Page 10 of Swerve
Getting in.
Because in the end, it would have been far better to die there. At a place where they’d had a good time. Where life was familiar. And the choice of living or dying was still theirs to make.
Sergio
“Good loses. Good always loses because good has to play by the rules. Evil doesn’t.”
—Henry Mills
IT’S A HIGH like no other he’s experienced in this life.
Getting away with something does that. Makes him feel like he’s cracked a secret code or been given the keys to the kingdom.
And he’s become something of an expert at flying under the radar of societal rules. Take, for instance, the fact that he lives a very affluent life in the United States, but where citizenship is concerned, he’s a ghost. He doesn’t exist. And he has every intention of keeping it that way.
He takes certain precautions in his everyday life. Wears a baseball cap whenever he’s in public. Sunglasses outside. Fake eyeglasses when he’s not. One thing about America is true. Nothing is private anymore. Cameras are tucked into every mall entrance. Every traffic light observes your stop and go. Every ATM notes your deposits and withdrawals.
It takes some effort to go unobserved in this country.
But it’s worth the challenge. He has no social media footprint. No Facebook page. No Snapchat account. No Twitter feed. No email address. No credit cards. He uses a disposable cell phone. And he doesn’t visibly break laws. He comes to a full stop at stop signs. Never runs yellow lights. Leaves good tips at restaurants but not extraordinary ones because he doesn’t want to be remembered. He never goes to the same hairdresser to get his hair cut.
He’s good at what he does. But he’s not smug about it. Smugness creates overconfidence. And overconfidence creates mistakes. And mistakes, well, that’s death.
Taking two girls tonight could be considered overconfident. But he’d watched them a full three hours at the music festival before making his move. They’d been so comfortable with their safety. Oblivious to any thought of risk. The world was their Garden of Eden. Not a serpent in sight.
Or so they’d thought.
He comes to a full stop at the light ahead, listens for any sound from the back. Not a peep. The injections are doing their job. They’d be out for at least another forty-five minutes. Plenty of time to get them where he needed to take them. Tuck them away in their private conversion chambers. The room where they will either concede to a completely new and different life. Or no life at all.
The proprietor will be pleased.
And if she is pleased, life goes smoothly on. As he needs it to do. And then one day, when he decides it is time, he’ll step away from all this, take what he’d earned in the selling of his soul and disappear to yet another land in which he will be his own king with a woman of his own who will be with him because there is no other place she would rather be.
Not a woman he’s had to steal.
Emory
“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
—Joan Didion
I COME AWAKE with a start.
At first, I’m not sure where I am, sleep a heavy veil between my brain and consciousness. I sit up on one elbow, realizing I’ve left the lamp on, and that I’m on the couch in the living room and not in my bed.
I bolt upright, glancing at the watch on my wrist. One a.m. How had I fallen asleep? I’d sat down on the couch at just before midnight to eat the sandwich I made after getting in from work, expecting Mia home at any minute. I glance at the end table next to the sofa, spot my sandwich sitting on its plate and realize I never even ate it.
A meow sounds from behind my head, a tentative paw taps my shoulder. I turn to see Pounce, Mia’s twenty-pound cat, balancing the beam of the sofa back. Mia. Had she not woken me up when she came in? Or was I so out of it that I don’t remember?
She always tells me when she’s home though. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to wake me, thinking I needed the sleep. I pick up Pounce and walk the short hallway to her bedroom. The door is closed. I knock once, then turn the knob.
But she isn’t there. Her bed is neatly made, the stuffed animals lined up in front of the pillows in the soldier-like order demanded by Mia’s OCD.
After our parents’ deaths, Mia’s teenager-typical room had become as neat and ordered as any museum. The counselor had explained to me that this was a way Mia could impose order on her suddenly chaos-filled life, and that I shouldn’t question her need to return to the room half a dozen times before school to double-check that she had turned off the light.
“Mia?” I call out for her, thinking she might be in the bathroom across the hall. The door is closed. I knock, only to turn the knob and find the light off.
I put Pounce down. He bounds into the bedroom and onto Mia’s bed where he knows he’s supposed to already be at this time of night.
