Today

 

“This one is broken. It’s time to get a new one.”

 

* * *

 

Someone called 911 when they spotted her huddled under the tree by the Walmart parking lot exit. It was the only shady spot around, and it wasn’t unusual to see a homeless person there, waiting out the worst of the desert afternoon’s brutal sun while trying to get money out of the drivers who pulled up to the stop sign. The person who called told the dispatcher emphatically that he didn’t want to be involved, he didn’t know who she was, where she’d come from, or how long she’d been there. The only thing he did know was that she looked like something unspeakable had happened to her.

He was right.

 

* * *

 

April 3, Two Weeks Earlier

 

God, she was so hot. She felt like she was on fire, or maybe she was baking in a giant oven. Where was she? No matter how she tried, she couldn’t open her eyes. Was there something tied across them? She couldn’t move, either. Maybe she was paralyzed. No. She could feel all right, feel everything. Jesus, she was flat on her back with her arms and legs splayed out, and she was tied, that’s what was going on. Her mouth was covered, too, so she couldn’t scream—she couldn’t see, she couldn’t get free, she couldn’t call out for help.

She struggled uselessly for a while until she was too tired and overheated to do anything but lie there and fight to breathe. Tears soaked into the material covering her eyes, and she sucked in and swallowed the phlegm in her sinuses, afraid it would build up and block her nose, suffocating her. Her tongue already felt thick and dry, and it scrabbled around uselessly inside her mouth, searching for saliva but finding nothing but thirst. Could people burn alive when nothing but their own heat caused it? She’d read stories about spontaneous human combustion but thought they were all hoaxes, the stuff of B-grade horror movies and sensational websites. Maybe there was something to them after all—

No, that was ridiculous. She was delirious, so overheated that her thoughts were getting scrambled and making no sense. She tried to think back, to figure out how she had gotten here—wherever here was. Everything in her memory was a blur, and she was so thirsty she couldn’t concentrate on anything else. Dear God, was she going to die? She wanted to fight, to live, but she was so tired and hot that she couldn’t move anymore, couldn’t do anything but lie there and take shallow breaths through her nearly plugged-up nostrils. Now and then the tiniest of breezes slithered across one side of her face, the wind too warm to help anything. And then—

Water, a cooling mist that kissed her skin in all the right places, and all the wrong ones, too. There was some kind of hot, crinkling padding beneath her, but she was naked, for crying out loud, staked out like the bird in a spatchcocked turkey recipe. The realization made everything worse, made all the virgin parts of her body that were never meant to experience the sun suddenly feel singed and raw. Was she going to be raped? Tortured even more than what she was going through right now? Or simply left to die? Never had she been more vulnerable, so helpless. If she was going to die, then so be it. She wished it would happen now so that she wouldn’t have to endure the hellish heat while she waited for the inevitable. She wished she could just close her eyes and surrender, force her traitorous body and all its stubborn organs to just stop. She—

What’s that?

 

* * *

 

I’d always thought of myself as a little OCD. I focused too much on getting the little things just right—a picture hung on the wall just so, a wash-and-wear shirt that had to be ironed because the dryer had left too many wrinkles in the fabric, the stapler or telephone in the wrong place on my desk at work because someone had used my workstation while I’d been in a meeting. Infuriating, any of it. No, all of it. When I was growing up, my fixation on things had been criticized, and this had made me feel self‑conscious for most of my life. Then I read an Internet article that stated people who chewed on their fingernails weren’t dirty or obsessive. They were perfectionists.

I’d done this all my life, working at the smallest crack or ragged edge as I tried valiantly to smooth it out.

Perfectionist.

I’d finally discovered the truth about myself.

 

* * *

 

The only thing the police had was that the car the young woman had been forced into was a silver Honda, three years old. There was a decent shot of the license plate from the department store’s parking lot security camera, but it was useless—the license plate had been plastered over with dark tape, or maybe mud. The man who’d grabbed her was average height and weight and had been wearing a plain gray hoodie and sunglasses, and the only thing they could see for sure was that he had a dark mustache and some kind of a tattoo on his left hand. The resolution wasn’t good, and the tattoo looked like nothing more than a vague blue circle, maybe with a few points. A star? They weren’t sure. There were thousands of those silver Hondas statewide. If that wasn’t bad enough, the state wasn’t visible on the license plate either, so the car could be from anywhere. Their painstaking database searches of parolees and known criminals with tattoos came up empty, and none of the snitches on the streets of the small town knew anything.

It was like she had vanished into the desert.

 

* * *

 

Footsteps.

She wanted to cry out to the person coming up to her, to beg for help and release. At the same time, she wished she could fold in on herself for protection, like one of those pill bugs she had toyed with as a child. Was this a rescuer? Her kidnapper? Or someone who had stumbled across her and would bend to the temptation presented by a naked and helpless woman, someone who wouldn’t be able to resist a previously hidden—or not— darkness in their soul? Three possibilities, but only one had a good outcome. She was the unwilling piece in a game of chance. That she’d been taken to begin with was perhaps representative of her lousy luck, but she had to hope for the best. She had to.

The footsteps paused next to her. She waited, breathing heavily, but no one said anything. Then she heard the earth shifting as the person crouched next to her, still soundless and inexplicably treacherous.

When she felt hands on her, she knew she’d lost.

 

* * *

 

The girl’s skin was a nice shade of pink and her body glistened with sweat. Dehydration had been a potential problem, but I’d finally worked out a system to get around that. I pulled the duct tape off her lips in one fast motion; she gasped and sucked in air for a scream. Before she could get any sound out, I shoved the valve of the hydration pack into her mouth. “Bite and suck,” I commanded. Her need for water won and she drew in water, then again and again. I had another piece of tape ready and I slapped it over her mouth, pinning the valve between her lips. Now the girl would be able to get water when she needed it. Instinct and thirst would keep her hydrated, and all I had to do was periodically refill the reservoir.

It was still early enough in the afternoon that I had to worry about hyperthermia, but I had that covered, too. I’d driven all the way to Phoenix and paid cash for a misting fan that hooked up to a garden hose, and now I positioned it so it would oscillate the length of her body. Pretty ingenious, if I do say so myself.

 

* * *

 

In fourth grade she’d found that if she hooked her fingers in the sides of her mouth, then stretched and held a sort of funny face, she could make her lips dry and crinkly. She’d thought it was fun, but the teacher, not so much. That had gotten her slapped across the face, and she hadn’t fared much better when the same teacher caught her pouring Elmer’s Glue into her palm and letting it dry so that it would crack and flake. She hadn’t told her parents about either time. They would’ve just said she deserved it.

 

* * *

 

The water was oddly salty, dishwater warm and tasted like plastic tubing, but it smoothed out the sandpaper feeling of her tongue and slid down the ragged, dry length of her throat. Her face and lips burned and itched where tape had been ripped from her mouth then put back on—she’d always had an allergy to adhesive, even the kind used in bandages. She’d pulled hard enough to know there were ropes around her wrists and ankles, and her waist, too. She was bound tightly enough so she couldn’t arch her back. The covering across her eyes was horrid enough, but even her head was secured by something flat and wide across her forehead so that she couldn’t turn her face either way.

The person who had forced the water tube into her mouth had also turned on some kind of fan and spray system. Every few seconds a mist of water would blow across her skin and give her a smidgen of relief from the unrelenting sun. At first she felt better, cooler, the horrific dryness satiated. She forced herself to be calm, to listen for anything that might help her determine her location, not that she could do anything about it. But when she got rescued—and she had to believe she would be—there might be something she could use to identify the bastard who had taken her and tortured her. As the time dragged on, minute after minute, all she heard was birdsong and the buzz of insects. Surely hours had passed. Where had she been taken that there wasn’t the sound of a single passing car? Or an airplane? Nothing, not even a faraway dog’s bark. And the one sound that should have lifted her spirits did nothing but absolutely terrify her.

Footsteps.

 

* * *

 

I’d been monitoring her from the patio all afternoon, using a small pair of binoculars to keep pace with her progress. I could tell by the way the muscles moved in her jaw and her throat when she was taking in water, and that had slowed to a more regular rate after the first twenty minutes. The hydration pack was still swollen, so there was plenty of fluid—water cut with a small amount of electrolyte drink and some Valium—still left in it. There was no sense in trying to get her to eat this soon. I knew she wouldn’t, and besides, right now she was keeping her belly full of liquid. The sun was rapidly dropping toward the spiky western peaks. The temperature would plummet and it would get cold once the light was gone from the sky. Another twenty minutes and she would go from overheated to uncomfortably cold, so she would need to be covered. She was a fair-skinned young woman and the areas of her body that were new to the sun were a bit darker than others. The remainder of her flesh was a pleasing shade of red, like a perfectly rare steak.

It was time to turn her.

 

* * *

 

Once, when she was still a careless teenager in the big city, she set out on a Saturday morning and rode her bike all day, enjoying the summer weather and winding through neighborhoods she’d never visited before. She was trim and muscular, and the tank top and shorts she wore showed skin in all the right places. She’d enjoyed the occasional whistle and admiring looks, and the breeze generated by the leisurely ride ensured she never gave a thought to her unprotected skin. By the time she locked her bike in the basement and dragged herself up to her apartment in the late afternoon, her back and shoulders were a mass of blisters—big ones, the size of fingernails, running together like some sort of disease. Her body felt like it was on fire, and she could barely tolerate the touch of cotton sheets. It was only two days before the blisters broke and the skin started to slough away.

 

* * *

 

It was nighttime.

The fiery heat of the sun had faded and cold settled in its place. She had looked forward to the temperature drop for what had seemed like hours, but the reality of it was a cruel surprise. The overheated surfaces of her body felt shocked by the absence of warmth, and shivering cycled through her muscles—her teeth were chattering so loudly that she missed the sound of the approaching footsteps.

Then there were hands on her. She wanted to cringe away, to scream, but she still couldn’t move. A finger pressed on the ridge of her collarbone then drew all the way across. She winced at the pain that followed the touch, the sting of a vicious sunburn. Her heartbeat thudded inside her chest, frightened but sluggish. Was she dying? Before she could process the thought further, something tiny and sharp—a needle—penetrated the sweaty skin of her neck. Her brain registered a feeling of dizziness and a kind of high-pitched whine, then…

Blackness.

 

* * *

 

“Save that,” Eddie told her. His sudden, brusque voice made her jump. He was her mother’s friend, a tall, strangely angular man with thick black hair and thin lips. He only visited when her father was out of town, and her mom said to never tell anyone. When she asked why, her mother said it was because Eddie had been “in the pen” and was dangerous, so it had to be a secret. Her mother told her not to ask any more questions about it, and that was that.

“What?” she asked. She looked over at her mother. They’d gone out to the lake the previous weekend and gotten sunburned. Now they were both peeling. She loved the tickling that came when she pulled off the dry skin, enjoyed getting lost in the compulsion to work at it more and more. “Why?”

He knelt in front of her and he still seemed to tower over her four-year-old frame. His grin was full of big, uneven teeth gone slightly yellow from smoking. “Because you can make a lampshade out of it.”

Eddie pushed himself back up and walked away, leaving her to stare in wonder at the long, inch-wide piece of dead skin dangling from her fingertips.

 

* * *

 

When she woke, she was lying on her stomach. Her head wasn’t secured like it had been before and she could turn it from side to side, even crank her neck for short periods so that she could get her face off the mat, or whatever it was that was underneath her. She must’ve slept through the night. Now the sun was up, and the back of her body was stinging with heat. The fan and the mister were going, but neither relieved the sensation of being cooked alive, braised in her own bodily juices. There was a pool of liquid beneath her, mist water, sweat and…urine. The sudden realization that she could smell herself made her even more miserable. She squirmed and then gagged against the tape that still covered her mouth.

Then, with no warning—not even the footsteps she’d started listening for automatically—water, hot at first, then dropping to lukewarm—sprayed across her back. The pressure was strong enough to make her instinctively suck air through her nose and she choked when water came with it, coughing harshly and struggling to breathe over the water and snot bubbling out of her sinuses. Not enough oxygen made spots float in front of her closed eyes by the time the spray stopped and the tape was suddenly yanked away. The tubing was pulled roughly from her mouth and she stretched her mouth wide, alternating between hauling in air and trying to push the liquid out of her nose and throat.

Finally, her coughing and gasping faded. She lay there panting, wondering what was coming next. It felt like she barely had a moment to recover before the water hit her again, this time washing up and down her back, hips and legs. She got it then: she was getting a “bath,” having the nastiness sprayed off. She didn’t know whether to be happy or to despair—was she being cleaned up for release, or because her abductor couldn’t stand the stench of her anymore?

“Please.” The croakiness of her own voice startled her. She struggled to make herself heard above the sound of water pushing from a hose. “I haven’t seen anything. I don’t know who you are or even where I am. Let me go and no one will ever know.”

The crude bath stopped abruptly, then she heard footsteps walking away along with a sound she identified immediately as that of the hose being dragged.

“Please,” she repeated. It was better to be calm, but she couldn’t stop her voice as it rose, climbing toward a shriek. “You have to—”

Her begging cut off as her wet hair was grabbed and her head was forced back. Before she could say anything else, the hydration tube was shoved back into her open mouth. She forced it out with her tongue and slammed her teeth together, thinking it was too bad she hadn’t been able to bite down on a finger or two in the process. Now there were two hands on her, but desperation had given her strength and she twisted her head back and forth, fighting the fist gripping her hair and the other hand trying to pry open her lips. Once, no, twice, she snapped at flesh and almost got it, like some kind of zombie prisoner. When the hand holding her hair let go, she thought she might be heading toward freedom.

Until she felt a pinprick in the side of her neck and everything sparkled away into blackness.

 

* * *

 

The days rolled past, they had to, even though she couldn’t really tell one from another. There was daytime and blazing heat, nighttime and cold, the sort of chill that’s born of fever and delirium. In between was a lot of unconsciousness, where she knew she’d been drugged but didn’t know what was being done to her while she was out. Hot, cold, but not much sensation beyond that except a strange sort of tickling that pulled across the tender surfaces of her body. Sometimes it came with tiny pinches or scrapes, almost like something was trying to get underneath her skin. Not digging too deeply, just sort of…skimming.

Once or twice she woke to find something thick and sweet coming up the hydration tube when she sucked on it, a liquid she could only compare to a warm milkshake. She took it in because her body wanted it, even though she’d rather not, even though she would rather simply die.

She tried to imagine rescue, the sudden intrusion of sirens into the non-stop birdsong and buzz of insects that was her daily soundtrack, the blaze of light that would coat her pupils when the blindfold was removed. In her darkest hours, she sees herself like this for the rest of her life, a time period that stretches incomprehensibly before the thin sheet of her mental sanity.

 

* * *

 

When the girl nearly succeeded in biting me, I started drugging her until she slept most of the time. I hadn’t wanted to, but ultimately I realized that was less cruel than what she was enduring. The process was working and the hours I spent with her were relaxing and fulfilling in a way that nothing else in my life could be, but it was taking longer than I’d expected—the effort to productivity ratio was poor, indeed. I wanted more from her, but it seemed clear she’d given all that she could. She could no longer recover quickly enough to start the cycle again, and it had never been my intent to torture her. I just wasn’t that kind of person.

 

* * *

 

She heard the footsteps and vaguely felt the ropes around her loosen and fall away, but she was too heavily sedated to care anymore. In the movies, the prisoner might hold the pills in his or her cheek, then spit them out and get away. In her reality, there is no escape from the kidnapper’s hypodermic. The blindfold was still on as her hands were retied behind her back. She was lifted and carried, then placed in what could only be the trunk of a car. Her head lolled and she thought it might be a good thing that she was high. The material over her eyes slipped just enough on one side for her to glimpse the skin across the top of her right breast. It was a suppurating mass of raw, burned patches that dribbled liquid where fresh blisters had been broken and peeled away. Right now, though, she didn’t feel a thing.

Her abductor gave her one last dose to ensure she stayed cooperative as she was wrapped in an old sheet.

 

* * *

 

Working carefully, I laid the last piece of skin, still faintly moist and delicate, across the bottom of the thin wire frame. I’ve been working my way around for quite some time, and this last layer, the newest, is gray-white above where it joins the older, yellow-tinted ones below it. In only a few days the latest additions will be as dried and discolored as the other layers. Hanging at just the right height above my reading chair, the lampshade was small and very fragile. So many years in the making, yet so much more to go before it’s finished.

 

* * *

 

I propped the girl beneath a tree in a parking lot I’d never been to before, then drove away. My route was fast and anonymous, down a country road that’s not used much and where I could see any traffic both coming and going. When the road was empty in both directions, I pulled over and removed the magnetized cover on my license plate. I slipped it beneath the mat on the driver’s side floor. Climbing back into the driver’s seat, I shrugged out of the gray hoodie, then tugged off the fake mustache and the piece of clear plastic on my left hand on which I’d drawn a sort of maritime star tattoo. All of that went into a brown paper shopping bag, one that had no store logo on it, so that if I found myself in a spot where I had to dump it, there was nothing to trace back to me. I shook out my hair and let the blonde curls fall naturally across my shoulders, then quickly dabbed some pink gloss on my lips.

A moment later, I was back on the highway. I’d give it a couple of weeks, then get back to my project.

“It’s time to get a new one.”

 

 

 

 

Yvonne Navarro lives in southern Arizona where, until recently, she worked in one of those super-secret squirrel buildings on historic Fort Huachuca. She is the author of twenty-two published novels and well over a hundred short stories, plus numerous non-fiction articles and two editions of a reference dictionary. Her writing has won the Bram Stoker Award® plus a number of other writing awards. She also draws and paints, and once sold a canvas print of a zombie painting.

She is married to author Weston Ochse and dotes on their blind Great Dane, Ghoulie, and a talking, people-loving parakeet named BirdZilla.