The Six: Complete Series

by E. C. Richard

  “Shit,” she said as she grabbed the bottle. A stream slid down her arm and stained her jacket. By the time she was able to stop it, a quarter of the bottle had dribbled out onto the floor. The smell burned her throat and made the entire room smell like an auto shop. There was no way she could walk out of the room with it smelling like this.

  Another knock on the door. “Ma’am?” It was a different voice.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “One second.”

  Lila grabbed as many paper towels as she could and drenched them in water and hand soap. She fell to her knees and scrubbed the floor. The towels shredded under her fingernails. The smell wasn’t getting any less strong, just mixed with the strawberry soap. It was hard to breathe but all she could do was try to get rid of the evidence.

  They were going to be knocking again at any second. They’d bring in the cop and have him break down the door. For all they knew, she’d taken a handful of pills and was slowly slipping into a coma. At the very least, they would try to rescue her. She needed to get out.

  She threw the paper towels in the trash and flushed the toilet for effect. She clutched her bag close to her side and slid the sleeves of her stained jacket to her elbow. As she opened the door, the face of a teenage barista met her. The girl had a concerned, almost panicked look on her face. The large ring of keys dangled from her wrist and a middle-aged woman in a too-tight t-shirt and khakis hovered over her. The woman’s hands were on her hips and she glared as Lila slid around them, past the door.

  “I’m sorry,” she said as she tried to squeeze through the small crowd.

  The woman scoffed. “I mean, really...”

  Lila resisted the urge to run back and smack that woman in the face. She prayed that the woman wouldn’t notice the smell or the brown stains on the grout. Ten minutes... it would all blow over in ten minutes.

  The crowd had thinned. Baby and mom were gone and the group of high schoolers were replaced by a pair of bearded men hovering over laptops. She stood against the wall to catch her breath. The teenage barista walked back to her post at the sink. As she wiped a blender down with a dingy cloth, the girl looked up. They caught each other’s eyes for a brief second. The girl didn’t want to look but she stared for just a moment too long. Lila wanted to tell her everything and tell the girl to run. She was sweet and stupid, and didn’t deserve any of this.

  “You’re still here?”

  The cop was at the table, nursing a large tea and a muffin the size of his head. He pulled off his glasses and set them to the side. The flirty smile was gone and had been replaced by an inquisitive glance and a look of boredom and disdain.

  Lila struggled to smile but she reeked of that liquid and she could feel the eyes of the entire store on her as she lowered her eyes to the ground.

  He took a long sniff. “Do you smell that?”

  It was her jacket. The gasoline had seeped through the leather.

  He patted the seat next to him. With a humorless voice he said, “Why don’t you take a seat.”

  Milo was getting tired of the gasping and crying from the corner. When he’d come back from his job, he never carried on like this. It happened. Move on. They take you out, you do what you have to do, and you get over it. This guy wasn’t going to last much longer if he couldn’t move on. It was only a matter of time before they came back in again. It was a cycle that never ended.

  There was another guy in with him at first. Frank was a middle-aged tough guy. He was the kind of man who had a regular booth at the bar and a group of rowdy friends that were frequently asked to leave baseball games. Frank had a daughter, a little four year old, and a wife who was chronically ill. He said that they were all that was keeping him going. Frank was the last of his group, the only one who had made it through all the rounds. They had promised him that after his fifth job they would put him under the knife and take out the device. Five jobs and he would be a free man.

  Milo had finished the American Idol tour and had just gotten home when they took him. His bags had been brought into his bedroom and he’d breathed the first gulp of Oregon air in months. All those long nights on the tour bus made him miss being home, without cameras and stylists around 24/7.

  The plan was to take one walk around the block and grab a cup of coffee. He was going to be gone for all of ten minutes, and then he’d be back home. Because of the show, there were a few people who recognized him. He got used to people stopping him to take picture or get his autograph, so he decided to go incognito. A sweatshirt was pulled over his head and his Oregon Ducks baseball cap got yanked down so even the most rabid fans couldn’t sniff him out.

  Two blocks from home, he heard a familiar shriek. When she screamed his name from across the street, he forced that cheesy smile that had gotten him 3 million votes in the finale. It was a girl, just another attractive smiling sixteen year old who wanted to meet someone from TV. She came up, shouting and laughing like she was his biggest fan. Ready for a quick and unflattering snapshot, he took down his hood and lost the hat.

  He barely had time to react to the teenage girl they’d hired to knock him out.

  The girl reached for his arm and pulled out her phone at the same time. She talked so fast he hardly had a chance to react. One second the flash from her camera went off and the next he could hardly stand. His knees buckled and she caught him. In the blink of an eye a car was there beside them. The last thing he remembered was being tossed into the back seat as his legs went numb and he passed out.

  Frank was in the room doing push-ups when Milo finally walked through the doors. He didn’t look like a man who had spent the last three months of his life shuttling between horrific crimes and dank imprisonment. Milo came in as a nervous puppy and Frank immediately welcomed him inside. The others, he said, hadn’t come back for at least a week so he figured Milo was the first of a new class of hostages.

  For three days it was just the two of them. The people brought better food, better tasting water, and it was quiet. Frank talked all about his daughter and all the plans he had when he got home. There were so many things he realized that he really wanted to do with his life and he had just been putting them off for no good reason. When he got home, he declared, he would start really living again.

  Milo was excited for Frank even though they both knew what he’d have to do to get out. Being four jobs in, Frank was numb to what he had already done. There was blood on his hands but he knew that he was just their vessel. The people who made him do these terrible acts were the real criminals. They wanted the chaos and agony and were going to such lengths to cover it up.

  He talked about his third job, the one that almost ended it all. He needed to kill the CEO of a tech company in the city. He was a young guy, an intellectual wunderkind type from a small town on the East Coast. His company was a medical research firm that did a kind of robotics that was beyond Frank’s understanding. Whatever the reason, they wanted him gone.

  They knew he took the BART home at the same time every day, like clockwork. Frank had one chance to push him off the platform and into the oncoming car. It was harder than his other jobs, when he had been given the privilege of a few hours to prepare. This one needed to be timed perfectly.

  He circled the platform a dozen times and waited for the guy to make an appearance. Frank stood at the stairwell and watched like a hawk for the sandy haired genius to scamper down the stairs to make his train. He waited and saw each person walk by, but his man wasn’t there. The seconds counted down and the heft of the train shook the entire platform. If the man didn’t come to the train before it made it to the station, then the job would be impossible. They told him that it had to be done. Whether it was his fault or not, if that man didn’t die by 5:26 Frank would be the one dead on the platform.

  The headlights peeked out from the dark tunnel. He prayed for the man to run down the stairs. All he could hear as the train tumbled forward was his daughter’s laugh, and how that would be the last thought he’d have in this lifetim
e. In those seconds, he’d resigned himself to death. The job couldn’t be completed and there was no second chance.

  Just as he gave up, a man sprinted down the stairs. He took them two at a time as his messenger bag flopped against his side. Frank remembered seeing the man at the end of the stairs, completely out of breath. There were only seconds to make his move. He grabbed the man by the collar and didn’t even look him in the eye. With one swift push, the unsuspecting man got thrown off balance just enough to fall to the tracks, two seconds before the train crossed in front of him.

  His driver had waited by the exit and was able to get him out before the witnesses could identify him. After that day, Frank didn’t fear what came next. Whatever happened on his last job, he’d be free.

  One night, when they were both fast asleep, the pounding footsteps came down the hall. They flung the door open and grabbed Frank who was barely awake enough to realize what had happened.

  He never got to say goodbye, because Frank never came back.

  In those days, while he was left alone, Milo dreamed of Frank back at his home. He would see him running through the front door of his home with his little daughter jumping into his arms. He wanted to believe it, he wanted so badly to think that there was a way out. If you did what you were told, then there would be a light at the end of the tunnel.

  He wasn’t stupid. What those people had done, and still were doing, was vile and unconscionable. Once Frank was untethered from their little button, what would stop him from driving to the nearest police station and telling the world what they had done?

  There was no way out. There was no get out of jail free card. Whatever they had done to Frank, he wasn’t with his daughter and planning his trip to Australia. Milo had to be realistic. Even if Frank had completed whatever his fifth job was, they didn’t let him go. A loose end who was that angry and that damaged would never be allowed to live free.

  Milo had resigned himself to never seeing his family again. The hope of getting back to any semblance of normality was gone after the flames of that car went up behind him. That first job had changed everything. He would never be able to walk down the street, never be the same guy who lived such a boring life that the producers needed to make things up just to give him a decent backstory.

  “Can you stop?” Milo snapped.

  Simon’s whimpering hushed but he still hadn’t spoken a word since they brought him inside.

  “Leave him alone,” Marie said. “Just let him be.”

  Milo had let Simon “be” long enough. It had been at least three hours of sniffling and crying into his sleeves. No one wanted to come near him, not even to comfort him. The others were too scared to get close. They didn’t know what had happened and they seemed to take the approach that ignorance was bliss.

  He’d had enough. If he was going to die, he wasn’t going to do it coddling the crybaby in the corner. For the first time in days, he got to his feet. Milo walked with an unsteady gait over to Simon and kicked his foot.

  “You need to get over it,” Milo said. “This isn’t going to be the first time. They’re going to keep coming back.”

  Simon shook his head.

  “Milo, for God’s sake,” Benjamin said.

  “No. He needs to hear this.”

  The room fell silent.

  “What? What do I need to hear?” Simon said.

  Milo lay against the wall. “What did they make you do?”

  Simon shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Mary Ann moved forward. “What are you talking about?”

  Milo put a finger to his lips. There was nowhere to hide in here. There couldn’t be any secrets in this room.

  “You’ve got to. What did you have to do?”

  The others’ eyes were on the two of them. To them, Simon left in a sweatshirt and came back in a suit. Damaged, yes, but not hurt. He wasn’t missing any fingers and he hadn’t been strapped to table and tortured.

  “Just go,” Simon said. “Why do you care? Just go.”

  Frank said the first one was a test. It was the one that would hurt the most and numbed your conscience enough to keep you going. Frank didn’t talk much about his first, but he said it involved a family. The only time he saw Frank cry was when he began to talk about what he’d had to do.

  “I want to know.”

  Simon rolled his eyes. “Fuck off.”

  His words sank to the floor. He went to push Simon to the ground and break his nose but stopped himself before he could. “I had to blow up a car.”

  Marie couldn’t contain her shock and Benjamin didn’t bother to make eye contact anymore. Dennis barely moved and the words seemed to wash over him and back onto the floor. “They didn’t even tell me which car. They made me pick. It just had to have people in it.”

  “You did it?”

  Milo nodded. “I did it right away. That’s what you’ve got to do. They’re not going to cut you a break.”

  Simon picked at the end of his shirt. “I almost lost the girl. There were these guys outside the club that were trying to stop me. I think I broke his nose. Shit, I think I did.”

  “Who was she?”

  He looked up with heavy eyes. “Brianna Powell.”

  Marie’s eyes perked up. “What did you do to her?”

  Milo motioned for her to move back to the wall but she kept coming forward.

  “Marie, please,” Milo said.

  Her eyes were bloodshot. He’d heard her lying restlessly on the floor every night. She hadn’t slept more than a few hours since they’d brought her in and she was barely eating. “What did you do?”

  “They made me,” Simon said. “I didn’t have a choice.”

  Marie’s eyes began to water. “What did you do?” Her voice grew more frantic with each word.

  Benjamin had grabbed her shoulder and started to bring her back but she pulled away. “God damn it, why aren’t you answering me?”

  Simon hung his head. “I’m sorry.”

  She stood, in the middle of the room, frozen in place. “Oh god,” she said under her breath. The tears glazed her eyes as her lips twitched. “Marie...” Milo started to say. He put out a hand of comfort but she slapped it away. Instead, she barreled through his arm and straight to Simon’s huddled body.

  She grabbed his sleeve and threw him to the ground. “How could you?” she shrieked. Marie began to kick as hard as she could. Simon yelped in pain as her face devolved into a monstrous mask. Benjamin had one arm and Milo the other. She was strong. The two of them combined were barely strong enough to get her away from the groaning Simon.

  Milo pinned her against the wall. She breathed hard and couldn’t stop looking at her victim on the floor. “What the hell was that?” Milo asked.

  Her fingers curled into a fist even under his grip and she tried for another round. “Benjamin!” Milo screamed as she began to race back to Simon. Bent over and tending to Simon, Benjamin leapt up and clotheslined Marie. She bounced off his arm and fell to the ground herself.

  She didn’t try to get up. “I can’t believe...” she whispered before her voice was enveloped in tears.

  Simon rolled over onto his knees and crawled across the room to a space as far away from Marie as he could get.

  “What was that?” Benjamin asked.

  “I have no idea,” Milo said.

  “I’m pregnant,” Lila said.

  Hannah’s jaw fell to the ground. “You are? Oh, my god, who?”

  She had to come up with a guy, the more pathetic the better. “It was this guy I was hooking up with at this club. It was so dumb. He was such an asshole.”

  “Are you guys still...?” she asked.

  “No,” Lila said, “he won’t call me back.”

  Hannah sighed. “Oh, honey. That’s terrible. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Lila said. “I just found out yesterday. I can’t believe it. I’m such an idiot.”

  Hannah gave a reassuring smile. �
�You are not an idiot, Lila. God, screw that guy. He’s the idiot.”

  The cop hadn’t stopped staring at her since she got out of bathroom. She’d made small talk in a desperate attempt to divert his attention. The more she spoke, the more she rambled. The entire time she knew she reeked of gasoline and his alarm bells were going off. She wasn’t a good liar. He’d have her outside for questioning before she had the chance to even try at this job.

  Lila played up the uneasiness and preyed on her friend’s bottomless well of goodwill. Hannah had a gentle smile and rubbed her friend’s arm. It felt good to be touched, reassured, even if the reason was bullshit. She only had thirty minutes left and needed to get into the staff room.

  Lila mopped her brow and let her lips quiver. “I’m really freaked out,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  Hannah squeezed Lila’s shoulder and lowered her voice to a calming whisper. “I’m here for you, you know that. Whatever you need, day or night, I will help you.”

  “I know,” Lila said. As bad as she felt, she needed to push through this. Hannah would die a saint, a beautiful person that never had a cruel word to say about anyone. She would be a martyr in an evil world that didn’t care about anyone.

  “Hey,” she said, “do you think maybe I can go to your staff room? I’m feeling really faint. I think I’m going to pass out or something.” Lila staggered in place and gripped the side of the table for effect.

  Hannah lurched forward. “Oh, God, of course. Do you want some water or something?”

  Lila shook her head. She needed to be left alone. She had to have time to do this without anyone looking over her shoulder.

  “I’m okay,” she whimpered. “I just need some time to think. Is that okay?”

  Hannah brought her in for a hug. Lila felt no pity, no fear. For the last four years she’d lived with the anxiety after the accident. Every time she heard a siren, she assumed that they’d figured out that it was her.