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Bonnie is very frightened.
There’s an orange crate against the far wall with two bottles of Artesia water on it. Jorge Castro and Cary Dressler got Dasani, but Emily insisted on switching to Artesia, because Dasani is owned by Coca-Cola, and they are (according to her) sucking the upstate water table dry. Artesia is locally owned, which makes them more politically correct.
Bonnie opens one of the bottles, drinks half, and recaps it. Then she lifts the lid of the Porta-John and drops her pants. She can’t do anything about the camera, so she lowers her head and covers her face as when as a small child she did something naughty, reasoning that if she couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see her. She finishes, drinks some more water, and sits on the futon.
With her thirst slaked, she actually feels—strange under the circumstances, but true—rested. She wouldn’t go so far as to say refreshed, but rested. She tries to reason why they took her and can’t get far. Sex would seem the most obvious motive, but they’re old. Too old? Maybe not, and if it’s sexual at their age, it’s got to be something weird. Something that won’t end well.
Could it be some kind of experimentation? One requiring human guinea pigs? She’s heard around campus that Rodney Harris had a few screws loose—his screamy lectures about meat as the central pillar of nutrition are legendary—but can he be actually insane, like a mad scientist in a horror movie? If so, his laboratory must be somewhere else. What she’s looking at is the kind of workshop where a retired oldster might putter around making bookcases or birdhouses. Or cell bars.
Bonnie turns her mind to who might figure out she’s missing. Her mother is the most likely, but Penny won’t realize something is wrong immediately; they’re going through one of their cold snaps. Tom Higgins? Forget about it, they’ve been quits for months, and besides, she’s heard he’s gone. Keisha might, but with the library barely running in low gear thanks to summer break and Covid, Keish might simply assume Bonnie is taking some time off. God knows she has plenty of sick days. Or suppose Keisha thinks Bonnie just decided to drop everything and leave town? Bonnie has talked about wanting to go west, young woman, go west, maybe to San Francisco or Carmel-by-the-Sea, but that’s just so much blue-sky talk, and Keisha knows it.
Doesn’t she?
A door opens at the top of the basement stairs. Bonnie goes to the bars of the cell. Rodney Harris comes down. Slowly, as if he might break. Emily usually brings the tray the first time, but today her sciatica is so bad that she’s lying in bed with her Therma-Brace cinched around her back. Much good that will do; it’s quack medicine at best. Pain pills, with their relentless destruction of the brain’s synapses, are even worse.
Roddy thawed and stewed most of what remains of Peter Steinman and was able to make her a kind of heart-and-lung porridge sprinkled with bonemeal. It may help some, but not a lot. Human flesh that’s been frozen and thawed seems to have little efficacy, and what Em really needs is fresh liver. But the Steinman boy’s was harvested long since. Supplies always run out, and the benefits they get from their livestock simply don’t last as long as they used to. He hasn’t said as much to Emily, but he’s sure she knows. She’s not a scientist, but she’s not dumb.
He stops a safe distance from the cell, drops to one knee, and sets the tray on the floor. When he straightens (with a wince; everything hurts this morning), Bonnie sees a purple bruise on his right cheekbone. It has spread up to his eye and almost down to his jaw. She has always been an even-tempered girl, largely exempt from the strongest emotions. She would have said only her mother could really get her goat, but the sight of that bruise makes her simultaneously furious and savagely happy.
I got you, didn’t I? she thinks. I got you good.
“Why?” she asks.
Roddy says nothing. Emily has told him that is by far the best course, and she’s right. You don’t talk to a steer in a pen, and you certainly don’t engage in a conversation with one. Why would you? The steer is merely food.
“What did I ever do to you, Professor Harris?”
Nothing at all, he thinks as he goes to get the broom leaning against the stairs.
Bonnie looks at the tray. There’s a plastic go-cup lying on its side with a brown envelope tucked into its mouth, maybe some kind of insta-breakfast. The other thing on the tray is a slab of raw meat.
“Is that liver?”
No answer.
The broom is the wide kind that janitors use. He pushes the tray through a hinged flap in the bottom of the cell.
“I like liver,” Bonnie says, “but with fried onions. And I prefer it cooked.”
He makes no reply, just goes back to the stairs and leans the broom against it. He starts back up.
“Professor?”
He turns to look at her, eyebrows raised.
“That’s quite a bruise you’ve got there.”
He touches it and winces again. This also makes Bonnie happy.
“You know what? I wish I’d knocked your fucking crazy head right off your fucking neck.”
The unbruised side of his face reddens. He seems about to reply but restrains himself. He goes up the stairs and she hears the door close. No, not close; it slams. This also makes her happy.
She pulls the envelope from the go-cup. It’s Ka’Chava. She’s heard of it but never had any. She guesses she’ll have some now. In spite of everything, she’s hungry. Crazy but true. She tears off the top of the envelope, dumps it in the cup, and adds water from her other bottle. She stirs it with her finger, thinking the elderly dingbat could at least have provided a spoon. She tries it and finds it quite good.
Bonnie drinks half, then sets the go-cup on the closed lid of the Porta-John. She goes to the bars. Crazy or not, the old prof is a compulsive neatnik. The cement floor doesn’t have a single spot of dirt on it. The wrenches are hung on pegs in descending order. So are the screwdrivers. Ditto the three saws—big, medium, and a small one Bonnie believes is called a keyhole saw. Pliers… chisels… rolls of tape… and…
Bonnie puts her hand over her mouth. She had been scared; now she’s terrified. What she’s looking at brings the reality of her situation home to her: she has been imprisoned like a rat in a cage and barring a miracle, she’s not getting out alive.
