Omega The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,95

to deal? That she won’t shoot me again?”

“Yes to the first,” Janus said, “yes to the second, maybe to the third, but I’m indifferent on the outcome of that one.”

There was a lengthy pause. “What makes you so sure she’ll come to us?”

“Because,” Janus said, and there was little satisfaction in it, “she has nowhere else to go.”

28.

Sienna

I stole a car out of the Directorate employees’ lot. It was Zack’s car. I doubted he’d miss it. It rattled a little—the transmission, a small voice told me, one that I didn’t want to think about yet. It carried me down the road though, the old windshield wipers shrugging off the slowly accumulating snow as I drove down U.S. Highway 212 in the middle of the night, the headlights illuminating the snow that was falling ever faster now, little dots of white that flurried past the beams.

It was well after midnight by the time I had managed to peel myself off the snowy ground and get going. Not a single police siren was to be heard, nothing, nada, and no one was around when I came to. No one but him, his body. I didn’t know whether I had fallen asleep or passed out, and I didn’t much care, either. The car smelled like him, and I wanted to burn it, burn me, make one giant funeral pyre and be done with it. But I couldn’t. Not now.

Not yet.

The freeways were starting to get slushy when I hit Eden Prairie and Interstate 494. I followed the road I’d driven a million times in the last year, took Minnesota Highway 62 toward the south side of Minneapolis, then headed up Interstate 35W. I could see the skyline in the distance as I drove, getting closer and closer. The houses grew older as I went, and when I exited in my old neighborhood, I rolled down the window, felt the flash of cold rush into the car, and realized that the cold was like home to me. The snow was insignificant. It covered the ground the first day I left my house, and for the longest time it was my whole world, a snow-covered, frozen-over hell. Let it snow, I thought, let it come down in volume enough to bury me.

I pulled onto my old street, the trees catching the headlights and casting twisted shadows on the walls of the houses as I drove past. Like the shadows from the flames of the campus, they seemed to take on a life of their own, as though they would reach out for me, take hold of me, shake every bit of decency and life out of me until there was nothing left...

Well, they were welcome to try. I suspected there wasn’t much of either remaining, anyway.

I pulled into my driveway and killed the engine, leaving the keys where they were. I didn’t care if someone stole the car. I almost hoped they did, because it smelled like him, and I could hear the engine the way he heard it, could almost taste his kiss again, as I sat in it.

My feet crunched in the first accumulation of snow, one step at a time as I made my way up the walk. I opened the door to the porch and it swung wide, closing behind me. I felt the handle of the door to the interior of the house, remembered my keys had burned in my dorm room, and twisted the lock until I heard it break. I pulled out the guts and used my finger to twist it. It broke the skin, but I didn’t care. A bleeding finger was insignificant compared to the other things that were on my mind.

I opened the door and stood silhouetted in the darkness of the living room. I felt a flash of memory, a thought of his, not mine—of him and Kurt, making their way across this room. Kurt hit the coffee table with his leg, making a noise. I could hear their breathing, steady, the motion, the smell of the outside—my memory now, intersecting with the other. I shook my head, tried to forget it, to put it out of my mind. I closed the door behind me, shrouding the room in darkness.

Darkness. Peace. Quiet. Nothing moved, there was no sound. Bliss.

I looked to the hallway, and I could see my old bedroom from here, remembered I had been lying there when—

I put it out of my mind again, tried to quiet it, to shut it up.