The Six: Complete Series (10 page)

“You going in?” a voice said behind her.

Lila jumped at the noise. “Yeah, I’m sorry.” She grabbed at the door and pushed her way inside. The man attached to the voice maneuvered around her and made his way to the back of the line.

The place was full. A dad and his little daughter sat at a table in the corner. He furiously highlighted a large stack of papers while she worked, brow furrowed, over a sheet of homework. There were small groups of college students with textbooks in front of them, which were an afterthought to the discussion they were having over lattes. Everyone seemed so calm, so peaceful. She tried to subconsciously will them out of the store with whatever inherent telepathy she might have. “Just leave,” she thought. “You don’t have to be a part of this.” No one got up, in fact a small herd of high school football player types barreled through the door.

All she could do was stand in line and act like nothing was wrong. Inch by inch she moved up. Lila looked at the menu intently just to keep from thinking about the flammable contents in her bag.

“You ready?”

It wasn’t the barista, but the man from the doorway. He gestured in front of him to the empty space in front of the cash register.

“What?” she muttered.

The man pointed at the menu “I can’t decide. You go ahead.”

He was handsome and gentle with a smile that made her feel, just for a second, like a normal person. He gripped a fruit and cheese plate in his hand and squinted intently at the long list of coffees. It wasn’t until she crossed in front of him that she noticed the badge on his chest.

A cop.

Lila couldn’t control the wide eyed look of panic that crossed her face as she stepped in front of him. His gun and Taser hung at his waist as he gazed at the muffin selection. The only comfort she had was her time limit. Two hours. A man in a hurry wouldn’t be around the whole time. She’d just need to wait him out.

“Lila!”

Her heart skipped a beat as she was hurtled back into her old life. Hannah stood at the cash register with her giant engagement ring gleaming under the fluorescent lights. “It’s been so long!”

“It has!” Lila screamed back. She forced a smiled back on her face and put her arms out for an over the counter hug.

Hannah fiddled with her ring and dipped the diamond beneath her finger. “I’ve been trying to call you. Where’ve you been?”

Tortured. Kidnapped. Nearly dead. “Out of town. Sorry, I lost my phone.”

“No worries. You want your normal?” Vanilla latte, extra whipped cream. She hadn’t had to pay for a single drop of coffee at this place since Hannah started working there.

“Yeah, that’d be great.” Lila fingered the strap of her bag. She could smell the gasoline fumes that seeped through the leather.

“Are you okay?” Hannah asked. “You look a little pale.”

She probably looked like shit, even after the makeover that they’d hurried her through in that basement. It was impossible to hide how tired she was after the last two weeks. Since high school, she’d seen a lot of terrible things, but nothing could have prepared her for this.

Hannah could help. She could get everyone to evacuate the building. All it would take was a flip of an alarm. It couldn’t be that hard.

They would kill Hannah in an instant and they’d turn back around and activate the thing around her heart. The rules were explicit. “Yeah,” she said, “I’m fine, just been working late.”

“I see.” Hannah had already sniffed out the bullshit. They’d stopped rooming together after she found Lila’s stash of pills in the living room, stuffed inside a vase. It was the last straw. “You’ve got a problem,” Hannah had said, “and I can’t be around it anymore.” Ever since then, she’d always looked at Lila from the corner of her eye, mostly assuming that there were a number of pills coursing through her system at any given moment.

She walked away before Hannah could ask anything else. There was one small table next to the window which she snagged before the wannabe novelist could get there with his laptop bag and large stack of notebooks. As she sat down, Lila could feel her heart beating hard against her chest.

She held the bag close to her chest and peaked inside. The bottle sloshed at the bottom with its amber liquid gleaming under the fluorescent light. The box was still settled against the side, taunting her with its potential for destruction.

A baby cooed beside her. Its tiny hands bounced up and down against the high chair as its mom juggled between shaking a toy in its face and sipping on her coffee. “Please leave,” she prayed. “Just get out of here.”

“You okay?”

Her eyes had been fixed on the stuffed dinosaur the baby had snatched from its mother’s hands. As she gazed away, she saw his face, the cop’s face. It was freshly shaved and there were bits of loose hair running down the back of his neck. He had the antiseptic smell of a man who had just spent the last hour in the barbershop next door.

“I’m fine,” she said. She ran through what might have given her away. The mascara hadn’t run down her cheeks and they’d put enough foundation on her that no ghostly pale terror would seep through.

“You mind?” He grabbed the seat and spun it around to meet her awkward angle.

She wanted to protest but it was better to be agreeable and not attract any attention. If she stayed pleasant, he would leave and she could move on. “Okay,” she said quietly as she tucked the bag between her feet on the floor.

He looked down at his uniform and back up with a smile. “Just got off duty. Don’t you worry, I’m not going anywhere.” It was supposed to be charming but it made every muscle in her body tense.

He was cute in a college kid just hitting the big city kind of way. Any other day, she would have worked his flirty generosity into a free muffin and promise to call him. Today, she took after her sister, the one who spent every Friday night in her room with the computer on and her legs shut. She was a doctor now. Lila, well she was here. “I have a boyfriend,” she said. “So...”

Her sister used that many times. Whenever she’d go out, the guys would inevitably hit on her. It drove her insane. She didn’t want to talk to them and it never seemed to matter how many sweatshirts she wore, or how messy her ponytail was, they would try to talk to her. She took to wearing an engagement ring as she got older just to make the point that much stronger. Lila always hated her for that. It took so much effort for her to get anyone’s attention. The lengths she used to have to go to in order to get a date when Georgia just got cute guys throwing themselves at her.

The cop didn’t seem to care. He kept talking but it came out as mumbled white noise. The room felt like it was closing in on itself. If he wasn’t going to leave, then the whole job suddenly became much harder. The entire shop was only so big; there weren’t too many places to hide.

“So, you from around here?” He still smiled. How was he still smiling? She felt like a jerk but she had to get him out of here.

“I need to go…” she pointed towards the bathroom. Her stomach was in knots and she needed to get away from that baby that cooed in her ear. It made her want to cry. Before he could say a word, she was gone.

She scooted towards the restroom and locked the door behind her. As she leaned against the cold metal handle, she could finally breathe. The adrenaline had taken over her system and she could barely stand. A thousand thoughts raced through her mind. There were so many options on how to make this happen. It would have been so easy for them to tell her exactly what to do, step by step. If they knew so much about her, then they knew that she was incapable of pulling something like this off. All they wanted was those people’s blood on her hands in some kind of twisted revenge plot.

As she pulled the bottle of gasoline out, the driver’s words flitted through her subconscious. He said they picked her because they knew she could do this. On paper, she was a pill-popper with a part-time retail job. She wasn’t a Girl Scout and had barely held a hammer much less knew how to do anything handy. The people who knew how to do this were pyromaniac teenagers and men who knew their way around a blowtorch. As she took out the lighter, it hit her like a truck.

They didn’t mean she knew how to burn down a building.

She knew how to kill someone and live with it.

They knew what she’d done. Somehow, someone knew what she’d done. Did they know that kid? Were these people trying to get payback for what happened? Her throat clenched as she tried to start the lighter. When she finally had to do this, it was going to happen fast. She couldn’t be fumbling.

“Hello?” a muffled voice asked through the door.

How long had she been in here? “Sorry. I’ll be right out.” Her voice was layered with panic. As she tried to put the bottle back in the bag, it slipped through her fingers and smacked on the hard tile. The top tweaked and the brown liquid began to leak out from the small gap and into the crevices of the floor. Immediately, the room was encased in a chemical stench.

“Shit,” she said as she grabbed the bottle. A stream slid down her arm and stained her jacket. By the time she was able to stop it, a quarter of the bottle had dribbled out onto the floor. The smell burned her throat and made the entire room smell like an auto shop. There was no way she could walk out of the room with it smelling like this.

Another knock on the door. “Ma’am?” It was a different voice.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “One second.”

Lila grabbed as many paper towels as she could and drenched them in water and hand soap. She fell to her knees and scrubbed the floor. The towels shredded under her fingernails. The smell wasn’t getting any less strong, just mixed with the strawberry soap. It was hard to breathe but all she could do was try to get rid of the evidence.

They were going to be knocking again at any second. They’d bring in the cop and have him break down the door. For all they knew, she’d taken a handful of pills and was slowly slipping into a coma. At the very least, they would try to rescue her. She needed to get out.

She threw the paper towels in the trash and flushed the toilet for effect. She clutched her bag close to her side and slid the sleeves of her stained jacket to her elbow. As she opened the door, the face of a teenage barista met her. The girl had a concerned, almost panicked look on her face. The large ring of keys dangled from her wrist and a middle-aged woman in a too-tight t-shirt and khakis hovered over her. The woman’s hands were on her hips and she glared as Lila slid around them, past the door.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she tried to squeeze through the small crowd.

The woman scoffed. “I mean, really...”

Lila resisted the urge to run back and smack that woman in the face. She prayed that the woman wouldn’t notice the smell or the brown stains on the grout. Ten minutes... it would all blow over in ten minutes.

The crowd had thinned. Baby and mom were gone and the group of high schoolers were replaced by a pair of bearded men hovering over laptops. She stood against the wall to catch her breath. The teenage barista walked back to her post at the sink. As she wiped a blender down with a dingy cloth, the girl looked up. They caught each other’s eyes for a brief second. The girl didn’t want to look but she stared for just a moment too long. Lila wanted to tell her everything and tell the girl to run. She was sweet and stupid, and didn’t deserve any of this.

“You’re still here?”

The cop was at the table, nursing a large tea and a muffin the size of his head. He pulled off his glasses and set them to the side. The flirty smile was gone and had been replaced by an inquisitive glance and a look of boredom and disdain.

Lila struggled to smile but she reeked of that liquid and she could feel the eyes of the entire store on her as she lowered her eyes to the ground.

He took a long sniff. “Do you smell that?”

It was her jacket. The gasoline had seeped through the leather.

He patted the seat next to him. With a humorless voice he said, “Why don’t you take a seat.”

Milo was getting tired of the gasping and crying from the corner. When he’d come back from his job, he never carried on like this. It happened. Move on. They take you out, you do what you have to do, and you get over it. This guy wasn’t going to last much longer if he couldn’t move on. It was only a matter of time before they came back in again. It was a cycle that never ended.

There was another guy in with him at first. Frank was a middle-aged tough guy. He was the kind of man who had a regular booth at the bar and a group of rowdy friends that were frequently asked to leave baseball games. Frank had a daughter, a little four year old, and a wife who was chronically ill. He said that they were all that was keeping him going. Frank was the last of his group, the only one who had made it through all the rounds. They had promised him that after his fifth job they would put him under the knife and take out the device. Five jobs and he would be a free man.

Milo had finished the
American Idol
tour and had just gotten home when they took him. His bags had been brought into his bedroom and he’d breathed the first gulp of Oregon air in months. All those long nights on the tour bus made him miss being home, without cameras and stylists around 24/7.

The plan was to take one walk around the block and grab a cup of coffee. He was going to be gone for all of ten minutes, and then he’d be back home. Because of the show, there were a few people who recognized him. He got used to people stopping him to take picture or get his autograph, so he decided to go incognito. A sweatshirt was pulled over his head and his Oregon Ducks baseball cap got yanked down so even the most rabid fans couldn’t sniff him out.

Two blocks from home, he heard a familiar shriek. When she screamed his name from across the street, he forced that cheesy smile that had gotten him 3 million votes in the finale. It was a girl, just another attractive smiling sixteen year old who wanted to meet someone from TV. She came up, shouting and laughing like she was his biggest fan. Ready for a quick and unflattering snapshot, he took down his hood and lost the hat.