9
“No, no, no, no—”
The room was static and pulse. The two men wrestled with Jimmy’s mother, who lifted herself off the ground and writhed in their jerking grasps. Her feet kicked and whirled. Jimmy’s father lay still as stone beneath her.
“Open this goddamn door!” the man with the portable yelled. The radio on the wall was deafening. Jimmy hated the radio. He ran to it, reached for the dangling cord, then thought better and grabbed the other portable from the rack. One of the knobs said “power.” He twisted it until it made the hissing sound, turned to the screen, and held the radio to his mouth.
“Don’t,” he said, and Jimmy realized he was crying. Tears splashed his coveralls. “I’m coming.”
It was hard to tear himself away from the view of his mother. Harder still to be far from her, to not be there for her or his father. As he rushed down the dark corridor, he continued to see her kicking and screaming, her boots in the air. He could hear her yelling in the background as the man radioed again: “Tell me the code!”
Jimmy held the portable’s wrist strap between his teeth and attacked the ladder. His hands rang out like dull bells as he slapped his way up, ignoring the pain in his shoulder and knee. He found the release for the grating and threw it aside with a clang. Tossing the portable out, he scrambled after it on his knees. The lights above were on fire. His chest was on fire. His father was as dead as Yani.
“Coming, coming,” he said into the radio.
The man yelled something back. All Jimmy could hear was his mother screaming and his pulse ringing in his ears. He ran beneath the angry lights and between the dark machines. The laces on one of his boots had come undone. They whipped about while he ran, and he thought of his mother’s legs, up in the air like that, kicking and fighting.
Jimmy crashed into the door. He could hear muffled shouts on the other side. They came through the radio as well. His mother’s screams could be heard both places at once, crackling and hissing in one ear and dull and distant in the other.
Jimmy slapped the door with his palm and shouted into his portable. “I’m here, I’m here!”
“The code!” the man screamed.
Jimmy went to the control pad. His hands were shaking, his vision blurred. He imagined his mother on the other side, the gun aimed at her. He could feel his father lying a few feet away, just on the other side of that wall of steel. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He put in the first two numbers, the level of his school, and hesitated. That wasn’t right. It was twelve-eighteen, not eighteen-twelve. Or was it? He put in the other two numbers, and the keypad flashed red. The door didn’t open.
“What did you do?” the man yelled through the radio. “Just tell me the code!”
Jimmy fumbled with the portable, brought it to his lips. “Please don’t hurt her—” he said.
The radio squawked. “If you don’t do as I say, she’s dead. We’ll all be dead. Do you understand?”
The man sounded terrified. Maybe he was just as scared as Jimmy. Jimmy nodded and reached for the keypad. He entered the first two numbers correctly, then thought about what his father had said. They would kill him. They would kill him and his mother both if he let these men inside. But it was his mom—
The keypad blinked impatiently. The man on the other side of the door yelled for him to hurry, yelled something about three wrong tries in a row and having to wait another day. Jimmy did nothing, paralyzed with fear. The keypad flashed red and fell silent.
There was a bang on the other side of the door, a muffled pop, a blast from a gun. Jimmy squeezed the radio and screamed. When he let go, he could hear his mom shrieking on the other side.
“The next one won’t be a warning,” the man said. “Now don’t touch that pad. Don’t touch it again. Just tell me the code. Hurry, boy.”
The man was panicked, and Jimmy blubbered. He tried to form the sounds, to tell the numbers in the right order, but nothing came out. With his forehead pressed against the wall, he could hear his mother struggling and fighting on the other side.
“The code,” the man said, calmer now.
Jimmy heard a distant grunt. He heard someone yell “Bitch,” heard his mother scream for Jimmy not to do it, and then a slap on the other side of the wall, someone pressed up against it, his mother inches away. And then the muffled beeps of numbers being entered, four quick taps of the same number, and an angry buzz from the keypad as a third attempt failed.
More shouts. And then the roar of a gun, louder and angrier with his head pressed to the door. Jimmy screamed and beat his fists against the cold steel. The men were yelling at him through the radio. There were a lot of screams coming through the portable, screams leaking through the heavy steel door, but none of them came from his mother.
Jimmy slid to the floor. The angry yells bled through the wall. They bled and bled. They crackled from the radio in hissing bursts, and Jimmy buried the portable against his belly and curled into a ball. His body quivered with sobs and strange sounds, the floor grating rough against his cheek. And while the violence so very close raged impotently, the lights overhead continued to throb at him. They throbbed steady. They weren’t like a pulse at all.