Taken Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Kidnapped

  “An Edwardian Christmas Celebration”

  Rituals of Social Inversion

  Dessalines

  Foods, Drinks, and Games

  Dr. M. Reyes

  Saint Elmo’s Fire

  Albert

  Victoria

  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

  El Día de los Reyes

  Copyright

  For Pam

  Everybody knows the deal is rotten.

  Old Black Joe’s still pickin’ cotton

  For your ribbons and bows

  And everybody knows.

  —Leonard Cohen

  Kidnapped

  Once you’ve been taken, you usually have twenty-four hours left to live.

  By my reckoning, that meant I had about twelve hours remaining.

  The blue numerals on my vidscreen showed the time, 11:31, and the date, 01-01-36. From where I was lying, the blue glow of the vidscreen provided the only color in the room. If it was a room. Other than the screen, all I could see were white walls. All I could hear was a low thrumming, like an engine.

  Ever since I’d come to my senses, though, I’d felt strangely calm. Not like a sedated calm, either, although I had definitely been sedated. No, it was more of a logical calm. I was trying not to panic; trying to think things through.

  I was not in this room of my own free will. Therefore, I was a prisoner. Logically, then, I must have been “taken,” the popular euphemism for “kidnapped.”

  If you lived in The Highlands, like I did, then you were an expert on kidnapping. I even wrote a paper on the subject. It was filed right there on my vidscreen, along with the other papers I had written last term: “The World Credit Crash,” “Metric at Midnight, 2031,” and “The Kidnapping Industry.”

  I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t. I had a strap tied around my waist, holding me to the bed. Or was it a stretcher? Yes, I remembered. It was a stretcher.

  I could move my arms, at least. I could reach over and press MENU. The screen was still active, but it looked like all input and output functions had been disabled. Not surprising, if I had been taken.

  My own files, though, were still accessible to me. I located my recent term papers and clicked on the pertinent one. Here is part of what it said:

  The Kidnapping Industry, by Charity Meyers

  Mrs. Veck, Grades 7–8

  August 30, 2035

  Kidnapping has become a major growth industry. Like any industry, though, it is subject to the rules of the marketplace. Rule number one is that the industry must satisfy the needs of its customers. That is, if parents follow the instructions and deliver the currency to the kidnappers, the kidnappers must deliver the taken child back to the parents. If the kidnappers do not fulfill their part of the bargain, then future parents will hear about it, and they will refuse to pay. The trust between the kidnappers and the parents will have broken down.

  The kidnapping industry today in most areas of the United States usually operates on a twenty-four-hour cycle (although a twelve-hour cycle is not uncommon in areas outside of the United States). In the majority (85%) of cases, the parents deliver the currency and the kidnappers return the child within the twenty-four-hour period.

  Kidnappers’ demands usually include a warning to parents not to contact the authorities. It is hard to estimate, therefore, how many parents have actually received ransom instructions and obeyed them to the letter. Professional kidnappers always include a Plan B in their instructions, describing a second meeting place in case the first falls through. In a minority (12%) of cases, unprofessional crews have murdered their victims right away and continued the ransom process dishonestly.

  Several related industries have emerged as a result of the rise in kidnappings. For example, special security companies now track victims who have not been returned but who are thought to be still alive. These companies can gain access to FBI data. Unlike the FBI, however, these companies are willing to search for taken children in unsecured areas of the United States and in foreign countries.

  The paper went on from there to describe common aftereffects on taken children and to cite many alarming statistics about kidnapping, supplied by the stateofflorida.gov and TheHighlands.biz content sites. Cases of reported kidnappings increased by 22 percent in the last three years. However, estimates are that unreported kidnappings increased as much as 800 percent in the same time period.

  The statistics only reinforced what I already knew. It’s what every kid knew: if kidnappers identify your parents as people with a lot of currency in their home vault—dollars, euros, pesos, yuan—then you are a target. And if you don’t get returned right away, there’s not much the authorities can do about it. They are only willing to track you so far. Even now, there are parts of Florida and Texas that are beyond the reach of regular police forces. And from there, who knows? The Caribbean, Mexico, South America? Once you are gone to one of those places, you stay gone.

  The sedated feeling in my head was clearing, leaving a dull ache in my stomach and in the space behind my eyes. I was starting to remember things. I was starting to put the pieces together. The white metal walls and the thrumming engine sound made more sense. I remembered where I was: in an ambulance. That’s how the kidnappers got past all the security at The Highlands. They showed up in an ambulance.

  And the guards opened the gates.

  Then Victoria and Albert opened the door.

  Then—

  Suddenly I heard voices just outside the ambulance, low, gruff voices. They were arguing in Spanish, I think. Or it might have been Creole. Both languages are common in Florida. They were the voices of the kidnappers, the phony ambulance doctors.

  How could the security guards have been so stupid? How could Victoria and Albert have been fooled so easily? I knew as soon as I saw “Dr. M. Reyes” that something was wrong with him. He didn’t look or act like a real doctor. And he didn’t talk at all, not until we were in the ambulance, pulling away. Then he talked in the kind of low, gruff voice that I was hearing.

  Dr. Reyes was giving orders outside the ambulance door, orders to the other kidnappers. How many were there?

  His Spanish was too fast for me to understand. Was he talking about the ransom payoff? Had my father agreed to his terms? Was he planning on keeping his end of the bargain and returning me unharmed once he had the currency? That, of course, would be the best scenario for everybody. Killing me would be the worst—for his industry, for him, and, of course, for me.

  Maybe he was talking about my GTD. Children in The Highlands and in other wealthy developments usually have GTDs—global tracking devices. These are tiny bio-med transmitters that are inserted somewhere in their bodies. They were marketed to parents as a way to keep track of a kid’s whereabouts 24/7/52. GTDs were supposed to bring about the end of the kidnapping industry. Instead, they have introduced a grisly new stage into the process.

  Some kidnappers use repurposed medical equipment—X-ray machines, magnetic scanners, et cetera—to try to locate the GTD in the kid’s body. It may be in a tooth, under a toenail, in an earlobe. Then the kidnappers surgically remove that body part.

  The GTD industry would prefer that its customers not know about that stage. They spend billions highlighting their successes on infomercials, showing happy kidnap victims reunited with happy parents while hangdog kidnappers look on in handcuffs. But they can’t suppress the truth. My friend Patience has an older brother named Hopewell. He was taken three years ago, just before they moved to The Highlands. After delivery of a ransom, he was left along the side of a country road, holding a bloody bandage to the left side of his head.

  The worst thing about those GTDs is th
at even the kids themselves don’t know where they are located. If kids knew, I guess they would talk about it. So instead, kids go to the doctor’s office, are given a light anesthetic, and wake up with a GTD in some mystery part of the body. Only the parents know where.

  Since my father is a doctor, he had installed mine himself. He kept the GTD tracking device with him at all times. So did he know yet that I had been taken? He wasn’t at home when it happened. Were the kidnappers able to contact him to get the twenty-four-hour clock running? Did they tell him that they would start amputating my body parts if he even thought about using the GTD tracker? Or was he too busy watching college football to even bother answering his vidphone?

  And what about my stepmother, my ex-stepmother? She was not at home to receive instructions, either. Only Victoria was. What would she do? What would she advise my parents to do? Would they cooperate with the kidnappers exactly, to the letter? That’s what the FBI, the Highlands security staff, and the police advise.

  I had to believe they would cooperate. They would read the instructions carefully; they would put the currency in a bag; they would drop it off where they were told to. That’s what I would do, and I counted on them to do it, too. Right. That’s what would happen. There was no reason to worry myself into a mental state.

  I looked again at my vidscreen, sensing that something was different, and I was right. The camera light was on! The red laser at the top center was trained right on me while some creep was watching me on a monitor. Who was it? Where was he? I felt a flash of anger. But then I started to feel a sense of panic bubbling up in my throat like a series of wet, disgusting burps. Some stranger, some criminal, was watching me!

  I tried not to move. I tried not to show any emotion in case they were transmitting this scene back to Victoria. I didn’t want her to see me panicking and crying and hysterical. I could acquit myself (a Mrs. Veck word) better than that, I hoped. I had been trained well in how to behave at a moment like this.

  Or had I?

  Why was my throat constricting like it was trying to choke me? Why was the blood pounding so loud in my ears that I wanted to scream?

  To shut down the rising panic in my head, I concentrated, hard, on my surroundings, on the four walls around me. The door to the ambulance was there beyond my feet, just one meter away from the foot of the stretcher. That meant that the front cab was behind my head. To my right was a long shelf, empty except for my vidscreen and a bottle of Smart Water. Nearer the back, along the wall, was a metal square with a hinge on its bottom. To my left were two cabinets with metal latches. Between them was wall space filled with medical stuff—three-pronged electrical plugs, oxygen outlets, a blood pressure cuff, a biohazard box.

  Now that I was fully awake, it was all very obvious. I had gotten sick. Kidnappers had taken me away in an ambulance, and they were keeping me in it, with the engine running.

  For that to happen, the many layers of security around me had to have been breached; I had to have been betrayed by someone. But who?

  Suddenly I heard a metallic latch snap, and the door at my feet opened. The sun flashed in, hurting my eyes. I squinted at the door and saw a black figure outlined there. He reached his hands inside the doorway and wriggled his long fingers to get a grip. He raised his knee up and stepped on the bumper. Then, with a lurch, he was inside and looming over me. Someone outside pushed the door shut again and latched it.

  As soon as my eyes adjusted, I could see him clearly. He was a teenage boy, nearly two meters tall. His close-cropped hair nearly touched the metal ceiling. Did I know him? Had I seen his face before? I couldn’t remember. With someone else inside, the ambulance seemed to shrink in size, and I felt the panic rising again. But the boy seemed to have no evil intentions. In fact, he gave no indication of seeing me at all. He reached toward the right wall and grabbed the top of the metal square. He pulled it forward, and it folded out into a bench seat with a leather bottom.

  Once he sat down, I could only see his left side clearly. He snapped open a two-way vidphone and stared at it glumly, stoically (another Mrs. Veck word), like someone who was planning on sitting there for a long time.

  Trying to remain calm, I concentrated hard on the boy. This is what I could tell: He was sixteen or seventeen. He was very thin, with gangly arms. His skin was very dark, like African dark. My father is a dermatologist, so I know skin. I know that his skin was that dark because his top four layers of derma had very active melanin molecules. His remaining three layers of derma were exactly the same as mine, as were all the other organs in his body.

  I hoped he knew things like that. I hoped he had empathy for other people, like me. If he did, maybe I could talk to him, relate to him, one human being to another. He looked like he could go either way. He could either be a genuine human being or he could be one of those teenage African warlord soldiers who murder and rob and rape.

  Right. Not a good thought, Charity. Teenage soldier rapists. Not the kind of thing you were trained to think about, is it? Get out of that mental place right away. Do something else. Try something. Anything. Try talking to him.

  I glanced at my vidscreen clock—11:45. I tilted my head and shoulders up slightly, like I was doing crunches. I said, with as little fear as possible in my voice, “Is everything going all right? I mean, going as planned?”

  He did not look up.

  I continued, “I mean, is there anything I can do to help with the plan? Because that’s what they teach us to do, to cooperate fully. My father feels that way, too. And Victoria and Albert feel that way. Because it’s only currency, you know? Currency can be replaced. I cannot.”

  There was no answer. There was no reaction at all.

  I waited a full minute; then I tried a different tack. “Excuse me. I have to go to the bathroom.”

  This was true, and it had an immediate effect. The boy folded up his two-way and stood, causing the hinged chair to snap back into the wall. He took two steps across the ambulance, reached into a cabinet, and pulled out a plastic bedpan with a roll of toilet paper inside it. He placed it on the stretcher, still without looking at me. He reached beneath the stretcher and snapped a metal latch, undoing the thick leather belt across my midsection. Then he opened the back door.

  I gasped, “Wait a minute! What am I supposed to do with this?”

  The boy stepped through the door and closed it behind him. Simultaneously, the red light of the vidcamera blinked off. Who was controlling it? I stared at it hard, waiting for it to come back on, but it did not.

  I agonized for two minutes about what to do next. The truth was, I couldn’t last much longer. I had no choice. I pushed through the humiliation of pulling down my pajama pants and sliding the bedpan under me. All the while, I kept one eye on the vidcamera. If it had come back on, I think I would have died right then. When I finished, I pulled the bedpan back out. With a wave of revulsion, I slid it as far away from me as I could on the stretcher.

  A minute later, the door opened. But it wasn’t the boy who stepped back in; it was Dr. M. Reyes.

  I froze in place, terrified at the sight of him. He was dressed in green hospital scrubs, including a cap, a surgical mask, and tinted goggles. Clearly, there was no way I could ever identify him, except for the hint of oily black hair under his cap and the apelike way he moved. He never looked at me, as far as I could tell. He just picked up the bedpan and left.

  As soon as he was gone, the boy returned. He pulled out his seat and resumed staring at the two-way screen. This was part of his job, obviously; part of the kidnapping plan. He was to keep watch on me and on whatever other scenes he had on that small screen.

  Obviously, they were not worried that I would try to bolt. The boy didn’t even bother to reattach the leather belt. Why should they worry? They had me surrounded.

  I stared at him for a while longer, still seething from the humiliation of using the bedpan, still shaking from the close encounter with the menacing Dr. Reyes. I took a few minutes to just breathe and
try to calm myself. What could I do? What should I do?

  I couldn’t just sit here and wait for Dr. Reyes to walk in and cut something out of my body. I had to act. I had to do something rather than nothing or I’d lose my mind. I reached over and clicked back into my “Kidnapping Industry” paper. The boy did not object; he did not stir at all. I scrolled until I found the section titled “Psychological Damage.” This is what it said: “Many victims of kidnappings, although released without any obvious physical damage, may still suffer serious psychological damage.” I thought about Hopewell Patterson. He was damaged goods, all right. “Damage occurs when a victim passes beyond normal fear into escalating states of panic, to hysteria, and then on to total psychological breakdown.”

  I clicked out of the document and concentrated as hard as I could. I thought back to my anti-kidnapping classes. Most were taught by Highlands guards, but some were taught by Mrs. Veck. And one was taught by a psychologist, a pretty young woman in a blue suit. I pictured that woman in the classroom that day, and I tried to remember her words.

  She said, “Use your mind to shut out fear.”

  She said, “Go to a safe place in your mind, to a memory of some kind. Pick a recent memory, so that it is still fresh.”

  She said, “Try to relive every minute of that memory—everything that happened; everything that you said and did. This will take you away, mentally, from your present fearful circumstances.”

  That was what she advised, so that’s what I would do. I would not break down in this white metal prison. I would go someplace else in my mind. Someplace safe.

  I concentrated hard. I thought back to a recent memory.

  Friday, December 21. That was the last day of satschool. It was the day before the Christmas holidays began.

  I would tell myself the story of that day, filling in every little detail. I would relive every part of my old life. By doing that, I would help myself get back to that life.