie, listened to nothing but bro country – is built on top of an evolved architecture that Naomi has studied all her life.

  Yes, she knows quite a lot about rape. And she knows quite a lot about Donnie. Time to use all that knowledge . . .

  OK, she thinks. Yes. I can do this. Get up close. But he’ll want me to prove I’m unarmed . . . So how do I convince him it’s safe, without making it safe? How do I let him think he can do . . . that . . . without letting him do that?

  And an answer comes to her. It is so ridiculous, and so perfect, that this time she does laugh aloud.

  ‘I’ll come out unarmed, no gun,’ she shouts, and she worries for a second that there is triumph in her voice, that he’ll hear it; she damps it down, tries to make herself sound beaten. ‘Nothing hidden, no weapons . . . You win.’

  ‘You think I’m going to trust you? You tried to fucking shoot me!’

  Perfect. Close the trap. ‘I’ll prove it. I’ll take off my clothes, I’ll come out naked. You can check.’

  ‘Huh.’ A pause. ‘Naked?’

  She can hear it in his voice. The gears shifting.

  ‘Yes, naked,’ she shouts back. ‘No weapons. Safe.’ You creep.

  A longer pause. ‘OK. Naked. Hands where I can see them.’

  ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Sure . . .’

  OK. Great. What else will she need?

  She crosses the room, as quickly and quietly as she can.

  Some kind of lubricant . . . she looks around, but sees nothing. Then she remembers. It’s probably still there . . . She moves to the shelves; reaches up to the top one. At the back, yes . . . She takes down a heavy, dusty jar. It contains a small pile of silvery particles, beneath a clear liquid.

  Tiny pellets of sodium, submerged in high-purity mineral oil.

  The door shakes, as Donnie kicks it hard from outside, and she jumps. She hears Donnie backing away from the door, fast.

  ‘Just fucking come out!’ he shouts.

  ‘I’m still undressing! Look, I’ll come out totally naked.’ Yes, keep putting that image in his head. ‘Unarmed. You can do anything. Please, don’t kill me. I’m not any kind of threat—’

  ‘Bullshit! You’ve got a fucking gun!’

  ‘I’ll give you the gun,’ she shouts, as she pulls off her shoes.

  ‘You think I’m an idiot?’ he shouts back through the damaged door. She rolls her eyes and nods, as he continues, ‘You have another weapon in there.’

  She quickly takes off all her clothes, as she says, ‘No, just the gun . . . Look, I’m sorry Colt’s caused all this trouble . . .’ Buy time, buy time. ‘I didn’t mean to pull the gun, you scared me, that’s all . . .’

  ‘It doesn’t take that long to get undressed.’ Donnie sounds freaked out. I guess he’s out of his depth too.

  ‘I know, I know. I’m naked.’ This is an experiment, you can do this: turn his penis on, turn his brain off . . . ‘But I’m scared, Donnie. I’m scared to come out.’

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you . . . Just come out with your hands up.’

  Ugh, he just talks in clichés from movies. What a dick.

  She squats, and picks up the syringe. As she rolls it between her fingers, studies it, she feels herself decide. It’s physical; her shoulders loosen, relax. Yes, I can do this. I’ll do this. He’s stronger; but I’m smarter. Her mood shifts again, and she feels almost giddy.

  ‘Swear you won’t kill me?’ she shouts, to keep him busy.

  ‘I won’t kill you. Unless you pull some stupid bullshit.’

  The long red protective cap on the needle seems tight; but at the thought of it inside her, she grimaces, and screws it a little tighter, just in case. I’ll need some thread . . . hah! With her teeth and fingers, she unties the bracelet of red thread Yaakov gave her, to protect her from the evil eye.

  She ties the red thread around the base of the plunger. Tugs the knot tighter.

  ‘Maybe I should take the bullets out of the gun first?’ Yes, best if he thinks she’s reloaded. If he knew she had no ammo, he could just walk in . . .

  ‘Just throw out the fucking gun. With the safety on.’

  ‘OK. Oh, wait, which one is the safety . . .’

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ . . .’

  She opens the jar, dips her fingertips in the mineral oil, and oils the fat barrel of the syringe. Oils the smooth, rounded base of the plunger. Oils her labia. The oil is cool from the aircon. It’s OK. You’re just preparing apparatus for an experiment.

  And what’s the alternative? Get raped? Murdered? Both? This is a war. Women have done harder things, to survive.

  She takes a deep breath, tries to relax. Oh come on, it’s a lot smaller than a speculum. You can do this . . . Look, you’ve passed an entire human being through there. This is nothing . . . But she still feels a deep, primal reluctance to put death inside her body. Her fingers won’t move.

  ‘I think it’s safer if I take out the bullets,’ she
shouts, to gain time, as she tries again to calmly, logically, persuade herself. Look, Donnie’s dangerous; doing nothing is dangerous; the syringe is safe. High-grade materials, high specification, it can’t leak, the needle’s covered, the cap’s on tight . . . ‘I don’t want to throw out the gun, and it goes off . . .’

  ‘This is fucking ridiculous.’ Donnie sounds close to losing it. Uh oh. Not good. ‘Just put on the safety. It’s the little switch where your thumb sits. You used it earlier, I heard it . . .’

  ‘Oh! That thing!’ Yes, make him feel smart . . . ‘Found it! Thank you!’

  Just do it . . . She sings la-la-la-la-la-la-la in her mind, to stop herself from thinking, as she slowly slides the red plastic cap, then the rest of the syringe, inside her. Pushes it further back, till the whole thing is completely out of sight, and only a few inches of red thread are still visible. More than enough to get a grip . . . She tucks the trailing thread back up, between her labia. Invisible. Good. See, that wasn’t so bad . . .

  ‘OK, OK, I’m coming out now,’ she says. ‘I’m going to slide the gun out first.’

  She unlocks the door. Opens it a couple of inches. Slides the gun out along the floor as far as she can.

  Slides out the box of useless ammo. ‘OK? No gun. No bullets.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘I’m going to . . .’ No. Don’t tell him. Act submissive. Make it his idea. ‘Shall I come out now?’

  ‘Yeah. Slowly. Hands where I can see them.’

  She can’t see him out the crack. He must be off to one side, covering the doorway.

  She takes a deep breath.

  You’ve got a plan, you know what he likes. You know how he sees you. Play that stereotype, use it. Be submissive, yes. Get his guard down.

  Then kill him.

  She pulls the door further open. Steps out into the corridor, naked, hands raised.

  OK, there’s Donnie, his gun pointed at her.

  She turns to face him. She can see the erection forming in his pants, trapped sideways in his hideous yellow khakis.

  He hesitates. His mind is still anxious and paranoid. But the penis outranks the prefrontal cortex. The penis is far older; its needs are more primal.