Ghost Hold

by Ripley Patton

  I struggled against the hold on me, thrashing, and then someone’s arms were under both of mine, wiry arms wrapped under my armpits and over my shoulders, pulling me, pulling me.

  My head broke the surface, and I gasped for breath, hacking water out at the same time, spewing the river from my throat—not so I could breathe, but so I could scream.

  “No,” I cried, but it came out more like a cough. “He’s down there,” I tried to say. “I need him.”

  The wake of the water rippled behind me as my savior pulled me toward shore. My heels banged against rock, jarring my knee with hot pain. Then we were standing up, waist deep in water, Passion clinging to me, her skinny, pale arms practically holding me in a head lock.

  “Let go of me,” I said.

  “No,” she said in my ear. “You can’t save him.”

  “We have to get out of here. Now,” Jason said, his hands on me too, dragging me further up on the rocks.

  “He’s not dead,” I struggled against them both, snot and river and tears running out of my eyes, and nose and mouth. “He can reboot.”

  “It’s too deep,” Passion insisted. “You can’t pull someone up from that deep. You’ll die trying.”

  “I don’t care,” I said, struggling against Passion again, but her grip was relentless and my knee was so wacked, I couldn’t get leverage. “We can’t leave him down there.”

  “They’re coming,” Jason said.

  I could hear it, men crashing through the brush and trees behind us, calling out to one another.

  “We have to go,” he said, yanking me up on my feet as Passion let go of me.

  “I can’t run.” I looked Jason full in the face, willing him to understand, telling him with my eyes, with my soul. “I can’t even walk. And I can’t leave him.”

  “I can carry you,” he said.

  “No,” I shook my head. “Then we’re all dead. Go,” I said to him. I looked at Passion. “Please, go,” I begged.

  “Come on,” Jason said, grabbing Passion’s hand and pulling her up the rock. She was still looking back at me as they disappeared into the woods.

  And then a strange peace descended over me, a calm so deep and dark it was as if I was seeing everything from the bottom of that deep pool of the river, lying down there next to Marcus, waiting for us both to wake and rise.

  I saw the scattered groups of wet, terrified teens, huddled on the rocks, some injured, all in shock.

  I saw the bodies floating, one bumping up against the rocky shore.

  I saw the armed men up on the cliff, milling around and pointing down at us.

  The helicopter was there with them, the flat top of the plateau making almost a perfect landing pad.

  I saw it all. Saw the army of men emerge from the woods on all sides, yelling at us, telling us “Don’t move. Put your hands in the air.”

  But I did not comply like the others. My hands were clamped between my thighs, what little warmth my body had left slowly but surely seeping into them.

  “I said, ‘put your hands in the air,’” a man said, planting the barrel of his gun on the back of my neck, the cold circle of it biting into my vertebrae.

  “No,” I said, my teeth chattering. “I’m freezing. I need to get warm.”

  “You won’t be warm if I fucking kill you,” he said, pressing the gun even harder into my neck.

  “Kill me then,” I said, shrugging and watching the water. How long had it been since we’d jumped? How long had Marcus been down there? Five minutes? Ten? Fifteen? I would not leave this shore until he came back up, no matter how long it took. No matter what they did to me.

  “Stand up, minus bitch,” the guy with the gun said, pulling the barrel away from my neck and grabbing me under the left arm, trying to pull me upright.

  I let him, let him pull me up and pin me against him, ignoring the agony in my knee as I sank my ghost hand into him, my fingers searching even as I felt the puff of his breath in my face, even as his eyes went wide and vacant and I realized that if he collapsed, I’d go crashing down with him.

  “Don’t fall,” I whispered, pushing my hand upward and seeing him jerk upright with it, like a hand puppet. He was young, maybe not much older than me.

  “Hey, Paulie, what the hell are you doing?” someone called from behind us. “Bring her over here.”

  My hand found what it was looking for, Paulie’s burden, something perfectly round and smooth that would answer my need. But if I pulled it out, we’d both fall.

  “Paulie?” the voice was closer, the other man almost on top of us.

  I yanked my hand out of Paulie and felt him begin to crumple against me.

  I tried to move as he went down, tried to hop away on one leg, even as I looked down at the magic eight ball gripped in my fingers, its glassy wisdom staring up at me, Reply hazy, try again. Yep, that was helpful. I’d been hoping for a gun, or a knife, or a cane. Or a grenade.

  “What the fuck?” the new guy said, catching Paulie in his arms, which also pretty much rendered his gun useless, pressed against his side. He was much bigger and older than Paulie.

  Teetering, I tossed the eight ball over my shoulder into the river, and took its advice, sinking my hand into the new guy.

  The three of us went crashing down like a one-legged tripod.

  They broke my fall, which was good, but my hand was still fishing around inside of the big guy when I looked up to find ten or fifteen guns trained on me, cocked and ready.

  “Hold your fire,” someone commanded.

  “She’s got her fucking hand inside Gary,” another one said, his voice breaking with panic, his finger twitching at his trigger.

  “He wants this one alive,” the commander said. “Hold your fire.” Then to me, “Take your hand out of him. Slowly.” He reversed his gun and placed the butt of it just above my head.

  I could feel the thing in Gary, soft and small and pliable, like a tiny plush toy. My hand was finally around it. But I doubted that anything Gary gave me was going to save me now, and if they knocked me out, I wouldn’t be able to wait for Marcus.

  I let go of Gary’s burden and withdrew my ghost hand from him.

  The butt of the gun came crashing down on my head, and everything went dark.

  * * *

  I came to. Barely. I was drooling down some guy’s back as he carried me through the woods, the feet of other captives shuffling along behind us.

  I didn’t even hesitate. I sank my hand into his back, and we went crashing forward into the guy in front of us, knocking men down like dominoes.

  This time I came away with a knife, small but sharp.

  I cut three of them while simultaneously begging them to take me back to the river and the pool.

  I tried to run away. Well, more like crawl away. On one leg.

  Until they hit me again. And kicked me. Multiple boots banging into my ribs, until I heard something crack, and the pain was too much, and the world went dark again.

  * * *

  I woke up in the back seat of a plush car, awash in pain.

  I didn’t even try to move.

  Mike Palmer was sitting next to me with a gun in my side, which I thought was funny. They’d already proven they weren’t going to shoot me.

  He looked amazingly well, with only faint scarring left from the horrible beating Jason had given him a month ago in the woods outside of Greenfield. Apparently, he was a quick healer.

  “She’s awake, sir,” Mike said, and the man in the front passenger seat turned around and looked at me.

  “It is so nice to be awake,” Dr. Fineman said, grinning at me, looking hale and full of health as well. He did not look like a guy who’d been in a coma for a month.

  I had imagined him, in my pleasant daydreams, skinny and jaundiced, his skin stretching tautly over his skull, but here he was looking like he’d just stepped off the golf course.

  “What the fuck do you want?” I whispered, and even that hurt. It hurt to breathe.

 
“Never one to beat around the bush, were you?” he said, shaking his head. “Very well. I can be just as forthcoming. What I want is for you to put this back in me.” He held up the cube I’d pulled out of him back in Mike Palmer’s basement. Shit. How had he gotten it? We’d left it back at the McMansion. Which meant they’d been in the McMansion. “And then I want you to pull all the pretty little things out of people I tell you to, whenever I tell you to.”

  “Yeah, that’s never going to happen,” I said.

  “We will see,” he said. “It seems your time playing in The Hold has made you a little overconfident. But we can fix that.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he said. “They do say, ‘Like mother, like daughter.’”

  I surged forward, tried to use my ghost hand on him, but there was some kind of metal cuff around my wrist and the moment I reached for him, my whole arm went cold, flopping down into my lap.

  “Wonderful!” Dr. Fineman said, almost clapping as he admired my limp arm. “It works perfectly. And now I hope you understand that you’ll only be using that hand at my bidding.”

  “And what about this hand?” I asked, curling my other hand into a fist and smashing it into his face as hard as I could, feeling the satisfying crunch of his nose breaking.

  “Hey!” Mike said, yanking me back, jamming his gun into my ribs. He pushed on the broken one until I cried out in pain and the darkness began to gather at the edge of my vision again.

  Dr, Fineman was bent over in his seat, clutching his bloody nose and groaning.

  “Take it easy, girl,” Leo said from the driver’s seat, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “Honey will catch you more flies than vinegar.”

  Leo. Samantha’s personal driver and a major member of security for The Hold. Fuck. He was the CAMFer spy, the double agent.

  I stared at him, seething with disdain, and he looked away, back to the headlights on the dark highway in front of us.

  For a few minutes we were all silent as Dr. Fineman dug some wrinkled fast food napkins out of the glove box and stuffed them up his nose, staunching his bleeding.

  “So, where are we going?” I asked, leaning back against the seat, willing myself not to pass out again.

  “To my research compound,” Dr. Fineman said, his voice muffled as he glanced sidelong at me. “I’m sure your friend David told you all about it.”

  “The one in Oregon?” I felt myself begin to panic. “We’re driving to Oregon?” That was too far. Too far from Marcus. Too far from my mom, and Samantha, and Jason and Passion, and Alexander James. Too far from everything and everyone I knew who might help me. I couldn’t go there. I couldn’t.

  I reached out with my left hand and grabbed the door handle, pulling on it, but it wouldn’t open.

  I felt a sting in my right arm, and turned to see Mike Palmer sinking a syringe into it straight through my shirt.

  I looked up at him, his face and the interior of the car already beginning to grow fuzzy in my vision.

  “I warned you not to come,” he whispered when my face slumped onto his shoulder. “But you marked brats never listen.”

  36

  THE COMPOUND

  How long have I been in this cell? I don’t know. I don’t know how many days I’ve sat trying to keep track of the minutes and the hours, and I don’t know how many nights I’ve lain on a cold stone slab, my body and arm numb, trying to make my ghost hand obey me.

  They kept me drugged after I busted Dr. Fineman’s nose, but the drive to Oregon must have taken four or five days. Unless we flew. Maybe we flew. I have no idea.

  When I woke up the first time, I was wearing different clothes than I’d had on at the Eidolon and my dog tags were gone. So were Mike Palmer’s matchbook and the paper with my father’s inscription to Kaylee on it. But I still had on the weird cuff that kept my ghost hand from doing anything useful.

  As soon as I moved I could tell I’d been tended by a nurse or a medic. My knee was taped and bound, and so were my ribs. Later, they brought me pain meds with my meals and watched me until I took them. There is an extra blue pill at night that I think is supposed to make me sleep, but it doesn’t work anymore. I do not sleep. I refuse to sleep. Because, when I do, the dream comes. I have it every time I close my eyes, without fail, as if my subconscious only has one source, one pool of memory and regret, one place it must always return to.

  In the dream, I’m lying at the bottom of the river in the pool beneath The Devil’s Drop. Water is rushing and swirling far above me, but I’m hidden in the stillness beyond the world.

  At first I always feel a swell of hope. Hope to see Marcus again. Hope that I didn’t leave him after all. Hope that if I swim long enough and search hard enough, I will find him and pull him back up with me.

  But then I realize I can’t swim. I can’t even move. I’m lying on my back, looking upward, arms floating next to me, fish swimming lazily past me that I can’t even turn my head to watch.

  And that is when I look down at myself, at my strange body, and realize that I’m not me. I’m Marcus. I am Marcus at the bottom of the river, looking down at the hole in my chest and the piece of water-logged tree branch jutting through it, poking up through one of the bullet holes in my shirt, disrupting my ability to reboot and come back to life forever. And, as I watch, my Marcus body begins to rot, like one of those time-capture videos sped up, first my clothes rotting off, then my skin, shriveling to black wet nothingness. When the fish come to nibble on my exposed flesh, the tug of it always wakes me up, gasping and sweating in my cold cell.

  I have begun to believe that it is not just a dream, but a vision.

  I left the man I love sunk to the bottom of a river, helpless, defenseless.

  Anything could have happened; the stick I see in my dream, or a jutting rock. All it would take was something to break the plane of his PSS, and he would not reboot. And even if he did, would he inhale that murky water as he came back to life? Would he be so disoriented that he couldn’t find his way to the surface in time?

  If he is dead, I want to be dead.

  That’s why I stopped eating what they bring me.

  I have no hunger. I have no desire to be their guinea pig or puppet or weapon of torture. I have no reason to go on.

  My mother always said I was obsessed with death. And now I am.

  Today, I think it was today, someone came to the door of my cell, keys jingling in the lock.

  Dr. Fineman entered alone, not with Gary or Paulie this time, and I hoped maybe the interrogations about what I had done to them with my ghost hand were over. Maybe he’d finally given up trying to get me to reach into Gary and pull something out.

  The armed guard who stands outside my cell brought in a chair, and Dr. Fineman sat down in it, leaning forward like he cared about me and frowning at my full lunch tray. His nose looked fully recovered, which meant I hadn’t broken it, and that made me sad.

  “Are you giving up so soon?” he asked, sounding disappointed. “I thought you had more fight in you than this.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “We’ve been filming you, you know?” he said, gesturing at the camera mounted in the corner of the cell. “I know about the nightmares.”

  I looked at him, wishing looks could kill, imagining myself reaching my ghost hand into his head and scrambling his brains like eggs.

  “You call out for him in your sleep,” he said, snickering a little. “You moan, ‘Marcus’, and that isn’t even his name. He lied to you about his name.” Dr. Fineman leaned back. “How many other things do you think he lied to you about?”

  I looked away, tried to focus on something else, something inside of me so he couldn’t get to me. Because he was getting to me.

  “Did he lie to you about the list we gave him?” Dr. Fineman asked. “Did he make himself the hero and say he was rescuing all those poor PSS kids from our evil clutches?”

  I looked up, my neck practically snapping aloud.

/>   “Oh yes,” Dr. Fineman said. “That lie was my idea. After all, what better way to gather a group of teenagers than to give them a heroic peer to follow? Of course, we had to make it seem realistic along the way. We had to chase you, we had to harass you, had to prove to you all that what he was saying was true with that little performance in Greenfield. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have followed him and gotten him a free pass to upset The Hold and get rid of so many troublesome youth all in one fell swoop.”

  “You’re lying,” I said, unable to hold my tongue any longer. “You botched Greenfield and got your soul handed to you in a box, and now you’re trying to say that was your plan all along? You’ve got to be kidding me. I was there. I know what happened.”

  “Do you?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “Do you really believe it would be that easy to get past three armed, experienced men, if they hadn’t been told to let you by? And how did your Marcus know exactly where I was? Oh yes, I told him in one of our many communications. I asked him to draw you down into the lab so I could get a sample of that wonderful PSS of yours while it was exhibiting its power. And, of course, the giant minus meter—a fake, by the way—was to scare you away again, off to Samantha and The Hold. It was a considerable added bonus that we got to see what the items you’d extracted could really do in a pinch. Amazing that. Truly amazing. Jumping forward in time three days. Of course, now we do have the awkward problem of that other boy’s artifact stuck in mine, but I’m sure we can sort that out together.”

  Fuck. How did he know about Jason’s bullet in his box and the missing days? How could he possibly know? No one knew any of that except those of us in PSS camp. Yale and Nose were dead. They hadn’t told him. Jason and Passion had gotten away. They hadn’t told him. I certainly hadn’t told him, unless I’d mumbled it all in my sleep, which I highly doubted. Which left Marcus, but I couldn’t believe it. This whole thing could not have been an elaborate set-up with Marcus as an agent of the CAMFers. Marcus hated the CAMFers with every cell of his being. They’d killed his sister in front of him. He could not have faked the way he felt about them. I’d seen it in the line of his body, in the depths of his eyes, in his very soul.