She swallowed and tried to work up the courage to fall on him, to stick her thumbs in his eye sockets, rake her nails down his throat, knee him in the balls. The thought of the violence was so seductive that she was actually stayed from moving, surprised at her id’s ardor.
But then she embraced it, with a predator’s grin. She heard herself panting. Now she would do it. Her father understood, she saw it in his eyes. He was scared. The predator rose. She would enjoy this.
One step. Two steps.
A hand on her arm. Strong. A man’s hand, squeezing so hard she gasped, then the needle in her elbow. She turned and saw the man, not big, shorter than her, but with a face like a stone and a bull’s neck. Then she see didn’t anything else.
[iii]
She was certain she was still in the house. You couldn’t fake the smell. But it looked like a hospital room. The door had no handle or inset panel, just some kind of invisible sensor that chose who passed. This hospital bed was bigger, cruder, and she was—she squirmed her hips—she was plumbed into it. There was an IV in her wrist, and a sense of fuzzy well-being she knew couldn’t be endogenous. She wondered what was in the IV bag. She’d have loved some Meta right now.
She was in four-point restraint, with an extra band around her forearm to keep the IV firmly seated.
She supposed it was a suicide attempt. The idea wasn’t very disturbing. Her sorrow was a distant moon orbiting her psyche far away, visible but ultimately exerting only the mildest of tides.
“Now what?” Her voice was thick, her mouth pasty. If there was saline in the bag, it wasn’t keeping her hydrated. It was like someone had dumped a tablespoon of hydrophilic shipping gel-pellets in her mouth, drying it to the texture of old roadkill.
She willed the door to open, thinking of the days she’d spent in isolation in the other room, wondering if they’d leave her, a tube going in and tubes going out, a brain inextricably tethered to inconvenient meat, easily coerced, thanks to its ridiculous frailties.
Had they had this room ready all along, as plan B? Or had she been kept unconscious while they refitted a room to make it secure?
A nurse came through the door, wearing hospital whites and wheeling a cart. He stood beside the bed.
“Hello,” she said.
He stared at her consideringly, then pulled out the cart’s trays, pointed a thermometer in her ear, fit a pressure cuff to her arm. He flipped back the blanket and impersonally hiked up her gown, accessing a small box taped over her hip that she hadn’t known was there.
“Why doesn’t all that stuff come with remote telemetry? If you’re going to pretend I don’t exist, why not get transmissions in another room, spare yourself the social awkwardness?”
He was good at ignoring her. He checked her catheter, so mechanically that she felt anger instead of humiliation, which was, in its way, a mercy. What an asshole.
“I know there are cameras recording, but at least tip me a wink. Don’t nurses have to take a vow? An oath? Are you a nurse? Maybe you’re a ‘med-tech.’ Did you flunk out of nursing school and get the version that doesn’t come with the Florence Nightingale training?”
Taunting him wasn’t satisfying, and her mouth was so, so dry.
“How about a drink? Water? Juice?”
He had a hose with a sponge tip. He pulled off the sheets and threw them into a basket in the cart’s base, revealing a rubbery under-sheet. Working with that same impersonal efficiency, he gave her a quick sponge bath, hose in one hand and a small hydrophilic towel in the other, stopping after each limb to wring the cloth into his cart. From her distant mental vantage point, Natalie admired the cart and wondered who its primary market was—people with loony old relatives locked up in attics?
He did her face and ears with wipes in sterile packaging, like the guys at the detailing place working squeegees over the windscreen of her dad’s cars. The fact that it was done by humans was a selling point. All the places her dad used had “bespoke” or “hand-wash” or “artisanal” in their names, sometimes all three. She smelled the nurse, soap with a bit of sweat, saw some stubble under his left ear. There was one point where she could have kissed him. Or bit him.
When he was done, he packed up his tray, tugged her clothes into place, and replaced the sheets. He fished under the bed for a flexi-hose with a bite-down nipple on the end. He pulled off lengths of surgical tape and taped it to her collarbone and cheek, so she could turn her head and drink. She could have bitten off a fingertip, but didn’t. He packed his things and left. The door sighed shut and clicked, then clunked, a reminder that it had serious locking stuff. It sounded like the second clunk came through the floor, like the door had a set of pins that penetrated it.
She realized where she was: her dad’s panic room. It had independent, redundant network connections, power backups, food and water stashes, a whole armory. It wasn’t like her dad to tell other people about the panic room—she’d never seen it and knew that opening it would set off alarms all over town. Her dad made sure she knew, just in case she got the idea of throwing a party there.
Dad must’ve built himself a better bolt-hole—he’d mused about one in a second subbasement, bored out beneath the house using a super-covert drill that his zotta buddy had used to turn the plot under his estate into a bat-cave. It sent Dad into ecstasies of jealousy. There’s no way he’d let Mr. Not-a-Nurse into this place if it was still the secret he’d bet his life on. Unless he planned to off all the staff once he’d brainwashed her and entomb them within the reinforced walls, like a pharaoh’s tomb-builders.
These thoughts produced seven minutes’ worth of distraction. When they were exhausted, she was alone with her situation. Thinking of Gretyl made her cry with desire and loneliness. There were thoughts about her father and sister. Hadn’t her father said her mother was on her way? Was she here? She had her own floor on the adults’ side of the house. It hadn’t been occupied often, but when it was, the house’s affect changed. The whole household was alive to the possibility of their mercurial mistress doing one of her patented Valkyrie numbers.
She chased the tail of her thoughts in ever-tighter spirals. It was a desperate place. Visit it enough and it might drive you to suicide.
“Fuck it,” she said aloud. “Brainwashing, rubber hoses, deprogramming, all that Patty Hearst stuff.” She’d learned about Hearst, the poor little rich girl who’d carried a gun with her kidnappers, after Gretyl joked about it. She’d been offended, but then adopted the girl as a totem. Hearst was an idiot, but at least she wasn’t just another rich asshole.