The man closest to her target stops in his tracks, still holding a bright bag that probably holds a tent. He stares, then finally shakes free of his shock just as more arrows fly from the trees. His yell is too late. Already those around him are sprouting their own strange flowers.
The battle has begun.
Now
Miranda
She can hear him at his bedroom door. Of course, she can. If he thinks he’s silent and undetected, then he’s delusional. How did Tom become this strange heavy-breathing weirdo when he’d started out as such a nice man? He’s the same genteel man in front of her, but at night there’s that heavy breathing and the shadow of his feet under his door.
At the midpoint on the stairs, she stops and strains her ears to listen, trying to still the thundering heartbeat in her ears. She’s been making this same trek every night for the past three weeks. Cilla hasn’t visited again, and she’s worried that somehow George has found out Miranda knows what’s going to happen to her. If that information has slipped, then Tom knows too. And if he knows, then she’s running out of time.
All Miranda can do now is hang onto the hope that he isn’t aware of her knowledge. She’s sure that if he did know, she’d already be sporting a nice scar on her own skull and missing a few billion neural connections.
Still, every day that passes brings that day closer. This repeated path up and down the stairs at night is meant to throw Tom off, but also get him used to the idea that she does it. Eventually, she won’t return. Instead, she’ll walk out the door, get into the car, and be gone.
That won’t happen until she gets the keys. And it turns out getting those keys is a lot harder than she thought it would be. How had she never noticed how closely Tom guards his keys? How had something so essential and obvious escaped her? But it had and he does. They are in his pocket unless he’s in his room. For all Miranda knows, he keeps them in a pocket even when he sleeps.
And tonight she’s no closer to figuring out how to get those car keys than she was the day she started this. Her trip down the stairs is just a reinforcement of her new pattern. She’ll stay down there one minute longer than she did last night. When the big day comes, she needs as many minutes as possible before he comes looking.
At the bottom of the stairs, the cold floor makes her toes curl, but she manages to remain silent. It’s important that she does. This pattern will only work for her if she can make it so that Tom doesn’t rely on noise to confirm she’s still in the house. He has to trust that she will make this trip in the night and that, at some point, she’ll return to her room. That’s all.
She’ll need all the time she can get, because Tom won’t come looking alone. It will take nothing more than a phone call to bring all of Tom’s fellow lobotomy-giving friends out to join the search party. If there’s one thing that gives her a bigger case of the creepy-crawlies than Tom, it’s the idea of all his creepy friends. It still amazes her that her feelings about him could alter so drastically in only the amount of time it took Cilla to utter a single sentence.
No matter how much they think they’re trying to help, trying to keep women they care for alive, and trying to save some chunk of humanity from extinction, there’s nothing that will redeem him. Butchery is not help. Removal of her essential self so that she can withstand any horror and not die is not help. There are no words that can turn such horrors into something good.
Miranda grits her teeth as she tiptoes across the cold kitchen floor toward the window. She pushes aside the curtain and looks out. The sky is overcast again, so the stars are no help. Not that she really knows them. She might be able to find something she recognizes though. Orion’s belt? Does that point somewhere specific? It’s pointless and she knows it.
The surroundings are not pointless to examine though. There’s a faint gleam of light in the distance and she’s sure now that this is the town where Tom goes for his shopping and services. That means she needs to go in a different direction. She needs to find a different town, one where a woman showing up at a police station to say she wants government care won’t likely meet up with a member of the lobotomy group. That would be bad.
But where? Where is the next town? Where’s the damned highway? Do they even have freeways out in this rural place or is it all little roads like they always show on movies about the countryside in Britain? She’d be more likely to roll down the wrong person’s driveway if that’s the case.
The car gleams dully, dotted with raindrops from an earlier shower. It’s right there, so close. It would take all of twenty seconds to reach it from the door. It might as well be the moon. It’s too new for any misguided attempts at hotwiring, which she has only ever seen on television.
Glancing at the clock, Miranda knows she needs to kill another three and
