The bedroom window was open, the curtains waving. In recent months, his parents had gotten lazy about activating the home security system that included sensors on his window; he’d been glad they had since it was easier to sneak out. But now someone had sneaked in!
Unless Luowski had four arms, he wasn’t holding Finn down. That job belonged to someone else, the person to Finn’s right. Finn couldn’t see well enough to identify who it was.
Luowski was instead busy trying to keep a hose in Finn’s mouth and down his throat. The hose connected to the end of a rubber funnel. Awake now, Finn bucked and threw his legs up. Luowski climbed onto the bed, using his considerable weight—he was a chunk of muscle and bone—to pin Finn’s legs as well. The whole time the boy worked to push the tube into Finn’s mouth.
“Hold him still!” Luowski whispered to whoever was holding Finn. He got a plastic jug—it looked like apple juice from Costco—up to the funnel and began to pour.
Finn never tasted booze, but he’d smelled it on his parents’ breath plenty of times—and this was booze. Bitter and sharper tasting than he’d imagined. Nasty stuff. He spit as much out as possible, but gagged down some of it as Luowski drowned him in it. He quickly understood the plan: they’d wanted him drunk and unconscious while he’d been crossed over in his DHI state. If they’d managed it, he wouldn’t have been able to return. He’d have been stuck in Sleeping Beauty Syndrome. SBS. The Syndrome.
The light pulsed again: there were half-dissolved pills dancing at the bottom of the jug. Finn guessed that Luowski had spiked the booze with drugs.
He coughed and spit. Luowski managed to get his sweating, disgusting mitt pressed onto Finn’s forehead and held him down. He worked the mouth of the open jug to the funnel and poured. The disgusting concoction flooded through the hose and into Finn’s mouth as he sucked for air.
If Finn didn’t get out of this, his parents at the very least would find him drunk and drugged and would ground him for the rest of his life. He would lose the last family connection he had left—his mother’s support of his being a Keeper.
Finn had an idea. He wrapped his lips around the tube and blew, like into a snorkel. The booze concoction blasted out of the funnel and into Luowski’s face. Luowski jerked back, giving Finn an opening to fight back.
Finn sat up, breaking the grip on his shoulders. He smashed his bedside lamp into Luowski’s face and threw an elbow into the other person.
Here was the thing: his parents were constantly violating his privacy, coming into his room without knocking despite peace treaties to the contrary. Interrupting him, telling him to do things, bossing him around. So why was it that now, the one time he needed them, they were sleeping soundly down the hall while a pair of lunatics were trying to dispatch him? Didn’t they have any kind of parental intuition that something was wrong? Wasn’t his mom supposed to pop wide awake terrified something bad was happening? Weren’t parents supposed to rescue you when someone was trying to poison you?
Finn drove his heel between Luowski’s legs, causing the boy’s face to pucker and his eyes to bulge in the strobe light. Finn then did a back somersault, knowing this was the last move the other kid would see coming. Indeed, the other kid’s head ended up between Finn’s knees. Finn clamped his knees tightly, balled his fist, and was about to punch the kid’s lights out when he saw it was a girl. Sally Ringwald! Their faces were nearly touching. He knew he should, but he couldn’t bring himself to punch a girl.
Instead, he stuck his fingers up her nose, released her from the headlock, and drove her back with only a small amount of pressure to her nostrils. Spinning, he came off the bed and caught her again, then grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her back like he’d seen done in the movies. It worked surprisingly well.
He drove her forward and bent her over the bed from behind. That was when his mother opened the door.
“Lawrence Finnegan Whitman!” she said, seeing him alone with a girl in the dark. (Luowski was still rolling on the floor on the far side of the bed.)
She switched on the light.
Luowski stood and dove out the window. The coward didn’t stay to help his partner.
“Oh!” his mother said. “Is that alcohol I smell? What are the three of you up to?”
“Overtakers, Mom. OTKs, we call them: Overtaker Kids. That was Greg Luowski. This is Sally Ringwald. Sally,” he said, shoving her arm up higher, “say hello to my mother.”
“Hell…o…Mrs.…Whitman,” the girl choked out behind the pain Finn inflicted.