Now for the shower.
I realized two things under the massage of steaming hot water. First one was the fact that I had been real cold until then. Or tense. Or tense from being cold. I felt my body growing, relaxing, swelling with blood, especially the extremities — toes, fingers and so on. The other thing I realized was my stubborn repetition of a phrase “Don’t think of the dogs” in my mind. Although there was no way to be sure, I suspected I had repeated that phrase more than several times since beholding leftovers in the kitchen. So much for speedy recovery.
The good thing was, when I became conscious of my insisting on not thinking about dogs, I stopped insisting it and, eventually, stopped thinking about the dogs.
I went to the bedroom, disconnected the phone, fixed the closet door, which for some reason wouldn’t close, shut the blinds, and slithered under the sheets, intending to take a nap until indefinitely later. “I am back,” I said before closing my eyes.
Chapter Twenty
Brome hugged his little angel gently, wincing from having to bend.
“I missed you, daddy.”
Grace was smiling behind Anna’s back. Brome smiled in return.
“I missed you too. But now I’ll be home for a while.”
“Did you catch the bad guy, then?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Yay!”
“Maybe we’ll go somewhere warm. You want to go to Florida?”
“Disneyworld?”
“Sure, I think we can drop by there.”
“Yay! Are we going today?”
“No, not today. Daddy still has to finish up at the office. Can you wait a couple more days?”
“Thursday?”
“Let’s say Friday, how’s that?”
“Fine.”
“Let’s ask mommy if she’s okay with that.”
“I’d love to,” said Grace.
“Then it’s settled.” Brome clapped his hands, grinning. Suddenly a worried expression came over Anna’s face.
“Daddy?”
“What is it, honey?”
“Are you okay?”
“Am I okay? Of course I’m okay! Why?” Brome glanced at Grace in time to notice a fleeting frown. His daughter was watching his eyes and turned to look at her mother, who was now smiling again. When she faced him again she seemed ready to cry.
“You look like Gumpy again.”
Grace squatted behind her, pulling her close. “Well, of course he does, honey. That’s why we bought Gumpy, remember? Because he looked so much like dad?”
Brome kneeled, taking the girl’s face in his hands. “I though you liked Gumpy, princess.”
She peered at him closely, the pre-crying pucker replaced with seriousness only a child is capable of.
“I do,” she said. “But I like you more.”
Grace went to drop off Anna at the daycare, whispering to him on the way to the door that he should take it easy. The gentle smile, which Brome held on to until the door closed behind his girls, dropped from his face. Suddenly compelled, he hurried to Anna’s room and found the doll clown. Gumpy grinned at him. Gumpy always grinned. Lifting the doll up, Brome went to the mirror. Gumpy had a square face, and so did he, but aside from that Brome failed to detect any resemblance. We’re nothing alike, he thought. I can’t see.
He passed his hand over a sensor to open the drawer and stuffed the clown inside. He looked at himself in the mirror again. “It was you,” he said to his reflection. “It was you who almost got stuffed in the drawer the other night.” Then my baby wouldn’t have the option of choosing between me and Gumpy. But I got the bad guy. Did I get the bad guy? My gun put three bullets in his chest, so I must have, right?
He reached in the pocket of his red pants.
They had disconnected his IV while he was still asleep. Now, almost eight hours later, the medicine was wearing off. Brome knew it was time for the next dose. He wanted nothing more than to take the next dose.
To take it and become normal again. Become Special Agent Gumpy. Like everyone else, only better. Because he would be a regular fed. Or even an exceptional fed. The guy who catches bad guys fast. Like Brighton. He could be better than Brighton even, if he really put an effort. Sky was the limit, if that.
Anna would get used to it soon enough. She was only a four-year-old. It had only been one week. By the time she’s fifteen, she won’t remember a thing of it, he told himself.
And then, when she’s twenty, when she’s halfway through some half-good college, when she gets engaged, or married, or pregnant, she’ll get her own prescription.
He stared in the mirror. “And why the hell not? The world is a fucked up place. We’ll keep it that way for our kids just like our parents kept it for us. It was not our fault, and it won’t be theirs. We couldn’t fix it, but at least, unlike our parents, we invented a pill that will help our children get by. And they will get by. We’re getting by, right? Doing well for ourselves.”
With that he made a round gesture to show his reflection his daughter’s automated room, an adjustable “one size fits all” bed with a neat stack of pink pillows, toys of all shapes and sizes begging to be touched, windows with the weather-sensitive tint, the wallpaper with six different themes available at the push of a button.
The reflection seemed less than impressed. In fact, the guy in the mirror looked pretty sour. “Stop preaching,” he said suddenly. “You want to take it — just take it and feel better.”
Discovering his fingers locked around the small bottle inside the pocket of his favorite pants, which Grace had brought him together with a crisp white t-shirt and matching red jacket to put on at the hospital that morning, Brome pulled his hand out slowly and studied the label. A non-descript sixteen-digit number. A unique, confidential number that wouldn’t mean anything to anybody else. His number.
He pressed the button, releasing the vacuum seal. The bottle hissed open. A small, round pill rolled out into the crease of his palm. With a nod that almost broke his neck, Brome threw the pill into his mouth and ground it into bitter dust. His stomach turned, but he would not go for water. He remained in front of the mirror, chewing and competing in hateful, challenging stares with the guy on the other side.
Chapter Twenty-One
Millard Fillmore, Director of Operations at the Freedom Corp. facility in Long Grove, Illinois, hurried to the helicopter pad on the roof of the seamless obsidian building, dubbed, lovingly, “Freedom’s Tombstone” by the employees, to meet the visitor. It was the 31st of October, a holiday.
There was no sign of a helicopter, which he had expected, uneasily as always, but there was no sign of the visitor either, which lobbed his uneasiness into anxiety half of the field. The north wind blew in jerks and fits, scattering rare clouds this way and that. On the right Millard Fillmore could see the check point: a breach in a twenty-foot-tall black wall, around the top of which a current of electricity lay in ambush like a python, snatching an occasional bird. Useless, he thought, both the wall and the check point. Put a sign “No trespassing. Military Installation.” Stick it on a pole at the branching of the road and no one would approach within a mile. The guards, knowing as much, were probably playing poker in the guardhouse. Or sleeping.
Beyond the wall, brown and yellow hills rolled south, towards the distant spires of the city.
Could have just come down to the office, Millard Fillmore thought bitterly, turning his back to the wind.
“Can’t beat the view here, though,” a woman’s voice said. The Director of Operations turned around slowly, deliberately. The woman looked Asian and wore a red summer dress with spaghetti straps; the skirt flowed in the wind, revealing slightly tanned thighs. Her hair was raven black, short. She would be very much his type — and they knew that — if only she had been human. He shivered, instinctively checking the roof for a helicopter. The woman grinned. Stupid instincts.