Taken (2 page)

A minute later, the door opened. But it wasn’t the boy who stepped back in; it was Dr. M. Reyes.

I froze in place, terrified at the sight of him. He was dressed in green hospital scrubs, including a cap, a surgical mask, and tinted goggles. Clearly, there was no way I could ever identify him, except for the hint of oily black hair under his cap and the apelike way he moved. He never looked at me, as far as I could tell. He just picked up the bedpan and left.

As soon as he was gone, the boy returned. He pulled out his seat and resumed staring at the two-way screen. This was part of his job, obviously; part of the kidnapping plan. He was to keep watch on me and on whatever other scenes he had on that small screen.

Obviously, they were not worried that I would try to bolt. The boy didn’t even bother to reattach the leather belt. Why should they worry? They had me surrounded.

I stared at him for a while longer, still seething from the humiliation of using the bedpan, still shaking from the close encounter with the menacing Dr. Reyes. I took a few minutes to just breathe and try to calm myself. What could I do? What should I do?

I couldn’t just sit here and wait for Dr. Reyes to walk in and cut something out of my body. I had to act. I had to do
something
rather than nothing or I’d lose my mind. I reached over and clicked back into my “Kidnapping Industry” paper. The boy did not object; he did not stir at all. I scrolled until I found the section titled “Psychological Damage.” This is what it said: “Many victims of kidnappings, although released without any obvious physical damage, may still suffer serious psychological damage.” I thought about Hopewell Patterson. He was damaged goods, all right. “Damage occurs when a victim passes beyond normal fear into escalating states of panic, to hysteria, and then on to total psychological breakdown.”

I clicked out of the document and concentrated as hard as I could. I thought back to my anti-kidnapping classes. Most were taught by Highlands guards, but some were taught by Mrs. Veck. And one was taught by a psychologist, a pretty young woman in a blue suit. I pictured that woman in the classroom that day, and I tried to remember her words.

She said, “Use your mind to shut out fear.”

She said, “Go to a safe place in your mind, to a memory of some kind. Pick a recent memory, so that it is still fresh.”

She said, “Try to relive every minute of that memory—everything that happened; everything that you said and did. This will take you away, mentally, from your present fearful circumstances.”

That was what she advised, so that’s what I would do. I would
not
break down in this white metal prison. I would go someplace else in my mind. Someplace safe.

I concentrated hard. I thought back to a recent memory.

Friday, December 21. That was the last day of satschool. It was the day before the Christmas holidays began.

I would tell myself the story of that day, filling in every little detail. I would relive every part of my old life. By doing that, I would help myself get back to that life.

“An Edwardian Christmas Celebration”

I
remembered that December 21 was a cold day at my housing development, The Highlands, an estate community in Martin County, Florida.

I remembered that I began the day by helping Victoria with her morning chores. That was something I liked to do whenever no one else was around. My parents—that is, my father and my ex-stepmother—had recently divorced, but they still both lived in the house. It was a tense situation. I didn’t blame them for spending most of their time away, and that worked just fine for me. I preferred to be with Victoria and Albert.

The first thing Victoria asked me every day was, “Did you sleep well, Miss Charity?”

This was not a casual question, and she already knew the answer to it. I’d suffered for years from night terrors. To the kids at my school, to my parents, to practically everybody, I probably seemed a confident kid. But I was a sniveling coward at nighttime. I lived in fear of going to bed. I had horrible dreams that I thought were real. I woke up every night convinced that I was trapped in a cave, and that some monster was in there with me.

Only Victoria knew about this.

She had walked past my room one night and seen me sitting up in terror, drenched with sweat and gasping for air. She sat with me, saying little prayers and talking in a soothing voice until I fell back asleep. When I woke up later, she was still sitting there. And after that night, for three years, whenever I opened my eyes, she had been sitting there. I didn’t know when she slept herself. But she was always in the kitchen, smiling and happy, when I came down for breakfast.

That’s why I loved her so much. And that’s why I tried to start each day by helping her do the dishes, even though it was against RDS regulations.

Anyway, Albert had disappeared after breakfast, and he had not returned. Just as Victoria and I had finished cleaning, we heard a loud buzzing sound, like a swarm of giant bumblebees. She rolled her eyes and smiled. “That’s got to be Albert. Right?” She dried her hands and ducked into my bedroom, returning with a leather coat for me. “Here, Miss. You might catch cold outside.”

Victoria then grabbed a gray cape and pulled it on over her black skirt and white blouse (her maid’s outfit). I zipped my jacket up over my plaid Amsterdam Academy school jumper (my student’s outfit). Then we hurried through the marble foyer and pushed open the red oak, stained-glass door.

Our front lawn was large even by Highlands standards, about twenty square meters. It was enclosed by a wrought-iron fence that ran from the helipad in our backyard to the cobblestone street in front.

Albert, dressed in his black suit, white shirt, and black tie (his butler’s outfit), was crouched down on the left side of the flagstone walkway. He was tinkering with one of my father’s toys, a Granville 440C drone helicopter. It was plastered, like all my father’s toys, with University of Miami Hurricanes logos.

The 440C flew by remote control. It was similar to my father’s real helicopter, including the Miami logos, except that it was one-fourth the size and it had no seats. It did have some neat capabilities, though, including a one-million-candlepower searchlight, a mounted vidcam with night vision, and a rescue bucket that could be lowered to pick up a package or, as the brochure pointed out, “to rescue a drowning kitten.”

Albert turned and acknowledged us, muttering, “Miss Charity.”

Albert was a big man—broad-shouldered, with a military bearing and a military-style shaved head. His first four layers of derma were light-colored, although there was a hint of African ancestry in the features of his face and in his general muscularness. Genetically, he was somewhat of a puzzle to me. He worked as our English butler, but he was probably of Caribbean origin.

Victoria, on the other hand, was clearly of Mexican origin. I didn’t have to speculate about that. She once revealed to me, although it was against regulations, that she grew up in Mexico City. She was small and thin, but not at all frail. Her derma had a rosy brown tint, while her hair and eyes were lusciously dark. Patience and I agreed she was the most beautiful woman we had ever seen in person. She was Mexican, with an English name, but she worked as our French maid.

Victoria and Albert were both employed by the Royal Domestic Service, RDS—the largest and most prestigious company in the service industry. (I wrote a satschool paper about RDS, too.)

In the RDS hierarchy, Victoria was classified as a “one hundred percent employee.” This meant that she lived with us around the clock, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, except for the occasional emergency. One hundred percent employees got paid at the highest rate. Albert was classified as a “full-time employee.” This meant that he was entitled to take days off, up to five per month. Albert usually took all five days. Depending on which of Patience’s rumors you chose to believe, he spent that time either taking care of a house he owned somewhere or competing in professional chess tournaments.

Albert was working on attaching a metal box to the underside of the Granville 440C. He pointed at it and told me, “Ms. Meyers wants it to snow at your celebration today.”

I commented, “Too bad we’re in Florida.”

He held up a securephone. “I just checked the weather alert; there’s a chance of a thunderstorm later.”

“That I’ll believe.” Then I asked him, “What’s in the box? Fake snowflakes?”

He rapped his knuckles against the metal box, which had a hinged top. “That’s right. They’re soap flakes. But when scattered by the drone’s rotor blades, they’ll flutter down just like snow.”

Victoria smiled. “I would like to see that. I have never seen snow.”

I told her, “Then you should come over to the Square.”

“Me? No. I have no business being there today.”

“You could say I forgot my lunch and that you were bringing it to me.”

“Oh no. That would not be true.”

“Okay. How about if I really forget it?”

“Miss Charity! I am not going to let you forget your lunch.”

She was far too honest. I gave up. “Okay.”

Just then, Albert pressed a button on a black control module. The rotors of the drone slowly came to life. He told us, “Step back, please. I have to log some flying time for the drone.”

Victoria and I stood together on the flagstones and watched as the Granville revved up and then, with the push of another button, rose three meters into the air.

Albert stood with us, holding the controller in one hand and a thin metal vidscreen in the other. He held out the vidscreen to Victoria. “Here. You can watch on this. You can see what the Square looks like.”

Victoria took the screen and turned it for both of us to see. Albert pushed another button and, suddenly, we were looking at the tops of our own heads on-screen, captured by the vidcam affixed to the drone.

The little helicopter rose higher and the vidscreen picture rose with it, showing all of our one-thousand-square-meter estate home with its red Spanish tiles, its ozone-screened pool and patio, its helipad, and the airstrip just beyond us to the south.

The drone shot up to a height of thirty meters and turned at a right angle. Then it darted off eastward, down our street, cruising over other estate homes—some with red tile roofs, some with green—until it reached the turrets of the guardhouse and banked left. In the distance, we could see the northern boundary of The Highlands, the St. Lucie Canal. The drone banked again, cruising over a row of homes with yacht moorings behind them, until it finally arrived at the Square.

The Square, which is officially called The Highlands Community Square, is part of a commercial area that occupies the entire west side of the development.

Victoria smiled happily at the sight of a dozen fake Christmas trees arranged in a circle around one very large real tree, a Scotch pine that had been trucked in right after Thanksgiving.

Albert let the drone hover there for a moment while Victoria took it all in. He told us, “This is where I’ll press the eject button and the soap flakes will start flying out.”

Victoria oohed like it had really happened.

I was more reserved.

Much more.

I dreaded the thought of another Mickie Meyers special being shot with me and my “friends,” as Mickie called them. The fact was, I had only one friend at school, and that was Patience. Mickie kept showing up in our classroom, though, with her crew, and shooting us doing a bizarre array of activities. We hated it. (But her audience must have liked it. Her ratings were and are always high.)

We had just recovered from a bogus “Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving Feast” with all-authentic foods during which the Dugan sisters, who are bulimic, actually took a break to vomit. The video feast ended with a heartwarming speech by Mickie about people from different backgrounds coexisting in peace and harmony. The actual feast ended with Patience Patterson overhearing a snide remark by Sierra Vasquez, becoming enraged, and pushing Sierra’s face into a cranberry pie. Patience would not tell me what Sierra had said, but it must have been pretty bad.

Albert finally guided the drone homeward, back to the front yard, and landed it.

I called over to him, “Do you know when my ex-stepmother is getting here?”

Albert killed the drone’s motor with a final button push. “Any time now, Miss Charity.”

Victoria handed him back the vidscreen. She started walking toward the house, calling, “I’ll get your backpack, Miss. It’s almost time to go.”

Albert locked the rotor blades of the drone by hand. Then he clicked open both doors of the garage, revealing my father’s massive Mercedes 700D and our Yamaha 220 golf cart.

Although you were allowed to drive cars in The Highlands, most people used electric carts like our Yamaha to get around. Albert drove me to school in it every day. For a while, I insisted on walking the relatively short distance to the Square, but that meant that Albert had to walk with me with his Glock semi-automatic machine gun strapped behind his suit coat. Then he had to walk home. It was too much to ask. When we drove in the golf cart, he could at least store the Glock in the center console.

Well-trained, muscular butlers with semi-automatic weapons were the last line of defense against thieves, kidnappers, and other evildoers at The Highlands. The earlier lines of defense included the guards on patrol, the electric fences, the security cameras, and, of course, the GTDs.

The Highlands was considered to be one of the securest developments in the United States. There was a waiting list of people willing to pay millions in currency to be among the 120 families who lived there.

Patience’s father, Roy Patterson, was the top-selling realtor in Martin County. I had heard him offer my parents “cash on the barrelhead right here and right now,” as he put it, for our estate house, but Mickie kept saying no. She is currently vidding a series called
Living with Divorce.
Once she has wrapped that project up, I expect her to move on. But you never know. She is relentless. And for the time being, I remain trapped in her world, a reluctant performer in her latest video reality series.

A sudden movement near my feet pulled me out of my thoughts and back to the ambulance. The dark boy was fidgeting around.

I watched him for a moment and realized that he had to go to the bathroom. After the bedpan incident, I had been extremely reluctant to drink anything. The dark boy had placed a bottle of Smart Water on the shelf next to my vidscreen, but I had not touched it. For all I knew, it was filled with drugs, or even poison.

The dark boy had a similar bottle on the floor next to him, which he sipped from regularly while staring at that screen. Those sips must have caught up with him, because he closed the two-way, stood up, and threw open the ambulance door. He looked out to the left and right. I figured he was trying to find someone to take his place. He turned toward me and made a face somewhere between the menacing snarl of a kidnapper and the pained expression of someone with a bursting bladder. Then he hopped out and slammed the door behind him.

My first thought was to try to escape. Could I throw open the door and make a run for it? My second thought, though, was about my training. The words came back to me verbatim: “An escape attempt is counterproductive. It may enrage the kidnappers. It may disrupt the ransom process, which is likely to be proceeding smoothly.”

So I cleared my mind of escape thoughts. Instead, I reached over and activated my vidscreen. All output and input remained disabled. I scanned the titles of my files and spotted one that reminded me of Victoria and Albert. I needed to think about them for a while, so I clicked on it. Here is what it said:

The Royal Domestic Service, by Charity Meyers

Mrs. Veck, Grades 7–8

May 29, 2035

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the second most common career in the United States (after farmer) was domestic servant. Then this career disappeared almost completely due to new job opportunities and new household appliances introduced after World War II.

In the middle of the twenty-first century, however, the cycle has come around again, and
domestic servant
is once more a common career choice. Estate homes in particular require the presence of live-in help. To quote Mr. Roy Patterson of Patterson Realty, “Selling an estate home without servants’ quarters is like trying to sell one without a currency vault. You just can’t do it.” The largest and most successful domestic servant company in the United States is Royal Domestic Service, or RDS.

My paper then included a link to a Royal Domestic Service brochure, which read: “RDS provides full-time, live-in servants for a variety of lifestyles.” The brochure showed pictures of young, smiling RDS employees and descriptions of three types of plans (the comments in parentheses are mine).

For large families, the
Great-House Plan
provides four full-time servants:

• A butler (named something serious, like Edward or William)

• A maid (named something attractive, like Emily or Jasmine)

• A cook (named something French, like Henri or Louis)