Джош Малерман - Inspection

The Letter Girl K had been on the other side of the glass in the tunnel. Covered in blood.

Whose?

This is not a mutiny, he told himself. It’s an isolated incident and J has been dealt with. Now K will be dealt with, too.

The other boys were on lockdown. Confined to their rooms. J’s telling him that nobody else had seen the girl wasn’t good enough. Even if it did register as honest with the game. J might not have known who saw what. Richard would find out.

But first, why wasn’t Marilyn answering her phone?

He considered aborting the whole experiment. Considered rounding up all the Alphabet Boys, lining them up against the Turret bricks, shooting them one by one.

Should he panic?

He hung up the phone. He didn’t want to panic. J was in the Corner. Surely K had escaped her own Corner. Surely she’d been put back in by now.

He considered sending the Inspectors to the second Turret. But no. That would jeopardize all of Marilyn’s girls.

What else to do but go up? Call Marilyn again from his office?

“Watch the Corner,” he told Collins and Jeffrey.

He’d already put together an explanation for J’s absence by the time he reached the first floor. He refined it in the elevator to the third. J simply didn’t fit in. He was sent to a new Parenthood, where boys like him might thrive. Life was about overcoming sadness, boys, my boys. Lose and live. Live and learn.

He wouldn’t tell them about J in the Corner. Not yet. He needed more information from the others before he froze them with living nightmares.

No man can withstand this much guilt.

Warren had said that to him earlier, as Richard walked him from quarantine to the Corner. But it was something else the fat troll had said that really irked him.

Women don’t distract, Richard. They inspire.

As the elevator rose, Richard reminded himself that he was indeed a big thinker. He cited the speeches he’d given, the events he’d planned, the boys he’d raised.

Oh, how the staff must revere him! All he’d done for them! All they’d seen him do.

He had no way of knowing that both Collins and Jeffrey were killed by the Letter Girls Q and B outside the Corner that harbored Warren and J.

He had no way of knowing Gordon had a garden fork in his belly, that he lay flat on the white carpet of the Body Hall.

You can’t consider yourself remarkable, Richard thought, without being disappointed by the people around you.

And, ah, what a disappointment J was in the end.

When the number 3 lit up and the bell announced his arrival, Richard had convinced himself the Parenthood would be stable once again. Perhaps it would even grow stronger for this.

He stepped off the elevator and entered the hall.

He paused.

The hall looked the same. The doors and the floors.

So what was different?

Richard sniffed the air. Possibly it was the floor shift, boxes of belongings moved about, strange scents rising.

He waited. He didn’t like it. Whatever it was. He didn’t like it.

He went first to F’s door and opened it. Inside, F the boy and F the girl stood side by side, facing him.

They held knives.

A vision as impossible as A and Z, risen from the dead.

An Alphabet Boy and a Letter Girl.

Together.

“Hi, Richard,” F said. He wagged the knife.

Richard fled the room. Went to X’s, opened it.

X the boy and X the girl.

Holding knives.

Do not panic. Do NOT panic. If one boy is secure, JUST ONE BOY…

Richard moved to G’s door and kicked it open. Before he could register that G the boy and G the girl were walking toward him, carrying axes, the door to the stairs opened down the hall.

W the boy holding hands with W the girl.

D the boy and D the girl.

“D,” Richard said, the authority in his voice irrevocably lost, “you have been a bad boy !”

Ruined, Richard. Every one of them.

No…just this floor…just this floor…

What are you going to do? Start again?

“Unclean! You’re all unclean!” he cried, inching back toward the Check-Up room door. “You all have Placasores! Are you happy, F? STOP SMILING! STOP SMILING AT ME! ”

Richard charged and F stuck him with a knife.

Gaping at the blood from his gut, the blood on his fingers, Richard looked to Q, his Q. When had Q arrived?

“My boy…”

When had they all arrived? The floor was full of them. And only more were coming through the stairwell door.

“Inspection,” B the girl said.

Richard looked to her.

She’s covered in blood. Where’s Marilyn?

“Inspection.”

They were all saying it. All the boys and girls.

“What do you mean to do?” he said.

“INSPECTION!” they yelled.

From the far end of the hall, the elevator doors opened. When had it gone back down?

In it, J. The Letter Girls K and Q.

Warren Bratt.

“Warren,” Richard said. “No no. You can’t be a part of this. This is…this is murder, Warren. You did not sign up for this! Think of your life! You’re throwing your life away!”

“INSPECTION!” the boys and girls yelled.

Forty-nine of them.

“Get in the Check-Up room,” B the girl said. But it might have been any one of them.

“Marilyn predicted you’d revolt at age twenty,” Richard said, trembling, one hand on the Check-Up room door. “But here you’ve done it at twelve.” Then, a smile. “See how advanced you are? My boys…?”

The kids stepped toward him. Armed. All of them.

He opened the Check-Up room door and stared down at the handle.

“This door has never opened from the outside,” he said. “Who reversed the locks?”

From the crowd of them, nobody raised a hand.

Tears in his eyes, Richard nodded.

“That’s my boys.”

He entered the room. He turned to face them.

“What will you do without me?” he asked.

But they gave him no response.

And J closed the door. And K locked it.

Two days after locking Richard in the third-floor Check-Up room, Warren and the forty-nine kids discovered a shack a mile through the pines behind the girls’ Turret. Inside, they found three sleeping men. The cabin smelled of alcohol and smoke. Warren recognized them as classic Parenthood employees: ex-cons with a real need to hide.

He woke them as the kids stood outside the cabin door. He told them their employers had been killed, that they would want to pack up and leave if they didn’t want to meet the same end.

The only question they asked was how to get their money out of their individual accounts. Warren told them how. Then, with only a bag of clothes each, they left the cabin, the pines, and the Parenthood.

The boys and girls spent a month in the two Turrets. Warren told them they had to. Had to eat. Pack. Plan. They couldn’t just leave this world and enter the next one. They needed some guidance. Some wisdom. They needed to know the rules of the real world, no matter how unreal it was going to feel.

They all read Needs. Cover to cover. Boys and girls.

Most avoided the third floor of the boys’ Turret, but not all. In the early days of their stay, some enjoyed listening to the starving man moaning on the other side of the metal door. And when those moans became weak utterances, a few boys and a few girls snuck inside. Just to see.

“He’s still dressed in red.”

“Thin as a blue notebook.”

“His hair is longer; his nails are longer.”

“He looks like a statue. Stuck that way.”

“Reaching.”

“Reaching for a magnifying glass on the floor.”