Бентли Литтл - The Disappearance

The bald guy was still there, still unmoving, still staring in her direction.

She turned away again, her mind racing, trying to come up with a plan. He couldn’t do anything in public, she reasoned, not now, in broad daylight, in front of all these witnesses. This was the perfect place to confront him, and though the sharp pain in her stomach made her wonder if this was what an ulcer felt like, Joan forced herself to be brave. Instead of fleeing, as she wanted to do with every fiber of her being, she took a deep breath, crossed the crowded walkway and started across the lawn toward the man.

He made no move to get away, and she saw as she approached that he was not looking at her but still staring in the same direction where she had been. He seemed as much of a statue as the sculpture next to him, and for a brief second she thought that he might be some art student’s amazingly lifelike project. Then she saw the white cane leaning against the marble and realized that he was blind.

She relaxed a little. But some of the Children were blind or deaf, too, and she kept glancing around to make sure this wasn’t a trap and she wasn’t about to be jumped by Homesteaders hidden in the bushes. She approached slowly. “Hello?” she said softly in the Language.

There was no response.

“What is your name?” she queried.

He turned his head in her general direction, a quizzical look on his face. “I’m sorry. Are you talking to me? I’m afraid I only speak English.”

The sigh of relief that escaped her made her realize that she’d been holding her breath. “I’m sorry,” she said in the Language, keeping up the pretense of being a foreign student. She turned, walking much more briskly back the way she had come. Gary was now heading up the walkway in the middle of a crowd of students, looking away from her toward the building, expecting to see her waiting by the steps as they’d arranged, and she tapped him on the shoulder. He started at her touch, nervous even here, and she realized how on edge all of them were.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” she said.

He bent down, kissing her. “No problem. It’s just… you know.”

“Yeah.” She tried to smile. “I need to ask you something: Did you notice anything strange in any of your classes today? Was anyone acting weird toward you?”

He frowned. “How do you mean?”

She explained that no one would sit by her in anthropology and that the students in her psychology class had been hostile and shunned her.

He tried to make a joke of it. “What are you, in junior high?” But she could tell from his eyes that he was worried.

“I think they’re attacking us with computers. They have a lot of information about us, and Father will use everything at his disposal. There’s no telling what they might do.”

“We have credit freezes, everyone’s been alerted, all the companies—”

“I don’t just mean online. There’s no telling what they might do physically .”

He nodded. “I bought you a present. Come with me to my car.”

That was a non sequitur if she’d ever heard one. “What?”

“I bought you something.” Sensing her confusion, he added, “It’s for protection.”

He’d parked in the north lot instead of leaving his car in his usual spot by the dorm and walking—an effort to vary his routine, which was something they’d all discussed and were trying to do. The parking lot was closer than the dorm, but it still was quite a trek, and though at first he refused to tell her what he’d bought, wanting it to be a surprise, his silence in the face of her constant questioning began to seem silly, especially as they had another five minutes to go. “I got you a baseball bat,” he finally admitted. “Big Five was having a sale and my sociology class was canceled, so I sped over there and bought it.”

When they reached the car, Gary opened the trunk and pulled out her bat, a dull red length of aluminum. “Here it is,” he said, hefting it. “You can fight off anyone with this. It won’t work against guns, but unless I miss my bet, Father and his people are less mechanically inclined.”

“They don’t use guns,” Joan agreed. She paused. “At least, I don’t think they do. I didn’t think they used computers, either.”

Gary rested the bat on his shoulder. “You can swing at any part of a person and it’ll work,” he said. “Legs, arms, midsection. Anything’ll put them out of commission. Don’t aim for the head unless you have to, though. That’ll kill them.”

There was an awkward pause, and Gary placed the bat back in the trunk. “So where do you think he is? Any ideas?”

She shook her head.

“There seem to be cult members—”

“Homesteaders,” she said.

“What?”

“We— they like to be called ‘Homesteaders.’ ”

He eyed her strangely. “We?”

“You know what I mean. What were you trying to say?”

“Just that there are Homesteaders all over. In Texas, New Mexico, maybe even here in California. I was just wondering if you know where any of them might be located. Or even how many of them there are.”

“I was brought up in the Home. I don’t know anything else. I do know some of the others who’ve gotten away… .”

“The people in your parents’ address book.”

“They might have some ideas. But I’m sure they’re in hiding by now. News travels fast on that network, and even if you didn’t scare them off with your clumsy investigation”—she smiled at him—“they’ve seen the news and they’ve scattered to the wind.”

“So what do you think happens next?”

Her smile faded.

“Joan?”

“I think he’s going to come after us,” she said.

The phone rang in the middle of the night. Not her cell phone or Stacy’s, but the landline, the one that belonged to the room. By the time Joan groggily lifted her head from the pillow, her brain still echoing with the dream of an endless hallway filled with horribly malformed Children, Stacy had already walked over to her desk and picked up the telephone. “Hello?” she said. Her eyes grew wide and frightened. She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s a man,” she whispered fearfully. “I think it’s one of them . He’s speaking some language I never heard before.”

Fully awake now, Joan jumped up from the air mattress on which she’d been sleeping and grabbed the phone from Stacy’s hand. She was prepared to hear Father’s voice, but it was someone else, though the words the man was saying could not have been more terrible. “Your flesh shall be rent for your crimes,” he stated in the Language, and it sounded as though he were reading the words from a scroll. “The Lord has sanctioned your punishment, and when you are dead you shall dwell for eternity in the fiery pit of Hell—”

Joan hung up the phone.

“Who was it?” Stacy asked, her voice quavering. “Was it… ?”

“It wasn’t Father, but it was one of them.”

“They know my number!” Stacy was on the verge of crying. “They know where we are!” She grabbed her cell phone from the nightstand, casting frightened glances at the telephone on the desk, as though she thought the object was possessed by a demon.

“Who are you calling?” Joan asked.

“Reyn!” Pressing a speed-dial number, Stacy quickly brought the phone to her ear. “We just got a phone call!” she said without preamble. Reyn must have answered. “Joan says it’s them!” There was a short pause, and Stacy turned toward Joan. “They got one, too!”

She tried to remain calm as Stacy and Reyn described details to each other over the phone, but inside Joan was just as frightened as they were. This might be just a scare tactic, part of the psychological assault, but she was by no means sure of that, and it could very well be that someone was on the way right now to carry out the threatened punishment. She crouched down next to her air mattress and reached under Stacy’s bed for the baseball bat.