The man with the gun reached overhead with a quick movement and slapped a handcuff end on the articulating bar that controlled the door's opening. He leered at me as I watched his movement.
"Wouldn't want anyone disturbing us now, would we?" he said. He turned towards Billy. "This the little puke you were telling me about?" he asked. Billy had a sour look on his face but nodded.
"I could see why he rubs you the wrong way. Little waif like this, breezing through life, everything handed to him. Did you punch him in the nose like I told you?"
Billy shook his head. I thought back. Oh yeah, he hadn't punched me this loop. I had come straight to the bathroom. With the conversation rolling, Miss Billings seemed to find her courage.
"Now listen," she began, her voice quavering slightly, "Mr. George."
His attention snapped to her like a cat catching sight of movement across the room. The gun followed his gaze. Her mouth closed the instant it was pointed her way.
"Mr. George, huh? Yeah, nice and respectable, ain't I? Well, listen, you're caught in the middle, and ain't no good gonna come of it. But if you keep your mouth shut and stay smart, you might live."
She opened and closed her mouth several times, like a fish trying to find air without water, seeming unable or unwilling to form a response to that. Billy's dad turned his cat-like focus back on me.
"All right, I don't know whose soup you pissed in, but you did it good. I've been sent for you." He threw a pair of handcuffs at me.
They hit me in the nose before I could react fast enough to catch them. I winced and then gave him a glare as I felt blood begin to trickle down the front of my face where they had struck me.
The man gestured with the pistol he held. "Put them on," he said.
I thought about my situation. This was certainly a wild deviation from anything I had experienced in any loop so far, and this was one of the only loops that I had started with luck. The tall man hadn't shown up. Logically, starting the loop holding the heart-napper’s luck, what happened was this person had been sent instead.
I slowly bent down and picked the cuffs up, thinking hard. I still had the luck symbol sketched on my palms. If I could get close enough, I was pretty sure I could make Billy's dad unlucky enough that it would be unwise to fire a pistol.
"Well, I'll give you this, kid," Billy's dad said. "You're tougher than you look."
The handcuffs had struck me right on the bridge of my nose, just past where the cartilage was replaced by bone. It had been a solid hit, and it hurt. But pain had been redefined for me recently, and honestly, I was a little bit grateful for the separate pain to focus on instead of just my poor, aching balls. God, being kicked in the balls sucked. I think I would rather run into a burning building than endure this again. I wondered if I should try and get shot right now, just to end the agony.
But I was curious.
I wanted to know who had sent this man. I wanted to know how far he would push things.
He had brought a pistol to the school his son attended. Something about that smelled fishy. Confronting me and a teacher together? Was Billy ever going to be seen again after this moment? I suspected that something like this would happen whether I was here or not, now that things had changed. I wanted to get a better handle on it.
So I bent down and picked up the handcuffs, putting them on. They were cold—unusually cold. I wondered where he'd been keeping them. A freezer? They were so cold, they were burning my skin where they touched. I regretted having clasped them shut immediately after doing so. The man grinned at me, his crooked, yellow teeth clearly stained from tobacco.
"Well, you ain't that smart," the man said.
"What?" I replied.
He turned and trained his pistol on Miss Billings. "Look, this isn't personal, but I can't leave a witness," he said. He raised the gun.
Realizing what was about to happen, I let out a guttural cry and charged him. I got close enough to lay my hands on him and prepared to rip the luck from him. But instead of my hands latching on like super space-defying magnets, I touched him with both hands like we were playing some ridiculous game of touch football. The man used his other hand to knock me to the floor. The backhand he hit me with was blisteringly fast. I didn't even see it coming. I had to think back to realize what had happened. He just casually swatted my head so hard I was afraid he may have cracked a vertebra in my neck.
I went sprawling, seeing stars, my ears ringing like they had after the explosion. The whole side of my face hurt. My jaw was hanging open, hard to close, and I felt several of my teeth were loose. The man walked up to Mrs. Billings, who stood frozen, and pointed with the pistol, directing her into one of the bathroom stalls. She went, strangely resigned. Why didn’t she fight? He followed her in, and there was a series of muffled cracks. One, two, three.
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I slowly pushed myself up as the man came back out and grabbed me by the handcuffs. He physically hoisted me up and looked me in the face. "There, that's her done with. Now you're coming with me."
He turned to Billy and pointed at him. "You go straight home. It's time to pack."
Billy nodded, looking sick.
The man then tucked his pistol into his pocket and bundled me up like I was an inconvenient suitcase. Slowly my senses returned, and I looked down at my palms to make sure I did have the symbols inked on them like I thought I did. There they were. Well, that was strange, but not insurmountable.
Had he just killed Mrs. Billings? The thought hit me late, much later than it should have, like it was an unreality my mind was rebelling against. I shook my head. The man smelled like grease, cigarette smoke, and leather. Focusing on breathing, I got a lot of that scent, but I was able to bring my mind back to the present. The man was quickly striding out of the school. I expected someone to call out and challenge him, but there was no cry of alarm.
Instead, I decided to pivot, and I reached for my core to spin up one of the medallions of luck. I would see what cold fire did. Horror began to dawn on me as my ability to move my luck slipped through my fingers. I couldn't touch it. Something was wrong.
The man carrying me shouldered his way out of the school building and jogged down the steps. It was at this point that I began doing what I probably should have been doing this whole time. I began to struggle and drew in a deep breath to scream for help, but I must have telegraphed what I was thinking, because the man's hand was around my throat in a moment.
His grip was more terrible than I would have imagined. It felt like steel. He squeezed, and I lost the ability to make a noise. I got the impression he was showing restraint—that if he wanted to squeeze until my neck broke, he could.
"You like breathing, kid?" the man said. He let go of my throat. "Your choice."
I shut my mouth.
"I see you've figured out by now you can't reach your tricks. Yeah. I was told all about you," the man said.
This didn't make any sense. I was so taken aback by the turn of events and the turn of phrase that I was speechless, trying to process. I opened my mouth to ask a question but, remembering a hand on my throat, thought better of it and closed it again.
We reached the parking lot, and the man headed toward a nondescript, boxy boat of a car straight out of an '80s action film. He walked around to the back and unceremoniously dropped me in the trunk. He looked down at me, his dead, flat eyes uncaring.
"Make a fuss while you're in there," the man said, "and I'll give you enough pepper spray to shut you up." He then slammed the trunk lid.
I was engulfed in darkness. I became sharply aware of the burning sensation the handcuffs were creating around my wrists, and I tried to move in such a way that I could get them out of contact with my skin. I felt around the inside of the trunk for any kind of loose wire, piece of metal, or anything at all I could possibly use to try and jimmy the handcuff lock. I had seen it done in movies before, and they made it seem easy. After about two minutes of a fruitless search, the car started and began to bump out of the parking lot.
The mat underneath me smelled of oil, plastic, grease, and that odd smell that coins always get—that dirty, lived-in stink with an undertone of sour vegetables. It sometimes clung to old tools, but it was somehow always present in aged places like this that were never meant to be occupied. The rough carpeting, where it wasn't worn away to reveal the metal underneath, was as gritty as it was greasy. My hands came up empty despite all my searching, though I had broken a fingernail, and I was sure they were now black with unknowable dirt.
The car's exhaust began to pour into the trunk as we drove, and the bumps made the car's non-existent suspension evident. I was jostled violently enough that I bounced off the trunk lid several times.
It occurred to me that these trunks were supposed to have some sort of built-in emergency escape, but after all my fumbling around in the dark, all I found were several things sharp enough to leave me regretting my groping efforts. The handcuffs were growing increasingly uncomfortable, and I tried to pull my hands out of them, squeezing my thumb and pinky painfully enough that at points I thought I might break a finger. If the trunk were a little more capacious, I could probably get my feet up on the handcuffs and push, but the angle proved impossible because there was a spare tire up against my back, severely limiting my ability to move around.
I'm not sure what it was exactly—the car's exhaust, my own building anxiety, or the fear-induced claustrophobia from being thrown inside a stranger's trunk and driven away with—but at some point, I lost awareness of myself and my surroundings.
***
When I came to, the smell of burnt flesh, blood, sweat, and an acrid, electric smoke filled the air. A dirty, unshaven man in front of me turned and spat to the side, throwing the electrodes he held carelessly on the table behind him. He rummaged around amongst a series of metallic-sounding tools, knocking several things off the table in a careless manner, muttering in a thick Russian accent.
From his features, I would not have pegged him as Russian. He had a medium-dark complexion, a hard-to-pin-down nationality, thick rough stubble, a pockmarked face, and a creeping balding pate, with hair grown out on the sides and back, tied in a loose ponytail. He was wearing a wife-beater stained with tobacco and blood. Beneath the wife-beater, he wore an old pair of hospital scrubs. They were stained, torn, and lived in. It looked like they had been through the wash a dozen more times than their lifespan should have permitted.
Brandishing his prize from the tool table, the man turned back to me. He had a crooked grin and a little ball-peen hammer—one of those types with a rounded end and a smooth end for masonry work. The man scraped the metal folding chair he had closer to me with a grunt, his gut sticking out over his pants from beneath the wife-beater. He leered at me and then spat tobacco onto my chest. Something there stung, but I didn't bother to look.
"You're tough for an old man," the man said in his thick accent, "but I know what will break you."
He twirled the hammer between thick, gnarled fingers with nails yellowed from some sort of lack of hygiene. I was reminded of those idiotic anti-fungal commercials in which somebody's toes were obscenely overgrown like some sort of troll. But here this man was, living proof that somebody needed that medication. He leaned down below my waist and began muttering the children's song, "This little piggy went to market." The hammer swung down, and with the metallic ping and a crunch I saw a flash of light. The pain startled me to my senses.
***
I looked around. My hands were tied behind me to a chair—straight, wooden-backed, sturdy. My feet were dangling over the end of it and didn't reach the floor. They were tied as well. I couldn't see if I still had my toes. They hurt gloriously. I remembered the tobacco. I remembered the smell. The room I was in was lit and clean.
A minute ago, it had been like a warehouse out of a horror movie—all old cement and bad lighting with spacious, cavernous opening high overhead and dark corners.
This wasn't that at all. I was in some sort of office space. It was carpeted with that sort of tiled carpeting you get in industrial buildings, alternating patterns—lines first in one direction, then the other—all neat squares and tight thin ply for easier cleaning. The ceiling overhead was a paneled drop ceiling. Bland white panels held up by a wire framework, inset with fluorescent lighting. The walls were a drab, neutral green. Drywall with a nondescript texture, and a single paneled door was set right in front of me. I couldn't see behind me, but the walls on either side had no decoration, no ornamentation, no art, no windows—just an empty, blank room.
My feet were tied tightly enough that I couldn't bend down and see my toes. They hurt marvelously. The man had been doing something to my chest, but I was now wearing my shirt again, and I couldn't remember what he had done. Gone was the smell of smoke and burned flesh. Gone was the smell of blood and tobacco. Gone was the stink of the man's sweat. But the memory was still sharp. I shook my head, trying to clear it. Then what he had said to me registered.
"You're tough for an old man." I stopped. Had that been my memory? Or had that memory belonged to my future self?
The door in front of me opened, and a tall man stepped in, decked out in his business attire.
"Hello, Timothy Thompson," the tall man said.
He grinned at me, too long, crooked yellow teeth leering out from his perfect face.
"Yes."
He drawled the word out, seeming to enjoy it as realization became clear on my face.
"I remember you," he said. "We have much to talk about, you and I. Especially now that I've got you. I know your little trick with death and time. And I'm not going to let you escape."
***