Page 87 of Haunted

I stand up and edge along behind the tables; there’s almost no room between the chair backs and the curtain. “Stall Ackerman,” I tell the organizer, clapping him on the shoulder and sending him in the direction of the man who is about to announce me, who has already taken possession of the podium.

“And thank you, ladies and gentlemen.” One of the presenters taps the microphone. “Straight into the second half. Our first speaker this afternoon has built an audience of four hundred thousand people from a laptop and a backpack—”

Okay. Not a disaster. Worst case I wing it, or fall back on the second version—weaker, but serviceable if the good file’s corrupted.

“Hello?” I call into the backstage. I’ve never been back here, and now it’s just dim and creepy—choir risers stacked in the dark, side curtains, coils of cable.

“What’s going on?” Lance says behind me.

I jump and glance instinctively out toward the stage. “How did you get back here?”

“I followed you.”

“Stand down, Marine.” It comes out sharper than I mean it. “You don’t have to protect me every goddamned minute, Lance. There’s a problem with my presentation, that’s all. I just need to log into something so they can pull the file. Otherwise I’m up there with no slides at all.” A figure moves at the far side of the backstage, and I feel a stupid flush of relief. “Oh, good! I know that guy! That’s Roger!” I go toward him, glancing at the laptop, which is sitting on an plastic chair. “They’re about to call my name. What do we need?”

Lance grabs me by the arm so hard it hurts. He pulls me behind him. “Go back to your seat,” he growls at me.

“What’s gotten into you?” I whisper. “Roger, I’m so sorry. Listen, if we can log into—”

“Go home, Nash.” Lance’s voice is just a hint above a snarl. He’s moved me behind him almost completely.

I freeze and look back and forth between them. The floor tilts under me. I step back. “What’s going on here?”

Roger looks at me. “Roger Nash, at your service. I believe you know my husband.” He looks at Lance. “Jonny on the Spot and I have some things to talk about,” he says, unhurried, a man with all the time in the world. His eyes settle on me and stay. “You’re coming with me.”

“I’d rather not,” I say.

“Walk away,” Lance says. “Now, while you still can.”

I think fast. “Why don’t we sit down somewhere public, have coffee, hash it out like grown-ups. My treat. The Bean Stop.”

“Oh, fuck this,” Roger says. His hand comes out of the hoodie pocket with something small and black and angular.

There’s a hard electric crack and the stink of a struck match.

Lance goes down in front of me on the planks like a tree being felled. I stare at him. “Lance?” I get down on my knees, touching him. “Lance! What did he do to you?” I roll him over. His eyes are open and his face is contorted in a mixture of pain and rage. There are two thin wires running from his chest back across the planks to the thing in Roger’s hand, and at this end of them, two barbs sunk into him—one high on the chest, one through the sleeve into his upper arm. I realize what’s happened: Lance has been tased.

Roger drops the thing in his hand and strides over and grabs me by the hair. I try to shout as he wrenches me away from Lance. I kick him in the shins and he loosens his grip enough that I can get away. I back into the risers, stumbling over the plastic chair. The laptop cracks against the floor and the lights flicker. His hand closes on my arm, and it’s the calm of it that undoes me, the businesslike ease, like I’m luggage he’s collecting. He’s pulling at me. A sound comes out of the dark I have never heard a person make. Not a shout—a roar, huge and wordless and animal, torn out of a man pulling barbed wire out of his own chest. Lance is up off the floor and into Nash and both of them go into the stacked risers, and the whole rack comes down on top of them with a noise like a building falling. I shout as the lights come back on, all of them at once, like every fluorescent tube in the ceiling has been thrown at the same moment.

I’m on the ground. I don’t remember getting here. Through the gap in the fallen risers I can see them, and I try to make what I’m seeing into a fight. I can’t, because it doesn’t move like a fight.

A fight is wild. This is methodical. Lance’s left arm hangs half-dead at his side where the current went through it, so he does everything with the other, and he does it the way you’d take apart a machine. He catches Nash’s arm and bends it back past where an arm is meant to go, patient, adjusting his grip, and there’s a wet, terrible pop and Nash screams and Lance’s face does not change at all. That’s the part I can’t stop looking at. He isn’t angry. Anger would be better; anger I could reach. He’s simply gone, somewhere cold and clean where Nash isn’t a person but a problem to be solved.

He turns Nash face-up and closes both hands around his throat.

Footsteps. Voices at the mouth of the wings, hushed and then not hushed. Somebody says oh my God. Somebody’s already saying call 9-1-1. The side curtain rips back and the backstage floods with light, and there are people crowding the gap—the harried techbro, a security guard, faces I don’t know—and one of them is screaming, and none of it matters. None of it reaches him. Nash is thrashing under him. His face is turning violet, his eyes rolling, and all at once he looks small and broken and mean.

Lance is going to kill this man, here, in front of all of them, and he isn’t going to know he’s done it until it’s done.

I get up and stumble to them.

“Lance.”

He doesn’t look at me.

“Lance. It’s me. Come back. Please.”

He looks up at me.