Untaken (17 page)

People began to drift back to their beds again, but Mrs. Ostrinsky and some of the others still shot angry looks at Frank.

“Speaking of finding new folks, I got one more for you,” said the new cop. “This is the son of an old friend of mine, so play nice.”

“Why can’t I stay with him, Lou?” a voice whined out in the hall. “He trusts me best, he can get real mad if he don’t know what’s going on.”

“It’s okay,” said the new cop—Lou. “He just needs to rest in the sick bay a spell. He’ll be back before you know it.”

Lou stepped back, and a teenage boy with messy dark brown hair, a scowl on his face and two black eyes walked in.

Brandon

he folks in The Center had found a bunch of pallets and crates and shit right at the back of the warehouse, and had spent that whole evening stacking them one on top of the other to make a crazy sort of tower. It looked like the whole lot was going to crash down any minute to me. The cops had shut out most of the lights, but with everyone screwing around with the tower, it was impossible to sleep. What they were trying to do, I didn’t know.

One of the men—a scrawny guy in a Red Sox shirt—stared up at the roof and flexed his arms.

“You sure you can make it, Marty?” asked the woman who’d been telling the others how to stack the pallets.

“Reckon so, Mrs. O.”

I reckoned he was wrong, but I wasn’t about to get involved in whatever stunt they were cooking up. I’d been at the center just shy of two full days, and all I was concerned about was getting some shut-eye. And maybe finding out how Dad was doing.

Marty began to climb. The crowd gasped when a pallet shifted and the whole tower started to sway, but Marty was a real scrawny guy, and he climbed carefully and well. I tried my best to mind my own business, but my eyes kept drifting back to Marty. I decided that maybe I could go over there, just casual like. Watching a crazy guy break his neck wasn’t “getting involved,” not really.

I drifted over to join the edge of the crowd. “Hey, where does he think he’s going?” I asked. A few people glanced in my direction, then looked back at Marty.

“Just take it real slow, Marty,” said the bossy woman at the front of the crowd. “You’re almost the there.”

I cleared my throat. “I said, what—”

“He’s seeing if we can get out, obviously. They locked the doors again.”

I turned, meeting her gaze. The girl was about my age, her hair pulled back into a raggedy-ass ponytail and a sort of superior frown on her face that pissed me off right away. I narrowed my eyes.

“There’s no point asking any of them about it. They don’t think little kids like us are worth the time of day.”

“I ain’t no little kid. I’m fifteen. And why in the hell are you all trying to get out? We just got in here.”

She sighed. “Well,
we
have been in here forever, Mr. High and Mighty Fifteen-Year-Old. They haven’t brought us any food since morning, and this afternoon we heard a bunch of trucks arriving. You were asleep.” She sneered, as if sleeping was something she would never stoop to doing herself.

“So?”

“So, something weird is going on. We asked them to let us out and they won’t. They said they’re moving us to Boston, but after what they did to Mona…”

“Mona?”

“That woman lying on the bed, see her? Some of them think she’s just talking crazy because she’s on pills, but they’re scared all the same.”

“Her? That old lady?”

“She’s not old. She’s just half-starved and hurt real bad. We think they did stuff to her. Tortured her or something.” She looked away from me as she said it, probably knowing how dumb it sounded.

“No way,” I told her “These guys are cops. My Dad knows one of them.”

“The cops aren’t in charge. They just do what the guys in suits tell them. I don’t think they get on too great, but they’re still taking orders. You didn’t see the suit guys when you came in? The guys who check the forms?”

“Sure I did. Bunch of pencil-neck office guys is all. Why would they want to beat on some lady?”

“They took Mona’s daughter. They wanted to know things about her, and they hurt Mona to get Stephie to talk. Mona says there’s a whole bunch of people back there. This used to be a pharmaceutical place. There are labs where they cut people up, ‘cause they think they know something about the Space Men. I know it sounds crazy, but what if it’s true?” She shrugged. “That’s why we want to get out, or at least try, and see what’s happening out there.”

My stomach rolled a slow loop-the-loop. They’d taken
Dad
back there. But I knew there couldn’t be anything but offices and the sick bay where they’d taken Dad because of his fever. Certainly no crazy torture dungeon. Maybe it was because I was the new guy—this girl was trying to haze me or something. The shelter for our neighborhood had been shut down, so Lou had had to drive us out here to where all the snooty folks lived.

Probably, they all knew Dad and I didn’t belong around here, and now they were trying to make me look dumb.

“This is bullshit,” I told the girl.

Her reply was interrupted by another collective groan from the crowd. I looked up.

Marty, balanced precariously on top of the pallets, had made a grab for one of the beams up in the roof. It looked to me like he’d overbalanced and was going to take a dive, but his palms slapped against the beam and then he threw out an arm and managed to sling it over the top. He pulled himself up slowly, legs dangling and kicking over the concrete warehouse floor thirty feet below. When he’d finally scrambled on top of the beam, the crowd started to applaud.

“Hush,” the bossy woman in front scolded. “You want them to come back in here?”

Marty inched along his beam until he was in front of one of the narrow windows at the top of the wall.

“You all really think you’re going to escape through those windows?” I asked.
The girl shrugged. “We don’t know yet. No harm in looking.”

Looking was all Marty was able to do. “No good,” he called down. “The drop’s even father on the outside.”

“No bushes or nothing?”

“Nothing. What should I do now?”

“Do you see anything?”

“Whole bunch of trucks. That’s about it.”

“Climb back down.” said the bossy woman with a sigh. “Dammit.”

As soon as Marty was back on solid ground, the rest of them set to pulling down that goofy tower.

I was real glad when they’d finally stowed all that junk back where they found it. I didn’t want Lou and his buddies to think I’d had anything to do with it. Nutjobs, the lot of them.

As if cops would be kidnapping people and cutting them up! If we were locked in here, I figured it had to be for a good reason. The people in here were just like the people who had lost their heads in our neighborhood and turned tail with no plan. A bunch of scared bunnies.

I looked over at the not-old woman lying on her bunk. She was muttering to herself. Sometimes, she made like she was trying to get up, but every time, she’d only get so far before she flopped back down onto her bed like someone cut all her strings.

Just sick was all.

Like Dad.

I sure wished they’d let me stay with him, but with Lou there, I knew he’d be okay. It was Lou that had dropped me off at the center. He said he’d stay until Dad got settled in. Lou didn’t want Dad sent off to the sick bay either; I guess he knew how Dad was liable to act if he got in a black mood, but I’d told him to come get me if Dad started cutting lose.

It was weird not to have Dad around. Every few minutes, I’d think I should go check on him, then I’d remember he was safe and sound in the infirmary and feel dumb. A few seconds later I’d be thinking I should go check on him all over again. It was like when you wake up thinking you have to go to school, then realize it’s a Saturday. Not that I minded taking care of Dad, but not to have to be the one responsible for him every second of the day was a real relief.

After they finished putting away the pallets, the other folks drifted back to their beds. A few of them slept, but most of them just stared up at the ceiling. There were three little kids in there, and one of the women started reading them a story. I thought maybe I could finally get some sleep, but all that crazy talk had gotten my thoughts stirred up, and I couldn’t relax.

The bossy woman couldn’t chill out either. She kept hopping up totry the doors over and over, like they’d be magically unlocked if she just kept at it long enough.

“For Pete’s sake, give it a rest, Ostrinsky,” snapped an old guy.

The girl I’d talked to earlier wasn’t laying on her bed either. She sat with Mona, the sick lady. Now that Mona had her face turned my way, it was clear that somebody had done a number on her. Her black eyes were worse than mine, and her lip was split and puffy.

There were a million explanations for the marks on her that didn’t involve any bullshit about folks getting tortured, but I guessed it couldn’t do any harm to go over there. If I heard her ranting for myself, I’d know for sure it was bull, and maybe then I’d be able to relax enough to get some sleep.

Miss Snoot didn’t look happy to see me.

“What do you want?”

“Just to see if she’s all right, I guess.”

“She obviously isn’t.”

“Jeez, okay, sister.”

“I’m not your sister. My name is Gracie.”

“Okay,
Gracie
, I just wanted to see—”

“I bet you have a name too?”

“It’s Brandon. Look. I just wanted to see what she had to say since you all think it’s so important, but if you’re going to be a bitch about it…”

Gracie glared at me. “Ask her then. And don’t call me…that.”

I tried to hide my smirk behind my hand, but she saw it and blushed, still glowering away. What a dork!

“So…how’s it hanging, Mona?”

“They took her. My Stephie,” the woman moaned. She was more messed up than I’d thought. Two of her fingers were red and swollen—broken, I guessed—and thick red welts edged in yellow and purple blossoms of bruising covered what I could see of her legs, where the thin blanket had fallen aside. The bruises on her legs looked too even to be from a fall, and I didn’t like that one bit.

“Are you sure this didn’t happen before she got here?” I asked Gracie.

“I came in with her and her daughter. They took them away when we first got here. She was fine on the bus, but when they brought her back, she was like this.”

“What did the cops say happened to her? What did Lou say?”

“I don’t know any Lou. You mean the guy you came in with? Blond hair?”

“Yup, that’s him.”

“He’s not a regular. They bring people here from all over now. Only Frank, and Jean—who really is a…a bitch, by the way—stay here. The other cops leave. I told you, the suits are running the show. The cops are just here to slop out our food.” She paused, glancing to the doors. “And lock the doors.”

“No way.” I said. “Lou promised he was going to stay with Dad.”

She shrugged. “Just telling you what I know.”

I hopped up off the bed. I was sweating, and not just from the heat of the warehouse. “I need to speak to Lou. He can’t have gone anywhere. Dad can get real wild sometimes, and he needs someone he knows around. He’s been kind of confused lately.”