What Comes Next (19 page)

“Tommy,” he whispered. He watched the small dust flowers race toward him. He knew they were machine-gun bullets, coming from a hut fifty yards away, directly in the path of the Warthogs. If only they were a little faster, Adrian thought. If only the pilots had opened up a second or two earlier.
If only
…

The line of bullets marched inexorably toward his son. Adrian watched as Tommy filmed his own death. It came just seconds before the hut vanished in a billowing explosion of fire.

Time,
Adrian thought,
is too cruel.

He put his hands up over his face, trying to prevent all the images that were coming at him from penetrating his eyesight and entering his imagination. And in that sudden darkness all the noise and terror dissipated, fading away like the end of a song on the radio, and when he pulled his hands away and opened his eyes he was alone, back in the quiet of his study, surrounded by books on murder and poetry.

Adrian felt as if he had died a little.

He wanted to say something to his son. He looked around for Cassie but she was not there. For a moment, he thought the force of the explosions had damaged his hearing; his ears filled with a ringing noise. It persisted, louder and louder, until he wanted to shout out, it was so painful, and then he suddenly realized that it was the sound of his front doorbell.

17

She had fallen asleep—she did not know for how long: minutes? hours? days?—but the sound of the baby crying awakened her.

She did not know what to do. It was a faint noise, very distant, and she was slow to recognize precisely what it was. She clutched Mister Brown Fur tightly to her chest. She craned her head first in one direction, then in another, trying to determine where the wails were coming from. They persisted for what seemed to her to be a long time—though it might have been only a second or two—before fading away. She wondered what this meant. Jennifer had little experience babysitting, and she was an only child, so her knowledge about infants was limited to those basic instincts that exist within everyone.
Pick the baby up. Rock the baby. Feed the baby. Smile at the baby. Put the baby back in its crib to sleep.

Jennifer shifted about, afraid to make any commotion of her own that would obscure the noise. The sound of the child meant something, and she tried to sort through what it was, forcing herself to be analytical, organized, rational, and perceptive.

For a moment, she wondered whether the cries were part of a dream. It took her a few seconds to determine,
No. They are real.

But something else was wrong. She shook her head, a feeling of apprehension creeping past leftover nightmares.
What is it? What is it?
she wanted to shout out loud.

Something had changed.

She could sense it. The hairs on her neck stood up. Her breathing grew raspy, panicky. She sucked in air sharply and suddenly, as if jolted by electricity. She screamed.

The sound of her voice echoed in the room. It terrified her even more.

She twitched. Her hands quivered. Her back stiffened. She bit down on her chapped and cracked lips.

The hood was gone.

Yet still she remained in darkness.

At first she thought she could see, that it was the room that was black. Then she realized that was wrong. Something still covered her eyes.

Confusion wrapped her up. She did not understand why it had taken her so much time to realize that the hood had been replaced. There had to be a reason behind the change, but she couldn’t tell what it was. She knew the change meant something important but whatever this change signified eluded her.

Leaning back carefully she raised her hands to her face. She let her fingers play over her cheeks, then move to her eyes. A single silken mask tied around the back of her head had replaced the hood. She felt the knot. It was already tangled with strands of her hair. She touched the chain around her neck. That hadn’t changed. She realized that she could remove the mask without too much trouble. It would cost her a chunk of hair maybe, as she ripped it free, but then she would be able to see where she was. Jennifer carefully placed Mister Brown Fur on the bed beside her, raised her hands, and began to work her fingers under the soft material. Then she stopped.

From somewhere far away the baby wailed again.

It made no sense. How could a baby be connected to what was happening to her?

She tried to arrange her thoughts.
A baby crying meant that she was someplace. An apartment? A house jammed close to another? Did the man and woman who had snatched her from the street have a baby?
A baby implied parenthood, responsibility, something normal—and nothing that was happening to her seemed normal in the slightest. A baby meant minivans and cribs and strollers and trips to the park but that seemed otherworldly now.
The hood is gone. Now I’m wearing a mask. I could take it off Maybe that’s what they want. Maybe not. I don’t know. I want to do what I’m supposed to do, but I don’t know what that is.

Then she gasped deeply, as if she’d been struck hard in the stomach.

They were here. In the room. When I was asleep. They removed the hood and replaced it with this mask and they never woke me up.

For what seemed to her to be the hundredth time she was unable to hold back tears. Gasping. Sobbing. She could feel the tears dampening the fabric of her new mask. She reached out for Mister Brown Fur and whispered to him,
Thank God you’re still with me, because you’re the only thing that makes me think I’m not alone.

Jennifer rocked back and forth in agony and solitude until she was able to regain control over her heaving chest. Her breathing slowed and the half gasps that had wracked her body subsided.

Just as her sobs ended the baby let out a long, heart-rending wail. It echoed. Distant. Elusive.

Once again, she tilted her head. It was as if for a single second or two the baby’s cries had reminded her of the world that existed outside the darkness covering her eyes. Then, just as swiftly as they had penetrated her consciousness, they disappeared, leaving her in the same dark limbo of uncertainty.

Jennifer battled her emotions.
No more tears. No more crying. You’re not a baby.

She did not allow herself to think maybe she was.

For a terrifying instant she thought
she
was making the cries, that somehow the bleating and wailing was hers and that she was listening to herself as she retreated through years to infancy.

She breathed in hard.
No,
she told herself.
Not mine. I’m here. They are there.

She admonished herself:
Take control.
Although she had told herself this before, and she didn’t know yet what she could take control
of.

She also was smart enough to recognize that every time she had insisted to herself to seize her emotions, something had happened that disrupted her efforts.

She thought,
They mean to do that.

Again, she tried to sharpen her hearing. Jennifer was unsure whether to be encouraged or dismayed by the sounds the baby made. They clearly meant something important, and yet interpreting the noise was elusive. This frustrated her almost to the point of tears.

She leaned back on the bed. She was thirsty, hungry, scared, and in pain, although she could not say for sure that any part of her was injured. It was as if she had been cut in her heart. But even that sense was almost overcome by her parched throat—she hadn’t had anything to drink since the spiked water.
When was that? A year ago?
Or anything to eat since midday on the day she had run away from home. Whenever that was.

She understood she was imprisoned, but the nature of her jail was something that existed outside of her sight. She thought that even the worst killers put in prison forever know why they’re there. She had an image, stolen from some movie she’d seen that had no title or stars or plot, but what she remembered was a prisoner carefully scratching into the wall a mark for each day that passed. She couldn’t even do that. Knowledge, she understood, was a luxury.

Any kind of comprehension eluded her.

The woman had said to
obey.
But no one had asked her to do anything yet.

The more she pondered all these things, the more she rubbed her fingers nervously into Mister Brown Fur’s worn pelt. She was nearly naked, in a room she couldn’t see. There was a door. She knew that. There was a toilet. She knew that. Somewhere, there was a baby. She knew that. The floor was cement. The bed creaked. The chain around her neck would tighten at six paces right or left. The air was hot.

She was alive and she had her bear.

Inside the darkness, Jennifer took a deep breath.
All right, Mister Brown Fur, that’s where we will start. You and me. The way it’s always been since Dad died and left us alone.

She did not know how much longer she had to live.

She did not know what was in store for her.

She did not know what she was a part of.

Jennifer wondered then, for the first time, whether anyone was looking for her.

At the same time that this thought occurred to her, she heard another wail from the baby. A single high-pitched, desperate cry. Then, as before, it disappeared, leaving her and Mister Brown Fur alone. She did not fully realize it but the sound helped her, because it distracted her from the most despairing idea of all:
How would anyone know where to look for her?

“Play it once more,” Michael said. He was fiddling with the main camera and thinking he might have to do a little repair work on the electronic tracking system. “Don’t want to overdo it. Just a little bit…”

Linda punched some keys on the computer board. The baby cried again.

“Are you sure she can hear it?”

“Yeah. Absolutely. Look at the way her head moves. She hears it all right.”

Linda bent toward the primary feed camera. “You’re right,” she said. “You’re sure the clients can hear it too?”

“Yes. But they will have to work as hard to figure it out.”

This made Linda smile. “You don’t like to make it easy for them, do you?

“Not my style,” Michael replied, laughing.

He put his hands behind his neck, linking the fingers together, and he stretched like any office drone working for a large company might after too many hours in front of a computer screen.

“You know, they’re all going to love it when Number Four screams like that. It just makes it all the more
real
for them.”

In a contradictory way, Michael felt both contempt and fascination with the many people who subscribed to Whatcomesnext. At one instant, he thought them weak because they could not control their impulses as they grew ever more fascinated with Number 4. But then he would stare at the screen as it filled with the fantasy narrative he created, and he would feel the stirrings of the same compulsions.

Linda tried not to imagine their clientele at all—or, at least, not in the way Michael did. They weren’t people to her, with dark passions that drove them to the website; they were just so many accounts in so many countries. Many different fifteen-number credit card authorizations. She had a businesswoman’s calculating sense—this many subscriptions meant this many dollars deposited in the blind, offshore accounts she had established for them. She rarely thought about who was out there, watching, except to crunch numbers and make sure that Michael was providing the right edginess to the program, so that
Series #4
would have a drama of its own.

Michael was in charge of the story of Number 4. She was in charge of the business. Both aspects were critical to their success. It was a relationship that she believed defined true love. In her spare time and in between the different series, she liked to read the fanzines and gossip magazines about movie stars and she paid special attention to who was with whom, and who was breaking up with a partner, week by week. She indulged in the fascination of trying to guess what Brad or Angelina or Jen or Paris was going to do next, and where they might be caught in some compromising situation. This was her greatest flaw, she thought, the notion that she took all these celebrity couplings and dismissals seriously. But she also considered this a benign flaw.

Many days, Linda longed for celebrity of her own. She imagined that if people could only appreciate the success of Whatcomesnext they would be writing about the two of them in
Us
or
People.

She was dismayed that the criminal nature of the business prevented them from being famous. It seemed to her that what they did was so much more important than who they did it to, and that there ought to be some exemption. They were the salesmen of fantasy.
That,
she told herself,
ought to be worth something more than money.
They were stars, she believed, but the world didn’t know it.

Michael knew Linda dreamed of prominence. The smart side of him preferred anonymity, although he also wanted to please her in any way he could.

“It’s time to give her something to eat,” he said.

“You or me?” Linda asked.

Michael reached across the bank of computers and shuffled through some loose-leaf papers. It contained a very flexible script. Michael was one for preparation; he had taken the time to write down many of the elements of
Series #4
long before they had started. There were checklists,
to do
details, and lengthy paragraphs on his sheets of paper that he called Impact Viewer/Impact #4. He liked to believe he was meticulous in his planning but that he had the mental agility to create. Once, when he was in college, he’d taken a film studies course and he’d written a paper about the moment in
On the Waterfront
when Eva Marie Saint dropped her white glove and Marlon Brando picked it up and the director, Elia Kazan, had the good sense to keep the cameras rolling through something unscripted, which became a classic moment in cinema.
I would have been the same,
Michael often told himself. He wasn’t the type to yell
Cut!
and retreat into something predictable. He was fluid. And as he looked at the screen in front of him and saw Number 4 clutching her teddy bear and sobbing, he thought that all the great movie directors had nothing on him, because he was sculpting something unique and something real and something far more dramatic and unpredictable than they had ever imagined possible.