The ride home wasn’t pleasant. Aside from the homeless guy who smelled of sour B.O, there was the man across the way who kept eyeing me with a hungry look. Creepo. When my stop came, I was glad someone else pulled the cord because I didn’t dare alert him until the driver was about ready to close the doors.
The bus pulled away and I breathed a sigh of relief. Once inside my home with my doors locked, I released the stress in my shoulders and ran a warm shower over my shivering arms until my heart slowed to a steady rhythm.
My head spun from all the cigarettes and beer I’d just inhaled in the befouled air. Reality mocked me. I was stuck with the idea of living as my grandson’s, what, adopted child or something? Imagine the awkwardness that would cause as I slowly de-aged and eventually died. Yeah, there had to be another option.
I stared up at the plaster ceiling for a long time. When sleep finally came, it wasn’t the restful type and it ended all too soon with the chirping of annoying birds and chitter of playing squirrels.
My mouth ached bad. The kind of ache that made me want to smash it on something in hopes of countering it. Slipping out of bed, I walked, exhausted, into my bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. The pigtails I’d forgotten about last night were a nest of tangles with the ties so badly knotted into the hair I’d have to cut them out. One side of my lip pulled up in a snarl and I froze at the flash of white beneath.
Wait, what?
Opening my mouth, I studied my teeth. Not dentures. Teeth. I even tapped on a couple to make sure they were real. Well, at least that explained my aching mouth, but how? Twenty something years of moving backwards and I’d done it all with dentures.
I considered it and recognized at least a marginal explanation: Wasn’t seven or eight about the age that adult teeth grew in? I guess I must have reached the right age. One thought continued to nag all through breakfast though: If I were de-aging, why would new teeth grow. I could see them fading, but not appearing. I spooned each bite of my frosted flakes into my mouth out of habit, my mind flying through the possibilities.
One glance at the clock and I sprinted back up to my room. Clean clothes sat in a pile waiting to be folded. Dirty ones sat in a similar pile with the only difference being that one pile sat limp and the other fluffy. I needed to pack; not because I wanted to go, but because there was no sense in being obstinate. After last night’s close call with a creep, I was starting to see the logic in his offer.
I grabbed the first items from the clean pile that represented a whole outfit and stripped down.
And that was my next surprise.
Uh, I thought those disappeared a year and a half ago…
My hands cupped my triple A’s while I looked at myself again in the mirror, perplexed and concerned. Did my face look just a bit longer? I turned away from the mirror, unsettled, and shifted focus to pulling on my outfit.
My extra-large suitcase sat at the bottom of a large pile of ‘stuff’ on the side of my closet. I tugged hard, grunting with effort, but the hard-sided case didn’t budge. Great. I could pack up two or three of my smaller cases, but somehow that just felt demeaning. As if it wasn’t bad enough that I was pint-sized—
“I can help.”
Kids have great lungs. I’d forgotten how great until I screamed, spinning to face Creepo. No, wait, the guy who stood in my bedroom looked an awful lot like him, except several years too young. Creepo had been in his forties; this guy was probably closer to his thirties. Heaven forbid there were two of them. I scanned the room even as I finished my scream.
Creepo dove across the distance locking his arms around my mouth and neck. Movement meant pain.
“Now, just calm that very powerful voice of yours,” he hissed into my ear.
I obeyed, but only long enough to suck in another breath.
Creepo didn’t let me get it out. His vice grip tightened on my throat, preventing my vocal chords from vibrating. “Good girl. You’ve certainly got enough spirit. Now, look, I just need to know how long your parents are gone for. You see, I don’t really have a place to sleep at night, and this house, well, it’s a pretty decent gig. You let me take up a spare bedroom until they get back, and I swear you won’t even know I’m around.”
I tapped his arm—the universal sigh for “Get your hands off my throat so I can take the opportunity to smash you in the face.”
He obviously didn’t know the universal language, but I think he was a pretty quick student. I felt his nose buckle beneath my elbow. The pop reverberated in my ear and his grip loosened around my throat. In two seconds, I dove through the open bedroom door.
I slammed it shut behind me, hoping to buy a bit of extra time, but he was fast and uncaring about the blood that poured from his broken nose. A significant number of swear words streamed from Creepo’s mouth as he chased me down and finally tackled me on the landing above the stairs.
It was my own fault, really. I hesitated on the idea that he’d catch me on the stairs and we’d tumble to the floor below. Despite my almost perfect health, broken bones weren’t fun to set and heal.
My head hit hard against the solid wood of stairs my Aaron had built forty years ago. “Get off me!” The depth of my growl surprised me.
“Sorry, darlin’, I can’t do that until you either agree to my terms or leave me no choice.”
“What does that mean?” I rolled, managed to get one knee under me and used it to lever him up. Another well-placed blow left him groaning as I tore down the stairs.
He hit me again as I reached my locked front door. My hands refused to function correctly. I felt like I was in one of those grade D horror movies where the girl is whimpering and can’t figure out a simple lock, and the audience is shouting: ‘Will you just stop! Calm down for one second and you’d already be out!’
Except, my head was screaming the exact same, but my hands wouldn’t obey.
Creepo knocked me hard against the wood. “Sorry, little one. I hoped not to have to do this.”
My energy left me in a whoosh. I sagged against the door, hands dropping to my sides. Even as I dropped, my head just kept screaming: ‘What are you doing? Why are you going to sleep! We’re supposed to be running.’
Except I couldn’t. I couldn’t even move. I could barely breathe. My eyes slipped closed and my body crumbled the rest of the way to the ground.
I woke hours later. I’m not sure how many except that I heard my Jake’s voice calling for me.
“Z! Come on, this isn’t funny.”
And Valentina’s voice, “There’s a suitcase gone and all of her clothes.”
“She wouldn’t do that,” he insisted.
“Well,” her voice lifted and I could imagine one of her regular shrugs. “Maybe the thought of moving in with us, or having you watch her die was too hard for her.”
“She wouldn’t do that.” Jake repeated. “She would have called. She’s not a coward.”
I started to struggle; to scream around my gag. If I could hear him, he would be able to hear me. The cock of a gun froze me in my place and I turned my head to see Creepo standing in the corner of the room, weapon pointed straight at me. One finger of his free hand rested in front of his lips.
“Honey, we should go. You have her cell number. Call her and leave her a message. Let her know we won’t pressure her. If she wants to stay here, she can stay. It was just an offer.”
“Yeah.” I could hear the heartbreak in his voice and it killed me to just sit silent and stupid on my own guest bed.
I tried to struggle again, but Creepo had done a mighty fine job of taking away the option of movement. I wondered how often he practiced, and what that meant for my overall chances of surviving this.
Beyond my door, the sound of my Jake and his wife faded back down the stairs and I heard the front door open and close.
Creepo shifted positions so he could look out the window until Jake’s car disappeared down the street. He spun the gun around one finger. I flinched, but it didn’t fire.
“Well, that was exciting, wasn’t it?”
I started struggling again and managed to gain a bit of ground with my right hand.
“Oh, don’t pretend you aren’t excited about this. I haven’t yet met a girl your age who didn’t enjoy the thought of a little adventure.”
I rolled my head back and forth until the gag shifted.
“U’v meber met a gurw wik me!” I growled.
His brows lifted a bit and he tapped the gun casually against his hand, barrel facing away from both of us. “Let’s see. That wasn’t your parents. So, a friend? Why do I get the feeling that you live here alone? Oh, right, because your bedroom was the master suite, and neither of the guest rooms are used.”
“fut up.”
“Temper, temper.” He moved a little closer. “Okay, now that the excitement is over, I’d really like to try for a new deal. I’ve already got what I need out of you, so I’m going to leave. You won’t see me again. All I need from you is a promise you won’t tell the cops what I look like. That’s it.”
“Pake off my gag.”
He considered that a minute and finally slipped his pointer fingers onto either side of my mouth and forced it out. He didn’t, I noticed, put those fingers near enough for me to bite. He’d definitely done this before.
“What’s your name?”
Creepo laughed. “You don’t want to know me. What you do need to know is that I accidentally took a bit much from you, so you’re probably going to feel tired for the next day or two. Eat a lot of spinach and kale. Maybe some acai berries, I’ve heard they’re a superfood. Give yourself a few weeks and I swear you’ll think this was just a weird nightmare.”
I struggled to puzzle out his motives. “If you didn’t want me to know, why did you show yourself?”
He cocked his head to the side, thoughtful. “Stupid mistake, I guess. You have an amazing amount of life. I was a little drunk on the feeling, I think. And then I thought, you know, this could be a long-term thing, at least for a while. The idea of settling down has its merits, especially when you’ve never had the chance to. Nice digs, good eats. I got a little greedy.”
“What are you?” I slowly worked my fingers free, testing my right hand to make sure I hadn’t missed any layers of rope.
His eyes clouded for just a moment before he shook his head and slipped the gun back into his pants.
“That’s a really stupid place to put a gun.”
“Not when it’s not loaded.” He grinned at me again. “Seems like you’re doing a bang-up job of getting yourself out of my ropes, so I’ll just leave you to it. Have a wonderful life.”
I watched, or rather listened, as the kid sauntered out of my guest bedroom and down the same path Jake had gone only minutes before. The front door opened and closed, and I dropped my head back onto the bed, sighing. What was that? He said he took something from me? A vampire?
Nothing would have surprised me, although I’d never actually met any supernatural creatures in my outings. From all that I had seen, I couldn’t even feign shock at the idea of actual vampires. Except that I had no pain in my neck. I did feel tired though.
Now that my right hand was free, the ropes came away easily. But rather than move, I just curled over and went back to sleep. It wasn’t until I woke in mid-afternoon that it really hit me.
Startling awake, I went on a rampage through the house looking for my cell phone and quickly texted Jake first. I told him to give me a call as soon as he had a moment, or better yet, to come over this evening if he was free.
That done, I rushed into my bedroom to assess the damage Creepo had caused. As Valentina noted, that suitcase I’d worked so hard on was missing along with my entire wardrobe. A few pieces of clothing still hung on the rack, but they hung haphazardly, or had already fallen to the floor. If Valentina had known me well, she would have noticed that the pieces left behind were some of my favorites, but I didn’t blame the woman who hardly knew me.
Heading back to my guestroom, I found the suitcase with only a cursory search. He hadn’t done much to hide it. As I suspected, the clothes were literally dumped in, hangers and all. Replacing them in my closet took only a handful of minutes and then I was back in my front room struggling with the concept of security.
I’d definitely locked the doors last night. Jake’s plan for taking me to his place looked better and better.
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