BAD BOY’S SURPRISE BABY

by Kathryn Thomas

  Okay! I’ve decided I’m not going to let whoever that is bother me anymore! I’m done with being scared! Done with it! If I put good energy out into the universe, good energy will come back to me! So you’re in the Bahamas drinking cocktails and that man is just some strange man standing outside an apartment building! Nothing to worry about!

  I am scared so scared scared so scared scared so scared scared so so so so help me come back Lily come back please help me please come back I am so scared I have no one else to turn to nobody cares nobody cares nobody cares

  Please disregard last!

  Okay, so something happened today and I need to make sure I tell somebody or I think my head is going to implode. I was leaving my apartment building for my shift when I saw the man across the street. This is strange because usually the man doesn’t stay there when I come down usually he runs away. I knew I should’ve just walked away and pretended he wasn’t there but I was so angry. (You remember when Sissy shouted at me in front of all the other nurses? I was even angrier than that!) So I marched across the street and pointed my finger at him and screamed, Leave me the hell alone you fucking freak! His response terrified me. He just folded his arms, smiled, and stared at me. Just stared right at me. Jesus fucking Christ I think I’ll see that stare for the rest of my life. Lily, I have to give you his description. I have to. I need someone to know what he looks like, just in case—Just in case! Okay, so he is tall and muscular, really muscular, like one of those bodybuilders, with big arms. He has a slightly crooked nose and his hair is a goldeny brown color, sort of like a lion’s hair. And it’s cut really short. Um . . . oh, yeah, his tattoo. He has a tattoo on his arm, of that Chinese symbol thingy, you know the one, let me look it up. He has a tattoo of yin-and-yang on his arm. The way his arms were folded, I could see his hands. His pinky finger was missing. So you know now. So if anything happens to me—if! His eyes were really weird, too, like blue but too blue, almost like he was wearing fancy dress contact lenses or something. Almost white. Freaky. So I just got the hell out of there. I feel better, telling someone, even if you’re not here with me. P.S. please come back.

  The more I read, the more I shake until I have to run into the bathroom and vomit into the bowl. As I kneel there, sick dripping down my chin, I think over everything I’ve read, especially that last bit. That was Roman she was describing. That was Roman, except . . . Roman doesn’t have a pinky finger missing, and Roman had no reason to stalk Carol, to kill Carol. Roman would never have done that. And Carol mentioned his eyes, too blue, contact lenses. I keel over, vomit again, Bump going crazy, kicking madly, as though he too is in shock about what I’ve read.

  The idea sounds so silly I almost can’t let myself think it. But if I have ever thought to call myself Nurse Sherlock, I need to live by his words. I whisper to myself: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” Standing up and splashing water in my face, I go over the details. A man was stalking Carol, a man the police were seemingly reluctant to investigate, Carol finally confronted this man and he looked exactly like Roman, right down to the hair color and the yin-and-yang tattoo, but he went too far. He made his eyes too blue, bought the wrong contacts, and he couldn’t hide his missing pinky finger. I think back to those phone calls of Roman’s I overheard. Once, perhaps . . . yes, I think he mentioned a pinky finger. Or am I misremembering that? It doesn’t matter, because I have to confront this idea. It’s silly, but . . .

  I say it aloud, as though that will mitigate its effects.

  “Darius Taggart has undergone plastic surgery to look like Roman, which explains why Roman has had such a difficult time tracking him. Perhaps this is Darius’ sick idea of a joke. A man known as the Acid Man would certainly find some depraved pleasure in something like this.” I repeat it all to myself, twice, head reeling, wishing I’d checked that work email months ago. I think back over my time here, the humiliating OBGYN appointments, the bullshit I’ve had to put up with from Markus at work, and how if I had checked my email and told Roman earlier, I could have avoided it all. He would’ve caught Darius, and we would be together right now.

  I need to tell Roman. I go into my bedroom and begin to get dressed for work. Despite the bombshell revelation, I still need to get ready for work. Time marches on despite my preferences. I need Roman. I need to get to him. I need to contact him in some way. The problem is, I have no way of doing that. When he left me at that diner, he left me without any details. And there’s the other possibility—I swallow painfully, terror gripping me, as I apply my makeup—that he might be dead, that Darius, Roman’s double as Carol was mine, might have found and killed him the second he left that diner.

  “Fuck,” I mutter, as I lock my apartment door. “Roman, I need you.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Lily

  As I leave my apartment building, I look up and down the street, feeling paranoid and desperate at the same time: paranoid that Darius might be lurking somewhere and desperate to miraculously see Roman appear. Both are unlikely; it’s just Carol’s emails, giving me the spooks. I walk down the street toward my car, going over the emails in my head and wondering how in the hell I can get hold of Roman, as long as he is alive . . . Stop it, I tell myself, just stop it. Of course he is alive. He is Roman. Roman doesn’t die, ever. I wish he’d given me his phone number, or an email, or a goddamn forwarding address. Something. Having this information and not being able to tell him is infuriating. Perhaps he’s roaming across the States on some weak lead right now, perhaps he’s wasting his time when I have vital information.

  I put my keys into the car door, suddenly angry with him, furious with him. Who the hell does he think he is, leaving me like this? What the hell’s his problem? How difficult would it be to leave me some damn way to get into contact with him? At first I think my anger is making the door difficult to open, my anger-shook hand. But even when I calm down and try and turn the key, it gets stuck. It feels like something is wedged in there.

  “Lily!” The voice cuts through Betty’s life, cuts it right in half. As soon as Roman shouts my name, I forget Betty, forget this shit car and my shit apartment. I forget everything and I just want to be in his arms. “Lily!” he roars. I turn toward him. He’s at the far end of the street, sprinting toward me, arms pumping. He’s too far away for me to see his face, but it’s definitely Roman: my Roman, not some Darius doppelganger. “Lily, run, now, run!”

  I am so happy to see him that I don’t register his words right away. I want to run toward him as he runs toward me, want to sprint as he sprints, full of love and hope and happiness, a beautiful reunion after these long months. But then he roars again, closer now but still horribly faraway. I think anywhere but pressed up close to me would be faraway. “Lily, he’s behind you!”

  I’m about to turn when what feels like a length of rope is coiled around my neck, choking me. I stare at Roman, still halfway down the street, seeming to move in slow motion as the rope drags me backward. I claw at the rope, gasping for air, and then realize it’s not a rope but an arm, a solid, immovable arm: a solid, immovable arm with a yin-and-yang tattooed on it. How long have I wished for that arm to be wrapped around me? And now it is . . . the universe is a cruel bitch. I claw with my nails, digging gouges into Darius’ skin, but the man doesn’t make a sound. Then I am flying head over heels, hurled with so much power that I slam into the floor with a thump which rattles my bones. Luckily, I land on my back. I clasp Bump, making sure he is unharmed, terror making it difficult to move. It’s only when Darius—who this close looks nothing like Roman, despite all the surgery—slams the doors that I know I’m in the back of a van.

  I shimmy to the doors, heart pounding in fear, mouth full of blood from where I’ve bitten my tongue, ears still ringing with Roman’s voice, nose full of the scent of blood and oil, the van reeking with it. When I get to the doors, I lie on my back and kick them with all my strength. My legs have become weak from so much sittin
g—no longer the double-shift-honed legs of Lily, but the soft legs of Betty—and so the door moves barely an inch. I kick again, and again, but the door just wobbles pathetically. Then the van growls to life, and we are moving.

  “Darius, you fuck, Darius, you fucking monster! Bring her back! Fight me like a fucking man! Bring her the fuck back!”

  The back windows of the van are spray-painted black, so I can’t see him, but I know he was close. His voice was loud, but now it is growing quieter, and after a minute of frantic kicking, I can no longer hear him.

  “You shouldn’t have logged into your work email,” Darius says from the front of the van, in a calm voice. Too calm. The voice of a man who has done much, much worse than kidnap a pregnant woman. A business-as-usual voice. “I’ve known you were in Carson for a while, but I didn’t know exactly where. Tut-tut, pregnant cunt.”

  I don’t want to turn around; I don’t want to face him. This is the man who killed Carol: who did more than kill Carol. This is the man who’s done thousands of unspeakable things. And now I am lying in the back of his van, jostling up and down on the stiff suspension, one hand on Bump and the other clawing uselessly and the oil- and blood-slick floor. I try and take a deep breath, but I can’t. I’m panting, I realize, as though very far away and somebody else is panting, not me. Betty, it is Betty panting. It is Betty is the back of this madman’s car.

  “Get a grip,” I whisper, voice quavering.

  “What was that?” Darius says, a cheerful note in his voice.

  I force myself to turn around, sit up and stare between the seats at the road. Darius is driving us toward the mountain, going way too fast but not seeming to care. He drives through three red lights, but no sirens follow us. I think about just charging at him, tearing his eyes out, gouging them until they go pop. And I would, I’m sure I would, if it were not for Bump. But Bump comes first. Our son comes first. If I were to charge at this man, what would he do? Throw acid in my face? Throw acid at Bump?

  As if reading my mind, Darius lifts up a small metal jug from the passenger seat. “You wouldn’t be such a pretty cunt if you tried anything, no way.” He smiles at me in the rear-view. “Do you like what I’ve done? You see, your friend Roman tried chasing me once before. Got quite close, to be fair to the man, but of course he couldn’t manage anything meaningful. But it was a good chase, better even than the Marines and CIA that came after me once upon a time, before I paid the right people. So I decided to play a little dress up just in case he ever decided to come after me again. Roman has a very distinctive look, doesn’t he?”

  “You got the eyes wrong.” I spit, draw myself up. I am more scared than I have ever been in my life, but I decide not to show him that. He can’t see it. Men like him thrive on fear. “Your eyes are white. Roman’s are a particular shade of blue.”

  Driving over bumpy mountain roads at around eighty miles per hour, so fast and bumpy that I have to grip onto the handrails of the van door and wedge myself into the corner so I don’t go flying and then slamming back down, Darius turns and faces me. He doesn’t seem to notice that he’s driving a van over dangerous roads, nor that Roman is chasing us: must be chasing us. Has to be. He grins at me, nothing at all like Roman, a poor imitation. “You ought to be more polite,” he says. “Pretty soon I’m going to be up to my nuts in your guts, so some manners might be a good idea.” Then he turns back to the road.

  “Where are you taking me?” I ask, my voice one-hundred times calmer than I feel.

  “Somewhere,” he says, “where I can fuck you silly without interruptions. I’ve never fucked a pregnant woman before,” he goes on, in a musing tone of voice, so out of place in this current situation. “A pregnant girl, but never a pregnant woman. Hmm.”

  As he speaks these sickening words, my mind begins to cycle through past instances of fear, trying to see if I’ve ever been more scared. I settle on the hospital when I watched Les getting strangled by the metallic man, but even then, at least Roman was beside me. At least I wasn’t visibly pregnant. At least I could run, move. At least I had some sense of hope. Now, it is just me and this madman, with hopefully Roman following somewhere behind us. If Darius really does try and—I almost cannot face the thought, but I have to—if Darius does try and assault me, what exactly can I do to stop him? He is larger, stronger, and if I put up any sort of fight Bump will be in grave danger.

  Darius turns off the main road onto a dirt track leading up the mountain, driving recklessly and not giving a damn when I bump up and down in the back.

  He grins, glancing in the wing-mirror. “Your knight in shining armor is following us,” he says. “Oh, Roman, you poor little boy. Interesting, isn’t it, how his mommy saved yours and now here he comes to save you? I really do believe that has something to do with yin-and-yang. Yes, I do. Yin-and-yang is real, oh yes.” He giggles. “Just kidding.” Turning violently down another dirt track. “Roman isn’t a very smart man. I think we can all agree on that. He’s a good trier, though, that’s what I’ll say. He tries very hard and he should be commended for that.”

  “If he’s behind us, you’re a dead man,” I say, voice fierce, far fiercer than it should be. I growl at him, teeth bared, no idea what’s come over me. I am too scared to be behaving like this, but anger, too, teems within me when I hear this pathetic excuse for a man, Carol’s killer, talk about Roman like that. “He is twice the man you are.”

  “Only twice?” Darius answers with an easy smile. “I thought I was much more evil than that.”

  We are driving up the steep side of a mountain; we must look like a tiny dot from down in Carson, an insect climbing up the side of dirt mound.

  “I hate you!” I yell, anger exploding from my lips. “I hate you, you evil fuck!”

  “Hmm, some fight in you,” he mutters, more to himself than to me. “Does that extend to the bedroom, I wonder?”

  My teeth begin to chatter, cold, icy, the fear almost too much to take. I want to roll into a ball and bring my face to Bump and rest my cheek against him and feel him kick reassuringly against me. I want to feel him in my arms. I want Roman to look over my shoulder as I cradle our son. I want to kiss our son and have him laugh and smile and be happy. Instead, I will be raped and murdered by a psychopath on Kit Carson.

  “When you’re done with me,” I say, “are you going to kill me?”

  Darius’ white-blue contacts flit to me through the rear-view. “Do you really want to know?”

  I nod, feeling numb with dread.

  “Well, then, if you really want to . . . Let me explain what is going to happen.” He smirks, enjoying himself. I remember Roman’s smirk, back at that hotel restaurant, that cocky, confident smirk and how drawn to it I was. Like a moth to a flame: a musclebound, handsome, sexy flame. Darius’ smirk is nothing like that. Darius’ smirk is a joke; Darius’ smirk is like an unskilled actor trying to imitate an Oscar-winner’s performance. “Okay, so I am heading toward one of my mountain hideouts right now, where I have a large machine-gun positioned in the window. I’ll leave the car, mount the gun, and tear Roman apart as he comes to your rescue. With that done, I’ll take you into the cabin, tie you to the bed, and have some fun.” He licks his lips. “I’m hard just thinking about it,” he laughs.

  “And when you’re done?” My throat is so dry, too dry. I can barely talk. My voice is a croak.

  “Oh, we’ll see,” he says vaguely. “Really, it all depends on your performance. Either you will die or I’ll keep you as my whore.”

  “What about my child?” I ask.

  The truth is a cruel bitch, because as I ask this question I know, deep down, that if this reality truly became the reality, I would have to find a way to adapt . . . as long as my son was safe. As long as my son was allowed to live a life—perhaps go to a foster family somewhere, though that thought makes me want to add vomit to the oil and the blood on the van floor—I could somehow survive this hell. I am sorry, Roman, I call silently through the van doors.

  But t
hen Darius says, “I hate children. Babies, anyway.”

  I see it clearly in my mind, what could happen, what will happen unless somebody does something. We will get to the cabin, and Darius will do as he says and kill Roman, my Roman, and after he has used me, if I performed well, I will give birth and he will kill my child. The panic and alarm and terror within me is strong, but there is something stronger, something age-old, as old as the first mother to walk the earth. It’s old and powerful and as I envision this man killing my son, it takes hold of me firmly. I clench my teeth so hard a jagged spike of pain enters my head, obliterating my fear, replacing it with calm vengeance.

  I take my hands from the rail, climb onto my knees, and pause for a moment. Is this really the best thing to do? What if I get hurt in the crash? What if Bump gets hurt? But then, if I let him go on, Roman will die, I will be raped, and my child will die. I have to take the risk. My son—I will not let this man do anything to my son.