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Sally and Billy in Babyland

Chapter Twenty-One

Sally crossed through the office area to the restroom where Wendy scrubbed the floor on her hands and knees. Ms. Elle stood just outside, her arms crossed, looking in.

“Excuse me,” Sally said. “But I need to get the keys so I can go upstairs to Big Baby’s private rooms.”

Elle scoffed. “You impertinent little slug. Do you need to go to Time Out?”

“No ma’am. It’s just that Mr. E told me to do it. He said Big Baby wants his diaper changed right away and that I was to go upstairs and do it.”

“Why didn’t he take you there himself?”

“He said his time was too valuable, and that you should do it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yes ma’am. I know you’re busy too so I thought I could just go do it. But he said these damn kids were your idea and that you should be the one to deal with it. He was busy.”

“That son of a bitch,” Elle said and stormed off.

Wendy stepped out of the restroom. “That was good.”

“I learned it at home,” Sally said. “But I hoped she would give me those keys. So now what?”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s the plan?”

Wendy shrugged. “We run away.”

“But that won’t work. There are security officers at every door. We must be escorted in and out. We need those keys.”

Sally looked around. At each desk, the adults, all of them wearing diapers, looked bored. It wasn’t all that different from being in school. Maybe the only thing you learned at school was to sit at a desk and not get caught picking your nose. She used to think getting caught farting at school was the worst possible thing but, now she’d seen so very many adults wearing nothing but diapers, she was certain farting wasn’t a big deal.

Ms. Elle was in Mr. E’s office, their argument heard across the floor. And there were security men at the doors and the elevator. It was like her school back home. Once school started, the doors were locked and hall monitors — parents who volunteered to stand guard because they were worried about a shooter attacking the school — were at every corner and doorway. There was no way out until the end of school. Except…

An idea formed in her mind.

“How do you get people out of school all at the same time?” Sally asked.

“I don’t know,” Wendy said. “How?”

“A fire alarm.”

“Fire alarm? What’s that?”

Sally realized that they may not have done such things at the abandoned factory where Wendy went to school. “It’s a pretend fire. The alarm is pulled. It’s a chance to practice evacuating the school in case of a real fire. And kids love it because none of us want to be in school. We get a chance to be outside. And everybody has to leave the building.”

“Okay, what do we do?”

Sally looked around and noticed the fire alarm thing on the wall over by the security area. “We pull that thing and then everybody gets up and leaves.”

“Good because I think this building will blow up soon.”

“What?”

“I don’t know but I think that’s what I overheard. You know how adults never explain things to kids. They told me to hurry.”

Sally wanted to get more information but Wendy took off running, headed straight for the fire alarm. Sally hadn’t meant for Wendy to do it herself but maybe that didn’t matter either. In fact, this was better, because the rest of Sally’s plan was to run up the stairs during the evacuation and make sure that Kitty was set free.

A siren screamed and pulsed, on and off and on again while lights near the exits flashed. The security officers standing guard looked around but didn’t move. All the men and women stopped what they were doing and looked around.

At school, when a fire alarm goes off, the kids hurry outside because they all would rather do anything other than sit in a classroom. But here, nobody headed for the doors. Sally didn’t think for even a second that these people wanted to be here. So why did they stay at their desks?

And then the answer popped into her mind. These were old people, like her parents were old. And old people get set in their ways. She understood from watching her parents stay in a marriage neither one wanted to stay in that, once you get to a certain age, you’ll keep doing what you hate and staying where you don’t want to be.

Old people would rather be miserable in the familiar than take a risk with something new.

The security officers grabbed Wendy and made her stand in the corner while Ms. Elle and Mr. E were summoned from his office. They were still arguing as they approached the scene, but Ms. Elle slapped Wendy, knocking her to the ground.

“Get up,” she said.

Wendy got up. “Please don’t hit me,” she said. “I’m just a little kid.” Then she threw her arms around Ms. Elle and pulled her close.

Ms. Elle, baffled by the gesture, ordered the security officers to pry Wendy off.

She and Mr. E. argued about who would punish Wendy. They decided to take turns, and slapped her across the face, hitting her until she wailed in pain and her legs collapsed. The security officers held her up so the beatings could continue.

Sally wished these fools could suffer. None of them deserved her sympathy. Not Ms. Elle, nor Mr. E. Not the security forces, nor the fools in diapers who wouldn’t leave their desks to stop a little girls’ suffering. She wanted nothing more than to see all of them burn, but how could she start a real fire?

The gas lights.

If she put out the flames the gas would keep hissing out of the nozzle, like a gas stove she saw in a movie once. If she put out a bunch of them, then enough of the gas might gather up to start a bigger fire.

Sally grabbed the bucket full of dirty water from the restroom, and the long handled toilet brush, and used that to throw water at the gas lights burning along the wall.

And it worked. She figured out how to dip and snap the brush in one motion, flinging enough water at the fixture to extinguish the flame. Sure enough, the gas kept hissing even though it wasn’t burning.

She worked her way around the room, extinguishing gas light after gas light. She wasn’t sure how many she needed to put out, so she decided to keep going until someone noticed. But no one noticed.

They were all watching Ms. Elle and Mr. E beat Wendy. They seemed to relish it like entertainment, sort of like how her father watched mixed martial arts fighting on television, or her mother went shopping on Black Friday.

With the alarm silenced and the flashing lights near the exits turned off, the room grew darker as Sally had extinguished over half of the lights.

At last, Wendy’s beating stopped, and Sally walked up next to her.

“Would it be all right if I take her to her room? I’ll come right back and finish scrubbing.”

“Fine,” Ms. Elle said, breathing hard from the exertion.

“I’d like to take the stairs if that’s okay. I don’t want to get blood in the elevator.”

“I don’t care what you do.”

Sally surprised herself next by maneuvering Wendy onto her back and lifting her up. She asked the security officer to open the door to the stairwell.

Before she left, she worried about what might happen to the people in the office area. She cursed her weakness, and wondered if she might be too soft to save herself from this situation. But she noticed how the fools staggered back to their desks to return to work, oblivious to the gas filling the room, and unconcerned that so many lights had gone out. They were like everybody else in the world, including her parents, who became caught up in the drama of their own, pathetic lives, that it was all they could do to get through a day.

Maybe they didn’t all deserve to burn.

“I think there’s something wrong with the gas lights,” she said to the security officer. “You should get everybody to leave because there might be a fire.”

Then Sally carried Wendy out of the office area into the stair well.

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