In Time (5 page)

I push the girl forward, toward the bathroom.

“Clean yourself up,” I tell her just as there’s a knock on the door.

I feel about ten times more panicked than the girl looks as she walks to the bathroom and shuts the door. I stand there, just to make sure she doesn’t have ideas about causing trouble, but the knocking turns into pounding.

I look through the door’s peephole and one of Phyllis’s boys glares back at me. He’s got a good twenty years on me but also is carrying about a hundred extra pounds tucked into his bright yellow polo shirt. I keep the chain on as I crack the door open, more to make a point than to stop him.

“Yeah?” My brain is scrambling to remember the guy’s name. He’s the one who’s actively balding. The other one just looks like he lets his mother cut his gray hair. I know this one is trying to figure out how I managed to get back in.

“You need to be outta here tonight if you aren’t going to pay,” he says. “I
thought
we made that perfectly clear.”

“I’ll have the money for you—” I start, but then I remember the lump of bills in my back pocket. I didn’t get a chance to count it before I stole it, so I start to thumb through them, making a show. That’s when the bathroom’s crappy faucet sputters to life. What’s-his-name looks up sharply, trying to wedge himself farther between the door and the frame.

“You know it’s extra if you have another person sleeping here,” he snaps.

“Oh, she’s not spending the night,” I said, wagging my brows. “You know how it is.” Except, clearly, this guy does not know how it is. And also, given the age of my “guest,” that was one of creepiest things that’s ever come out of my mouth.

“Here—here’s the hundred,” I said. And two hundred slides back into my pocket. Nice
.
“Tomorrow I’ll be out of your hair.”

The guy stares at the twenties in my hand like it’s Monopoly money.

“Where’d you get this?” he demands, snatching it up and recounting the five bills himself. “You doing something sketchy in here? Something we need to know about?”

“Just finished some freelance mechanic work,” I say, holding up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

“You wouldn’t know honor if it was spitting in your face,” the man mutters, still staring at the bathroom door at the other side of the room, the shadow of her feet moving beneath it. He’s looking at it like he’s thinking, like he’s finally realized what I meant earlier, and suddenly, he’s interested.

“She done with you?”

Well, at least I’m not the biggest scumbag here
.

“Already booked.” The words taste like vomit in my mouth. So all of a sudden it doesn’t matter to him that hookers definitely fall under the category of
something sketchy
? “Sorry, dude.”

His meaty hand swallows the money. “Out by noon tomorrow. Not a second later.”

“Sure,” I say, worrying that he’s waiting to get an eyeful of my “guest,” waiting to follow her out to the parking lot. Jesus
.
“That it? Okay, great.”

I slam the door in his face before he can get another word out, and flip the dead bolt over. I watch the guy stand out there for a few more minutes, and don’t turn away until he finally sucks it up and leaves.

Leaning back against the door, I survey what’s left of the groceries I bought two weeks ago. I have a bag of chips, a cup of ramen, a loaf of bread and peanut butter. I don’t realize how hungry I am until I see how little I have to eat. I could try to order something in, but that’s the kind of luxury I know would draw unwanted attention from the other residents of Phyllis’s motel. I can’t go pick something up without leaving the girl alone to potentially escape. She can live with a sandwich. All kids like peanut butter sandwiches.

Unless they’re allergic to peanut butter
.

Okay. She gets the ramen. I just have to remember to sit far away while she eats it so she can’t throw the hot broth in my face.

I bend down, pouring the last of the water from the gallon jug into a chipped mug to zap in the microwave. I pour the hot water straight into the Styrofoam container, my stomach gargling at the first whiff of the roast chicken flavoring.

What if she’s a vegetarian?

Shit—no, stop it
.
She doesn’t get to be a vegetarian.

It is a living thing with needs, but it is not human
.

It is a living thing with needs, but it is not human.

It is a living thing with needs, but it is a freak.

It has also been in the bathroom with the water running for the past fifteen minutes. I let my brain get as far as wondering if it’s possible to drown yourself in a sink full of water before I cross the room in two long strides. The door’s lock has been broken since I got here and she has nothing to block the door with.

The first thing I see is the trail of bloodied puffs of toilet paper on the counter. She’s left the water running at full blast, and the drain, which functions at half capacity on a good day, can’t handle this load. The water has breached the shallow basin and is spilling out onto my feet. The vanity lights cast everything in a sour glow.

The kid is sitting on the ground in that little bit of space between the toilet and the shower, her face stubbornly turned away from the door. Her shoulders are still shaking, but the only noise that escapes her is pathetic sniffling. As she scrubs at her face, I realize I never cut the zip tie around her wrists, and I start to get a fluttering panic low in my stomach.

When she does turn to face me, the only trace she was ever crying is in her eyes, which are still a raw pink. The cut across her forehead is finally scabbing over, but she’s managed to reopen the one on her chin.

“Stay here,” I say. “Right there.” I have a tiny first aid kit I bought off the old high school nurse. I don’t know that she was really supposed to be selling her supplies, but we were the last class to graduate before they shut the schools down, so I guess there was no point in pretending she’d need it one day.

The only bandages I have seem absurdly large, but they’ll do as good of a job as any. I tell myself it’s worth it to use them because otherwise the PSFs could dock some of my reward money for “medical costs,” but really, it’s just hard to look at her face like that.

I peel the first one out of the package as the vanity lights begin to buzz and flicker. I glance up at her under my dark bangs. “Don’t zap me. I’ll kick your ass.”

She finally loses that terrible forced blank look and snorts, rolling her eyes.

It’s a quick job that’s not especially gentle, but she sits there and takes it. She doesn’t say a thing. I have to swallow the irritation that comes with it; if the freak would just act out, try something, it would make this whole process that much easier on me. I feel like she’s waiting for me to screw up and make a break for it, or she’s just laughing at how terrible I am at this gig. Laughing like I’m sure the rest of them are back home.

“I made dinner,” I say, mostly to fill the silence. The freak just watches me, her mouth twitching like she might smile, and I know I’m right. She thinks I’m a joke.

Maybe I’m doing this all wrong—I shouldn’t just give her the food. Maybe she should have to earn it through good behavior? I don’t think she’s scared of me. But she should be—she needs to be. She has to know what’s coming.

While she sits and carefully eats the ramen I left for her on the cleared desk to avoid spilling, I take out the knife I swiped from the dead kid and kind of…make a show of twirling it around. But eating with her hands tied like that takes up so much of her concentration, I’m ignored.

By the time she finishes, I can feel the frustration and embarrassment burning just under my skin. I grab her arm and pull her off the chair, working a plan out as I lead her to the bed. I force her down onto the floor, trying not to echo her wince as she sits.

“Don’t move,” I bark, leaving her only long enough to get one pair of handcuffs out of my duffel. The bones of her ankle are tiny enough that I can tighten one end around it and latch the other over the metal bedpost hiding beneath the bed’s ruffled skirt.

And again, she just stares at me the entire time, and I feel my face flush with heat, the way it always used to when I was flustered and on the verge of crying as a dumb kid. The bandage covering her chin exaggerates its point as she tilts her head up.

“Stop it,” I warn her, feeling anger rise like a swarm of hornets in my skull. “Same thing that happened to your friends is gonna happen to you, so you can wipe that stupid look off your face—
stop
it!
”

Jesus, I can’t stand criers. I turn my back as her face crumples, just for a second. And I wonder, in a way that pisses me off all over again, if she was crying in the bathroom because of what I was going to do or what happened to her friends. Not knowing for sure what happened to them, really.

Why were they all traveling together like that, anyway? I swipe the handbook off the nightstand and bend the soft cover between my hands. That other Asian girl—was that her sister? Did her sister really just leave her there to save her own ass? Cold, man. Is that what these abilities do to them? Turn them into animals that know it’s all about survival of the fittest—

STOP. IT.

Because the situation already isn’t uncomfortable enough, 2A, the neighbor to my right, apparently has a guest of his own for the evening. I can feel the bedpost knocking against mine through the wall and scramble to grab the TV remote before the moaning starts. Static, static, static, news, game show rerun…I settle on
The Price Is Right
and turn the volume way up. This damn freak—I should have just left her, hoped to find one closer to Phoenix. She’s pricked every last one of my nerves with this act of hers, trying to pretend she’s all innocent and sweet to work me over, to put me in this exact place where I feel like I have to make sure she doesn’t have to deal with an ugly thing like that.

There has to be something in the handbook about PSFs being willing to pick up a kid instead of me having to drive to Prescott to drop her off. I don’t like the way my brain keeps circling back to wondering if I should give her one of the pillows or a blanket or if she can send an electric charge through the bed frame and kill me while I’m sleeping.

There’s a brief description in the book about what each color represents, but nothing about the theories of what caused the “mutation,” as they so eloquently put it.
Abilities fluctuate in strength and precision depending on the individual Psi
. Great. Of course life hands me the one that’s
strong
and
precise
enough to KO a car.

It’s sort of amazing to think that for as long as this has been going on, they’re still not any closer to figuring out what caused it or how to fix it. The rest of us would love if Gray would remember he’s supposed to be fixing the economy, too, not just pouring money into research for this supposed virus. What does it matter if we save the “next generation of Americans” when we can barely keep the current one going on what little we have? Nobody wants to have kids these days, not when it means potentially losing them a few years later. Birth rates are way down; there’s no immigration into or emigration out of the country because they’re terrified of the virus’s spreading. The future is all they want to talk about these days, not the present. Not how we fix things
now
.
How will America move forward after losing an entire generation?
the radio broadcasters want to know.
If the Psi can be rehabilitated, how will they handle being reintroduced to society?
asks the
New York Times
.
Is this the end of days?
cries the televangelist.

Maybe we all die out and the freaks inherit the world. No one seems to want to suggest that possibility, though.

There’s nothing about a PSF pickup in the handbook, of course, though there’s this:
If you feel like you are in imminent danger and the Psi you are pursuing is classified as Red, Orange, or Yellow you can request backup from nearby skip tracers through the network. The Psi Special Forces unit and the United States government are not responsible for any reward disputes that may follow.

So…that’s ruled out, seeing as I still have zero access to the skip tracer network.

I roll off the bed, walking the long way around the freak to get to my food hoard and mini-fridge. As I slather peanut butter on the stale bread, I tell myself,
Tomorrow you’ll be eating steak. Pizza. Whatever you want.
Right now, though, I just feel exhausted at the thought of having to deal with all this again tomorrow. I can’t even psych myself up with the mental image of throwing the bills in the air as I jump on Phyllis’s crappy-ass bed, letting them shower down around me.

The beer might as well have been NyQuil. Gone are the glory days of high school, when I could down bottle after bottle after the Friday-night football games and then stay up late enough to watch the sun rise from the roof of my buddy Ryan’s house. One and done.

I don’t want to think about Ryan, though, or any of them. They left me behind, vanished into a world of black uniforms and secrets. It’s fine. I swear it is. Sometimes, though, I just wish one of them had fought to take me with them. It’s hard to be the person who gets left behind, and never the person who gets to do the leaving.

I’m just starting to drift off to sleep, the handbook open across my chest, when the game show ends. At some point, I must have dozed off, because the next things I’m aware of are Judy Garland’s unmistakable crooning and her big brown eyes meeting mine as I squint at the screen. It’s that famous song about the rainbow—lemon drops, birds, all those nice things. She’s flanked by her little dog and a sepia-toned Midwest sky. The next time my eyelids flutter open, the house is in the tornado, crashing down.

I pat around the bed, searching for the remote just as Dorothy opens the door of her house to the Technicolor world of Oz.

It’s…somehow nicer than I remembered. My dad forced me to watch it with him when I was a little kid, maybe seven or eight, and all I remember thinking was how stupid the special effects were compared to those in the action movie I’d just seen in the theater the night before. I hated everything, even the way Dorothy’s voice seemed to wobble when she talked.