The Extraction List (8 page)

As she tucked a loose curl of blonde hair behind her ear, she began her speech. The audience stared at her up there on that podium, and as the TV cameras turned toward her, the world stopped. “I hated the way the lawyers fancied up the death of my son. They swaggered through the courtroom talking about ‘intracranial hemorrhaging’ causing ‘intracranial pressure,’ which caused ‘brain herniation.’ I didn’t know what any of it meant, just a lot of fancy words that said the same thing: my son was dead.

“There was no colorful way to paint what happened to Aidan. There was no sunshine-and-roses way to say his brain was crushed. There were no candy-coated words to convey that the blood made his brain explode through his skull. My perfect little boy’s brain exploded—all because of some stupid game.”

I tore my eyes away from her to glance at the faces around me. She held the gaze of every parent in the audience. Her words tightened around their hearts as their fingers tightened around their children’s hands.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the place.

“The local gang called it ‘pop and twist.’ Maybe you’ve heard of it? A gang leader gives the new prospect a gun and tells him to shoot at a tire of an oncoming car. The child then looks on as the car twists in circles, spinning its occupants over and over again.

“When Aidan and I drove down an unlucky street, the bullet sailed through our SUV, piercing the metal right before it pierced Aidan’s skull. The noise scared me into driving off the road. When the car stopped, I could have sworn I heard laughter in the distance. I said to my son, ‘How are you doing, baby? We got lucky, huh?’ I was answered with silence.

“I turned around and faced the back seat. At first glance, it only looked like he was sleeping.”

I looked at the ground. I’d heard that speech several times. Heck, I even helped her rehearse it. But a time never went by without my brother’s coffin appearing on the surface of my mind during that part, and I shuddered thinking of how close sleep was to death: removed from the world, quiet, still.

Mom held up the front page of a newspaper. There was a picture of Aidan’s killer on the cover, from the day the verdict was handed down. “The boy who killed Aidan pissed himself at sentencing. They sent eleven-year-old William Baker to jail for a decade, in a prison with rapists and pedophiles three times his age. I remember that the sleeves of his orange jumpsuit draped over his hands, and his fingertips barely peeked out from behind the fabric. When William looked into the audience, I guessed he was looking for his parents. They weren’t there. There hadn’t been a day where they bothered to show up.

“William screamed as they lead him away. That’s when I realized the killer I had created in my head was just a terrified little boy with no parents and urine-soaked pants. I realized that Aidan’s life was not the only one cut short.”

Mom always had to pause after that part: the part where over and over again we were both reminded of what Aidan could have been, and never would be. Her voice started to shake, like a cold wind had just blown by.

“Our children are angry, everyone. We have failed them. We have allowed them to go to school with other kids who have been raised by people who are not paying attention. And while no one was watching, these misguided children were forced to raise themselves in this dangerous world we call our own. We have taught our own children to turn the other cheek and ignore it when the products of absentee-parenting inevitably turn into angry, evil people. And now OUR children have paid the price.

“Allowing this horrible trend in youth violence to continue got my child shot. We have ignored the fact that people who have no business having children are having them anyway, and it’s this passive aggressive mentality that has put our own children in the line of fire. The time for being polite is over.” She slammed her fist down on the podium and it rattled on impact. No one dared take a breath.

“No one is going to save our children but us. The time to take action is now.” Mom held up a picture of Aidan, smiling in a pair of red overalls and a blue shirt, clutching his favorite stuffed duck. “Don’t let what happened to my child happen to yours. Please, sign the petition. Tell our government that you support the Parental Morality Bill. Tell them to enact the Parental Morality Bill today.” She always repeated the name of the bill as many times as she could without it sounding, well, repetitive. She had read in a book somewhere that it took someone hearing a message seven times for it to sink in.

Judging by the faces in the crowd, I doubted she’d ever have to worry about someone forgetting her bill. As my mom left the stage, the crowd saluted her with an admiration normally reserved for military members coming back from a war.

I ran up to give her a hug and noticed a man in a black suit with a yellow tie following right behind me. As I threw my arms around my mother, he spoke. “Mrs. Crane? Great speech!” Mom thanked him politely, and we started to walk away. But as we headed toward the car, he ran in front of us and blocked our path. “My name is Bo Dodson and I work for Senator Gray. He’s heard about you and thinks you may just be on to something. As you probably know, he’s running for president. He wants you to be a part of his team. And if the bill passes, he wants to name it after your son.”

• • •

“Get out.” Joe started to slowly step backward, as if my mom had suddenly come down with the plague.

Mom leaped up. “No! No, we can’t, please!”

Natalie glanced at her husband. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t you recognize her?” He threw an accusing finger toward my mom. “It’s HER.”

“Please…we have nowhere else to go! You’re a safe house. You are supposed to help my daughter. I don’t understand.”

Joe’s cheeks flushed. “Of course you don’t. It’s your fault that our sons got taken away. You started this whole mess in the first place. You wouldn’t understand, would you? Your kid died so now you had to make sure everyone else loses their children too!”

Natalie must have finally recognized her too. Her face tightened. “He’s right. You aren’t welcome in our home. Get out.”

“Mom, Dad, you can’t do this. This is our JOB.”

“Yes please don’t—”

“Shut up, Claire,” Jordyn ordered.

I ran up to my mom and squeezed her tight.

Jordyn turned back to her parents. “Remember? You started to do this for the kids. It’s not about her. It’s about HER.” She pointed at me. Everyone stared at both of us, mother and daughter glued together.

“Xander and Matthew are gone, Jordyn. Forever. Those Taskforce bastards took them from us. No one hears from their children again after that happens. You know that as well as I do. And it’s her fault.” Joe turned away, inhaling sharply, trying to suck his tears back into his eyes.

Cain, who had been silent during the whole conversation, moved closer to Jordyn’s mom. He lightly grabbed her face and pulled it close to him. “Natalie, I’m asking you. Please let us stay. We will be gone by tomorrow morning. We can even leave before you wake up if that’s what you want.”

Natalie silently broke from his grasp and went over to the pictures on the mantle. She picked up one that was sitting in the middle, holding it gently, as though, if the frame were to shatter, the memory might too. The boys were smiling with their arms around each other. Jordyn stood behind them, giving them bunny ears. The boys were younger then, probably long before they got taken away.

“You can sleep in the attic. I don’t want to see you again.” Suddenly, Natalie turned and faced Bo. Almost gliding, she stepped so close to him I imagined he could feel her breath on his face. She wrapped her hand around his cross necklace and pulled hard. I heard it snap in two and watched as she let the broken necklace dangle from her tight fist. “And you…don’t think I didn’t notice the way you look at her. And that you wear this.” She shook it in his face, and the tip of it whipped against his chin. “You present yourself as a Godly man while you run around with her, a woman who wrecks families. You’re almost no better than she is.”

Bo went white, watching Natalie’s hand carefully. Natalie didn’t realize what she had stolen from him. “You can’t have that!” I shouted at her, ignoring the redness in her face. “That belonged to his dead wife! You can’t take it!” Bo glanced at me, probably wondering how I knew the history of his necklace.

Natalie opened her mouth to continue, but before she could, Cain asked her to come back over to him. He looked at Natalie as she turned from the group, putting his arm around her shoulder. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but by the time they finished their conversation, Bo’s necklace was lying in the palm of Cain’s hand. I wondered why he cared to get it back for him.

Then I remembered his tattoo.

I expected Cain to hand it straight back to Bo, but instead, he tucked it gently into his own pocket. Bo glanced at him expectantly, but Cain just stared him right in the eyes. I thought Bo would argue with him, but he didn’t. Instead, he slid closer to my mother.

Mom’s chin shook, but she agreed to go upstairs to the attic. Joe took a blanket and a pillow that had been sitting on the couch and threw it at her, almost knocking her backward. “Attic’s up those stairs,” he said, pointing at an almost hidden staircase in the back corner of the house.

Mom started dragging herself up them, each step heavy. I followed.

At the bottom of the stairs, Joe put his hand on my shoulder. “Dear, you don’t have to stay up there. You can stay down here if you want.”

I shoved his hand away. “I’m going with HER.”

He released me and walked toward his wife. When I took one last glance at them, he had his arms wrapped around her waist.

The ceiling of the attic was low, even for me. Mom had to hunch over slightly to keep from hitting her head. Somehow the temperature seemed to take a nosedive as soon as we reached the top of the stairs. Maybe it was our shattered nerves and not the temperature, but my teeth chattered either way. Books, toys, and random kitchen stuff were scattered across the floor, like someone had dug through a dozen boxes trying to find something vitally important. Or the stuff was just banished to the attic because Natalie and Joe didn’t care for any of it or even like it anymore, kind of like me and Mom.

There were a few pillows scrunched in the corner of the room. We piled them up along with the pillow from downstairs and rested against them, huddling under the blanket Joe had given us. “You know, it’s okay, honey. I know it would be more comfortable downstairs. You can go back down.”

I shook my head. “No way, Mom. We’re a team, right?”

She kissed me on the forehead and hugged me tighter.

I was just about to shut my eyes when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I expected to see Bo peering at us when the door swung open, but it wasn’t. Cain smiled a gentle smile, the kind that wasn’t meant to be too happy-looking. “Hey. Just so you know, there’s extra blankets in that trunk over there.” He pointed to a huge black trunk that looked like a treasure chest sitting unassumingly in the corner of the room. We grabbed the soft fluffy blankets and threw them on top of our other blanket, making ourselves a nest of soft fabrics and lumpy pillows. One felt like there were golf balls bursting from it, but it was better than the hard floor. Cain sat next to us. “Tomorrow we’re heading out at—”

“Cain?” Mom interrupted him.

“Yes?”

“Why don’t you hate me? The rest of them do…”

“How do you know I don’t?”

Mom paused. “You’re up here, aren’t you?”

“Fair enough.” He picked up one of the many books on the floor, pages sprawled open and bent at the corners. He stared into the pages for a long moment, as if it might tell him something important. While he stared at the book, I stared at him. “Do you know why my name is Cain?”

Mom and I looked at each other, neither of us able to answer. Dad taught me a few things about the Bible, and I remembered that the name Cain wasn’t exactly associated with anything positive. I knew what my own name meant: courageous. Mom had told me once that she and Dad named me that to make sure I was strong. I remember telling her it must have worked.

“Because my father named me. He named me after a murderer. Cain killed his own brother, his flesh and blood. My father named me that. And my mother allowed it.” Cain pushed the book away from him and it slid across the floor, knocking into an upside-down blender. “She was too cowardly to speak up. My theory is that my father didn’t believe I was his. If I didn’t have his face, I would have thought he was right. Either way, I ended up the same.” He quickly stood and, to my surprise, removed his shirt. I threw my hands across my eyes, but like a child in the movies, I peeked at him from between my fingers. His shirt had been concealing a rippled chest and a stomach that you could grate cheese with. I was rather enjoying the view.

Then he turned around.

My air left me. His back looked as if it had been branded with something the size of a car hood. His flesh appeared to be one big scar, an endless pattern of raised bumps and skin. I got up and looked closer. I realized that what I had thought was one giant scar was actually a huge collection of several. I could barely tell where one stopped and another began as I stared at the strange patterns that stretched across his back. I gently traced one with the very tip of my finger.

I didn’t know how long I had been standing with him when he slid his shirt back on. “My father met all your criteria, Claire. Every last bullet point. He was well-educated. Had enough money to send me and ten of my closest friends to college if he wanted to. Married. Religious. Except what your spreadsheet didn’t count on was that someone could have all these things and still be a sociopath.”

Tears slid slowly down Mom’s face. She listened silently. I sat down next to her and linked my fingers with hers. “I used to watch your speeches on the television. I’d sit up at night, icing the swelling parts of my skin, and wonder when that nice lady on TV was going to come and take
me
away. When was it going to be my turn? I imagined what my new life would be like when I got rescued. But you never came.”