Sara Reinke - Backwoods

“How long?” Prendick cut in.

“I can start on it tonight,” Moore said. “Have a test serum ready to try in tomorrow, maybe the next day.”

Andrew heard a soft snict! then caught a whiff of tobacco smoke, just as Moore huffed out a short, sharp breath.

“He’s smoking,” Alice whispered. When she looked up at Andrew, the light from the office bathed her face, bisected in parallel lines by stripes of shadows. “He’s not supposed to be smoking. He told me he’d quit.”

She moved as she said this, stumbling in the dark and knocking loudly into a box on the closet floor. Andrew grabbed her to spare her a fall, but leaned into a cluster of bare wire coat hangers dangling from the overhead rod. These banged and clanged together and the damage was done. Through the narrow margins of space in the door vent, he could see both men in the office beyond turn to look their way.

“Shit,” he whispered.

“I’m sorry,” Alice hiccupped.

Moore started for the closet door, his brows furrowed.

“Shit.” Andrew backpedaled, pressing himself against the wall. Alice seized him by the hand, gripping hard enough to draw his gaze.

“Wunno, wunno,” she said. Or at least, that’s what it sounded like to him. But before he had time to do anything other than blink stupidly at her, convinced he’d misheard, Alice pushed him aside and shoved the door open, just as her father reached for the knob on the other side. Startled, Moore danced backwards, and Alice darted out, kicking the door shut behind her before her father or anyone else could catch sight of Andrew inside.

“Alice,” Moore exclaimed. She didn’t answer him, just bee-lined for the door, and he followed her, catching her by the sleeve. “Alice, what are you doing in here?”

“Where did she come from?” Prendick asked.

Moore wheeled her about and she blinked up at him, all round and impassive eyes. “You’re smoking.”

“And how did she get in the lab?” Prendick demanded.

“You’re not supposed to be smoking,” Alice said to Dr. Moore. “You quit.”

“I know.” Moore snubbed his still-smoldering cigarette out beneath the toe of his shoe, then gathered his daughter in his arms.

“How the hell did she get in the lab?” Prendick snapped again.

As Andrew watched, safe again in the closet, Moore hoisted Alice against his chest. “She must have figured out the door codes. I’ll take her back to the compound, put her to bed.” He carried Alice toward the door. She had her arms around his neck and looked over his shoulder toward the closet as they left, seeming to meet Andrew’s gaze.

“I want you back here after that,” Prendick said. With a thoughtful frown, a slight crimp to his brows, he glanced across the office toward the closet, as if having taken note of Alice’s gaze and redirected his own to follow.

Shit. Andrew shrank back again, his breath cutting short.

He heard the soft, crunch-tap of Prendick’s shoe soles on the linoleum floor, a slow rhythm, a deliberate approach.

Shit, Andrew thought. Shit, shit, shit.

The lights from the office outside abruptly went dark and he risked a quick enough peek to see Prendick walking out the door, swinging it shut behind him, leaving Andrew alone.

“Shit,” he whispered, a shaky sound, and he managed a breathless laugh as he listened to the muted sounds as the men walked away. When he raked his fingers through the crown of his hair, he found the roots damp with anxious sweat and he had to laugh once more. “Shit.”

The next morning, Andrew was up before sunrise, dressed and outside, waiting for Alice to begin her ritual walk. When he saw her trailing along the outer edge of the yard, Suzette marking a leisurely pace and broad space behind her, he broke into a sprint, crossing the dew-soaked grass to catch them.

“Hey,” he gasped with a winded grin. The morning was the sort of crisp and cool found only in autumn, a sharp but pleasant chill that was just enough to frost his breath in a thin film before his face.

She didn’t stop, didn’t even look at him. Continuing on her way, she brushed past him, mumbling numbers to herself, counting her steps.

“Alice?” Puzzled, somewhat wounded by the cold shoulder, he turned and followed. “Hey, hold up a second.”

Because she still didn’t stop, he pulled into the lead, then turned again, positioning himself directly in her path. Only then did she draw to a halt. Because she won’t walk around me, he realized. It would mess up her count.

Andrew squatted in front of her, trying unsuccessfully to draw her gaze from her toes. “I wanted to thank you,” he said. “For last night, covering for me, giving me the pass code.”

As it had turned out, wunno-wunno wasn’t what she’d said to him in the closet in the split seconds before she’d ducked out the door and distracted her father and Prendick. He hadn’t realized it until he’d tried to leave the building and discovered that the exterior doors required a pass code for both entry and exit. After a moment’s frustrated near panic, he’d thought of what she’d said, and of something else she’d mentioned earlier, when he’d found himself locked inside her father’s apartment.

Daddy always chooses binary numbers, using only zeroes or ones. He says they’re easier to remember. That means there are only eight possible combinations within the four-digit limit. I guessed the right one my first day here.

Wunno-wunno had in fact been one-oh-one-oh, or in this case, one-zero, one-zero, which happened to be Dr. Moore’s pass code for all of the laboratory and compound key pads.

Her hair had fallen into her face and he brushed it back behind her ear. “You mad at me?” he asked, because she still wouldn’t look at him.

It was wrong and he knew it, but he’d taken Moore’s scrapbook with him when he’d left the lab building the night before. He’d sat up for awhile once he’d slipped back into his room at the barracks, too full of adrenaline to relax or sleep, and had flipped through the book, reading all of the articles tucked inside. Time and again, he’d found himself drawn to the photograph of Moore carrying Alice down the stairs of Gallatin State Hospital.

Daddy says it’s a place for crazy people, Alice had told him. He says I didn’t belong there. My mother put me in it. He had to go to court to get me out. It took a long time because she had a court order that said I had to stay.

Andrew had studied that photo, the haunting image of Alice’s large eyes, her vacant stare spearing out of the print and up at him. What had happened to her in that place? he’d wondered. Three years, he’d thought, stricken and sad. Jesus Christ, the poor kid.

Her cheek was cold to his touch. Though she’d worn socks and shoes that morning, unlike before, she still wore only a thin flannel nightgown. “Where’s your coat?” he asked, because she still wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t acknowledge him. “Here.”

He wore an insulated flannel shirt, the one he’d been wearing on the day he’d wrecked his Jeep. Suzette had laundered it for him since then. It was quilted inside, thick and warm, and he shrugged his way out of it now, wearing a long-sleeved thermal shirt beneath. “Put this on. You’re going to get sick.”

As he drew the shirt around her narrow shoulders, tugging the collar together beneath her chin, Suzette drew near. “Watch it now. I’ll get jealous,” she chided with a smile.

Andrew thought of the magazine clipping he’d seen last night, the image of Dr. Moore and Suzette together in the laboratory.