Save Her

Drayden - Chapter 1-3

A tempered-glass work station is scattered with electronic parts, four large monitors, and lots of wires. Scattered around the floor and the workspace are circuits and microchips and a few drawings of complicated circuits. I lift one of the papers off the desk. On it is a hand-drawn line-picture of the global electrical circuit showing the magnetosphere, ionosphere, middle atmosphere, and troposphere levels. Arrows point the direction of the flux transfer events, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why he would have cared about this process. I fold it and put it in my other back pocket. The four display monitors are on with blank blue screens because the computers that ran them are gone, and the monitor’s orphan connectors dangle with no base. The theft had probably been done quickly because two of three ethernet connectors are broken and pulled. A slight film of dust reveals at least three base stations had once existed. Now, all of those had been taken along with all the information inside them. I pull my backpack’s straps tighter and feel the weight of my brother’s laptop against my back as I jostle the bag and know the detective and the coroner have certainly figured out that I had pulled the old computer switcheroo. They might be on their way here already, in which case I have to hurry. In just three hours of being in Pittsburgh, I’m a thief for stealing evidence, an assaulter for knocking out the guard, a vandal for breaking into my brother’s car, and an obstructor of justice for crossing over police tape. I wonder if that’s enough to get me on Pittsburgh’s most-wanted list.

An empty backpack meant to hold a laptop lays on the ground next to the glass workstation and looks deflated. A thick, yellow 50-amp power cord rests on the desk unplugged, the other end snaking all the way to the wall to its own dedicated outlet. Interesting. My curiosity gets the better of me because circuits, networks, and coding is my realm. It’s certainly not Reginald’s. He was the biologist in the family. I’m the tech guy, so when did he get around to learning about this? I grab a screwdriver from the top of the desk, kneel down to the wall and remove the new cover as quickly as I can. My heart is racing again. The feeling of being watched overtakes me again. I stop and try to control my breathing. I look around but see nothing. I'm tired. Or maybe it’s hunger. Or adrenaline because my brother is dead. I pull the plate from the wall.

Inside is a subsidiary breaker panel, switched off. It’s housed directly next to an outlet, but unlike any outlet I’ve ever seen. It’s industrial with five cylinders the size of number-two pencils that seem to accept a plug. There’s an ‘On’ switch, so I use the screwdriver to flick it in that direction, but nothing happens.

I’m sensing something. I get up and turn around quickly and then do another 180. I’m paranoid. Heart’s racing and eyes are looking around on their own, and I wonder if I’m losing it. Why can’t I shake this feeling? I need to leave, but something’s missing. Something feels incomplete. I’m missing something, and I can’t go until I figure it out.

I’m back in the living room looking at his taped outline. I stare at it heartbroken and confused. I flash back to his morphed body at the morgue, lying there half-covered, warped nearly beyond recognition. A tear falls to the carpet inside his taped outline and surprises me that it came from my eye. I wipe my cheeks and look at the back of my wet hand.

We hadn’t talked in a year, not since we moved our favorite stepdad to a hideout in the California mountains, but we were very close if that makes any sense. The last time I had seen him was at my mother’s fifth wedding, which took place over a weekend in Hawaii, and where each of us met delightful beauties staying at the same resort who pretended to be our wives in every way. We drank so much there. We laughed so much. He had just gotten accepted into a master’s program to study Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, so we made my mother’s wedding a celebration for his acceptance, and didn’t tell her that we didn’t care that she was married again and that we didn’t like her newest fellow.

I stand and look at the outline and imagine how the police must have found him: on his back, his right arm landing in the position of a chicken wing, his legs somewhat separated because the outline of his feet show separation between them, and his left hand outstretched at a ninety-degree angle from the rest of his body. I focus on the left arm because of the awkward direction it’s in. It looks forced. Or maybe it was broken. I don’t know so I reenact it and lay down on the ground next to the tape but not inside because that seems like an invasion to the world beyond, wherever and whatever that was. I try to mimic the position and have to remove the backpack. I put it immediately beside me, look around again because I get that paranoid feeling back, and then try to push it out of my mind and continue. I twist my legs to the right, separate my legs slightly, crook my right arm like a bent chicken wing, then put my left arm and hand in the same angle as my brother’s death-pose. My left shoulder and elbow hurt from the pose as I look in the direction of my outstretched left hand toward the wall and ceiling and realize my brother had been pointing.

I quickly get up and grab the backpack and go to the far wall and step over two crisscrossed bookshelves that had been pulled off the wall and I’m climbing on top of textbooks as I focus on the area in between the ceiling and wall that I think my brother’s outline is pointing to. I tiptoe and knock high on the wall. Solid. Above, I’m sure what I saw from the floor is still there — a discoloration, barely noticeable, just a shade off the original paint job. It’s a minuscule amount of difference, but I had done enough home remodeling over the summers to know how hard it is to match a ceiling color accurately. More often than not, it’s better to just repaint the entire ceiling. My brother’s ceiling is flat with no spackle -- just an off-white that had the slightest blemish near the edge of the crown molding.

I hurry to his workstation and wheel his office chair below the blemished ceiling and have to clear some of the debris from the pulled bookshelf for the chair legs. When I do, I uncover two pictures near each other, one of him and I and the other with mom and us. They had been removed from the frames and were slightly bent from it. Both were from my mother’s most recent wedding over a year ago. I pick them up and try to unbend the folds. He looked great, and so did I, half drunk, tan, and relaxed. Seeing him in such a healthy state was a temporary welcome relief after seeing the gruesomeness of the monster at the coroner’s. In the picture, we held up Mai-Tai’s at the Maui beach bar. In the other picture, Reginald and I wore tuxes on either side of mom in what neither of us suspected would be her last white wedding dress. I put the pictures in my back pocket.

I get a chopping knife from the kitchen, climb carefully onto the chair, and stab the ceiling. It sticks hard, so I wiggle it back and forth until I can pull it out and then stab it again and again like an insane person, causing larger and larger bits to fly down on top of me into my hair and on my shoulders and all over the leather chair. I again feel the urge to hurry and pretty soon I’m punching into the more significant hole with my fist. I drop the knife and grab hold of the rim of the opened ceiling and pull a big chunk off. Along with the chunk of ceiling, a thin and small brown notebook the size of my hand falls out and hits me on the forehead before landing flat on the carpet below. I jump down, pick it up, blow off the debris, and flip through to the middle. Both pages are filled top to bottom with passwords. No time now to figure it out, so I unzip the backpack, stuff the notebook near my brother’s laptop, zip it up, and put both straps on my shoulders.

I’m at the front door when I look back at my brother’s taped outline before leaving and make a promise: “I’ll find whoever did this to you.”