I thought he’d pass out. A sheen of sweat covered his face, and his mouth twitched with some involuntary muscle spasm, his tongue protruding through slightly parted lips. His chest rose and fell with the urgency of a jackhammer, each breath drawing in with a gasp, then out again with a wheeze.
Stella looked up at the camera. Somehow, through that lens, through the monitor I watched, our eyes met. “Please, Jack, don’t watch. Don’t watch this,” she mouthed.
Ms. Oliver pressed a button on the wall, an intercom of some sort. “Finish this, Stella.”
Stella’s head jerked to the left, to a speaker outside my view, Oliver’s grating voice reaching her.
“Whatever this is,” I said, “stop it.”
Oliver nodded at the man in white. “Hold him. Make him watch.”
The man grabbed at my arms, twisted them behind my back. I tried to turn away from him, and he kicked at the back of my leg, beneath the knee, and I dropped to the floor. The woman beside him pulled her rifle out from under her long, white coat and pointed the weapon at me. “Don’t.”
“Watch,” Ms. Oliver said, nodding at the television monitor.
Stella stood, circling the man again.
He was crying now. He didn’t want to, he tried to hold back, but the tears came anyway. Sobs caught between breaths. “Please stop,” Visconti said, the words barely audible.
Stella paused in front of him and reached for his face, her fingers hovering so close.
He tried to shrink away but could only move so far. “No…please…”
“Nobody heard Manuela Seiden’s final pleas. She died alone in that box. Death is too good for you, but it’s all I have to give.”
Stella leaned forward then and pressed her lips to his, one hand behind his head, pulling him close, pulling him into her kiss. The man’s body tensed, and he no doubt screamed one final time, but I didn’t hear it. I lunged backward against the man holding me, I shoved him back with all the strength I could muster. The woman beside him reversed the grip on her rifle, spinning it in her hands. She brought the stock down on the side of my head, and the world went black.
The dream.
Tied down in my car seat, unable to move.
Chocolate milk spilled everywhere, my clothes soaked with it. Sticky.
A white SUV so close in front of us. The driver’s seat looks like it was part of Mommy and Daddy’s seat.
Our car and that car, now one car.
Smoke.
Burning.
“Daddy?”
Nothing.
“Momma?”
Nothing.
A body in the white SUV, half in, half out, hanging over the steering wheel.
A dead thing.
A dead thing wearing a white coat stained with deep spots of red, watching us.
“Daddy?”
“Jack?” from the front seat. “Are you okay, buddy?”
