Бентли Литтл - The Disappearance

Brian shrugged. “There’s nothing we can do.”

Gary’s fists clenched.

Brian backed up, palms outstretched. “I’m just saying—”

“Shut up,” Reyn told him.

In Gary’s mind, he saw Joan alone in a dark, dirty room, naked, bruised and beaten. He saw Kara dead in the desert, collateral damage. “We have to do something ,” he said, but he couldn’t think of what. His head seemed heavy, his brain numb and dumb.

Stacy nudged him. “You have to get some sleep,” she told him. “You haven’t slept for—”

“I slept in the car.”

“Yeah, for about ten minutes.”

“We all need some sleep,” Brian said. He yawned, as if to prove his point. “I definitely need to crash.”

Reyn put a hand on Gary’s shoulder. “It’s true.You won’t be much help to her if you don’t get some sleep.”

He was right. They were all right, though Gary didn’t want to admit it. He was tired, and likely not thinking clearly, and probably the best thing he could do was catch up on his rest before doing anything. But he imagined Joan bound and gagged, tied to a chair, tortured by unseen assailants.

The Outsiders.

He not only had no idea where she was; he didn’t know what was happening to her—and that was the most maddening, frustrating part. Was she being treated well? Was she being gang-raped? Was she dead?

The latter two possibilities seemed the most likely. She had not been allowed to contact him, and there’d been no demand for a ransom. He could think of no reason for her captors to keep her safe and unharmed if they weren’t after money.

It was the thought of sexual assault that really upset him, the image that burned in his mind like a white-hot needle, and he was both enraged and deeply disturbed by the idea that hostile strangers—

Outsiders

—were forcibly abusing her while the police sat around and tried to figure out whether or not she even existed.

He wondered if he should take an official leave of absence from school. There was no way he would be able to sit in class, to shuffle from course to course, from mythology to math, while Joan’s whereabouts remained unknown. If this dragged on for more than a few days, he wouldn’t be able to catch up on all the reading and work in his classes, and the whole semester would be a waste. He’d probably jeopardize his grants and scholarships, too, since to receive the money he was required to maintain a certain grade-point average. Of course, he was also required to keep a full twenty-one-unit schedule each semester to keep the money, so either way he was screwed.

Gary glanced around at his friends. “I am tired,” he acknowledged. “But I don’t think I can sleep. Is anybody going to their classes today?”

Reyn and Stacy shook their heads.

“I’m on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule,” Brian said. “I’m taking a siesta.”

“So what’s the plan?” Reyn asked.

“I don’t know.” Gary sighed.

“Sleep on it,” Stacy suggested. “We all will. Maybe we’ll come up with something.”

“Those cops…”

“I know,” she said. “But they’re just doing their job. Once they figure things out—”

“ If they figure things out.”

“Even if they do,” Brian said, “they still might not find her.”

“Shut up,” Reyn told him.

“I’m just saying.”

Gary’s head hurt. “I’m going back to my place,” he told them. It suddenly occurred to him that the phone in his dorm room had an answering machine. He didn’t want to get his hopes up, but it was possible that she had called and left a message. “I’ll call you guys later,” he said, heading toward his own building.

“If we think of something, we’ll let you know!” Reyn called after him.

Gary waved, hurrying away, and seconds later he was sprinting toward his dormitory. It was stupid, but in those few moments he had somehow convinced himself that there would be a message waiting for him.

Of course there wasn’t—he arrived at his room, drenched in sweat, to find his answering machine sitting there, its message light off, not blinking.

He sat down heavily on the bed and cried. He didn’t know where that came from. Worry, stress, tiredness, all of it probably factored in, but he couldn’t help himself, and tears rolled down his cheeks, sobs shaking his frame as he faced the fact, really faced the fact, that Joan might be dead. He closed his eyes against the emotion and found that he didn’t want to open them again.

He lay down, not bothering to take off his clothes or kick off his shoes, and within seconds he fell asleep.

And dreamed.

In the dream, UCLA looked like Burning Man. Instead of the usual brick buildings with their pseudo–Ivy League ambience, the campus was made up of temporary structures fabricated with found objects and recycled materials. He and Joan were seated on a blanket, on some grass, eating a picnic breakfast of dry Apple Jacks. Barefoot students in ragged clothes were running by them, each carrying a log or tree branch. They were running toward the south edge of campus, where a wall was being constructed with the wood, and Gary understood that UCLA was not a university but a fort, and the wall was being built to keep the Outsiders from gaining entry. He told Joan to wait where she was and ran forward to help with the wall, but halfway there, he saw a portion of it collapse and a horde of Outsiders break through. They were cloaked, bansheelike figures whose faces could not be seen within the darkness of their cowls. Turning, he tried to run back to Joan, to protect her, but the Outsiders sprinted past him, and by the time he reached the picnic blanket, she had been whisked away and was gone.

It was after nine thirty when Teri Lim finally left geology. The class actually ended at nine fifteen, but she’d wanted to ask the instructor a few questions about the syllabus. She’d waited until all of the other students who were staying after had asked their own questions because… well, because Dr. Prem was cute. The ring on his finger said he was married, though, and his no-nonsense responses forestalled any flirting and made her feel foolish. She asked her questions meekly, nodded at the answers, then walked out of the class and out of the building, sucking in the cool night air, hoping it would reduce the heat on her embarrassed face.

The campus was quiet and nearly empty. UCLA’s nightlife was headquartered at Westwood Village, next door, and the university itself seemed to shut down after classes ended. From far away came the faint, raucous sounds of frat parties, mingled with the even more distant sounds of city traffic, the two together creating a soft, indistinct background noise that made the stillness around her seem even deeper, this section of the university feel even more remote and cut off from the rest of the world.

Teri looked behind her, hoping to see other students coming out of Physical Sciences, hoping to see her professor. But everyone else had exited through the main entrance that led to the well-lit parking lot in front of the building, and she remained alone on the dark, winding walkway that was a shortcut to her dorm. To her right, on a bench beneath the dim, hazy light of an old lamppost, a couple was making out, and she let out a sigh of relief, grateful she was not the only one here. Seconds later, however, she was past the bench and walking between two pine trees whose shadowed indentations resembled malevolent beings with pointed heads. The trunks of both trees were more than thick enough for someone to hide behind.

She sped up. Noises from the outside world seemed to have faded away or been swallowed up by the silence, and the only sound she heard was the tap-tap-tap of her own shoes on the sidewalk. There were goose bumps on her arms, and not from the temperature. It was hard to see, and she kept her eyes on the ground, not wanting to trip over a rock or branch or crack in the cement. The walkway curved, then straightened, opening out onto a flat expanse of concrete. She looked up.