Dark Matter (3 page)

He lunges between the front seats, his gloved hand reaching around my waist, snatching the phone away.

Merge right onto the Eighty-Seventh Street exit in five hundred feet.

“What's your passcode, Jason?” When I don't respond, he says, “Wait. I bet I know this. Month and year of your birthday backwards? Let's see…three-seven-two-one. There we go.”

In the rearview mirror, I see the phone illuminate his mask.

He reads the text he stopped me from sending: “ ‘1400 Pulaski call 91…' Bad boy.”

I veer onto the interstate off-ramp.

The GPS says,
Turn left onto Eighty-Seventh Street and proceed east for three-point-eight miles.

We drive into South Chicago, through a neighborhood we have no business setting foot in.

Past rows of factory housing.

Apartment projects.

Empty parks with rusted swing sets and netless basketball hoops.

Storefronts locked up for the night behind security gates.

Gang tagging everywhere.

He asks, “So do you call her Dani or Daniela?”

My throat constricts.

Rage and fear and helplessness burgeoning inside of me.

“Jason, I asked you a question.”

“Go to hell.”

He leans close, his words hot in my ear. “You do not want to go down this path with me. I will hurt you worse than you've ever been hurt in your life. Pain you didn't even know was possible. What do you call her?”

I grit my teeth. “Daniela.”

“Never Dani? Even though that's what's on your phone?”

I'm tempted to flip the car at high speed and just kill us both.

I say, “Rarely. She doesn't like it.”

“What's in the grocery bag?”

“Why do you want to know what I call her?”

“What's in the bag?”

“Ice cream.”

“It's family night, right?”

“Yeah.”

In the rearview mirror, I see him typing on my phone.

“What are you writing?” I ask.

He doesn't respond.

We're out of the ghetto now, riding through a no-man's-land that doesn't even feel like Chicago anymore, with the skyline nothing but a smear of light on the far horizon. The houses are crumbling, lightless, and lifeless. Everything long abandoned.

We cross a river and straight ahead lies Lake Michigan, its black expanse a fitting denouement of this urban wilderness.

As if the world ends right here.

And perhaps mine does.

Turn right and proceed south on Pulaski Drive for point-five miles to destination.

He chuckles to himself. “Wow, are you in trouble with the missus.” I strangle the steering wheel. “Who was that man you had whisky with tonight, Jason? I couldn't tell from outside.”

It's so dark out here in this borderland between Chicago and Indiana.

We're passing the ruins of railroad yards and factories.

“Jason.”

“His name is Ryan Holder. He used to be—”

“Your old roommate.”

“How'd you know that?”

“Are you two close? I don't see him in your contacts.”

“Not really. How do you—?”

“I know almost everything about you, Jason. You could say I've made your life my specialty.”

“Who are you?”

You will arrive at your destination in five hundred feet.

“Who
are
you?”

He doesn't answer, but my attention is beginning to pull away from him as I focus on our increasingly remote surroundings.

The pavement flows under the SUV's headlights.

Empty behind us.

Empty ahead.

There's the lake off to my left, deserted warehouses on my right.

You have arrived at your destination.

I stop the Navigator in the middle of the road.

He says, “The entrance is up ahead on the left.”

The headlights graze a teetering stretch of twelve-foot fencing, topped with a tiara of rusted barbed wire. The gate is ajar, and a chain that once locked it shut has been snipped and coiled in the weeds by the roadside.

“Just nudge the gate with the front bumper.”

Even from inside the near-soundproof interior of the SUV, the shriek of the gate grinding open is loud. The cones of light illuminate the remnants of a road, the pavement cracked and buckled from years of harsh Chicago winters.

I engage the high beams.

Light washes over a parking lot, where streetlamps have toppled everywhere like spilled matchsticks.

Beyond, a sprawling structure looms.

The brick façade of the time-ravaged building is flanked by huge cylindrical tanks and a pair of hundred-foot smokestacks spearing the sky.

“What is this place?” I ask.

“Put it in
PARK
and turn it off.”

I bring the car to a stop, shift out of gear, and punch off the engine.

It becomes deathly silent.

“What is this place?” I ask again.

“What are your Friday plans?”

“Excuse me?”

A sharp blow to the side of my head sends me slumping into the steering wheel, stunned and wondering for a half second if this is what it feels like to be shot in the head.

But no, he only hit me with his gun.

I touch my hand to the point of impact.

My fingers come away sticky with blood.

“Tomorrow,” he says. “What do you have scheduled for tomorrow?”

Tomorrow. It feels like a foreign concept.

“I'm…giving a test to my PHYS 3316 class.”

“What else?”

“That's it.”

“Take off all your clothes.”

I look in the rearview mirror.

Why the hell does he want me naked?

He says, “If you wanted to try something, you should've done it while you had control of the car. From this moment forward, you're mine. Now, take off your clothes, and if I have to tell you again, I'm going to make you bleed. A lot.”

I unbuckle my seat belt.

As I unzip my gray hoodie and shrug my arms out of the sleeves, I cling to a single shred of hope—he's still wearing a mask, which means he doesn't want me to see his face. If he were planning to kill me, he wouldn't care if I could identify him.

Right?

I unbutton my shirt.

“Shoes too?” I ask.

“
Everything
.”

I slip off my running shoes, my socks.

I slide my slacks and boxer shorts down my legs.

Then my clothes—every last thread—sit in a pile in the front passenger seat.

I feel vulnerable.

Exposed.

Weirdly ashamed.

What if he tries to rape me? Is that what this is all about?

He sets a flashlight on the console between the seats.

“Out of the car, Jason.”

I realize that I see the interior of the Navigator as a kind of lifeboat. As long as I stay inside, he can't really hurt me.

He won't make a mess in here.

“Jason.”

My chest is heaving, I'm starting to hyperventilate, black spots detonating across my field of vision.

“I know what you're thinking,” he says, “and I can hurt you just as easily inside this car.”

I'm not getting enough oxygen. I'm starting to freak out.

But I manage to say, breathlessly, “Bullshit. You don't want my blood in here.”

When I come to, he's dragging me out of the front seat by my arms. He drops me in the gravel, where I sit dazed, waiting for my head to clear.

It's always colder near the lake, and tonight is no exception. The wind inflicts a raw, serrated bite on my exposed skin, which is covered in gooseflesh.

It's so dark out here I can see five times the number of stars as in the city.

My head is throbbing, and a fresh line of blood runs down the side of my face. But with a full load of adrenaline shotgunning through my system, the pain is muted.

He drops a flashlight in the dirt beside me and shines his at the disintegrating edifice I saw as we drove in. “After you.”

I clutch the light in my hand and struggle to my feet. Stumbling toward the building, my bare feet trample sodden newspaper. I dodge crumpled beer cans and chevrons of glass that glitter under the beam.

Approaching the main entrance, I imagine this abandoned parking lot on another night. A night to come. It's early winter, and through a curtain of falling snow, the darkness is ribboned with flashing blues and reds. Detectives and cadaver dogs swarm the ruins, and as they examine my body somewhere inside, naked and decomposed and butchered, a patrol car parks in front of my brownstone in Logan Square. It's two in the morning, and Daniela comes to the door in a nightgown. I've been missing for weeks and she knows in her heart I'm not coming back, thinks she's already made her peace with that brutal fact, but seeing these young police officers with their hard, sober eyes and a dusting of snow on their shoulders and visored caps, which they shelve respectfully under their arms…it all finally breaks something inside of her she didn't know was still intact. She feels her knees liquefy, her strength giving way, and as she sinks onto the doormat, Charlie comes down the creaky staircase behind her, bleary-eyed and wild-haired, asking, “Is it about Dad?”

As we close in on the structure, two words reveal themselves on the faded brick above the entrance. The only letters I can make out spell
CAGO
POWER
.

He forces me through an opening in the brick.

Our light beams sweep across a front office.

Furniture rotted down to the metal frames.

An old water cooler.

The remnants of someone's campfire.

A shredded sleeping bag.

Used condoms on moldy carpet.

We enter a long corridor.

Without the flashlights, this would be can't-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face dark.

I stop to shine my light ahead, but it's swallowed by the blackness. There's less debris on the warped linoleum floor beneath my feet, and no sound whatsoever, save for the low, distant moan of wind outside these walls.

I'm growing colder by the second.

He jams the barrel of the gun into my kidney, forcing me on.

At some point, did I fall onto the radar of a psychopath who decided to learn everything about me before he murdered me? I often engage with strangers. Maybe we spoke briefly in that coffee shop near campus. Or on the El. Or over beers at my corner bar.

Does he have plans for Charlie and Daniela?

“Do you want to hear me beg?” I ask, my voice beginning to break. “Because I will. I'll do anything you want.”

And the horrible thing is that it's true. I would defile myself. Hurt someone else, do almost anything if he would only take me back to my neighborhood and let this night continue like it was supposed to—with me walking home to my family, bringing them the ice cream I'd promised.

“If what?” he asks. “If I let you go?”

“Yes.”

The sound of his laughter ricochets down the corridor. “I'd be afraid to see what-all you'd be willing to do to get yourself out of this.”

“Out of what, exactly?”

But he doesn't answer.

I fall to my knees.

My light goes sliding across the floor.

“Please,” I beg. “You don't have to do this.” I barely recognize my own voice. “You can just walk away. I don't know why you want to hurt me, but just think about it for a minute. I—”

“Jason.”

“—love my family. I love my wife. I love—”

“Jason.”

“—my son.”

“Jason!”

“I will do
anything
.”

I'm shivering uncontrollably now—from cold, from fear.

He kicks me in the stomach, and as the breath explodes out of my lungs, I roll over onto my back. Crushing down on top of me, he shoves the barrel of the gun between my lips, into my mouth, all the way to the back of my throat until the taste of old oil and carbon residue is more than I can stomach.

Two seconds before I hurl the night's wine and Scotch across the floor, he withdraws the gun.

Screams, “Get up!”

He grabs my arm, jerks me back onto my feet.

Pointing the gun in my face, he puts my flashlight back into my hands.

I stare into the mask, my light shining on the weapon.

It's my first good look at the gun. I know next to nothing about firearms, only that it's a handgun, has a hammer, a cylinder, and a giant hole at the end of the barrel that looks fully capable of delivering my death. The illumination of my flashlight lends a touch of copper to the point of the bullet aimed at my face. For some reason, I picture this man in a single-room apartment, loading rounds into the cylinder, preparing to do what he's done.

I'm going to die here, maybe right now.

Every moment feels like it could be the end.

“Move,” he growls.

I start walking.

We arrive at a junction and turn down a different corridor, this one wider, taller, arched. The air is oppressive with moisture. I hear the distant
drip…drip…drip
of falling water. The walls are made of concrete, and instead of linoleum, the floor is blanketed with damp moss that grows thicker and wetter with each step.

The taste of the gun lingers in my mouth, laced with the acidic tang of bile.

Patches of my face are growing numb from the cold.

A small voice in my head is screaming at me to do something, try something, anything. Don't just be led like a lamb to slaughter, one foot obediently following the other. Why make it so simple for him?

Easy.

Because I'm afraid.

So afraid I can barely walk upright.

And my thoughts are fractured and teeming.

I understand now why victims don't fight back. I cannot imagine trying to overcome this man. Trying to run.

And here's the most shameful truth: there's a part of me that would rather just have it all be over, because the dead don't feel fear or pain. Does this mean I'm a coward? Is that the final truth I have to face before I die?