The Undesirable (Undesirable Series) (10 page)

My mouth dropped open. 

“I just disabled it.” He tossed me a grin. “Now we can talk. They won’t be able to track you.”

“Track me? What the…? Huh? What about yours?”

“Mine is special. It’s cloaked in a way. They never know where I am if I don’t want them to.” Thompson handed me back my watch, leaned up against the building, and put a hand in his pants pocket. He glanced down at the brown and green grass before he watched me put the watch back on my wrist.

“Oh, my God.” I gawked at him in disbelief.

“Okay. Here goes, Charlotte. I know who your father is,” he said after a few moments. “And I know you face more dangers than you realize.”

My mouth dried up as sweat broke out behind my ears. In my 18 years of life, I’d asked about my father twice. Both times, my mother had been drunk. Both times, she waved my questions away and told me he never loved her. Both times, she told me I came from a one-night stand kind of conception. After those two failed tries, I never asked again. Instead, I became the girl at school who knew nothing about her father. Over the years, I accepted the title of “trash”. I shrugged off the pain from the gossip of my peers, and got good at it.

“How do you know about my father?” I stammered out in a whisper.

He held up his index finger to stop my questions. “Do you remember the blood test you took, the one they gave you the first day you became #OHHC-547?”

My mind flickered to the woman in the white makeup, the prick of my finger, the vial of red blood. Of course, I remembered it. I remembered wondering about it at the time. But I didn’t say anything to Thompson. I just nodded.

“Nothing, Charlotte, is done in by this government without a reason.” He paused. “Nothing.”

“So? Who is he?” I asked, able to stand it no longer. I didn’t care that this person had been a stranger just 15 minutes before. “Who is my father?”

Thompson frowned. “Sure you’re ready to hear it? You want to hear the truth, even if you don’t like it?”

“Well, I’ve wondered about my dad most of my life.” I steeled myself for whatever he would say. I sucked in a breath and waited like a defendant in a criminal case for him to tell me his information.

Thompson crossed his arms again but continued to lean his muscular body up against the wall. “They tested the blood samples,” he said, matter-of-fact. “At the CDC in Atlanta, they’ve run tests for months on hundreds of blood samples a day.” Then he snorted. “Researchers there stopped doing any real work. It’s all DNA matches now. That’s it. They want something very specific. Someone very specific.”

“DNA from who?”

Thompson put one hand on my arm. Later I decided he did it to steady me for his next words. “They’re matching the DNA to Maxwell Cooper,” he said. “And you came up as a match. So did your birthday.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Somehow, I got back to the shack that night. The front door hung open on one hinge; someone had busted out the front window. I saw even before I walked inside that someone ransacked the whole place.

Not that I hadn’t expected this.

Broken glass spilled across the floor of the front room. I picked my way through the place where I spent the majority of my life. Even though it would not fully close, I pulled the front door shut. I flipped the light switch on the side of the wall. No power. My eyes took a few seconds to adjust to what I saw inside the house.

Someone had sliced the couch in half. Mounds of stuffing broke free. The few books and papers we owned lay on the wooden floor like confetti. Pieces of copper wiring hung exposed out of the wall like vines. In the kitchen, the door to the refrigerator lay open. The food on the floor reminded me of a rotten cornucopia. I recoiled from the smell. I got to my mother’s bedroom and threw myself on what remained of her mattress. Even in the mess, I still smelled her.

My world had shattered, just like the remains of this house. Nothing would ever be the same. Nothing.

Why had she never told me about my father? Why? Why? WHY?

Of course, I could guess her reasons. I wouldn’t tell my daughter either about the man I’d had a one night stand with, the one who’d paid me $150 for sex in the nightclub where I danced.

As I lay there, I thought about what Thompson told me after he revealed Maxwell Cooper as my father. The whole thing was too complicated to process. In the span of one conversation, my world contracted and expanded at the same time. What once made sense no longer did.

Thompson worked at the Regional Center of Communication in Toledo and held a good job there. For eight years, he had been one of ten people in charge of reading, cataloguing, and deleting emails sent between members of The Party. He did this for ten hours a day, six days a week. In exchange, The Party gave him a nice apartment in a good section of town and paid him once a week in stamps.

“I also learned enough about The Party to become pretty pissed off,” he had said. “They’re faking so much, lying so much to all of us. And then a few weeks ago, I saw the correspondence about you.”

“But why me?” I sounded like a small child.

“Maxwell Cooper’s a megalomaniac. He’s obsessed with erasing anything unsavory about his past in order to appear the perfect image of a Supreme Leader of The Party. That includes any trace of a daughter or a son he might have outside of his marriage.”

Maxwell Cooper had been married to Patricia for 25 years.  She was a gorgeous woman with a mass of bobbed brown hair, always appearing in a blood red suit jacket with a permanent plastic smile affixed to her face. I could only imagine her reaction to his infidelity.

I turned over on my side in my mother’s old bed and clutched what remained of the blanket against my stomach. In a strange way, the stillness of the house and the darkness comforted me. My eyes closed and I tried to sweep the anger and hurt from my mind. I needed to figure out what to do next. I had to come up with something, even if it just wound up being a sad little bandage to stop the blood.

Should I try to leave tonight? Should I tell Fostino? How long before they came for me? Should I trust Thompson? What had I done to deserve this?

Thompson told me to act as if nothing had changed. “That’s critical. You must act normal. They must suspect nothing.”

“But they’ll kill me.” The darkness fell around us at the park. “They will. Maxwell Cooper already has a life; he has a wife and kids. I don’t fit.”

Once again, this fit the story of my depressed little life.

Thompson had agreed. “They
will
kill you,” he revealed. “He can’t have an illegitimate daughter walking around. No way.” Then his words echoed with tension. “Charlotte, you represent the biggest threat to Maxwell Cooper since the first few days after he seized power. If anyone finds out about you, if you become public, you’ll be the downfall of his regime. You’ll be proof to everyone he is a fraud, a liar, a fake. He’ll do anything to stop that. Perfection is his best friend. Control is his biggest ally.”

My eyes had widened.

“Some of our people are at your house right now, Charlotte. They’re looking for anything the government might use against you — any proof of you who are.” He tightened his grip on my arm. “Maxwell Cooper squashed proof of his mistakes and indiscretions for years. He’ll eliminate you, too.” Thompson raised his other hand to emphasize his point. “So, you have to act. In a few days, you’ll hear from me again with a plan. I think we have some time, but not much.”

He paused. The break in his words hung in the air.

“The higher-ups in The Party right now seem to be the only ones who know about you. By that, I mean Maxwell Cooper and the inner circle. And as far as I know, they didn’t give the order, yet.” In the darkness, his words echoed in my ears.

They will kill you.

The dread consumed me. I had become a marked woman, a target. No. I was now the ultimate Undesirable. I touched the Hologram Watch on my right wrist. Thompson reactivated it as we got ready to leave the park. Now, I knew it as one other symbol of the lies I’d heard for so long. Everything I used to know just turned into a lie. Everything.

“Give me two days,” Thompson had told me before we parted ways. “I’ll get a plan. Meet me in the basement of First Presbyterian Church at 8:30 PM. Get in through one of the windows on the side of the church on the lower level.”

I shut my eyes and tried to fall asleep. As I did, my mind splintered and fragmented.

What the hell should I do? And what about Fostino?

CHAPTER TWENTY

If the minutes crawled by at the factory before, they passed even slower now. Two days after my fateful meeting with Thompson, I sat at my post in the factory. My back ached with tension. My fingers grew heavier with each stitch. The dread grew larger with each hour. I peeked at the clock while I sewed.

4:00 PM.

“Maxwell Cooper is our father. Maxwell Cooper is our leader. Maxwell Cooper will take care of us,” the woman shouted once again from the center of the room.

I struggled to keep my face in check; I had to make sure no one around me could tell how far off the grid I had traveled. The rest of the people at my worktable zipped through the work. The guards around the room didn’t notice me either.

Good.

I exhaled a long breath. No one knew my horrible secret. Not yet.

As I made shirt after shirt, I focused on what to do next. I had not been to the apartment in two days; I had not talked to Fostino about what I knew. I saw him twice: once at the factory doors in the morning, and once on the steps in between floors. Both times, I struggled to look him in the eyes, much less talk to him.

Besides, what would I say to him if I could?

Instead, each time, his green eyes bored into me like screws from a power drill. No one would mistake the hurt behind his chiseled jaw. I’d avoided him since I heard the news; now accusations poured out of him every time he saw me.

As I sewed, I tried to push the pain away. I remembered Thompson’s warning. I symbolized the problem. I had become dangerous. I had a dark secret, and Fostino just would not understand.

Right?

I reached under the table to pull more pre-cut fabric from the gigantic spool. The coarse fabric flowed through my hands with familiarity as I pulled it free. I pulled one piece, then another, and then another — three pieces total. Then, I saw the piece of paper drop to the floor below the spool. The paper flapped open and I saw the familiar handwriting in black pen. Fostino had written a large question mark.

Of course. He didn’t need to say any more.

My left hand flew out and I scooped up the small piece of paper in a flash before anyone saw me. I slipped it into the pocket of my black dress and bit the inside of my lip so hard I tasted blood after a few seconds. I choked down the pain and refused to cry. Instead, I found my way back to my stool and pulled the fabric onto the metal table. Wide-eyed, I searched the faces of everyone in the room.

Still, no one noticed me. Somehow, I managed to give nothing away.

The paper burned in my pocket. The question mark scorched my leg. The pain behind the note blistered my heart. I had left the one person who said he loved me in the dark about everything. My teeth found a new piece of my inside lower lip to chew on as I fixed my face on the pieces of tan camouflage in front of me.

As I sewed the two pieces together, I realized what I would do.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The First Presbyterian Church on West Street seemed eerie in the fading light and even stranger when I thought about how The Party had forbidden worship. Someone had boarded up the two main stained glass windows that framed the wide double doors of the entrance. A large metal chain snaked its way through the handles of the front doors and one thick lock held the chain in place. On the left-hand side of the front, thick black graffiti marred the brick. Dandelions pockmarked the grass in the short front yard and around the steps.

I slid up beside one of the brick walls to make it harder for anyone to see me and made my way down the small hill to the side yard. I hoped the large shrubs along the road concealed me.

8:24PM.

I studied the boarded up windows on the lower level of the church, the part that had once been the church’s fellowship hall. Huge nails held the big boards in place. I chose a section and pulled on the boards. The wood crunched and creaked under my fingers, but didn’t break free. The roughness threatened to splinter my hand. I pulled anyway. 

“Damn,” I said under my breath after the tenth try.

Hadn’t Thompson told me to get in the church this way?

I picked another window from the five in front of me. It didn’t pry open either, no matter how much force I put into the boards. I stepped back and put my head in my hands for a few seconds, exhausted, frustrated, and so very tired. I wanted to sit down and never get back up again.

Instead, I tried a third window, this one the furthest one down from the street. I reached up to the middle of the left hand side of the window and yanked on the wood boards with force.

On the third pull, the wood broke free. The panel split in two pieces with a huge crack as I stepped back on one foot and scowled in frustration at the broken window. I estimated I made enough space to crawl inside the abandoned church. I placed the wood up against the brick wall.

I sucked in my breath and steeled my nerves. If any one of those soldiers caught me doing this, they would kill me on the spot. The Party did not allow worship at church for any reason. With this act, I once again thumbed my nose at the people who controlled my life.