Movie Daniel to the set, please.
This was something he could think about forever. It was all he wanted to think about. The twists and turns of the craving. The structure of it was unbearably interesting, like a secret molecular formula scrawled across a chalkboard, and if he refused to get high, then he would at the very least examine every inch of the craving and make it his own.
He waved a hand in front of his face. Emojis wisped away like smoke. They annoyed him, he decided. Irritability was a symptom of withdrawal, sure, but swimming in emojis was legitimately irritating. The novelty had worn off.
“That’s enough, Otto!” The emoji storm persisted. “Never have I ever wanted to drown in chat symbols!” Nothing happened. He screamed above the heavy metal din for William to give Otto the command.
William’s voice called out, “Kill the emojis, Otto.”
The maelstrom vanished in an instant. Daniel took a moment to adjust to the car’s normal state and realized something was wrong. There were three passengers, not four. That vague sense of nausea hit him with queasy force.
Melissa was gone.
The gaunt man had a gun. He kept it pointed at her face.
She was perversely grateful for this. In some crazy way, it was better than his long fingers digging into the flesh of her arm. Her sense of terror was in constant revision, the clench and release of a massive fist squeezing her chest.
She was standing in what had once been a spacious living room separated from the kitchen by a wall of vertical two-by-fours. Smoke-yellowed shades covered the front window. Black sheets were thumbtacked over the rest. At her back was a sagging couch, its corduroy upholstery studded with cigarette burns like an epidemic of blackheads. She hadn’t been forced to sit on the couch, and that was a small victory.
She would stay on her feet at all costs.
The only other piece of furniture was a plain office desk cluttered with laptops, hard drives, speakers, monitors, game controllers, printers, a dozen phones. At least one of the monitors was functional. Melissa’s posts tiled the screen. The sight of it made her sick.
Junk from the kitchen spilled through the ruined wall: empty plastic watercooler jugs daisy-chained with thick tubes and duct tape, bulbous glass beakers and flasks protruding from big white buckets. The doorless cabinets were stuffed with bottles in the shape of her father’s beer growlers and plastic containers labeled HEET. The walls might once have been white, but now they wore a sticky coat of residue the color of cockroach wings.
The stench of cat pee brought tears to her eyes.
Melissa did not like looking at the gaunt man, but it was better than looking at the second man. The second man skulked about the kitchen with the contents of her purse arrayed on the counter by a sink piled high with crusty dishes. Watching his hands paw her possessions was revolting.
Lipstick, foundation, tampons, hairpins, stain stick, a Harvard Law key chain from Emily.
The gaunt man had a catatonic stillness about him, but she could see his heart pounding in his bare chest. His skin was pulled tight over his bones. Tattoos had been scrawled across his body with no particular scheme in mind. Most resembled blue-black stains or sorry attempts at skulls, but there was a large swastika just above his belly button, and various designs of the number 88 speckling his chest.
The gaunt man shot her a gap-toothed grin, and she forced herself to meet his eyes, pressing her knees together to keep them from buckling.
“Welcome to the center of the web, girl.” He had a thin, reedy voice. He wasn’t any taller than she was—a wisp of a human being. Smoke made flesh.
Her knees seemed to vanish completely at the way he said girl, and she struggled to hold herself up.
“Serena!” the second man called jovially from the kitchen. “Your voice is like nails on a chalkboard, and you’re making our guest uncomfortable.”
The gaunt man’s eyes blinked rapidly. “Don’t call me that, Everett. I told you before, I don’t like being called that.”
There was a clattering noise from the kitchen, and Melissa forced herself to look. The second man—Everett—was well into middle age. He wore an Arizona Cardinals cap, glasses, and a short-sleeved collared shirt. He looked like he could be one of her father’s golfing buddies.
Ash Granger. How could she have fallen for such bullshit? Start-up capital. Serena Klein. Sending him pictures of her designs. FUCK.
Tears came to her eyes that had nothing to do with the stench in the house.
Everett swept the contents of her purse, along with the purse itself, into a big gray garbage bin. He held her phone, examining it carefully. He looked toward the desk, seemed to think better of it, and turned a dial on the stove. Blue flame engulfed a burner. He placed the phone in the fire. After a few seconds, it began to crackle. He left it smoking on the stove and walked into the living room.
“So. Melissa Faber. I know this isn’t the kind of business meeting you were expecting, and for that I apologize, but I’m really confident that we can still come to some sort of agreement.” The voice that had sounded so eager and hopeful on the phone now turned her spine to ice. “There’s always plenty of room for negotiation.”
“My friends know where I am,” she said.
The gaunt man laughed, a raspy chuckle. Everett raised an eyebrow at Melissa. “Cat got your tongue?”
She realized with a wave of humiliation and despair that her words had barely been audible. She swallowed a dry lump and tried again. “My friends know where I am and they’re gonna call the cops if I’m not out that door in thirty seconds.”
“Then I guess things are about to get pretty interesting,” Everett said. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
The gaunt man
