Бентли Литтл - The Disappearance

“Gotta go,” Brian said, slamming the trunk. “Call me tonight. If I don’t hear from you by eight, I’m calling you . And if you don’t answer your phone, I’m coming over .”

“Right back at you.”

Joan had walked up behind him, and together they watched Brian drive away, standing on the sidewalk and waving until his car had turned the corner at the end of the block. “So what’s for dinner?” Gary asked.

“Let’s go in and see,” she said.

The apartment had a working microwave and a refrigerator, but the refrigerator was empty and the only food that could be found in the cupboards were packages of Top Ramen and Cup O’Noodles.

Joan grimaced. “I don’t think so.”

“Any ideas?”

“I can actually cook in a microwave, you know. Real food.”

“Like what?”

“How does pasta sound?”

“Pasta Roni?”

She hit his shoulder. “No. Real pasta. Sort of. I get, like, Ragú or something, chop up some extra vegetables and herbs, heat it up, cook the noodles and voila! A nice home-cooked meal.”

“Sounds good,” he admitted.

She took his hand. “Let’s go to the store and do a little grocery shopping.”

He smiled. “We’re getting awfully domestic, aren’t we?”

“Is that a complaint?”

“No. I think it’s great.”

She squeezed his hand. “Me, too. Come on.”

They drove down the street to the nearest supermarket, an Albertson’s. He grabbed a cart from the front of the store and followed her up each aisle as she compared prices and picked out items. “Do you want something for dessert?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I’m not much of a dessert fan.”

“I eat when I’m under stress. I’m making brownies.”

“In a microwave?”

“It can be done, believe it or not. Watch and learn.” She threw a box of brownie mix into the cart.

He liked this. It was fun. And for a few moments he almost forgot that Father was out there, angry and after them. Then they were in the produce department, where suddenly he smelled dirt, roots. He whirled around—and Joan was holding out a bag of loose mushrooms she’d chosen. “I usually mix these into the sauce,” she said, frowning at his reaction. “Gives it a richer flavor. Are you all right?”

“Fine. I’m fine.” But the smell was still in his nostrils and he was remembering the rag his kidnappers kept putting over his face. He felt nervous, jittery, and he found that he didn’t like being out in public like this. He felt exposed, and he made Joan hurry up so they could get out of there and get back to the duplex.

Reyn and Stacy arrived ten minutes before the dinner was done. Joan and Gary had already set the table and were watching the news, waiting for the microwave’s timer to beep, when their friends came in. “I was joking,” Reyn said when he saw the table. He breathed deeply. “But it smells good!”

The food was good, and they all overate and then retreated to different chairs or couches to complete the reading assignments for their various classes. Reyn turned on a radio and tuned it to a jazz station, keeping the volume low. “I can’t study in silence,” he said apologetically. “I need some noise.”

The evening was nice, but the aura of foreboding that hung over Gary refused to go away, and when they quit studying and went into their respective bedrooms, he had a hard time falling asleep, despite the fact that he’d been up almost all the previous night. When he finally dozed off, he dreamed, a horrible nightmare in which, like zombies from Night of the Living Dead , Homesteaders surrounded the duplex and started breaking windows, knocking down doors. He tried to grab his knife, but too many hands were on him, clawing, scratching, hitting, pulling. Homesteaders were everywhere, and as he looked frantically around, he saw that Joan had already been killed, that her bloody body was being torn apart. Through a gap between the lurching forms of his attackers, he saw the open doorway, and behind it the short hall, where an army of peasant-clothed Homesteaders was filing into Reyn and Stacy’s room. Over the grunts and screams and sickening wet crunches, he could hear Father’s deep, booming laughter, loud, raucous and happily amused.

In the morning, he awoke with the dawn, and for the first few confusing seconds thought that his dream had been reality. But Joan was dozing next to him, he could hear Reyn and Stacy murmuring in the other bedroom, and with grateful relief he realized that everyone was still alive.

So far.

Brian hated communications law. It wasn’t the subject matter; although, for the most part, the course was pretty dry going. No, he hated the length of the class. And its time slot. It was a course required for his major, so he had to take it, but it was only offered in one big chunk, on Wednesdays from four to seven, and that made the class unbearable. By that hour, he’d been at school for most of the day and his brain was tired. It also encompassed his dinnertime, so he was hungry. Students were allowed a fifteen-minute break at five forty-five, halfway through, and a lot of them got snacks from the vending machines on the first floor or coffee from one of the service clubs that’d set up a concessions table outside the building, but others just bailed, leaving and not coming back, and today Brian thought he might try that himself.

It had been a few days since they’d returned from Texas, but he still hadn’t adjusted to normal life. In a weird way, he’d liked the roller-coaster ride of the past two weeks. On some adrenaline-junkie level, he’d even liked that terrifying foray into the Home, although he could hardly believe now that he had held a guy at knife-point and forced him to take them to Joan. It seemed as though that had been another person, and thinking about it from a distance, he realized how lucky he was that he was not behind bars.

But that was why he was finding it difficult to get back into the rhythm of things here. After so much danger and excitement, it was hard to go back to being a regular guy doing regular things in a regular way—although Father was still loose and probably after them, if the events of the past two days were any indication. So he wasn’t exactly Joe Average. But compared to the adventure they’d had in Texas, life at UCLA was still a lot more sedate than being on the road.

And sitting through a class like comm law was sheer torture.

The session was not even halfway over and he’d already dozed off twice, though he doubted the instructor had noticed. A pompous windbag who loved the sound of his own voice and seemed to believe that a point worth making once was worth making thrice, Dr. Meyer seldom paid much attention to inconsequential minutiae such as the reactions of his students.

Brian had been taking notes on the lecture in the way that was expected, but in the margins of the notebook he’d been jotting down ideas. He still thought the best plan was to take the fight to Father, to get Dror and those film geeks together again, bring along the pigs if necessary and hunt the bastard down. But since none of them had any idea where to take the fight to , the next best thing would be to prepare themselves for the showdown that was inevitably going to come. Reyn’s little nambypamby plan of hiding and hoping no one would notice them was idiotic. The only reason they’d been able to get into the Home had been because he’d thought to bring knives, and Brian knew that their best chance now was to arm themselves the same way.

That was what he’d been jotting down: simple alarms they could set up around their rooms, places they could hide easy-to-use, easily accessible weapons, people they could enlist to help them. They’d beaten the cult the last time, and Father would do everything he could to ensure that didn’t happen again. So they needed to be ready.