Paolo Bacigalupi - The Doubt Factory

“You were distracted,” Dad accused.

The stranger leaning close, his hands gripping my shoulders, whispering in my ear to watch the prank. To see what happened next. The rats coming out, pouring down the stairs, all of them spreading out over the lawns like a fluffy carpet…

Oh God. What have I done?

“When the guy talked to me,” Alix admitted miserably, “I lost Jonah right after.”

“Dammit!” Dad exploded. “George! I want Crowe’s people here, now! They’ve got Jonah! And call Romero at the FBI. Tell him that it’s not just pranks now.”

Now?

“You know who these people are?” Alix asked, but Dad ignored her.

“You shouldn’t leave the house,” George was saying.

“If they wanted me, they would have already come after me.” Dad was pacing back and forth. “Goddammit! Why didn’t I see this? Why didn’t you see this?”

“Nobody—”

“Never mind. Get me Romero. They’ve gone over the line. I want the security here, now ! Find my son.”

George was dialing furiously on his mobile even as he was nodding. Dad was picking up his own phone, pushing the button that would give him an encrypted line out. He’d had the line installed when he started doing work for the Department of Energy, and Alix had always thought it was sort of overly dramatic that PR would need that much secrecy, but now…

“Dad, I—” She stopped short as her father looked up from the phone at her. He looked so sad and angry and frightened that she couldn’t get any words out. She’d never seen him like this. He’d always seemed so together . Mom sometimes lost it about things, but Dad never lost it.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, but he wasn’t paying attention to her anymore. He was talking into the phone.

“Priority code. Alpha. Alpha. Five. Nine. Zero. Tango. Zulu. Eight. Victor. Nine. Two. Alpha.” Pause. “Affirm.” Another pause, then:

“This is Simon Banks. My son has been kidnapped.”

THE HOUSE WAS FULL OFpeople. There were guys from the FBI, plus some other agency that Alix was starting to suspect was Secret Service, plus the private security people from Williams & Crowe. Two clean-cut guys were going through the whole house and the grounds outside, scouting for whatever it was that security people scouted for after it was too late to do anything, and more people were on their cells, talking to different law enforcement agencies, and coming in and out of the house on mysterious errands.

Alix sat alone and miserable, watching her world fall apart.

A slim woman in a black pantsuit came over and introduced herself. “Hi, Alix, I’m Lisa Price. I’ve been assigned to you.”

“Are you my bodyguard?” Alix asked, feeling dull and lost in the mess and horror of it all.

Lisa smiled gently. “Something like that. We’re all here to protect you. I understand you have a description of the man who took your brother?”

“I already told, like, fifty people.”

“Why don’t you go over it again with me.”

So Alix did. Lisa kept asking her more questions: Who was standing next to Jonah? And who had been standing with her? And then what happened?

Going over it again was like ripping open a wound. Everything she told Lisa just reminded her that she’d lost track of Jonah, and it had happened because she’d been obsessed with chasing after her stalker.

This was her fault. She’d let her own brother get kidnapped. Alix wanted to vomit.

“Do you remember anything else?”

Alix shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t… I can’t tell anymore.”

She’d been asked so many times that the events in her head were starting to seem fixed and unchanging. She wasn’t sure if any of the details were real memories or if her brain was just making things up now because she wanted so badly to fill in the blanks for the investigators.

Lisa must have seen something in Alix’s face, because the woman reached over to touch her hand.

“Hey, Alix. Don’t worry. I’m just trying to understand who I need to be looking out for. Do you have photos of your friends, too? I need to know about you. If I’m going to be protecting you, I need to know who to consider a threat and who to pay more attention to.”

“You mean you can beat up my enemies?” Alix almost managed to smile.

Lisa smiled kindly. “Only if they try to beat you up first.”

The door burst open.

“Mr. Banks!” a huge guy in a suit called out. “Mr. Banks!” His voice was followed by a higher, familiar voice that made Alix’s heart pound with relief.

“Let me go!”

Jonah was being dragged in by the security guys.

“Leggo of me, you goons!”

Dad ran over and the guys let Jonah go. Dad scooped him up. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

Alix didn’t even realize that she’d run over, too, leaping to Jonah so fast she hadn’t felt herself doing it. She grabbed him and hugged him.

“Let go of me!” Jonah kept saying. “What’s going on? What’s with the goons? Of course I’m okay! I’m fine! Let go , will you?”

Finally, they let him wriggle free.

“You ran away!” Alix accused him. “You just took off! Do you know how worried I was? Do you know—”

She broke off, because all of a sudden she was crying, all the fear and relief and anger pouring out of her. “You ran away!”

Jonah was looking at her like she was crazy. “But that’s what I do.”

They both looked at each other, and then Alix started to laugh and cry at the same time. She grabbed him and pulled him close, hugging him and wishing that she could hug him harder still. “Yeah. Sure, bro. That’s what you do. We should’ve known.”

By the time everyone had cleared out, it was dark. The FBI people had gone, along with local police and the Secret Service people Dad had summoned through his secure line.

When Alix asked him about the Secret Service, he just said that some of the people he worked with had clout. When Alix pressed, he gave her an exasperated look and said that there were certain things he wasn’t legally allowed to discuss, which dead-ended the conversation and left Alix feeling somewhat awestruck at how important Dad’s clients actually were.

Now the only people left were family. They had all gathered around the granite island in the kitchen. Mom was home. She’d given Alix chamomile tea, and Jonah was eating ice cream because no one was in the mood to make him eat something normal. Dad had gotten a beer from the fridge and was drinking it out of the bottle, which Mom almost never let him do.

At last, they were the only people left.

Well, the only people in the house , Alix amended.

The Williams & Crowe “specialists” had disappeared into the woodwork. Some were in a van across the street. More were in the backyard. Lisa had been relieved by a blond guy named Terek. Terek was outside now, smoking a cigarette and watching the street.

Alix got the impression that there were other Williams & Crowe people lurking around the area as well. She couldn’t decide if that made her feel safer or more afraid. Like her family was huddled inside the house, afraid of the dark, hoping these “specialists” would protect them from… something. Something big and malicious.

With fangs.

Like one of the monsters in Jonah’s Xbox games that would jump out and kill when you were least expecting it.

Alix sipped her chamomile and stared at her family’s reflection in the kitchen windows. She shivered.

Normally she liked the kitchen. Mom had redesigned it a few years ago, and Dad had gotten Architectural Digest to cover it. There’d been a lot of fuss about hand-forged fixtures and how she’d blended natural textures like bamboo with industrial textures like steel and concrete to make a space that felt both modern and warmly inviting, but Alix’s favorite change had been how Mom had gotten rid of the eastern wall and turned most of it into glass to let in morning light. Every morning, the kitchen and breakfast nook were bathed in sunshine.