The Extraction List (13 page)

I tiptoed between the rows of desks, being careful not to hit any of their legs with my feet. The cabinet was a dark gray metal, and I stared at it long and hard, trying to figure out how to open it without its drawers clanging and giving me away. It seemed to look back at me, daring me to press on. My fingers gently touched the handle, and I inhaled as I found the strength to pull.

The same hand that had covered my mouth earlier sealed it again, and I found myself trapped in Harlow’s arms once more. I kicked at the file cabinet, but he swung me around and my legs ended up smashing into several desks instead. He somehow managed to fold my own arms around my stomach like a strait-jacket. Warm air drifted across my cheek when he leaned in and whispered in my ear.

“Shhh…”

I
started drowning. Of course I’d never drowned before, but it felt like how I imagined drowning would feel like: the ticking clock, the crushing feeling on my chest, the realization that I only had seconds to make the right decisions at exactly the right time or it would be all over and I would be lost.

His body stole my air. I thrashed around as hard as I could, but I only managed to move one arm from his tight grasp. I tried to recall flashes of moments where Mom and I took a self-defense class. Key words surged through my mind. Eyes. Throat. Nose. Groin. Though our instructors never actually had us practice trying to hit those sweet spots with a two-hundred-pound man on top of us.

Mom, where are you?

I used the arm I managed to break free to reach over and swept a lamp onto the floor with a loud smash. I hoped it was loud enough to signal to the others that I was in trouble. But I was swallowed back up. And my body was losing strength by the second.

Please help me…

Lying face up on his blankets, even in the darkness I could see the glossy rage in his eyes. His dry, cracked hand fumbled at my zipper while he kept the other glued over my mouth, and he threw the weight of his body on top of me so I couldn’t move. I dug my fingernails as hard as I could into the hand that tried to undress me, but it kept coming. I tried so hard, but I couldn’t breathe. My muscles ached. My knee found his groin, but what I wanted to be a swift strike came out a soft tap. His eyes hardened with every breath, and the heat from his lungs burned my skin. Muffled words escaped his lips. Nothing that I could understand. Thank God.

It’s over…I’m gone…

I almost didn’t hear the crack from Jordyn’s gun. The only thing I felt was the tickling of concrete dust sprinkling down onto my face from where the bullet entered the wall above our heads. “Get the fuck off of her. Now!” Jordyn grabbed Harlow by the shirt and pulled him off of me with one hand while keeping her gun aimed square at his head with the other.

The pattering of footsteps echoed in the hallway, and moments later Cain, Mom, and Bo entered the room. The door smashed into the wall with a loud bang from the force of Cain’s hand. They only had to look at me, still frozen on the blanket, jeans half opened, to realize what had happened. Bo charged at Harlow, knocking him to the ground, smashing his head on a desk along the way. But that was nothing compared to the blows Bo gave to Harlow’s head once he landed on the floor. It seemed to bounce from fist to fist, blood exploding with each contact.

Mom came over to me, tears already flowing. “Oh my God, baby, are you okay?” She grabbed my face, pushing my hair out of my eyes. “Did he…?”

I didn’t make her say it out loud. “No…Jordyn came in time.” I buried my face in Mom’s shirt. No tears came, but my body trembled and I worried I would be unable to stand.

While cradling me in her arms, Mom spoke to Jordyn. “Thank you. Thank you more than I can ever tell you.”

I looked up just long enough to see Jordyn smile bleakly back at me.

“I’m just glad I had to pee.”

Cain pulled Bo off Harlow, but not before his face had turned into a swollen, puffy mess. “What are you doing?” Bo asked, wiping the blood from his hands. “I’m going to kill him.”

Cain calmly spoke. “No, you’re not.”

Bo kicked a desk in response. “Fuck you I’m not!”

“We need some information from this man.” Cain reached his hand to his leg and pulled out one of his knives, then looked right at my mom. “And I am going to get it.”

Mom reached out and ran her finger down the blade.

Bo looked at Mom’s face as she inspected Cain’s knife. “Okay.”

Cain guided everyone toward the door, but Mom hesitated. “Claire, you don’t want to see this.”

Mom looked Cain square in his eyes. “Yes. I do.”

She didn’t blink.

Despite Mom’s best efforts, she couldn’t argue when Cain said that I needed her more than she needed to be there for Harlow’s “questioning.” So the four of us went back to the room where we had been sleeping. I crawled in Mom’s bed with her like I used to, back when I was younger and not too proud to admit I had nightmares. I didn’t imagine this nightmare would ever go away though. Not completely.

The school creaked. And every time a sound snapped through the air, my heart sped up and Harlow’s face appeared again in my mind. It didn’t matter if the sound came from Mom shifting her weight on the bed or a tree hitting the roof outside. Every single time, I shuddered and I was back on top of Harlow’s blankets, with his face hovering over me. His eyes had glazed over, like someone possessed. Maybe he was.

From that moment on, I believed in demons. I’d always been more of an if-you-can’t-see-it-it-isn’t-real type of person, but not after that night. I HAD seen it. Harlow’s eyes were real. Harlow’s breath was real.

And Jordyn getting out of bed at exactly the right time was real too.

Bo sank down on the bed across from us, his head in his hands. “I’m sorry, Riley. I’m so sorry. That never should have happened. This whole thing has been one disaster after another. I should have never gotten you into this.”

I just huddled there. I tried to open my mouth, but words just wouldn’t form.

Mom spoke for me. “Bo, you didn’t get us into anything. You saved us from never seeing each other again. I owe you everything.”

“Claire, I…” Bo stopped. “Thank you for saying that.”

Jordyn couldn’t sit still and walked from one end of the room to the other, arms folded tightly across her chest. She was probably hoping Harlow didn’t bleed to death before he told Cain where the files were. The longer he was gone, the more likely that seemed.

Finally, Cain opened the door. His clothes looked exactly the same as they had before, except for a small red mark on the bottom of his shirt. His hands glistened with water; freshly washed, of course. “I know where the files are.”

We practically ran toward the kitchen, the last place that I would have thought the files would be, which made it the perfect place. As we went, I asked Cain where Harlow was.

“He won’t hurt you again.”

I believed him.

But I still heard Harlow’s whisper in my ear, and felt his breath on my cheek.

Jordyn and Cain arrived at the kitchen drawer before the rest of us and threw the files open on top of a nearby table. One large file held a collection of smaller files, all thin with only a few sheets of paper between their folds. I peeked around Cain’s arm to see. Bo hung back behind us.

Papers flew out in a fan, and pictures of children looked back at us: an African-American girl with long wavy hair, a white boy with big blue eyes. Not a smile among them. The papers each had one photo of a child, as well as basic information: hair color, eye color, where they were born. Someone had stuck a little colored dot in the corner of each sheet too: red, green, blue, yellow, and orange. “What are the dots for?” I asked.

“I have no idea, but it has to say somewhere.” Jordyn took each paper out of the file one by one, frantically searching for her brothers. “Where…are…they?” With each word, she slammed down another paper that disappointed her. When she was almost through all the small files, I noticed something written on the larger file itself, peeking out from behind the smaller files. I managed to push past Cain and slid the larger file out from the pile.

The colored dots were there again, except this time, each had a country written next to it, except for one: Ireland, Italy, China, and Kenya. The last dot, the orange one, had the word “adopted” written in red next to it. “It’s a key!” Everyone turned and looked at me. “Look! Each color stands for a country! Red is Ireland. Italy’s green, blue China, and Kenya’s yellow. And the orange dot means they got adopted. This has to be where they got sent to!” I was proud that I figured it out, but Mom snatched the file from my grasp, frowning at me.

“This can’t be. It just can’t. The children are supposed to stay here. There’s no reason why that would change. It just can’t be right.” She looked at Bo. “This can’t be right, can it? Tell me she’s wrong. Please. You would have told me before, wouldn’t you?”

Silence.

“Bo, what? Please tell me! Say something!” I wasn’t used to Mom begging. It didn’t suit her.

Bo found a chair and sat down, eyes never leaving the floor. “It was supposed to be for the parents. Just some of them, not all of them. The ones whose kids got taken away for something non-criminal, like being out of work for more than a year. Those parents were supposed to be able to let their children go overseas and possibly earn enough money to allow the parents to get them back. Some of the advisors presented the plan to President Gray as a way to help thin out the overcrowded boarding schools and help the parents at the same time.”

“Wait, the children were supposed to make money so they could go home?” Mom sifted through the children’s profiles. “Jennifer, ten…Kyle, eight…Zachary, twelve? They’re just babies! This wasn’t supposed to be for profit!”

Jordyn and Cain looked at Bo. “Go on,” Jordyn said.

“I swear to you, Claire, I thought it would just be a few. Only for a little while. I didn’t know they’d extend it to so many. But that has to be where they are. The country’s gone broke and there’s just no money anywhere anymore. Look at this place. It’s a box. It would make sense that they started shipping the children off. Everybody panicked.”

“But why? What monsters would take CHILDREN?”

“Think about it. All those people that died after the plague? Those are the countries that haven’t recovered yet. Meaning they need workers. And we needed a way to clean up the mess Gray made of this whole thing.” Tears slid from his eyes.

Mom took deep, fast breaths. “What about the last category? The orange ones. Adopted? By whom?”

Bo got up and paced around the kitchen, still avoiding all our eyes.

“ANSWER ME!!!”

Bo grabbed a pan and threw it across the room, smashing it into a bunch of canisters that sat on the counter. The room exploded in a cloud of sugar and flour. “The new thing for rich foreigners now is to adopt from overseas. From America. They pay the government massive amounts of money and they get a glamorous American child. That’s how they got rid of the babies.”

Mom fell at Bo’s feet. I brushed my own cheek with my fingertips and realized tears were leaking from my own eyes too. I knew he didn’t mean his words to come out the way they did. I knew he was hurting too. Tears don’t lie. But how could he have seen any children, no matter if it was a big number or small number, being exported and not say anything? One of my favorite lines from one of Mom’s speeches went something like this: “The greatest villains are good people who see a problem and do nothing.” I guessed that made Bo the greatest villain of all.

I looked over at Cain and Jordyn, and they just stood there silently. Even Jordyn, who had brothers missing, had nothing to say. Mom wept. I could hardly understand what she was saying, except, “They’re gone! How do we help them now?”

On my way over to sit beside my mother, I accidentally stepped on some of the papers with children’s photos on them that had scattered across the floor. It seemed disrespectful to just leave them there, so I gently gathered them up into a pile. I almost missed her as I shoved one unruly paper down neatly in the middle of the pile. I whipped it back out just in time. A pretty girl with long dark hair stared back at me. A green dot sat in the corner of her sheet. “Olivia! Mom, it’s Olivia! They took her to Italy!”

Mom peeled herself off the floor and came toward me. She tore the paper from my hands, and the sobbing that had been coming in sputters now escaped her mouth in waves. “Oh my God, honey, I’m so sorry! I thought I was saving her. I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”

I smiled and hugged my mother. “Don’t be sorry, Mom. This is a good thing!”

Mom looked at me quizzically. “Why would this be a good thing? She’s across the world.”

I looked up at her, my arms still wrapped tightly around her waist. “Because now we know where she is…now we can find her.” I glanced at Cain. “Maybe not today, but now we can find her.”

Mom squeezed me tighter.

I looked over at Jordyn. She smiled at me, but her eyes quickly gazed toward the floor. I wished she had been as lucky as me. “We’ll find them, Jordyn. I promise. If I got lucky, you can get lucky too. You’ll see.”

Cain wrapped Jordyn in his arms and gave me a wink over her shoulder. He mouthed the words, “Thank you.” Maybe she thought I was just trying to make her feel better, but I truly believed I was right. I think Cain did too.

When we returned to the truck, Mom and Bo sat on the tailgate and stared up at the stars. Bo tried to put his arms around her, but she scooted away. I was surprised she even wanted to sit next to him. I didn’t even look at him. They were supposed to be partners, a team that got one of the most significant bills in history signed into existence. They were supposed to share everything. Maybe for Bo that stopped after President Gray signed his name.

Jordyn slept soundly. Despite saving me from a near-rape and finding out her brothers could be long out of the country, she slept as if she didn’t have a care in the world. If only all of us could have done the same.

Cain inspected the truck to make sure that it was ready for the rough road ahead. I just sat and rested my back against a tree, digging my toe into the soft ground around me. All we heard for quite a while was the soft scraping of my shoe against the rough dirt.