Authors: Alex Ziebart
“Actually, that would be useful.”
Kristen peered at her. “Excuse me?”
“Kevlar?”
Kristen rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Did he have an ID in his wallet or not?”
Jane gestured for Kristen to follow and led her back into the living room. She picked up the wallet from the coffee table and tossed it to her. Kristen caught it—a thick, beast of a wallet—and flipped it open to look for the ID. The sight of a driver’s license made her break into a mad grin. “Holy shit, my scheme actually worked.”
“It did. Well done.” Jane picked a tablet up off of the floor beside the recliner. She rattled off the information while Kristen read it from the driver’s license. “Todd Schumacher. Six foot four, 220 pounds. Green eyes. Brown hair. Born October 1985. Not an organ donor. Married with three children. Triplets. Fertility treatment gone awry. I’d say something like
poor bastard
, but I feel worse for his wife.”
Kristen glanced up, brow high. “I don’t think that last part is on his ID.”
“Nope. I went digging online while you were asleep. He doesn’t put much about himself on the Internet, but his wife Katy does it for him.” Jane passed the tablet over to Kristen. An open document presented endless details of Todd Schumacher and his family. “The guy’s had an awful run of bad luck. Laid off four times in three years. First time was a month before his kids were born. Electrician to construction to cable installation to spring seasonal at a home improvement shop. Now he’s working as what his wife calls an independent contractor, but I think he mows lawns and paints fences for a few bucks an hour.”
“Jesus.” Kristen blew out a breath. “Can’t blame him for getting desperate.”
“And it isn’t a coincidence he turned up in the parking lot where you work. The two of you live less than five miles apart, and the Temple branch where I set you up is right in the middle. He has a house in a quiet little cul-de-sac nearby. Even if his address wasn’t on his driver’s license, his wife has posted geotagged pictures of their house.”
Kristen laid the tablet on the coffee table with a grimace. “I really can’t handle the creepiness levels lately. You can’t just steal this guy’s information off of the Internet.”
“Kris, you stole his wallet.”
Somehow, it felt different to her. Kristen wasn’t sure if she was only trying to justify her choices or not, but making a snap decision so they could find the man later seemed downright heroic, good judgment in a tense moment. What Jane was doing seemed more like harassment than heroism.
Jane went on. “Anyway, given your description of what he can do, he sounds like he could’ve been the guy who stole that ring. But the message in the box sounded personal, and I’ve never met him before. Are you feeling better now that you’ve eaten?”
“A bit, yeah. Why?”
“Think you’re up for paying a visit to Todd’s place?”
Suspicion coiled in Kristen’s chest, and she couldn’t keep the skepticism from her voice. “And when we get there, we do what?”
Todd knew about Temple. Not only did he know about them, he hated—or feared—them. Obviously, they’d done something to him. What that something was, she had no idea. A friendly job offer didn’t seem likely. What was the plan, then? Take him down? Drag him in for Temple’s benefit? Interrogation? Torture?
“That’s up to you.”
Kristen jolted at the response. “Really?”
Jane gathered her things. “Yep. I told you, this kind of thing isn’t my specialty. Temple picked you to be the face of what you are. That entails more than being on the news. The way we met wasn’t the best, I know. If you have a better method, this is your chance to practice. This is your job now. You’re the recruiter.”
“So you want me to recruit him?”
“I said that’s up to you, and I meant it.”
“And where are you going?”
“I’m going to check if Temple actually knows anything about this guy.”
“Should we do that first?”
“I don’t know how long it’s going to take. Safety is our first priority. His safety, his family’s safety, and the public’s safety. We can’t drag our feet. So if you’re up to it, get moving.” Jane heaved a duffel bag onto her shoulder. “There’s change of clothes for you in the back room. I think it’s your last set of black, so try not to ruin it. The car keys are back there, too.”
Kristen winced at the thought of ruining another set of gym clothes. Jane was right; she’d be down to her last set of black. After that, all she had left was pink, and pink didn’t seem very heroic. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“I’ll call you with any updates.”
With that, Jane left. Minutes later, Kristen was on the road.
She flipped through radio stations as she drove and couldn’t find a single station playing music.
“Have you seen the footage? It looked like something straight from a movie set. Personally, I think it’s a load of crap. We’re all being had.”
She changed the station.
“This Maiden Milwaukee chick went from hero to menace overnight. The entire town was in an uproar when the police chief called her dangerous, but he’s having the last laugh.”
She changed it again.
“The scene of the crime was downright satanic, wasn’t it? Blood, guts, and naked bodies all over the highway. It’s sickening. That’s the only way I can describe. Sickening. What was she doing out there?”
Another change.
“I’m not still not convinced she’s some murderer. Come on, did nobody see that truck? This woman risked getting gunned down to save these cops’ lives. I think she got set up. There’s no other explanation. Why would she murder that many people in the middle of the highway and then stop to help the police, especially after their boss called her a dangerous vigilante?”
Kristen turned off the radio and took slow, calming breaths. Her chest shuddered with each exhale. At the next red light, she grabbed her phone, plugged it into the auxiliary jack, and hit play on her Happy Thoughts Workout playlist. The very moment the music started, she danced in her seat, mouthing along to Kimbra’s “Cameo Lover.”
This is nonstop baby, you’ve got me going crazy, you’re heavier than I knew.
Kristen glanced out her window. The guy in the next car over stared at her. She stuck her tongue out at him and threw her shoulders into the dance. Whatever concern she had for the world melted away.
But I don’t want no other, you’re my cameo lover, only here for a moment or two.
As she drove, her playlist cycled through Kimbra, Salt-N-Pepa, and the Spice Girls. She rolled down the window, turned up the volume, and let “Wannabe” drown out everything else. By the time she pulled into the cul-de-sac and found Todd’s address, she didn’t think she’d ever felt better. She stowed her blonde wig under the car seat and climbed out.
Would someone see her? Write down the license number? Call the cops?
Kristen paused at the curb. Todd’s house looked television perfect: bigger than it needed to be, but not so big as to be ostentatious, with well-trimmed bushes beneath a large living room window, its white curtains drawn. Everything appeared perfectly maintained, nothing out of place. Even the lawn had been recently mowed—and watered. While the summer heat had fried neighboring lawns to straw yellow, Todd’s lawn as was green as she’d ever seen.
Three kids. Laid off four times.
He probably has nothing better to do than keep his house in good shape, but Jesus, how can he afford it in the first place?
She realized that might have been a damn good question. How did he afford it? Maybe he didn’t. Maybe that was the whole problem. Bernice was borderline neurotic about her finances. She’d bought a house young, thanks in part to Otherworlds’ success and her parents. Bernice had been working at her parents’ restaurant since she was fourteen years old. Every dime of her meager earnings over ten years went to opening her store, buying a house, and smoking cigarettes. Even so, Bernice said time and time again: if Otherworlds went tits up, she’d lose the house practically overnight.
For their generation, foreclosure was the name of the beast. You could do everything right, but the devil was always lurking around the next corner.
Kristen approached the house. The storm door was closed, but the inner door stood wide open. She peeked through the screen into the foyer where the typically feminine and the typically masculine lived side-by-side: arrangements of plastic, pastel flowers and ceramic kitties atop a lace doily on a well-beaten end table that would have looked more at home in a cabin up north, and a mounted buck’s head on the wall between two store-bought painting of potted roses. She could imagine the argument about that buck’s head.
Kristen gathered her nerves and knuckled the doorbell. No fingerprints.
She waited and listened. No one answered the door. She didn’t even hear voices or movement. With three toddlers, surely there should have been some noise. Again, she rang the doorbell. Nothing.
Not home?
She scanned the foyer again and saw shoes: a pair of lilac slip-ons and three pairs of children’s sneakers. If they were out, they would be wearing them.
Right? Maybe they just had a lot of shoes.
Kristen tested the storm door. It opened. She stepped into the foyer. “Hello?”
Nothing.
She ventured further into the house, stepping into a darkened living room, simultaneously rustic and floral. “Is anybody home? Todd? It’s uh…Maiden Milwaukee or whatever. I just want to know you’re okay.”
Nothing.
Kristen walked through on tiptoes. She tried to put herself in a detective’s mindset, wondering what they’d do on television—or in her comic books. Convincing herself the shoes were a sign of something, she looked for anything else out of place. The throw pillows matching the couch were on floor, which she supposed wasn’t too strange. Any house she’d ever seen with throw pillows, the damn things were constantly ending up on the floor. The living room’s tasseled rug was a mess, though, half-flipped, scrunched, and shoved out of place. Did someone slip, or trip?
She peered into the kitchen. Broken plates on the linoleum, a meat cleaver among the shards. No blood, though. That, at least, was a good sign.
Telltale buzzing alerted her to a cellphone nearby. She scanned the kitchen and spotted it facedown on the table, the imitation rhinestones stuck all over its case sparkling in the light as if screaming, “Look at me! I’m important!”
Kristen took it. The phone’s screen announced dozens of phone calls and text messages, the most recent of which had been sent hours earlier. Hours. No one in the modern age left their cell phone for hours. If you forgot it, it was the sort of thing you’d go back to get, even if you were only going to be gone for a little while.
She tapped the text message alert to open them. The phone switched to a password screen, a numpad with a connect-the-dots style password.
She’d had a phone with that style of password once. She’d always hated it; connect-the-dot passwords felt far less secure than punching in four numbers. Four numbers could be any combination. Connect-the-dots limited the possibilities: the numbers in the sequence always had to be adjacent to one another.
Kristen chewed her lip and tried her old password. Starting at 7, she slid her finger through 7-8-5-4.
Wrong.
9-8-5-6.
Wrong.
1-2-5-4.
The text messages opened. Kristen pumped her fist. “I’m a fucking genius.”
The messages brought her back down to earth. With the exception of one or two innocuous messages from friends or family, Todd had sent almost all of them. They were short, frantic, and concerned.
Please answer me
and
where are you
and
I’m serious, tell me if you’re okay
.
Kristen formed the scene in her mind. The changelings get into his house, either invited or uninvited, and they try to grab him or his family. Either they want him or something he has, so maybe he tried to lure them away from his family by running. He runs, gets tired, steals a car, and tries to lose them at the highway. With Kristen’s help, he escapes and goes into hiding while trying to contact his wife.
“Except she isn’t here,” she spoke aloud. “So either they ran, too, or the changelings grabbed them. And their shoes are still in the foyer, which means they got grabbed.”
She stared again at the phone in her hand. Should she call him?
No. Not from his wife’s phone.
Seeing her number would get his hopes up—it seemed like a Jane thing to do. She felt bad for thinking it, especially because Jane usually seemed to mean well. Jane was just…rough.
Kristen knew how it felt when Jane played rough, though. She pulled her burner from her pocket, transferred Todd’s number, and dialed.
Voicemail.
Hi, this is Todd. I’m not available right now. If you’re calling to get some work done, include the nature of the work in your message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks.
Kristen affected the most chipper voice she could manage. “Hey, Todd! We met last night. I was wondering, do you have any PR experience? Helping you out didn’t do my public image any favors. Whatever’s going on, maybe I can help. Even if you did try running me over with a truck.”
She hung up and took stock of the phones in her possession: her phone, the phone from Jane, and Todd’s wife’s phone. She packed them into her pockets one at a time—not an easy task, given the size of women’s pockets—and saved hers for last. Sure, she was intruding on the home of a family potentially abducted by evil shapeshifters from the mythical lost continent of Mu, but checking her text messages was extremely important.
“Oh, shit.” Kristen cursed under her breath. She stared at the unanswered message from the night before. “You give the guy your number and never answer him? Poor form, Kris.”
Jack’s message simply read
Hey.
Kristen tapped out her reply.
Hey! Sorry I’m slow, been a crazy day.
Before she could get the phone into her pocket, it buzzed a reply.
No problem! Sorry it’s been nuts. Slow for me. Doing anything tonight?