Novels

I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below

21. Mike

There was a moment of silence. Mike looked at Candace. The moment their eyes met, she dissolved into laughter. For a moment, Mike was horrified, and then he couldn’t help but smile.

“So let me get this straight,” she said, struggling for self-control. “Me, Candace Cuddyer, thirty-one year old high school grad waitress, Glen Eastman, retired, kind of pedantic schoolteacher, Jimmy Haggen, layabout, conspiracy theorist, and drunk, and Mike—”

For a moment, she had to fish for his last name.

“—Malloy, millionaire wanderer seeking wisdom—”

Mike winced internally, but decided it did sound ridiculous when you vocalized it.

“—are gonna destroy the world? I’m sorry, Dr. Raslowski, but if you’ve caused all these people to be killed because your computers told you that, you’ve fucked up massively.”

Dr. Raslowski didn’t seem fazed in the least. “I assure you, the modeling was checked and double-checked and then triple-checked. The math is sound, and the math doesn’t lie. We’ve confirmed our ability to predict outcomes and behaviors on smaller-scale subjects. It’s true the data set involved here is more profound, but the math scales.” He glanced down at his arm and moved it slightly, testing the discomfort. “Keep in mind, this is not something that happens overnight. The algorithms go years, decades into the future.” He looked back directly at Candace. “I assure you, Ms. Cuddyer, if left to your own devices, over the course of the next twenty-seven years you, Mr. Eastman, Mr. Haggen, and Mr. Malloy would, through a series of events, come to be responsible for the worst disaster the world has ever seen. Billions will die. Civilization itself is snuffed out.”

Mike and Candace exchanged a look again. Again, she burst into laughter.

Mike looked back at the scientist, who now seemed, if not friendly, at least approachable. “You know … that’s just nuts, Doc. I’m sorry, but … first of all, I just met these folks, and if you hadn’t come crashing in here, I’d have left by tomorrow—”

Raslowski looked pointedly at Candace. “No, Mr. Cuddyer, you wouldn’t have.”

Mike felt himself flush. He felt like an idiot, like a schoolboy. The fact that Candace began laughing even louder didn’t help at all.

“I would have,” he insisted, trying to reassert himself. “And no offense to anyone, but the idea that any of us would be capable of something of that nature—at that scale—is ludicrous.”

Raslowski shrugged, then winced. “Is it? You’re a wealthy man, Mr. Malloy. You have resources and connections. Mr. Haggen is a survivalist; he has a remote property that is off-grid and booby-trapped extensively, he has an arsenal of weapons and a larder filled with rations. Mr. Eastman, you might be interested to learn, is actually very heavily involved in radical politics—secessionists, actually, groups that believe states, cities, even individuals can legally declare themselves autonomous political entities—the FBI has a file on his online activities a mile long. And Ms. Cuddyer—well, I’ll admit Ms. Cuddyer’s role is less clear. Perhaps she’s merely the catalyst that brings you and the others together—”

“Oh, fuck you,” Candace groaned.

“—but the math is correct. If we allowed you to go about your business tonight, the model showed disaster. In twenty-seven years. So I started changing variables—in the models only, of course; using our technology to actually change the variables directly, as I’ve said, would be most likely disaster. I sought something we could change, something we could effect, that would remove the disaster without changing other fundamentals—and without requiring direct intervention, something that could be effected more … naturally. It took some time—and four backup generators—but I found that variable, and it was, I admit mysterious: Keep you here. Detain you for one night. When I ran the model with us securing this place and keep you—all four of you—from leaving, well, the future got much better.”

Mike shook his head. “There’s a glitch. You math is wrong.”

Raslowski opened his mouth, but Candace cut him off. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We broke your experiment, didn’t we, Doc? Don’t tell me your ?model’ took into account all these deaths, our mutiny, your own injury and imprisonment.”

Raslowski didn’t respond right away. Mike felt an overwhelming weariness, and suddenly found himself struggling to stay upright. He replayed Candace saying oh, fuck you to Raslowski and suppressed a smile.

“It’s impossible to say,” the scientist admitted, “without running the models again. Every action has a reaction—the Butterfly Effect, as you called it. So, yes; perhaps Mr. McCoy’s death and the other events here have changed the model. Perhaps. Or perhaps those altered variables have had other effects—speeding up the time frame, perhaps, perhaps we’ll see disaster in five years instead of twenty-seven, or thirty-seven years. Or perhaps the precise nature of the end is changed. It’s impossible to say without an analysis.”

Candace was shaking her head, but Mike chewed his lip. He was thinking about Julia, for some reason. He was thinking about the chain of events that led to her death, to him waking up stiff and hungover, and her on the floor, frozen in mid-crawl. There were gaps in his memory, but he knew the chain was long and complicated: Several places, dozens of people, random strangers. Taxi cabs and bars and restaurants and bathroom stalls and someone’s apartment. He thought about all those tiny variables, and how if he’d been able to see it all laid out before him—if he’d been able to model the events—he might have seen that precise moment when it all went sideways, when one more hit was one too many, when deciding that four a.m. was late enough would have saved her life. And his.

“Analysis,” he said slowly. “An analysis you could do back at your facility?”

In the corner of his eye, he saw Candace look up sharply. He ignored her.

Raslowski looked from him to Candace and back again. Calculating, Mike thought. That was okay; he had to assume that the good doctor would make a break for it, or try something to regain control over the situation. He would do the same in his place. “Yes,” Rasolowski said, looking back at him. “At the facility I have access to the mainframe cloud and … other equipment. I could do a through model run and determine the new outcomes.”

“The new future,” Mike said.

“Yes.”

“Mike,” Candace said curtly. “A moment?”

He nodded and they stepped over to the doorway, turning away from Raslowski.

“You’re not taking this bullshit seriously?” Candace whispered. “Changing reality? All of us just variables in an equation? The four of us—us!—somehow bringing about the end of the world? I mean, c’mon, Mike.”

He nodded. “I know how it all sounds. But, Candace, these people went to a lot of trouble to lock this place down and hold us hostage. There has to be a reason. Say you’re right—he’s bullshitting us, making up a wild story. Okay, why not check it out? We find out it’s bullshit, we might be able to start digging up what’s really going on.” He rubbed his eyes. “Besides, look who’s out there—these are the authorities. If we call the cops, what happens? More authorities show up. I wonder how that will go?”

She chewed her lip. He let her think. He didn’t suppose you could push Candace Cuddyer into much, and suspected any attempt to do so would result in her planting her long legs and getting stubborn as a mule about it—it was just his sense of her.

A sound drew his attention to the dark hallway outside of McCoy’s office. A soft, split-second squeak or scrape. He froze, straining to listen, but it didn’t repeat. He decided he’d imagined it.

“Okay,” Candace said. “Fine. You’re right: We need information. If the good doctor wants to take us to that facility, we should go and at least get some more information.”

He nodded. He liked how she thought: Calm, no panic, and logical. “Come on, Dr. Raslowski,” he said, taking the older man by the arm. “Let’s go to your lab.”

“What do we tell Jimmy and Mr. Eastman?” Candace asked as they walked the scientist down the hall.

Mike liked how she still called her old schoolteacher Mr. Eastman. It said something about her, though he wasn’t sure what, but he liked it nonetheless. “A version,” he said. “I don’t think we should start talking about changing reality and modeling the universe until we know for certain what we’re talking about. Let’s just tell them we’re going to get more information.”

“Jimmy’s gonna want to come,” she said, sounding resigned.

Mike nodded. “We’ll figure it out.”

In the main part of the bar, Mike recognized the stink of tension. Haggen was seated at a table with a bottle of whiskey in front of him, one hand resting on a Beretta as he took a pull. Eastman was seated at the bar, looking, Mike thought, old and tired, his face flushed, his mouth open.

“Keep an eye on our stormtroopers,” Mike said, affecting a casualness he didn’t feel. “Dr. Raslowski has offered to give us the full story back at his facility, and we’re taking him up on it.”

“Dr. Raslowski, you are absolutely prohibited from disclosing any data or information about the project!” Colonel Hammond snapped, surging up from the floor unsteadily, her hands bound behind her back. “Furthermore, you are—”

Haggen surged forward, snatching up the gun and hitting Hammond across the face with it, sending the officer spinning around and crashing to the floor with a strangled cry.

“Furthermore,” Haggen said, sounding drunk, “you can shut the hell up.” He turned and looked back at them, offering a smile that Mike was surprised to describe as shy. “Go. We’ll keep an eye on things here. You go and find out what’s going on.”

Mike studied him. He was surprised that Haggen was taking things so well. Candace had expected fireworks and difficulty, and Mike’s limited experience with the man confirmed that expectation. It felt wrong, but there wasn’t time to sit and contemplate and interrogate Haggen about his motivations. He glanced at Candace, and when she shrugged her eyebrows in a way he suspected was meant to be translated as that’s Jimmy being Jimmy he nodded.

“Come on,” he said, taking Raslowski by the elbow. “We’ll take my Land Rover.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below

20. Candace

“Dr. Raslowski,” Mike said slowly, rummaging in McCoy’s desk for the first aid kit. “Back up and explain this to us like we’re five years old. Let’s start there.”

Raslowski took a deep, shuddering breath and burst into coughs. “All right. Let’s start here: The universe is math.”

“Math,” Candace repeated. It made her think of math class at the high school, which had been her least favorite subject. Numbers always slipped away from her thoughts, and never behaved the way teachers or tutors or her brainy friends insisted they did. And then people got irritated and angry with her when she complained that it was all lies, all this math, that it was an ancient conspiracy going back centuries, going back to the Greeks and the Romans, pretending that numbers made sense.

“Math,” Raslowski said, wincing as Mike probed the bolt, a roll of clinging bandage in his hand. “Everything in the universe—you, me, the air, the planets, plasma, photons—is governed by mathematical relationships. You ever hear the theory that we’re all living in a Matrix?”

Candace blinked slowly. She felt like she’d somehow flashed back to all of the awful dates she’d ever been on, all the guys obsessed with geeky TV shows and video games. Maybe, she thought, she’d hit her head earlier in the day and everything since had been what one of those geeky old dates had called an Owl Creek Bridge Event, just her fevered brain spinning a fantasy while she lay in a ditch somewhere.

Raslowski turned to look at Mike. “The movie? Where the world’s a computer simulation?”

Mike nodded. “Sure. There is no spoon.”

Raslowski nodded, satisfied. “That’s my field. It’s a gross, gross simplification—ah, fuck, be careful!—but that’s where I live. Figuring out the equations that govern the universe. Think of it like this, you know what a variable is, right?”

Candace had a flash of memory and almost jumped in excitement. “Like X=15, so 2X=30,” she said.

Raslowski nodded. “That’s an equation. If you know the equation and the solution, you know what the variable is. You change the variable, you change the solution.”

Mike began wrapping his shoulder and the bolt up in bandages, and the doctor’s voice took on a rough, strained quality as he worked.

“In the universe, the equations I’m talking about—well, think of it this way: Us, all of us, we’re all the product of a billion, a trillion equations. How tall we are, the color of our eyes, our talents and our genetic infirmities, all products of math. And I was working on figuring out those equations and the variables. Imagine if I could “decode” you,” he said, jerking his chin at Candace. “I would be able to see every aspect of your existence. I’d see your past and your future, because it’s all math, it’s all governed by the variables and their values. Even better, I could adjust those variables. Change the value of X to 16 instead of 15, and suddenly you have blonde hair.”

Candace blinked. Raslowski grimaced and his face reddened.

“As I said: A gross simplification. I’m making this easy to understand.”

Mike looked up from his work on the wound, and winked. She found the wink remarkable. It reminded her of her father, who hadn’t met an occasion of any degree of solemnity that couldn’t be lightened with a well-timed fart joke. “He means he’s dumbing it down for us,” Mike said.

Raslowski closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Just think of it like that: Once you know the equations, you can hack the universe. Hack anything, reality itself. Of course, the equations are incredibly complex. We won’t be folding time or pumping gold bricks out of a machine any time soon. We have only a limited understanding of the implications—we can change variables, but only in very limited scenarios, and we’re basically terrified to do it because we don’t have the computing power to truly map out the consequences.”

“No cure for cancer,” Candace said. Raslowski’s eyes popped open and he actually smiled at her, a perfectly natural-seeming grin that transformed him from Evil Genius to Friendly Grandpa.

“That’s right!” he said. “We aren’t there. Not even close. But—ouch, for fuck’s sake, man!—stay with me here, we are at a point where we can sometimes see the variables. Their value, if you follow.”

Mike paused, seeming to freeze. Candace felt the weight of the gun in her hand and put her Bedazzled Smile on her face. She thought Mr. Eastman would recognize it, as would Mr. Howard, her old Algebra teacher. The Bedazzled Smile was a soft, diffuse grin that conveyed a sort of trashy feminine stupidity that worked with men. Boys, too, but mainly men. It was a smile that said, oh, my little girl brain can’t handle all this mayun-ly talk! and then burst into bubblegum-flavored giggles.

The Bedazzled Smile had never been something she was proud of, but it was a tool that had gotten her out of a lot of assignments and pop quizzes. And now, as she used it on Raslowski, she regretted all those previous uses. They’d left her with a sorely lacking mathematical background, and she kind of wished she could have saved up the power of those previous moments and focused them all right here, in order o force Dr. Raslowski to just make some damn sense.

“I don’t,” she said. “Follow, that is.”

“He’s saying they can see the future,” Mike said. “Isn’t that right, Doc?”

“Give the man a prize,” Raslowski said. “We can’t read all the equations, or re-write them. We’re decades, maybe a century or two away from even being able to make the slightest changes to reality. But we stumbled on a cheat, a hack. A way to see what the values of variables in those equations will be. So, we can take a variable—say, the position of a water molecule—”

Candace’s smile collapsed. “A water molecule?”

“As I said, this is complex—think of all the molecules in the universe, each one with an equation solved for it, each one representing a variable in another equation. No, forget that. Just remember this: I have been able to create a computer modeling environment that can take the position of a water molecule in one moment and accurately predict it’s location and state in another moment. Past, future. We can model the position of that molecule from the moment an Oxygen atom and two friendly Hydrogen atoms bonded to the moment that bond ends. We can skip along that timeline like watching a video on your laptop.”

Laptop, she thought. Little did the good doctor know he’d stepped back into 1985 by entering this bar, this town.

“And once we have identified a variable, or a matrix of variables, we can even change their values and see how it affects the timeline. Except we don’t actually do that, because it would be nearly impossible to predict all possible permutations. A single tweak to a single variable could bring reality crashing down, changes reverberating backwards and forwards along a timeline, and rippling outward in a domino effect.”

Candace nodded. “Right. The Butterfly Effect.”

Both men turned to glance at her. Mike was smiling. Raslowski scowling.

“Yes,” he said flatly. “Something like that.”

Candace thought he somehow made the word something mean nothing.

Mike was tying off his bandage work. It looked pretty thorough to Candace, and she knew there would be another aw-shucks smile and a story about shadowing a doctor for three months if she asked about it. “So you can model people—you can track what someone’s going to do.”

Raslowski nodded through a wince. “We can. With enough data.”

Candace forgot to act dumb. “How could you possibly get enough data for something like that? People aren’t a single molecule. They’re—” She paused. “Well, trillions of molecules.”

Raslowski smiled. “More than that, actually, but the modeling was very clever. I was able to scale up to individuals through a compression algorithm. But we still needed data to work with. I had the math, I needed the variables.” He sighed. “You’ve heard about all the scandals surrounding government surveillance, yes?”

There was a moment of silence. “No,” Mike said, working on the sling. “No way. Look, even if the Feds and the Spooks bugged every computer, every phone, every traffic camera, everything, no way you’d get even a tiny fraction of the data you’d need to do what you’re talking about.”

Raslowski nods as Mike slides his arm into the sling. “True enough. Except, remember what I said about compression? There are patterns. All data has patterns. You figure those out, you can guess them, predict them, anticipate them. Like compressing an image file—you don’t need to represent every single black pixel, you just need to know that anything that isn’t another color is black.” He shrugged. Candace thought he looked pale, and figured shock was setting in. She guessed they had a few minutes before he went woozy.

“You’d need a boatload of heavy duty computers to crunch those numbers,” Mike said.

“And we have them, just up the road. We’ve been pouring data in and refining the models for two years. We’ve been running the numbers.”

Candace frowned. “Why here?”

Raslowski hesitated for a moment. “Frankly? Because there’s not much here here. Not many people. Not much happening. A lot less data to chew through. If we tried modeling even one street corner in New York City, we’d drown. But here, it’s manageable, relatively speaking.”

Mike stepped over to stand next to Candace. He crossed his arms across his chest. “Okay, so you’ve been working for two years to predict the future right here. And then you, what—ran the models? Got some output? And came running over here guns blazing? Why?”

Raslowski was sweating lightly. “The models worked. Green across the board. And when they spat out their results, we saw that you were going to destroy everything. You were going to cause the end of the goddamn world.”

Mike and Candace glanced at each other. Then Mike leaned forward slightly. “Who’s going to end the world?”

Raslowski sighed. “All of you.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below!

19. Mike

A tense silence greeted Hammond’s words. Jimmy stepped away from Raslowski, who sat slumped in a chair, breathing hard and sweating as he stared at the protruding shaft of the bolt in his shoulder. Jimmy put his handgun close to Hammond’s head. She didn’t flinch, or take her eyes off of Mike.

“My friend Jack’s dead because of you,” Jimmy said. “He was kind of a prick and we argued a lot and I’m not really sure he liked me all that much, but you know it makes me not really care if you’re next.”

Mike felt another exhausting dump of adrenaline as he realized Haggen was maybe off the rails a little. But he didn’t disagree. These people had marched in and taken them prisoner. They’d killed first. He didn’t think the townsfolk had any choice but to fight back, and he wouldn’t feel bad if Jimmy shot them all. But he also thought it would be a mistake.

“Jim,” he said, stepping up behind him, slowly, careful, “We need to ask them questions. We need information.”

Jimmy nodded. “Sure,” he said. He extended the gun a little further and waggled it at her. “We’re going to ask you some questions. And you’re going to answer them. Or I’m going to shoot you dead.”

Hammond didn’t react. She stared at Mike, not Haggen.

“There’s no time—”

“No,” Mike said, pulling a chair from the floor, setting it in front of her and sitting down. He didn’t know what to do, how to proceed, but he didn’t see any profit in admitting that. “No, we’re not going to play that game. Here’s what’s going to happen.” He looked over his shoulder. “Glen, would you see to Dr. Raslowski? Don’t pull the bolt out, but get him some water, maybe, and make sure he isn’t bleeding too much.” He looked back at Hammond. “You’re going to tell us what’s happening, or Mr. Haggen here is going to shoot you. I’m going to ask Mr. Haggen to shoot you someplace non-fatal, so we can keep asking your questions—”

Haggen snorted.

“—but I don’t know if he’ll listen. Or if he’s good enough with that gun to miss your arteries. So, Colonel Hammond: What’s happening?”

The colonel rolled her head on her neck and stared at Mike in silence.

Frustration and anger boiled inside him. “Last chance, Colonel,” Mike said. “Why’d you storm in here and detain us? What’s going on at that facility up the road?”

Hammond swallowed. “I don’t relish the idea of a bullet, Mr. Malloy,” she said. “But I am unable to answer your queries because this is a matter of national—”

Haggen cocked the hammer of the gun. Mike held up his hand. He had the sense that this situation was hanging by a thread and could turn into disaster. If Haggen killed Hammond, he wasn’t sure they’d ever find out what was happening.

“A disease?” he said. “An experiment gone wrong? Radiation?”

Hammond’s face was tight with tension. “I am unable to answer your queries—”

Haggen stepped forward and pushed the gun into Hammond’s forehead. The colonel closed her eyes tightly, but didn’t move.

“Colonel!” Mike said, leaning forward. He was worried Haggen would do something too quickly. They needed time for Hammond to really think about being killed, being hurt. They needed it to sink in, to give them a shot of getting some information from her. He couldn’t say so to Haggen, so he tried to inject some urgency into his voice. “Colonel, you said if we lost Raslowski, if he died, we were all already dead. Why? You’ve already told us that much. Fill in the blank. Let’s start there.”

Mike pictured Detective Avvy Ramirez, Jersey City Police, who he’d hired for a week to give him lessons in interrogation techniques. Bald, loud, chubby, he was the sort of cop who wore gold chains and broke into spontaneous dancing while talking, suddenly swaying his hips to an imaginary salsa beat. He had a reputatioon as the guy you sent into the box to question someone, because he more often than not got guys to talk when no one else had been able to.

Ramirez stressed that everyone wanted to talk. Everyone wanted to tell their story. The trick was getting around their natural reluctance. And Detective Ramirez had taught him to look for chinks in the armor, stubs—things the subject had already said. They were almost always more willing to say more on the same subject, and once people started talking they had a tendency to keep talking.

She swallowed, eyes still shut. For one second Mike thought he had her. Then she opened her eyes, and they were clear, and her gaze was steady.

“I am unable to answer your queries,” she said in a steady voice. “Because this is a matter of national security.”

“Son of a bitch,” Haggen said, jaw clenching. Hammond closed her eyes again. Mike half-stood, reaching for Haggen.

“It doesn’t matter if I’m dead.”

Everyone froze. Mike stood up, looking over Hammond at Raslowski. Glen Eastman hovered over the physicist uncertainly, but the doctor didn’t seem to be about to pass out any more. He was staring at Mike with a bright, alert expression.

Haggen turned and trained the gun on him, but Raslowski didn’t pay him any attention. Hammond twisted around, face going red.

“You are not authorized to offer any data or assets to non-cleared individuals, Doctor!” Hammond snarled.

“Jim!” Mike shouted, stepping forward and putting a hand on Haggen’s arm. “Jim, he’s volunteering, man. He’s a volunteer here, okay?”

“Doctor!” Hammond shouted.

“Shut up,” Raslowski snapped. “It doesn’t matter. You think this scenario is salvageable?” He barked an unsteady laugh, and Mike thought the good doctor was further gone than he’d assumed. “We had one goddamn job, Colonel. All we had to do was preserve the status quo. All we had to do was prevent anyone from leaving for a few hours.”

“No one’s left,” Hammond said, her voice like gravel.

Raslowski snorted derisively. “Sort of, close to, kind of—it doesn’t matter. We had a clear baseline, and we have deviated from it severely. Imagining that we have accomplished our mission is ludicrous. But say we have! Say that despite this clusterfuck all around us, we’re still on target, praise Jeee-sus! Then it still doesn’t matter. Because then it’s over.”

The other soldiers murmured. Mike thought Hammond was going to explode, and he was ready to jump on her. Then he stole a glance at Haggen, who was sweating and kind of wild-eyed. Mike figured he’d never killed anyone before. Never threatened someone in cold blood. They were all crashing from the fight, getting achy and shivery in reaction. He thought he had better take control of the situation soon, get things sorted out, or they were going to lose their chance to find out what was going on.

“Candace,” he said without looking away. “You ever fire an automatic handgun?”

There was a beat of silence. “No. But I could sure try.”

He smiled. “Take one from the bar, come here, and I’ll give you the five-second lesson. Jim. Jim.”

“What!” Haggen said, too loud. He was blinking sweat from his eyes. “What?” he repeated, more softly.

“Candace and me are going to take Raslowski into Jack’s office, so he can talk freely, okay?”

Haggen nodded, eyes locked on the doctor. “Okay.”

“Keep things cool out here for us, right?”

Haggen nodded, but he was still holding the gun on Raslowski. Mike reached up and put his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. He jumped, then lowered the gun and looked at Mike. “Yeah, okay, okay,” he said.

“Thanks.” Mike turned and found Candace standing next to him, holding one of the Berettas.

“Safety,” she said, demonstrating. “Trigger.”

He nodded. “Good enough for now. Keep the safety on.” He turned and gestured at Raslowski. “Come on. Can you walk? We’ll patch you up while we talk.”

“I’m coming with you,” Glen Eastman said, looking ridiculously portly as he cleaned his glasses. “I want to hear this.”

Mike watched Raslowski struggle to his feet and walk towards him. He didn’t want Glen getting in the way, and he wanted to control the information. Maybe it didn’t make any sense, him thinking he would be the best person to be in charge, maybe he couldn’t justify it, but he didn’t want anyone else making decisions for him.

“Glen,” he said. “We’ve got a manpower shortage. It’s already me and Candace in there with one prisoner. Would you mind staying out here and backing up Jim? We’re gonna come right out and report back to y’all.”

He’d thrown in the y’all on purpose. As he said it, he pinched his nose and rubbed it, mirroring Eastman as best he could. One of the things he’d learned in his travels: Mirroring. It worked remarkably well; by adopting people’s expressions and gestures, they saw themselves in you and trusted you. It was subtle—it wasn’t magic—but it was effective.

Eastman pursed his lips, then nodded curtly. “All right. I can see that. I’ll even things up out here.” He turned and walked to the bar where the confiscated sidearms were piled. Mike and Candace looked at each other and he almost felt psychic, knowing she was wondering if letting her old gym teacher have a gun was a good idea. But one battle at a time.

Raslowski was pale, and when Mike leaned down to help him walk he didn’t object, steadying himself with a hand on Mike’s shoulder. Once in the office, Mike pointed at the desk. Raslowski sat on it, sliding himself onto it with a pained grimace. He looked defeated and tired, Mike thought; a spray of blood had stained his neck and hair.

“Let me take a look,” Mike said, leaning in to examine the bolt in the shoulder. It wasn’t terribly deep, but he remembered the bolts McCoy had loaded in it. After making sure the wound wasn’t bleeding actively, he nodded.

“Well, Doc, that’s a barbed head in there, which means it will tear your shoulder to pieces if we try to pull it out. It doesn’t seem to have hit an artery, so I’m sorry to tell you that our best course of action is to just leave it in place. We can wrap it in some bandages to secure it so it doesn’t get moved around, and make a sling for your arm. Until we have some real medical services, that’s all I think we should do.”

Raslowski grunted. “Fine.” He looked around. His glasses had been bent at some point and sat at a crazy angle on his face, but his eyes, bright blue, were bright and alert and intelligent.

“So,” Candace said, casually holding the gun at her side in what Mike thought was an implied—and impressive—threat. “What’s going on, Doc?”

Raslowski shifted his weight and grimaced. “It’s simple. We came here to make sure you couldn’t leave, because you’re all going to do terrible things in the near future.”

Mike and Candace exchanged a look. “Who’s going to do terrible things?” he asked, looking back at the older man.

Raslowski sighed. “All of you.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below!

18. Candace

Jack McCoy was dead.

At first she thought they were going to pull it off almost perfectly. When the shooting started, she’d panicked for one moment, ducking down behind the bar and freezing. The gun in Jimmy’s hand was louder than anything she’d ever experienced before, and she could tell that things weren’t going exactly like they’d planned, although at first the soldiers were obviously taken completely by surprise. When they started returning fire, the sound was unbearable.

Slowly, she pulled herself together. What Mike said rang true for her: If this failed, they wouldn’t get another chance. They would be tied up and imprisoned at best—shot at worst. And no one was going to listen to her if she argued that she’d cowered behind the bar instead of taking part. And if her friends died because she’d been too terrified to help, she’d never forgive herself.

She forced herself up into a crouch and peered around the end of the bar. She couldn’t see what she could do without a weapon. She turned to look behind the bar for something she could use just as Jack McCoy screamed, spinning around to face her, his chest a sudden explosion of blood. For one second that seemed to last much longer they looked at each other, and then he folded up and collapsed, dropping to the floor. The crossbow bounced towards her.

For some reason, this snapped her into action. She didn’t yell, or scream, or cry—she felt the shock rolling through her, but it burned away her panic. She crawled forward and took the crossbow, cocked and ready, still warm from his hands. She took a deep breath.

Out in the bar, as if from a very great distance, she heard someone shouting. Down! All of you, weapons down!

She stood up, raising the crossbow and ready to take a shot, just as Raslowski dashed from behind an overturned table and ran out into the night.

She ran without thinking; she saw Raslowski sprint out the front, and she thought everything they’d just gone through would be rendered meaningless if he, if he—she didn’t know. Called for help? Maybe. Reported their mutiny? She wasn’t sure. She simply had an instinctive sense that letting Dr. Raslowski escape spelled disaster.

For a moment the outside was disorienting. It had only been a few hours, but rushing out into the open, chilled air made her feel like the world was spinning away. And for one brief moment she thought, I could just keep running. She was out, she was free, and if she told herself she would call the authorities, send assistance, or just assume the others had the situation well in hand, she could excuse herself.

Except she couldn’t. She couldn’t leave Jimmy, or Mr. Eastman—or even Mike, who she barely knew but already liked tremendously. It wasn’t how her father had raised her.

She put her head down and got her knees up like Mr. Eastman had taught her so long ago in gym class, and she ran after Raslowski.

He kept glancing back at her, his round white face tense with fear. He was slowed down by his fumbling attempts to get something out of his pocket, and with a lance of fear she thought it might be a gun. They hadn’t seen Raslowski handle a weapon—hadn’t seen him do anything except tap on his laptops and operate other pieces of equipment—but that didn’t mean he didn’t have one. He was with a military unit, after all.

It was dark, and she had to rely on her memory of the place. She knew the parking lot and the woods around One Eyed Jack’s like she knew her bedroom at her father’s house, which existed in a strange state between her adolescent taste and attitude and the bland neutrality of a guest room. In the same way she knew which floorboards in that small bedroom squeaked, knew without measuring what would fit or not fit in the closet, or every divot and scratch on the old kid’s desk that still sat in the corner, she was almost able to imagine the rocks and other features in the parking lot that would trip her up. Raslowski had no such advantage, and he stumbled and tripped his way through the dark, letting her slowly gain on him.

He didn’t seem to know where he was going, anyway; he weaved this way and that, changing direction seemingly at random. He was nearing the tree line, and she knew if he made it to the trees she’d have a much harder time keeping him sight, and might even lose him.

She stopped running.

She knelt down on one knee and steadied the crossbow on it, sighting on Raslowski. She’d never hunted with a crossbow before, but she’d taken down her share of deer, and there was no time to worry over the finer points of shooting a bow as opposed to a gun. She squinted down the sight, tried to compensate for his erratic path, and squeezed the trigger.

He kept running and didn’t even seem aware that someone had taken a shot at him. She tried to find the button that would autoload the next bolt, but her fingers kept missing it, and she didn’t look down at the bow for fear of losing track of where he was. As she frantically ran her hand over the bow, she saw him finally free whatever it was he’d been trying to pull out of his pocket.

He spun and brought his arm up just as she found the little bump and pressed it, the crossbow humming smoothly in her hands as if it was happy to be doing the task it had been designed for. As Raslowski stumbled backwards from the force of his own momentum, a thrill of adrenaline and terror swept through her: He was pointing a gun at her.

Despite what had happened in the bar over the last few hours, this was a wholly new experience for her, and her reaction was almost involuntary: Her finger twitched, and the crossbow hummed, and then Raslowski was spun into the darkness as a crossbow bolt sank into his shoulder. There was the report of the gun going off, and then she was racing towards him, trying to keep her eyes on him in the gloom.

She thought her heart might just fail, it was beating so fast and ragged. It kept skipping beats, and then seemed to overcompensate with a lurching series of half-beats. As she ran, she felt weak and giddy, almost like laughing.

“Ah, fuck,” she heard Raslowski moaning, gasping. “Ah fuck you shot me!”

She staggered to a stop and loomed over him. She could see at a glance that the wound wasn’t going to kill him, at least not without some willful negligence. She knelt and retrieved his Beretta, feeling the weight. Feeling dog-tired, she held out her hand. “Come on,” she said gruffly, certain she had a good therapeutic vomit in her future.

Back in the bar, the eerie quiet made her pause, hefting the bow. It didn’t seem possible that things were that quiet, after the chaos and violence of the previous few minutes. Pushing Raslowski ahead of her, she crept in, nerves sizzling, but found everything under control: The five surviving soldiers, including Hammond, were all kneeling with their hands behind their heads while Mike tied them all up with their own plastic zipties. The unconscious one from the back room had been brought in, and was on the floor, breathing peacefully. Jimmy covered everyone with one of the soldiers’ handguns, which had been piled on the bar along with several extra magazines.

The bar was a mess. Raslowski’s equipment was strewn across the floor, several tables had been chopped up by gunfire, hunks of wood and broken glass were everywhere, crossbow bolts jutted from the walls. Two of the soldiers were wounded, although to her untrained eye none of the injuries looked life-threatening. Three bodies lay still on the floor, and she avoided looking at them.

Her eyes caught on something and she looked back at the bar itself, searching until the movement caught her eye. She couldn’t stop a small, amazed smile from blooming on her face: The goddamn Dipping Bird was still going, completely unscathed.

“Good,” Mike said, smiling at her. “You had me worried for a moment.”

Hammond, who had been staring at the floor, motionless, looked up sharply.

Mike frowned, looking at Raslowski. “You okay?” he asked her, crossing over to them.

“I’m not,” Raslowski said sourly, grunting in pain. “Thanks for asking.”

Haggen stepped over and took Raslowski by the arm. “Look on the bright side, Doc,” he said. “If Candace Cuddyer can’t kill you, chances are you can’t be killed by any mortal means.”

Mike guided her to a table. She realized she was numb and shaking from reaction. She’d come close to killing another human being. She’d hadn’t meant to, and hadn’t actually done it, but it still left her shaken. And even if she hadn’t actively killed anyone, she’d been involved with the deaths of other people. Her eyes kept finding their bodies, no matter how hard she tried to ignore them.

A glass of whiskey was placed on the table in front of her, and she looked up sharply to find Glen Eastman looking down at her with obvious concern. She smiled at him and lifted the glass, but didn’t drink right away. “Thanks.”

“You’re lucky he isn’t dead,” Colonel Hammond snapped.

Candace looked up, surprised. The colonel was leaning forward and staring at her fixedly, her eyes intense.

“Why?” Mike asked, stepping around to position himself between Hammond and Candace.

Candace couldn’t see Hammond as she replied, but she could hear the tone of her voice, which sent chills down her spine. “Because,” Hammond said steadily, “if that man dies, then every one of us, and everyone else—everyone, everywhere, all over the world—is as good as dead.”

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17. Mike

The moment she started walking, he wanted to reach out and stop her, call her back. For a second the insanity of what they were doing hit him, and hit him hard. The chances they would all wind up dead were stacked against them. Then he reminded himself that chances were they were going to end up dead no matter what, and taking a chance at going out in charge of their own destiny was better than sitting on his ass in this shithole bar, waiting to be executed, or to start coughing up blood.

He watched her storm over to Raslowski, though, and thought it should be him out there with a target on his back.

He watched with admiration as she laid into the scientist, fighting back the urge to grin. When she leaned in and slapped him hard enough to send the short man spinning to the floor, he was as surprised as anyone in the room. As the two guards by the front door leaped into the chase, he stepped behind the bar, nodding to Eastman and making his way to the trap door again. No one was looking in his direction.

He wouldn’t be any use in the front room. He wasn’t armed, and if Candace failed to pull the guards away from their posts, they would be on high alert and intolerant of any other misbehavior—and he didn’t doubt the next step would be to simply restrain them all. He had to put himself where he thought he might be of some use, and that was with McCoy and Haggen.

He dropped into the crawlspace and started moving, crawling as fast as he could. Glass cracked under his hands and knees and cut him, but he ignored it, listening to the noise in the bar as it receded and yet swelled and swelled. Sweat streamed into his eyes and dust and cobwebs choked him. When the second trap loomed above him he pushed himself up and climbed onto the floor of the back room.

He held a finger up to his mouth, breathing loudly through his nose. McCoy and Haggen had both turned with their weapons, and each nodded as he walked briskly for the door and back up the hallway. He pushed webs and dust off his clothes and pushed his bloody hands through his hair, composing himself just before he stepped into the office, saying “Colonel you had better get out here!” as he turned the corner.

Hammond was already out of her chair and around her desk, on her way to investigate the noise of chaos drifting from the bar. She stopped, and for a split second they stared at each other.

Her arm moved. Mike threw himself forward.

Candace needed time, she needed chaos and confusion. He’d seen enough of Colonel Hammond to know she was the sort of commander who took control of situations very quickly, effectively—with one order she would have everything back under control, and he needed to stop her from issuing that order. He needed to ensure she wouldn’t get in McCoy and Haggen’s way, either, or creep out behind them.

He locked onto her right arm, using his weight and momentum to drive her back into the desk. She bared her teeth and tried to push him off, but he was too heavy and had the advantage—she was off balance and he was driving forward with his legs. With her free hand she slapped at his face, trying to get a finger into his eye, forcing him to whip his head around to avoid her.

He leaned forward, bending her back over the desk and pinning her arm and holster between them. He pushed his free arm up and over hers and bent it down towards the desk, putting his weight into pinning it down.

Without warning, Hammond swiveled her pelvis and somehow rolled him; with all his force concentrated on pinning her down he was easily shifted horizontally, and suddenly she was pushing him until he crashed into the wall with teeth-shaking force. He hung onto her arm with everything he had, and then suddenly she went still.

“All right, Colonel,” he heard Haggen say. “Back on off.”

He had Warner’s sidearm pressed against Hammond’s head. After a moment’s hesitation, she decided to take him seriously and put her hands up by her shoulders. Mike leaned forward and snapped open her holster, removing her sidearm with one clean motion. Keeping his eyes on hers, he felt around her pockets, locating one extra magazine and pocketing it.

Out in the bar, the noise had reached incredible volume. Mike flicked the safety off the weapon and stepped back from Hammond.

“Not exactly the plan you outlined, huh?” Haggen said.

“Had to improvise; the guards didn’t cooperate. Thanks for the assist. I’ll take it from here.”

Haggen sketched a lazy salute. “I live to serve, motherfucker,” he said, grinning, and turned to step back out into the hallway.

“Take out a ziptie,” he said to Hammond. “And go to the radiator.”

She didn’t move right away. “You’re making a terrible mistake here,” she said.

He shook his head. “Colonel, you made the mistake when you swept in here and didn’t tell us anything. When you treated us like prisoners. You didn’t leave us any choice.” He gestured with the gun. “Ziptie. Radiator.”

She turned and started walking, fishing in her pocket. He watched her hands. “Maybe so,” she said. “I’d like the opportunity to explain what’s at stake, why our orders are what they are.”

“You’ll get it,” he said, following her a few steps behind. “Once we’re in control.”

She snapped off a sudden, angry laugh. “We’re not even in control, Mr. Malloy.”

She held a ziptie up in one hand as she stopped in front of the radiator.

“Loop it around the radiator’s feed pipe,” he instructed. “Don’t pull it tight.” He watched her do it. “Put your wrists through the loop.” She did so, settling down on the floor. He leaned in quickly with one hand and pulled the ziptie tight.

“Ow!”

“Sorry,” he said. “Hopefully you won’t have to be like this for long.”

“If they end up cutting off my hands, I’m bringing that bill to you.”

“Noted.” He turned just as the noise out in the bar died away completely—followed immediately by a scream and a volley of gunfire.

He started to run.

As he neared the dividing line between the dark hallway and the bright bar, he forced himself to slow down and pressed himself against the wall. He took a breath and checked the Beretta before leaning forward to look in.

Five of the guards were down, two with arrows in their thighs, one clutching a gunshot wound in his shoulder that was bleeding heavily. The other four were gathered behind an impromptu breastwork of flipped tables, exchanging fire with Haggen and McCoy, who were behind the bar, popping up and dropping down. He couldn’t see Candace or Eastman.

Taking another deep breath, he ran into the room and turned right, racing along the wall until he was perpendicular with the soldiers behind the tables. For a moment they were completely exposed to him and unaware of his presence, and he took aim.

He remembered his anatomy lessons with his shooting guru, a plump, taciturn man named Jerry who lived on a rundown ranch in Montana, tons of acres his family had owned for decades. Jerry made a living as a ballistics expert, and had been happy to take what amounted to a year’s salary to teach Mike how to shoot—and a lot of other things about guns that went beyond shooting.

“You don’t shoot at someone to wound,” Jerry had complained of the request. “That’s hippie bullshit. First of all, you can’t have that kind of control. Second, no matter where you aim you can hit something vital and kill them. But mainly, you shoot to stop. Someone coming at you, you need to drop ’em. If you try to aim for some fucking nonlethal spot, you’ll end up missing, or killing them by accident. You want nonlethal, kid, shoot rubber bullets.”

“Yeah,” Mike remembered saying around his beer. “But say I just want to know. Maybe I’m writing a book.”

Jerry, he recalled, had sighed in resignation, obviously reviewing the money Mike was paying him. “Well,” he said, “if you actually were dumb enough to try and drop someone non-lethally, you got to avoid bones. Bone shatters bullets and keeps them in the body—shoot someone in the ribs and that bullet’s gonna dance around in there. The torso’s where you drop people, but you can hit the heart. The head’s less fatal than you would think—most headshots don’t actually kill anyone, because they tend to be grazes, the head’s a smaller target than you think at distance, and skulls are thick. Arms and legs—too many arteries, too easy to bleed someone out.” He shrugged, taking a pull from his beer. “If I was looking to wound someone, and stop them, I’d go for the foot. Reasonable size of target if you’re close enough, chances of fatality are low, hurts like fuckin’ hell and immobilizes them.”

Mike thought: Aim for their feet.

Remembering Jerry’s eternally aggrieved training, he took a breath, steadied himself, and sighted on the nearest soldier’s boot.

He didn’t shoot.

Instead, he moved the gun slightly until the next soldier’s boot was right in the crosshairs. Then he moved the gun back, exhaled, and squeezed the trigger. The familiar kick and ear-splitting noise, and the nearest soldier rocketed backwards, screaming as his boot exploded into gore. Mike moved the gun and settled himself, not hesitating, not worrying about what the others were doing (“Easiest way to get dead is to try to shoot and watch your target at the same time,” Jerry had said, chewing on a cigar) and squeezed the trigger again.

Another scream.

He stepped forward rapidly. “Down! All of you, weapons down!” In his peripheral vision he saw someone stand up behind the bar. There was a tense moment when he wasn’t sure it was over, then the two guards dropped their guns and put their hands up.

Mike realized he was trembling. Get the weapons, he thought, first gather up their weapons. Then first aid.

He didn’t know what then. He almost didn’t believe they’d won.

A second later there was a commotion near the front door, and Mike looked up in time to see Raslowski dash out of the bar, something in his hand that might have been some sort of radio or phone. Before he could react, Candace dashed from behind the bar, carrying McCoy’s crossbow, and without a glance back sprinted after him.

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16. Candace

She steeled herself. She could hear her father again, the man who’d supplied most, if not all, of the sage advice she’d received over the course of her life: Sometimes you just gotta step in it. He’d said that any time he had to do something without the luxury of preparation, research, or practice. Like the time he had to give a speech at her Eighth Grade class because the father who was scheduled to talk about Career Day got sick, and he had to just step up to the podium in front of twenty-three disinterested kids and their even less-interested parents and talk about being a Plumber.

Correction: A Master Plumber, something that at least got a laugh from the class. And when she’d informed him that the teacher had suggested Mr. Cuddyer for an impromptu speech, she remembered the frightened look on his face, and then the immediate, warm smile as he’d shrugged, looked at her, and said well, sometimes you just gotta step in it.

She took a deep breath and thought, well, Dad, here I go stepping in the biggest pile of it I’ve ever seen, and started walking across the bar towards Dr. Raslowski.

She knew the paths of the bar perfectly. She’d covered every square foot of the worn wood, she’d gone through countless pairs of sneakers weaving her way between tables for tips. She kept her eyes locked on Raslowski’s pale, skinny frame as she moved, because she was worried if she looked at any of the soldiers they’d know what she was about to do, and if she saw them knowing she’d lose her nerve, because there was the very real possibility of being shot, just like poor Mr. Simms.

Raslowski was concentrating on a compact piece of equipment that he’d put on his crowded table. She could see he’d inserted one of her blood samples into a slot on its side, and he was typing instructions into a tiny chiclet-style keyboard. His glasses reflected the light of the tiny LED screen, making him look eyeless, like a monster.

She thought she could feel the whole place stiffen as she drew close to him. The two guards by the front door each stepped forward slightly, and she knew every single soldier had their eyes on her.

“You get what you need?” she asked, trying to make her voice bitter and acidic, which wasn’t very difficult.

Raslowski didn’t look at her. “Please go away,” he said.

“Do I have it?”

That made him blink and glance at her, though he looked at her midsection instead of her face. “What did you say?”

“Do I have it? It’s a disease, right? A bug? Am I sick?”

Mike had made a joke about an alien virus, but something told her it couldn’t be that simple—a disease. As Glen had pointed out, no one was following any sort of containment protocol. No one seemed worried about contracting anything. But it seemed like a perfect excuse to act like an idiot.

He stared at her belly for a moment more, then turned to look back at his work. “Go away.” he said with an irritated sigh.

Well, Dad, she thought. Here I go.

“You think you can just snap your fingers and have me tackled and do whatever you want,” she spat. “But maybe you don’t, you son of a bitch!”

She launched herself forward and slapped him across the face as hard as she could. It hurt like hell as he hand made contact. Raslowski let out a squawk of combined surprise and pain and was spun out of his seat, one laptop and the testing machine clattering to the floor. Candace herself was overbalanced and she staggered forward and to the side, crashing into one of the tables and chairs, which skidded across the floor and allowed her to gracelessly hit the floor, landing on her ass with a single bounce that made her click her teeth together.

Up, she thought, head suddenly buzzing. Get up, goddammit.

She clawed her way up using a chair as a brace. The two guards from the front door were almost on her, so she pivoted away, off balance, and crashed into another fourtop. She took hold of the edge of the table and dragged it around, swinging it into their path as she skipped into another lane.

She stole a glance at the guards by the hall entrance. They were on high alert, tense and following the action, but they hadn’t moved yet. There wouldn’t be any other chances; if they subdued her, she had little doubt Hammond would be tired of the constant trouble and would order they just be restrained. Or killed.

She whirled. She had four soldiers in pursuit. She needed more, she needed them all, which meant she was going to have to somehow stay ahead of them long enough to pull everyone in.

She leaped up onto the nearest table. Took another leap, and immediately another, and she was ten feet away from them. She hesitated, crouching on top of the tables, as two more soldiers left their posts to join in pursuit. But not the two by the hallway.

She leaped to another table, then another, then with an effort that sent the table under her skidding backwards into the shins of her pursuers, she launched herself for the bar itself. Glen scrambled to the other end as she hopped over.

A strange feeling of delirious excitement descended on her as she plucked two of the heavy beer mugs from under the bar and came up throwing. Her first one hit one of the soldiers in the shoulder, spinning her around. The second missed as the rest ducked, but she dived down and returned with more ammunition, tossing one at the knot of four working their way towards her. Then she pivoted, forced herself to exhale, and took aim at the two by the hallway, making the one to the left duck in shock as the mug exploded into glass shrapnel over his head.

She ducked and retrieved four more mugs, holding three awkwardly in the crook of one arm and striding quickly down the length of the bar towards the hallway.

You motherfuckers, she thought grimly, you’re going to move from that spot if I have to set you on fire.

There had been one moment in her life as exciting as this. Senior year of high school, drunk with some friends, she’d broken into the school and run around the dark, empty halls playing pranks. Looking back, it was all silly, juvenile stuff—toilet paper everywhere, a thousand photocopies of her friend Shelly’s ass littering the halls—but in the moment she’d had this white-hot thrill, that sense that the moment she’d engaged in a little casual breaking and entering she’d crossed a line and had a free pass. She was already in more trouble than she’d ever been, so why not stay ten more minutes and break into Mr. Hemming’s office and retrieve four years’ worth of confiscated items?

It was the same feeling she felt now as she ran to the end of the bar and planted herself to lob glassware at the two soldiers. She’d crossed that line thirty seconds before. If they were going to shoot her, if they were going to tie her up, whatever it was they were going to do, it was already going to happen. Nothing she did was going to change that fact, and there was this incredible sense of freedom because she literally couldn’t make things worse.

Glen ducked down and ran back the other way, intercepting the pursuing soldiers by apparent accident in his haste to escape danger. You go, old man! she thought. If nothing else the Weirdest Day of Her Life had shown her a side to old Mr. Eastman she was glad to be aware of. She hadn’t realized it before, had never consciously thought about it, but the way Mr. Eastman had transformed from the history-spouting PE teacher of her teen years into the slightly ridiculous old man hanging around the bar all the time, always happy to discuss his theories on sovereign citizenship and the myriad ways the government had abandoned the original intention of the Founding Fathers had been sad for her. Seeing him show this kind of spirit was exciting.

She hurled a mug at the closest soldier, and he ducked and scrambled away. She sent another one trailing him, then launched a third at his partner, who dived behind the nearest table. She sent one more glass bomb in his direction, then spun and ran back along the length of the bar. Two soldiers appeared at the other end while two paced her on the other side. She was aware that someone was yelling, bellowing really, but she didn’t have the time to home in on it.

With a leap she was on the bar, sliding a few inches on her ass before spinning and leaping to the floor. She stumbled, an ankle turning under her weight, and staggered forward. Two of the uniformed men were just a few feet ahead of her. She froze, and one of them stepped aggressively towards her, then stopped.

She stared at the soldier’s suddenly perplexed face. Then her eyes dropped to the crossbow bolt sticking out of his thigh.

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