Finding Zach (3 page)

“When can we see my son?” Jane asked anxiously.

Duffey smiled at her. “Soon,” he said reassuringly. “But I need to tell you some things you have to know before you go in there. To prepare you.”

“Prepare us for what?” Richard demanded.

The doctor rubbed his forehead. “They didn’t tell you anything about him, did they?”

“They kept telling us to wait to talk to you. What’s wrong with Zach?”

“Aside from being very emaciated from malnutrition, he’s severely traumatized and nonverbal.”

“What do you mean ‘nonverbal’?” Jane asked.

“He doesn’t talk.”

“We know what ‘nonverbal’ means,” Richard said impatiently, “but what does it mean in Zach’s case? He’s got something wrong with his throat? He ignores you when you talk to him? Makes funny sounds? Doesn’t make sounds at all?”

“He barks.”

There was silence in the little waiting room, then Richard said quietly, “What the
fuck
do you mean, ‘he barks’?”

“He barks. Whines, occasionally whimpers. He responds as if he were a dog.” Dr. Duffey shook his head. “From what the lieutenant who brought him in says, he was treated as if he were a dog for the last five years. Kept in a cage, with a collar, fed table scraps, occasionally walked with a leash—though not often; his leg muscles are atrophied, and he’ll need physical therapy for a good long time before he’ll be able to walk more than a few steps unsupported.”

“Oh, God,” Jane said, her hand on her mouth. Under his breath, Richard said, “Fuck.”

“There’s worse,” Duffey warned. They both looked at him. “I’d suggest you both sit down.”

“Fuck,” Richard said again, and they obeyed. He reached for Jane’s hand and held it tightly.

“He was raped, wasn’t he?” Jane asked. Richard blinked and looked at her. She looked back and said simply, “He’s beautiful, Richard. Of course someone would hurt him that way. Evil people want to damage beauty—they don’t understand it.”

“Yes. Physical indications are that he was sexually abused over a long period; there is scarring in both the genital and anal areas. There is nothing to indicate permanent damage, though, aside from the scarring; there’s no sign of STDs. Once he’s recovered, he should function normally.”

Richard snorted. “It’s the recovery part that’s the question, isn’t it? How do you recover from something like that?”

“Slowly, I’m afraid.” Dr. Duffey shook his head. “The fact that he’s still not speaking after five days in care is not a good sign. I’m hoping that now that you’re here, his condition will improve considerably.”

“I doubt it,” Richard said savagely. He stood and walked away from them, staring out the window much as he had in the conference room in the suburb outside Colorado Springs. The view was less inspiring here—just the hospital parking lot.

“Richard,” Jane murmured.

“Well, Jenny, it’s true. He has no reason to love us. He was in love for the first time in his life, and how did we deal with it? We put him on a plane and sent him alone into the hands of that bastard that raped and ruined him—all to keep him out of the hands of someone who loved him. Someone who fucking
saved
him. Jesus, Jenny. We should have let him be with David—at least then he would have been happy and
whole
.”

“I take it Zach is gay,” the doctor said delicately.

“I thought it was just being fifteen,” Richard said miserably. “David thought so too. He said he cared for Zach, but that he was too young for a relationship; he had told Zach they’d have to wait. I thought it was just… just hormones or something, that he had a crush on David. He’d known him his whole life, he’s older, more mature…. David was just out of high school, saving money for college, working with my company, but he’s the housekeeper’s son and lived on the estate, they saw each other every day. David used to drive him around until Zach was old enough to get his driver’s license… Jesus. He doesn’t even have a driver’s license….” Richard buried his face in his hand and wept.

Jane went to him and put her arms around him, her cheek laid gently on his shoulder blade. To the doctor she said, “My sister lives in Costa Rica, and she’d been asking for Zach to come down and visit her. We thought it would be a good idea for him to spend some time away from David, if it was just a crush, you know? David agreed. He said Zach needed to know his own mind, that he needed to be older before he’d be ready for a relationship with anyone, male or female. We all sent him away. It was all our faults. Richard blames himself, but it was all our faults.”

“It’s not your fault at all,” Dr. Duffey said. “Let’s cast the blame where it belongs, on the shoulders of the man that did this, the so-called General Benito Esteban.”

“Have they caught him? Is he in jail, that bastard?” Richard demanded, wiping his face irritably. “I want to see the face of that foul, stinking….”

“He’s dead,” the doctor said in surprise. “Didn’t they tell you?”

“No. Was he killed in the raid?”

“No. Zach killed him.”

T
HE
hospital room door opens and I jerk, startled. I should be used to the abrupt comings and goings of the doctors, but after living so long with only the sounds of human voices and bugs in the trees outside—not to mention the occasional gunshot—I’m finding the banging and humming and squeaking and beeping disconcerting. No, scratch that—downright annoying, irritating, scary….

It’s Fluffy Duffey, my personal shrink. He’s little and unintimidating, with fluffy brown hair and nice, patient eyes. “Hi, Zach,” he says. “How are you feeling this afternoon?”

Same as ever, Fluffy.

“How was your lunch? The nurse said you polished everything off.”

And would have eaten the tray, too, if it had been organic. My stomach shrank, they tell me, so I don’t have much capacity for food, but I’m hungry now. I wasn’t hungry the first few days, but I’m making up for lost time.

He takes my hand and checks my pulse. He’s a shrink, but apparently he’s a real doctor too; he seems to understand the monitors and charts and whatnot. Whatever my wrist tells him he’s apparently happy with. “You have visitors,” he says.

I blink, not understanding at first.

“Your parents are here.”

For a minute, I don’t know what he means. What are parents? Then my heart starts pounding and I’m terrified. No, not
them
. Esteban told me that they didn’t care about me, that they never sent the ransom he’d demanded, that they’d replied that they didn’t care what he did with me, that they had sent me to him on purpose…. I start hyperventilating, and Fluffy puts an oxygen mask on my face. “Breathe slowly,” he says over the hiss of the oxygen. I can’t breathe. I’m so afraid. This is a dream and I know what happens next: they come in and they’ve got the faces of monsters and they slaughter Fluffy and start eating my feet and then I wake up and it’s Esteban again, only this time he’ll know what I dreamt about and he’ll start telling more stories about my parents and the monsters they are and how they’ve eaten everyone I knew. I’m crying in fear now, when I haven’t cried in years, and I can’t catch my breath and Fluffy’s upset; not as upset as he will be in a minute when they come in and tear his throat out….

They come in and they’re just people, strangers with frightened faces. I suck in a breath and wait for them to turn into the monsters, but they just stand there. The woman is crying and the man has his arms around her. He’s got black curly hair like mine, but there are silver strands in it; his eyes are dark and there are lines on his face that only get deeper when he looks at me. The woman has blonde hair, sleeked back in some fancy knot I used to know the name of, something French, but I can’t see her face because she’s got it buried in his shoulder. “Jane,” he says, and then I recognize him. The silver and the lines confuse me, because my dad didn’t have silver hair or lines on his face. He does now.

I stop hyperventilating; I’m still crying but it’s just tears falling, the sobbing stopped. I take a couple of steady breaths and pull the oxygen mask away. Fluffy goes with it. “Are you all right?” he asks in an undertone. I just look at him, then over at the people. My parents. Dick and Jane. I wipe the water from my face. I’m calm now, that cold, empty calm I’m good at; I can look at them and hope that just this once they aren’t going to turn into monsters and eat everyone.

“Zach?” Dad says uncertainly.

I don’t answer, but I meet his eyes. They’re red and tired-looking, but he’s smiling a little. It hurts, somewhere deep inside, and I blink. I thought I was used to pain, but this is a different kind of hurt, one I don’t know quite how to deal with.

The woman turns then, and I look at her. She has blue eyes, like me, but they’re red and tired, too, like his. Right now, they look more like each other than either of them does like me. Both old and tired and sad. I feel old and tired and sad too. It hurts. I sigh and close my eyes.

Something touches my hand and I open my eyes again. It’s Mom, Jane of Dick and Jane. She used to get so mad at me when I’d call them that. It’s from the old reading books kids got in school years ago—“Fun with Dick and Jane” or something like that. Their dog was called Spot, though, not Zach. Mom’s hand is cold and very small. I can feel little bird bones in it. I could crush those bones without thinking about it, even as wasted as I am. After a few days of food and rest, I’m feeling a lot stronger, stronger than when I choked the life out of Esteban. If I could do that, a few little bones is nothing. But I don’t crush them. She’s so little and frail, much smaller than I remember. I whine in dismay, and her eyes widen. She doesn’t say anything, just stares at me in horror, as if I had been the one to turn into the monster and start eating people’s feet. Maybe she’s right. Maybe it’s me that’s the monster. After all, neither of them has strangled anyone with a leash lately, right?

She starts crying again. “Oh, Zach, my baby,” she says, and she puts her arms around me and hugs me gently, as if she thinks I’ll break. Her hand is cold but her arms are warm, and I feel like a bird in a nest.

God, I wish this wasn’t a dream.

I
KNOW
what reality is, and it’s not this.

Reality is cold, and hard. Reality is a place where all I know is pain and hate.

Reality is where I’ll wake up.

Some people are happy to go from their nightmares to reality; when your reality
is
a nightmare, there’s not much sense of improvement. I don’t sleep well anyway, never more than a few hours at a time; there doesn’t seem to be much point. I don’t get any exercise to get myself tired, and besides, when you’re asleep, you can’t see what’s out there waiting for you to let your guard down. Not that it matters; I know what’s waiting. He’s in the room behind the door a couple yards away.

It’s early, not quite light out, and Esteban’s not up yet. I creep up to the bars of the cage and piss in the bucket that’s set on the floor outside. I don’t need to do anything else, and that’s good; though the wire that forms the bottom of this dog crate sits up a couple of inches off the ground, it might be an hour or two before Esteban’s orderly comes around to move the cage on its wheels and clean underneath it. It’s not often an issue—not much fiber in my diet. But I don’t like the reminder that it’s one more thing I don’t have control over. I used to be a really clean kid. It bugs me that I’m not anymore.

The orderly and I hate each other with a sincere, almost cordial hate. He hates cleaning up after me, and I hate him because he can stand up straight. I haven’t stood in probably three or four months, whenever the last time it was that Esteban took me for a walk around the compound. I try to keep my leg muscles exercised by doing stretches when no one’s around, like now: reaching down to grab my toes and pull, stretching out the tendons and muscles in my back and legs and shoulders and arms. It hurts. It always hurts. The muscles burn and the bars of the cage floor grind against my naked butt and thighs and calves. But I keep thinking someday I’m going to have the opportunity to kill Esteban, and I need to be strong enough.

Who am I kidding?

The orderly comes in first for a change this morning. It occasionally happens, when Esteban is out raping babies, or poking the eyes out of old women, or cutting the wings off flies. There was a bit of fuss a couple of days or weeks ago—I don’t know—and I think there’s something going on. Esteban has been entirely too happy lately. I hate it when he’s happy. When he’s happy, he’s horny, and it’s my fucking ass that gets the dubious benefits. The only thing is when he’s pissy—then everything gets the benefits.

The orderly’s name is Ernesto; I call him “Che” to myself; not that he has a clue who that is, even if I’d said it out loud. He’s that stupid. He calls me “perro,” but then, everyone does. It’s what I am: Esteban’s dog. My own fault—when I first got here I was a smart-mouthed kid and called him a “dog-fucker.” He decided to make that literal.

Che sticks the little kid’s beach bucket of water in through the food door at the bottom of the cage. The bucket is pink, another commentary. As usual, there’s a plastic razor and a rag in the bucket, but no soap. I think I remember soap. I scrape the razor over my face, shaving my sparse beard; I think I’m close to twenty, but despite having black hair, I don’t have much in the way of whiskers, which is fine with me—I can’t imagine having to shave a thick beard with a ladies’ plastic razor and water. The orderly uses the ladies’ razors because they’ve got even less actual blade exposed. I tried to slit my wrist with a men’s razor once, years ago, and Esteban beat his ass because of it. But Esteban doesn’t like beards on other people—none of his men have them—though he’s got one. It’s some masculinity crap. For a guy who fucks ass daily, he’s got a big thing about masculinity. Guess a shrink would have a field day with that.

I shave and wash up with the rag using as little water as possible; whatever’s left is my drinking water for the day, and I’d rather be naked and filthy than naked and thirsty. Then I throw the razor at Che, just on principle. The rag goes into the little pile in the corner of the crate. It’s my hobby, collecting rags. Someday I’ll make a quilt. Except that every few weeks when Esteban’s got me bent over his desk with his dick in my ass, Che sneaks in and takes the pile of rags. I think that pisses me off more than the fucking. They’re
my
fucking rags, asshole.