The Extraction
by Mason Soun
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
Miller had never expected they would come in broad daylight. She had prepped the boy to be on the lookout for unmarked black SUVs or soldiers in uniform. So, when Miller first caught sight of the two men strolling along the sidewalk in front of her house, their shirts tucked into their khaki shorts, she thought nothing of it. By the time she registered who they were, after they had doubled back and reversed their direction again, it was too late.
She hurried into the living room. The boy was relaxing on the couch, watching a nature documentary on how lions sometimes eat their young.
“They’re here,” Miller whispered. She fumbled for the remote between the couch’s cushions, finally finding it under the boy’s thigh. She turned off the TV and dimmed the lights.
The boy straightened up. Eager anticipation bloomed across his face that she hadn’t expected. The dots that crescented his right eye burned bright red in the dark. Miller brushed his bangs so that they covered the marks. “They might be friends,” the boy mused.
“These men are not your friends,” she snapped, though she regretted raising her voice, even now.
Miller beckoned for him to get up, but he merely stared at her like a puppy struggling to comprehend commands. She scooped him up off the couch. His backside felt damp, but she realized it was sweat from her own arms. The boy tried to peek over her shoulder through the blinds.
With silent urgency, Miller carried the boy into the kitchen and dropped him in front of the door to the basement. She coaxed him to retreat to the crawlspace as they had practiced, but the boy clung to her pants and pressed his face into her leg as if he had regressed several years.
“I want to be here with you when they come,” the boy said. She heard yearning in his voice where fear should have been.
“They’re already here. Be a good boy and go hide like we practiced.”
The boy would not let go. He rubbed his forehead back and forth against her leg.
“Be brave,” Miller added, more to herself than him.
Before the boy could protest further, Miller managed to unpeel him from her leg. She nudged him down the first few steps of the basement and closed the door before he could look back.
With the boy hidden away, Miller paced in the empty kitchen. She tried to recall the next steps of her emergency protocol, but she was too distracted by possible theories of how he had been discovered. Had a nosy neighbor spied the boy in the backyard? Or perhaps she had failed to expunge some trace of him on the internet. In any case, she had gotten far too complacent after months without an incident. From the other side of the door, the basement steps creaked as the boy slowly descended them. Miller realized they had only practiced the emergency protocol with the basement light on.
She crept into the foyer, crouching down beneath the sidelights of the front door. The two men stood on her doorstep, but they did not seem too bothered with forcing a means of entry. Miller heard one of them laugh.
From the foyer closet, she retrieved her brother’s rifle. He’d given it to her when she had first volunteered to take the boy in. Everything had seemed so easy when he’d taught her how to use it.
In her hands now, it weighed more than she had remembered. She felt like a fool trying to figure out where to place her left hand along the barrel, how far to keep the rifle from her body. The only thing she knew for certain was how to disengage the safety, and she prayed the rifle was ready to go. It should have been her brother, or anybody else, who had been given the task of harboring an orb-child.
Cradling the rifle, she shuffled inch by inch towards the front door. Her breathing was shallow and labored. The extractors fidgeted with the bolt. She dismissed the idea of firing at the men through the door, for she did not trust her aim when she could see her target. Instead, she thought of some threats she could shout at the intruders once they breached the door, but even in her mind, they came out croaking and weak. Her hands could not keep the rifle steady.
The doorknob turned, and Miller flinched and almost discharged the rifle.
As the door creaked open, she scrambled to regain her composure. She made a big show of shouldering the rifle at the exact moment the first intruder poked his head through the door.
The man who slipped inside did not react to seeing Miller’s gun. He casually introduced himself as Harris and said, “We received a call that you might be in need of an extraction.”
Miller took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger. The firing pin clicked, but nothing happened.
Harris continued uninterrupted. “My partner and I were in the neighborhood, and we figured we could swing by here and squeeze one more in before sundown. It shouldn’t take but a few minutes.”
“Get out,” Miller said to Harris, though her voice was little more than a whisper. “Get out of my house before…” She trailed off, unsure of how to finish her threat.
She tried the rifle again, and the result was the same. Harris did not even blink. Instead, he knelt to untie his shoe. For a moment, Miller stood dumbfounded that he would so willingly assume such a vulnerable position. The foyer light reflected off the bald crown of his head. She was almost impressed by his nonchalance.
Recovering her wit, she seized the opportunity with his head still down. She flipped over the rifle and swung it as hard as she could. Before the butt of the rifle met his skull, Harris caught it, still unknotting his shoelace with the other hand. The extractor looked up and released his hold of the rifle. Miller staggered back. “Why don’t I take that off your hands before you hurt yourself?” he asked, flashing her a wolffish grin as if inviting her to try the stunt again.
The door opened wide, and in came Harris’s partner, a stringy college-aged kid who dragged a large aluminum storage case behind him. The younger agent gave Miller a quick glance and instantly regarded her as a nonthreat.
“Ronnie, leave the Twirler in the kitchen,” Harris instructed from his half-kneeling position. Ronnie asked if he should also fetch the boy while he was at it.
“Nah,” Harris said, brushing his partner away. “They always come bounding in eventually.”
Miller blushed. She was ashamed that she had let so many minutes pass without thinking of the boy all alone in the basement.
Harris placed his shoes on the bottom of the shoe rack next to the front door and rose to his feet. He wore thick, woolen socks. Scratching his bald spot, he reached down and picked up a framed picture of her and the boy from the foyer table.
“Don’t touch that,” Miller hissed at him, as if protecting the image of the boy was akin to protecting the boy himself.
Instead of putting it back on the table, the extractor handed her the framed picture. To accept it, Miller had to drop the rifle to her side. She leaned against the gun like a walking staff.
She had taken that photo on the boy’s last birthday. He had been so rambunctious that afternoon that they’d both forgotten about the presents after the cake. Miller was barely able to corral the boy long enough to take the picture. The awkward angle of her face made it seem like she had been badly photoshopped into the final picture afterwards. Her own eyes looked back at her as bright red as the dots running along the side of the boy’s face.
But holding the frame in her hand, she soon forgot how difficult the boy was that day. She felt his giddiness arc from the picture to her heart like an electrical spark. Nostalgia washed over her. What version of the boy was she trying to protect?
“It’s so cute that you threw him a birthday party. I’ve never heard of such sentimentality for an orb-child,” Harris said, examining the picture from an upside-down angle. The extractor sawed at the cleft of his chin. “He is quite the specimen. He’s sure to bring a strong yield that you can be proud of.”
Miller continued to stare at the photo. “I tried my best to protect him. It felt like the right thing to do.”
“We know you did. I bet you even gave him a name.” Harris rubbed her arm in a consoling manner. To her own surprise, she did not shrink away at his touch. She even let him take the rifle. It was little more than a prop in her hands anyway.
“For a time, I tried calling him Peter,” Miller said under her breath, reliving those first few days of earning the boy’s trust. “But he never answered to that.”
She was tracing over the boy’s face with her finger when Ronnie called from the kitchen that he had heard a sound coming from the basement. His announcement snapped Miller out of her nostalgic trance. The picture frame slipped from her grip. When it hit the ground, it shattered. She let out a pathetic whimper.
She followed Harris into the kitchen and almost tripped over the storage case. The extractor propped the gun against the refrigerator like an umbrella. He then sat at the dining table and massaged the soles of his socked feet.
They all listened as the boy scampered back upstairs with so much excitement he stumbled twice. He emerged from the basement door brimming with enthusiasm. His chubby and pale arms poked through the straps of his jean overalls like vanilla soft serve oozing out of the machine. The constellation of red dots above his eye glistened like the cherries on top.
When the boy saw Harris sitting in his customary spot, he exclaimed, “You made it!” He looked from the extractor to Miller. “We can all be friends now.” The boy’s smile widened. Miller realized who had alerted the extractors of their whereabouts.
Ronnie sat on the floor in front of the case. The boy joined him, running his hand along the case’s grooves in the same way he would pet a cat. The younger extractor opened the case and unearthed a spider-like contraption from the black foam inside the case.
“You guys brought the latest model!” the boy squealed. “It’s way bigger than the ones in the commercials.” Miller had no idea what he was referring to.
She debated whether she could snatch the boy up and bolt outside. Then she saw the pure awe in his eyes. Instinct told her wonder should be left unbothered, so she held herself back.
The machine’s spindly legs extended from a short, stubby handle with a knob at its end. Along the handle were rings of buttons and switches. Ronnie tinkered with them to tweak the settings. Periodically, the machine blinked a red light like the eye of a loon.
Harris chuckled at his partner’s industry. The boy went up to him and threw his arms around his legs. It was the same pestering tactic he had tried on Miller earlier. How long ago that seemed.
The boy let the agent sweep aside his bangs. The red dots above his eye shone as if lit from within.
When Ronnie found the right calibration of the machine, it tweeted an arpeggio of sweet tones. The boy let go of Harris and whistled a perfect imitation of the melody.
Miller cowered against the refrigerator. She could not take her eyes off the boy, who could not take his eyes off the machine. His earlier exuberance had evolved into a growing hunger for his own extraction. She had a disturbing feeling that the boy who stood before them was not the same one from the basement. As if the basement had swallowed up the real one and spit out a clone. One that Miller could not even save from himself.
“Please don’t go through with this,” she pleaded, though she didn’t know exactly whom she addressed. Tears were streamed down her face.
Harris nudged the boy forward. He took Miller’s hands, hardly bigger than his. “I’m ready,” the boy assured her. “This is for you and for me.”
Tears rolled down her face and landed on the boy’s wrists. He released her hands as though her tears had activated some mechanism.
Harris stood up and assumed Miller’s place in front of the boy. He positioned his hand at the base of his neck. “You work the Twirler, and I’ll hold his head steady,” he said to his partner. Ronnie inspected the boy’s head and pulled the legs of the Twirler apart to match his guess at its circumference. He held the claw-like machine above the boy and lowered it until the tips of its legs clamped onto the boy’s head as if it specifically accommodated the Twirler.
Miller wailed, shoved Ronnie aside, and tried to wrench the machine off the boy’s head, but it wouldn’t budge. Harris bear-hugged her from behind, restraining her arms to her sides. She twisted from side to side and jumped back toward his chest. Feet flailing, she freed one of her hands, but when she reached out for the machine, she was too far away to grab it. Seconds stretched to infinity. No matter how many times or how far she reached, the Twirler, sitting so snugly atop the boy’s head, eluded her grasp.
“Please stop. It’s time. Please, mama.” It was that final soft-spoken word that stopped her. He had never called her that before. It melted away her desire to fight. She relaxed and, as her body slackened, Harris released her.
Serenity blanketed the boy’s face. Perhaps she had been misguided all these years, and her attempt to protect him had been his greatest hindrance. It dawned on her that the boy’s deepest hope for himself should be held sacred above all, even if it ran contrary to his well-being. In that moment, she resolved to allow the extraction, if that was what the boy wished.
“Will it hurt him?” she asked. She had stopped crying.
“I’m more partial to the Cleaver myself,” Harris said. With his hand, he ironed out the creases her tussle had created in his shirt. “But the boys at headquarters developed the Twirler specifically for its humaneness.”
The boy turned his head to the extractor as far as the Twirler would allow.
“Can you save the first one for her?”
“Of course,” Harris answered.
He leaned forward to examine the side of the boy’s neck, as if trying to locate his jugular. “Ready?” he asked, more to Miller than the boy. Miller remained motionless where she stood.
Ronnie tapped some of the buttons along the Twirler’s handle. Both extractors took big steps back, and Miller followed their lead. The boy dutifully stood frozen in place.
The Twirler began to play a melody even sweeter than the first time. The notes seemed to linger in the air. The boy opened his eyes as wide as he could and gave Miller a reassuring smile. She braced herself, but she did not look away.
The Twirler ceased mid-note. It spun a full circle before Miller could blink. The boy’s face was a blur as it rotated. The head came off with a squelching pop followed by a faint sizzle.
The break was so clean that for a second the boy’s head stayed on his severed neck. Harris lunged forward. While using his hip to keep the rest of the boy’s body from slumping to the floor, he caught the head as it tipped over. Weak rivulets of blood spouted from the boy’s trachea, then subsided. With his free hand, Harris removed the Twirler and tossed the machine to Ronnie. The boy’s eyes were closed. Miller imagined he was sleeping. The red marks above his eye had vanished.
The decapitated body twitched, and Miller thought it was trying to deliver her one final message. She could not decipher its meaning.
“Do you want the first go at it?” Harris asked. He gripped the body by its armpits so that it remained upright.
“Me?” Miller asked.
“Sure. You heard the boy. He designated the first one for you. But you have to act fast while it’s fresh.”
Miller stepped forward and peered at the newly formed cross section at the base of the boy’s exposed neck. Blood had marbled over it like a stained-glass rose.
Miller took a deep breath. “This was what he wanted,” she whispered to herself. This was the fruit that his very existence had cultivated.
With dissipating hesitation, she plunged her arm into the spot where she guessed it should go. As her fingers penetrated the coagulated barrier, blood welled along her arm. She submerged her entire forearm into the warm, gooey body with ease. As she dug deeper, she could feel the esophagus constrict against her arm. She stretched her fingers as far as they would go.
“Don’t be shy to really get in there,” Harris whispered into her ear, though Miller no longer required such encouragement. The extractor tilted the body at a shallower angle to maximize her reach. Soon, the entire length of her arm, even up to her shoulder, had been swallowed up by the boy’s body.
The warm and soft inner lining gave way to something cold and round and smooth. Her fingers wrapped around whatever this prize was, and with more delicacy than when she had initially thrust it in, she removed her arm from the body.
Harris gave Miller a moment to admire her catch in silence. Her arm was caked in blood, but she did not care, for her attention was on the crimson orb that she was holding up to the kitchen light. She rotated it to examine it in full. The orb was perfect in shape and weight and hue. It felt natural, as though her hand was manufactured for the sole purpose of holding it. She dared to give the orb a gentle squeeze. Her fingers left indentations against its surface, and after she released them, those imperfections disappeared. A thought came to Miller: maybe the boy had been growing the orb all this time for her.
“If you can’t dispose of the body yourself, we can get a crew out here who can haul it away for you,” Harris said. In his hand was another red orb, identical to Miller’s.
Miller stared into her reflection on her orb’s surface. Upon closer inspection, her reflection was not alone. The boy stood next to her, holding her in a warm embrace. His visage bore that oh-so-lovely smile.
Miller looked up at the extractors. To her surprise, both of their eyes bulged wide with fear.
Unlike the one Harris held, her orb glowed as if absorbing all the light in the world. It began to burn. She shook her hand to get rid of it, but her fingers would not let go.