Time Will Tell

by Barry Lyga

“Meaning…” Jorja’s face had that expression she got sometimes when she knew she was about to say something outrageous, but she planned to convince you anyway. “Meaning what if we agree to meet… but it’s a trap?”

  On the one hand, Jorja’s idea was crazy illegal.

  Which was actually a point in its favor. Liam’s entire life had been rigorous instruction in right and wrong, and the notion of doing something absolutely insanely illegal sort of appealed to him.

  On the other hand, though, it was dangerous and risky.

  Jorja, determined to out–Stephen King Stephen King, had done some research online about hostage taking for a creepy short story she’d posted on Wattpad. (And how messed up was that? Well, at least Jorja would be the one on an FBI watch list, not Liam.)

  “We wouldn’t need much in the way of gear,” Jorja explained. “It’s actually easy to kidnap someone. We can do it with things from home for the most part. There’s four of us. Liam fought the guy alone and was fine—with four of us, we can take him down, easy.”

  El vacillated, talking herself into and then out of it.

  “I mean, I want to know what’s going on here,” she said, “but I don’t want to hurt anyone. And I don’t want to break the law.”

  “These people broke the law to get to you,” Marcie pointed out, far more enthusiastic about the idea than Liam would have predicted. “Don’t you want to finally clear this up, once and for all?”

  “My dad has a Taser,” Jorja told them. “I’ll sneak it away, and within a couple of hours, we’ll know everything. Problem solved; problem staying solved.”

  Ultimately, Jorja’s supreme confidence and the lure of putting an end to the drama that had begun with her throat being slashed tempted El over to Jorja’s side.

  Which left Liam. Odd man out. As always. It was three against one, but this wasn’t a pure democracy. He had a trump card to play: He could always just go tell his father what was going on.

  I’ll tell my daddy! It was his own voice, echoing from childhood. Running to tell a parent was beyond juvenile—it was cowardly.

  “Okay, I’m in.”

  Jorja rubbed her hands together. “Great. Let’s plan.”

  It was disturbing how easily Jorja cobbled together a kidnapping plan. It took her less than twenty-four hours. Then again, she was a writer wannabe who spent most of her time daydreaming creepy scenarios involving the ghosts of vengeful murdered wives, abused children wreaking havoc on their parents, and more. She was almost giddy at the prospect of doing it for real.

  Elayah had messaged the mystery man with instructions to make the swap the next day, one hour after sunset. It would be fully dark by then.

  They staked out the spot long before the sun went down. It was on the edge of town, opposite the factory about as far in the other direction as you could go and still be in Canterstown. Even so, the tips of the smokestacks peeked up over the horizon, solid black nubs jutting up from the earth, like zipper teeth missing their mates.

  A two-laner of old blacktop had once been the primary conduit from the center of town to the closest highway. Shops and houses along that road commanded a premium. But then a million years ago, the Cross-County Expressway had been built, and suddenly that two-laner became obsolete. School buses still trundled along to shuttle kids from one end of town to the middle school, but other than a few locals using it when the CCE was backed up, it was typically empty. The stores had closed up, and the houses belonged to retirees and other folks who couldn’t afford to move elsewhere.

  They had—well, Jorja had—picked a spot near an old billboard that still advertised a new season of ER with ragged, peeling paper tiles. The lights had burned out long ago.

  El and Marcie were stationed in a copse of trees with a pair of binoculars; if things went dreadfully wrong, they would call the cops, consequences be damned.

  Liam and Jorja took up positions equidistant from the billboard, lying in the tall grass. They wore all black, including balaclavas to hide their faces. Liam couldn’t believe they were actually doing this. It was insane, and he nearly called it off a half dozen times.

  Every time, he thought back to El in her hospital bed that night. The hitch in her breath. Every time, he sighed and settled in.

  everyone ready?

  It was Jorja. Playing general.

  Marcie and El answered in the affirmative. Liam tapped out, this cruise SUX.

  The idea was that the guy would arrive, go to the billboard, and take the package they’d tied to the post. It contained nothing more than a couple of old paperbacks, but it was just the bait. To get him into position. He was supposed to leave an envelope full of cash, but they suspected that wasn’t going to happen. He would take the bait and run.

  Or at least, he would try to run.

  The sun dipped low. Liam’s legs fell asleep, and he twitched to wake them up.

  He dozed. He was aware he was sleeping, but he was also aware of his surroundings. The waving grass around him. The darkening sky. He thought of El, crouched in the trees with Marcie. Then he just thought of El and he turned warm.

  up

  The vibration of Jorja’s text shook him out of midfantasy. A low rumble sounded off to his left. He checked through the grass—a car pulled up near the billboard.

  A man got out. Liam was pretty sure it was the same guy as yesterday, this time wearing jeans but the same black overcoat and black hat.

  The car took off. The man waited until it had disappeared in the distance before he approached the billboard.

  now?

  wait, Jorja sent back.

  The man stepped around the post, located the package. Liam had double-knotted it with a complicated sailor’s knot he’d learned on YouTube. The man struggled with it.

  go

  Liam leapt up and charged the man. There were about ten yards between them; he covered the distance in a dozen big, loping steps, coming up on the guy’s blind side.

  Jorja had risen up from her hiding spot at an angle to the man and was spotted as she closed half the distance. The man uttered a wordless cry and yanked at the package, tearing it loose from the post. He probably thought he had a few seconds to pull a weapon or run.

  He never saw Liam, who came up behind him and slammed into him with his shoulder, knocking him off his feet and sending him sprawling to the ground. The package flew from his hands and fell into the grass.

  “Wait—!” the man exclaimed, holding up both hands, but by then Jorja was there with the Taser. She jabbed it at the guy, mistriggered. The Taser arced into the open air, and the man rolled over, kicked out.

  Liam caught the foot and twisted, spinning the man over onto his stomach. Jorja straddled the guy’s back and jammed the Taser into the back of his neck. A sizzling sound filled the air, and the man offered one explosive, truncated syllable of pain before slumping, unconscious.

  Jorja turned to Liam, grinning. Her breath came fast, like Liam’s, a series of gleefully satisfied huffs and pants. “See?” she said, brandishing the Taser. “Easy!”

  THE PRESENT: ELAYAH

  Half a mile down the road, where the buildings faded into the background, only a single structure stood within sight, a ramshackle concrete cube with a faded red sign mounted above its single door.

  PSYCHIC ADVICE, it read, along with a phone number that had been disconnected before any of them had been born.

  For at least a hundred yards in every direction, there was nothing but overgrown grass and weeds.

  For years, they’d school-bused past this building, ancient even when they were young. The jokes about a psychic going out of business flowed naturally, fast and furious like rapids. Even kids could see the irony.

  This was where they took the man. Marcie had scouted out the place earlier in the day. It was empty inside, the windows papered over. Dust lay thick on the floor and on what had once been a sales counter.

  There was an archway that led to a back room, but that, too, was empty. Not even ghosts
haunted this place, just bad ideas.

  Was this another bad idea?

  She didn’t know for sure.

  They propped the man up against the wall, then zip-tied his wrists behind him, around a drainpipe exposed through a break in the wall. Liam tugged on the pipe a couple of times and pronounced it still sturdy.

  Jorja had brought a large backpack, from which she’d produced not just the Taser and zip ties but now also a blindfold, which she tied around the man’s eyes.

  “Remember, when he comes to: no names,” she told them. “And don’t talk unless you have to.”

  The psychic’s abandoned office swirled with dust and decades of pollen. There was no light here, but Jorja once again dug into her bag of tricks and brought out a small LED lamp that lit the place up, throwing harsh shadows around the tiny room. They danced over their captive’s unconscious form.

  Despite herself, Elayah found the moment haunting and intoxicating. This man—this helpless, confined man—was somehow connected to the knife across her throat. The spilled blood. Maybe he was the man who’d cut her.

  Liam shook his head. “Guys… this is crazy.”

  “I want to know what he knows,” she told Liam. “This is what we have to do. I could have been killed. I think I deserve some answers.”

  Marcie grinned. “And as soon as he wakes up, we’re gonna get them for you.”

  Something about that grin scared the hell out of Elayah. Marcie had been her best friend forever; they’d shared everything. And yet she’d never seen this side of her.

  They quickly frisked the man. As suspected, there was no envelope full of cash. “A liar, in addition to his other sins,” Marcie commented.

  “Nothing in his pockets except for this.” Jorja waved an iPhone at them. “No wallet. No keys.”

  The man stirred. Groaned. His shoulders flexed for a moment as he reflexively tried to move his arms, but his wrists were bound together, then zip-tied behind him to the pipe. Elayah bit her lip, waiting for him to speak. Waiting for his voice.

  Don’t scream.

  She would know the voice. Below the blindfold, his clean-shaven cheeks glowed with sweat, blotched with dirt, but he had no beard at all.

  Could have shaved.

  She couldn’t take it any longer.

  She lunged toward him, lips parting, ready to shout, “Who are you?” but in the same instant Jorja grabbed her from behind and yanked her back. The shout became a wordless gasp.

  It was loud enough. The man’s head snapped up at the sound of her gasp, rotating his obscured eyes in her direction. She experienced a trill of fear in her lower abdomen, like being stabbed in her gut with a sharpened icicle. He couldn’t see her, but her amygdala didn’t know that and it shouted Fear! Danger!

  “Who’s there?” he asked, and in that instant all the fear bled away, seeping out her pores like cold sweat.

  It wasn’t the voice with the knife. It wasn’t Don’t scream.

  “Who’s there?” he asked again.

  Marcie put her hands on Elayah’s shoulders and steered her away from the guy.

  Jorja typed into her phone and then held it up. “You don’t need to know who we are,” said a synthetic voice. “We don’t want to hurt you. Tell us who sent you and why, and we’ll let you go.”

  The man said nothing. He simply “peered” around the room some more, twisting his head this way and that, trying to find an angle from which he could see from under the blindfold.

  “If you tell us what you know,” Jorja’s phone said, “no harm will come to you.”

  The man did not quite chuckle, but his throat rippled in something like amusement. Or maybe it was resigned disbelief.

  They gathered in a corner, where they could whisper without being overheard.

  “I say we introduce him to a knife of our own,” Marcie said calmly, and reached into her purse.

  LIAM

  It wasn’t the biggest knife Liam had ever seen, and it wasn’t wickedly, intentionally lethal like the knife they’d found in the time capsule, but it was big enough and sharp enough to shock him.

  “What the hell, Marse? Why do you even have that?”

  Marcie shrugged as though explaining why she had a tin of Altoids in her purse. “Just in case.”

  “Just in case? Just in case?” Liam thought he might be hyperventilating but couldn’t stop. “Were you worried someone was gonna bring an Easter ham without telling you?”

  “Calm down,” Jorja told him. “I’m sure she’s thought this through.”

  “What, are we gonna torture the guy?”

  “It won’t get that far.” Marcie’s tone, distressingly imperturbable, evoked choosing between the four-pack and the six-pack of nuggets at McDonald’s, not opting for war crimes. “All we have to do is put it up to his throat. Let him know we have it. He’ll crack.”

  And wow. Marcie. Calm, cool, collected Marcie. The first one to lose it. He would not have bet on that.

  “This might work,” Jorja interjected with infuriating calm. “We need answers. He has them. It’s simple math. We won’t actually hurt him.”

  “And what if he still won’t talk?” Liam asked. “Are you gonna cut him open to look for what he knows?”

  Marcie folded her arms over her chest, the knife glimmering against the hank of red hair that fell over her shoulder. “I don’t like any of this, but this guy either tried to kill El or knows who did. We didn’t start this.”

  Liam’s throat bobbed as he tried to swallow. He couldn’t believe he, Liam, was the responsible one, outvoted by the others. Black was white; up was down; ketchup was mustard. The world no longer made sense.

  “He doesn’t have a wallet or any ID on him, and we can’t break into his phone.” Jorja handed it to Liam. “If you know some hackers, call them. Otherwise, let’s see what we can see.”

  “Who’s actually going to do this?” he asked. “Not me. El?”

  Elayah had been silent during the entire conversation, staring at the knife in Marcie’s hands. It took another “El?” for her to snap out of her fugue state and shake her head slowly.

  “No. I don’t… I don’t trust myself.”

  Well, hell. He never imagined in a million years that Elayah Laird would worry about going all Hulk smash on someone.

  “I’ll do it.” Marcie drew herself up to her full height, the knife still clutched in one fist. “He hurt my best friend. Or he knows who did. I have zero problem with this.”

  “Don’t actually cut him,” Jorja cautioned.

  “I’ll be careful,” Marcie promised.

  Which wasn’t exactly the same thing.

  Liam thought everyone seemed a little too eager, but he also knew that he was outvoted. He stepped back, turning the phone over and over in his hands.

  Marcie crouched near the hostage and patted him on the knee. Liam’s stomach tightened. That knee pat bothered Liam for some reason he couldn’t identify… until he did.

  Patting the guy on the knee was a humane gesture. It acknowledged the man’s humanity. And yet Marcie was still about to treat the guy like a cold side of beef hanging from a slaughterhouse hook. Somehow it would be less nauseating if Marcie just treated the guy like a thing, not a person.

  Jorja stood nearby and used her phone app to talk.

  “Let’s start with something easy. Your name.”

  The man said nothing.

  “There are two ways to do this,” the phone went on.

  Oh, God, don’t say a hard way and an easy way, Liam thought.

  Jorja’s phone said exactly that. Liam groaned and turned the man’s phone over again. It was a pretty new one.

  “Who are you? Who sent you?”

  The man shook his head and sighed. “Come on. Let me go. We can still make the swap.”

  Clearing her throat meaningfully, Marcie laid the knife against the man’s leg. “I’m giving you one last chance. And then I’m going to cut. I’m not telling you where or how deep. You’ll find out soo
n enough.”

  “You’re kids, right? You’re not going to hurt me.”

  Jorja’s eyes lit up, and she typed quickly on her phone screen.

  “Haven’t you read the science on the teen brain? Our heads aren’t quite right. Not until we turn twenty-five. Until then, the prefrontal cortex is still mushy. Consequently, we lack planning capacity. And impulse control. Who knows what we might do to you? You like cutting up girls? You like working for people who do?”

  The man stiffened, though whether at the accusation or at the touch of the knife, it was impossible to tell. He might not have entirely believed Jorja’s soliloquy, but he didn’t entirely disbelieve it, either. “Let’s just finish this up and be out of each other’s hair, okay?” he suggested.

  Marcie seemed to consider this, and for a moment, Liam thought she might agree.

  And then, without a word, Elayah stepped over to Marcie and grabbed the knife.

  ELAYAH

  The knife caught the cold white light of the lantern and warped it along its shiny surface. A smear of silver. A fun house mirror.

  Elayah had watched the whole thing at a remove. It felt unreal, but at the same time too real. That heightened sense of surreality that comes in deep, deep dreams.

  As she watched Marcie, she suddenly wanted the knife in her own hand. Her palm itched for it. In a single, unbidden instant, Elayah understood the term bloodlust in more than an academic sense.

  Yes, she knew she was in a fragile and precarious state after what had happened to her. One of the doctors in the hospital had—out of Elayah’s earshot, or so she’d thought—advised her parents to have Elayah see a therapist. That night, when her parents—again, thinking her out of earshot and again, wrong—spoke, they spoke of health insurance and what it didn’t cover, and why was the insurance company’s website so damn difficult to navigate, and that’s exactly what they want; they want you to give up, Dinah!

  She wanted the knife and she wanted to cut. To hurt. To inflict harm. It made no rational sense, but this was beyond rationality. She wanted it. To balance the scales. She’d been hurt, so someone else needed to be hurt.