Falcon sat in the hallway, his shivering wrists in handcuffs. He could feel his entire body twitching; the urge to throw up tickled dry heaves down in his stomach.
His gaze fixed on the handcuffs: chromed and bright. If only he could concentrate, but Aunt Celia was shouting, her voice dominating everything.
“Jimmy, you are such a disappointment,” she scolded, her face pinched. “I require the bare minimum of you. I cannot be the mother and father you lost. I ask so little, yet even that seems to be beyond your most facile ability to perform!”
He swallowed hard, saying, “I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”
“Yes, it is,” Aunt Celia agreed as she leaned over the waxed and polished table. Behind her, the tall grandfather clock from Germany tick-tocked in its carved cabinet. The flowered wallpaper seemed to ebb and flow at the periphery of Falcon’s vision. He could feel Julia’s wide-eyed gaze where she cowered in the dining room doorway behind him.
Avoiding Aunt Celia’s burning gaze, he ran his thumb over the table, tracing a knot in the polished wood.
“I’m sorry.” Falcon’s voice sounded distant, weak . . .
In his mind, the loop began to replay: “Jimmy, you are such a disappointment,” Aunt Celia scolded, her face pinched. “I require the bare minimum of you. I cannot be the mother and father you lost. I ask so little, yet even that seems to be beyond your most facile ability to perform!”
He swallowed hard, saying, “I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”
“Yes, it is,” Aunt Celia agreed as she leaned over the waxed and polished table . . .
Falcon cried out in fear as hands reached out of nowhere to grab his shoulders. His entire body jolted, as if an electrical wire had been touched to his skin.
Falcon stared up at two MPs, dressed in uniforms, their faces stern. Mad. Mad at him. “What?”
“I said, get up!” the young one on the right ordered harshly. “What’s the matter? You deaf!”
“Hey! Leave him alone!” The Skipper’s frantic voice cut through rising fear.
Falcon blinked, finding himself in a crowded and unfamiliar hallway. Police officers stood in knots, blocking any escape. Dr. Ryan, his hands cuffed, was trying to struggle to his feet, only to be shoved back with the tip of a riot stick.
“You gonna get up?” the MP bellowed in Falcon’s face.
His entire body shivering, Falcon whispered, “Can’t. Can’t.” His gut dry heaved, and he barely choked it down.
Panic built.
Their terrible hands shot down, twisted in the shoulders of his shirt, and lifted.
An empty cry tore from his throat as he felt himself picked up, powerless, and scared.
“They got ya now!” Rudy Noyes cried gleefully.
Some sort of scuffle, shouting, and chaos faded into a blur of background.
Chief Raven’s shout of “He’s not well, you son of a bitch!” lanced through his panicked brain as he felt himself propelled forward, his feet scrambling for purchase. Faces flashed in his peripheral vision: people he knew, strangers . . . and then he was carried through a door, past empty chairs, and plopped down before a table. Across from him, two hostile men shuffled papers. One was blond, thin, and pale, the other dark, squat, and menacing.
For a moment, Falcon sat shivering, his hands fluttering like twin birds. His heart hammered frantically in his chest. A dry heave caught in his throat. He wanted to have diarrhea.
Voices shouted in his head.
“Captain James Hancock Falcon,” the pale one noted, and fixed him with alien-pale eyes. The pupils were black dots that burned through him like coals.
“All right, you little pussy,” Rudy said with a smirk. “They got your candy ass at last.”
Falcon cried, “Rudy, shut up!” He shot a quick glance to the side where Rudy was slouched in one of the plastic hotel chairs just beyond the flanking MP.
“Who’s Rudy?” one of the men asked.
Unconcerned, Rudy flipped Falcon the bird. “God, you’re a worthless piece of shit.”
“I’m not.” Falcon swallowed against the vomit gurgling in the bottom of his throat. “You’re the piece of shit.”
“Hey!” An MP’s hard face thrust into his vision. “You’re gonna show these officers a little respect, or I’m gonna teach it to you, shit bag!”
Shit bag. Shit bag. Shit bag . . . the words bounced around the inside of Falcon’s skull like rubber balls.
“Major?” he cried. “Where are you? What’s happening?”
“Can’t help you this time, son.” Major Marks offered, and Falcon twisted his head to where Major Marks stood behind the officers at the table, arms crossed, his campaign ribbons mostly obscured. “In fact, where they’re taking you, I can’t go.”
“You’re . . . leaving me?”
“Other way around. You’ve let me down.”
“No, I never.”
The slap came out of nowhere, stinging his jaws.
For an instant, Falcon was able to fix on the MP crouched beside him. The veins stood out on the man’s neck, his brown eyes hot and angry.
Falcon watched the man’s lips moving, words, disembodied, echoing in his head like he was in the bottom of a well. “I don’t know what kind of shit you’re pulling, asshole, but you can stop it right now, or you’ll wish you were dead . . . wish you were dead . . . wish you were dead!”
In Falcon’s floating vision, the pale-eyed man and the dark one across the table were staring at him in amused disgust.
“Rudy, what do they want from me?” he cried. “Theresa?” He stared around, saw her crouching just behind the MP, her flower-pattern dress wrinkled, her hair undone. The sad look in her eyes surprised him. “. . . the variables are uncertain . . .” she was saying. “. . . mostly a redundancy effect . . .”
“Hey!” the MP shouted. “You’re being charged. You get that?”
Charged. You’re being charged. You’re being . . .
Falcon closed his eyes, searching desperately on the backs of his eyelids, seeking the pieces.
He formed fractured images, heard bits of Mozart.
Fragments of speech echoed hollowly.
Each time he tried to fix the fleeting images on the backs of his eyelids, they skittered away like spiders on a wall.
“Got to find the pattern,” he whispered to himself.
“Falcon?” Aunt Celia asked. “Have you finished your homework?”
Rudy’s slick voice chortled, “What’s the matter, you little pussy? Can’t find any backbone?”
“Are you or are you not Captain James Hancock Falcon?” yet another voice demanded.
Falcon tensed his muscles, curling, feeling the world falling away.
Confusion.
Everything eating everything.
So many voices. All these people, leering, peering closely, reaching out to touch him.
Somewhere was order. Somewhere . . . in the confusion.
And he let himself drift down into the darkness, hearing Aunt Celia.
“Jimmy, you are such a disappointment,” Aunt Celia scolded, her face pinched. “I require the bare minimum of you. I cannot be the mother and father you lost. I ask so little, yet even that seems to be beyond your most facile ability to perform!”
He swallowed hard, saying, “I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”
“Yes, it is,” Aunt Celia agreed as she leaned over the waxed and polished table . . .
“Jimmy, you are such a disappointment . . .”
Falcon fell deeper into the loop as it started over, and over, and over . . .