by Glenn Ball
“Add some killers outside the door, and the added discomfort of the attic and my nightmare has come true,” she thought to herself. But there was Pedro at least. He was not Adam, but at least she was not all alone. She missed her husband.
“If only my husband were here, we would be safe,” she commented in Pedro’s ear.
“Why we be safe? These men have guns and are very, very dangerous!”
“Yeah, but you don’t know my husband.” She was quick with her reply. An unexpected wave of pride rushed through her. She felt obligated to explain her statement.
She wiggled on her tailbone a moment to get more comfortable. “One time we were on vacation in Los Angeles and our pickup broke down in a bad part of town. My husband Adam went just up the road to bring back a part that he needed to fix the truck. He said he would be right back.
“Sometimes when you’re in a dangerous situation, like the one we’re in now, the hair stands on end. You may not even know why. This was a case like that. I did not know that my life was in danger, yet I had that same cold tingling feeling I have often felt today.”
They got silent for an instant to listen after something crashed in a room below. The hairs on their arms stood on end. The flickering glow on his face from more lightning brought her back to her story. “Two minutes after Adam left me a car pulled up behind ours. It was one of those cars with a special paint job and a suspension that they fixed up to bounce. I watched nervously in the rearview mirror as five guys got out. I could see that two of them had clubs.
“Moments later they busted the windows on both the driver and passenger side of the pickup, and forcibly dragged me out of the cab. That’s when I noticed that they also had knives, and two of them had pistols.
“The two that had drug me out of the truck held me tight while a third one put a knife to my stomach threatening me if I moved. The other two rummaged through the pickup, looking for money and valuables.”
The blanket moved some as Pedro jerked with a start when thunder shook his insides.
“I figured they were gang members. They all had the same color bandana, and each had the same strange tattoo on his arm and face.
“I knew that my life was in danger.” Susanna’s voice was becoming more dramatic having noticed the effect her story was having on her listener. “I have had plenty of experience handling knives and realized that the guy holding the knife to me had known perfectly well how to use it. The two that held me also knew pressure points. There was no use in me trying to escape. I was scared to death, but I refused to show it.
“It got worse from there. The two finished stealing everything they wanted from the pickup. One of them cocked his pistol as he held it to the back of my head. ‘Take off your clothes,’ he ordered in a firm unemotional voice. I was resistant. The thought of them raping me seemed somehow worse than death. The revulsion that ran through my mind was overpowering. And then what froze my blood was this: the realization that after they all took turns raping me, they would probably kill me anyway.
“’Here, we’ll help you,’ said the guy with the knife to my stomach. He grabbed my blouse and ran his knife down it, cutting right through the material. It was not even a second before he had the blouse completely torn open.
“’Now, or I’ll blow your brains out!’ demanded the man with the gun to my head.
“My body seemed to take over from that moment. I became a robot. I guess it was too painful to think about what they had in store for me, so my brain shut it out to protect me. I obeyed, taking off the torn blouse. I felt my bra strap cut immediately afterward.”
Pedro’s eyes were wide with attention. The strange gray-blue glow made them seem unreal, as if they had no face attached—just a pair of eyes in the middle of a dark void staring wildly at her. “Now the pants,” he said. I’m not sure which one said that to me. I was beginning to feel like I was far away in space, and that my body was there without me. They had become non-entities to me, and the whole experience unreal.
“I unbuttoned my jeans and was stepping out of them when I heard the guy behind me scream out in pain. It was the guy that had had the gun to my head. At nearly the same moment that I had felt the gun pulled away the guy on my left fell into the guy with the knife that ripped my blouse. My mind couldn’t take it all in. Before I knew what was happening all five were lying sprawled out on the pavement. Three had twisted, broken limbs and were howling and cursing in agony; two were out cold.
“That’s when I saw that it was my wonderful husband Adam; my hero; the one who saved the day, and my life.”
Pedro could not see the tear in her eye as Perle recalled how much Adam had meant to her. She began to feel horrible inside for telling him if he went on another mission not to come back. What could he do after all? He had no choice. She had driven him into a corner: disobey the government and go AWOL or she would want a divorce.
“Wow! You say husband of you win five hombres? How get so tough?”
“Hmm”, she thought…adding insult to injury, she had made him give up the very thing that she loved most about him. “He was trained how to fight in the military.” She tried not to show her emotion in her voice, but it trembled as the tears came down her face. She had failed her husband. Here he was fighting for her country, for her, and under orders, and she had blatantly defied those orders out of her selfish need for him. She missed him more than ever now, and she might never be able to tell him so and to ask his forgiveness.
Sucking up her emotions, she determined to go on. “You know he told me later he was glad those guys were armed. If they weren’t, he wouldn’t know how he could stop them. It is against the law for him to fight with his bare hands in a non-combat situation unless the culprit is armed.”
“Why?” By the confusion in his voice it was obvious that Pedro had never heard of such a thing.
She snuffed back her tears. It seemed she had never understood her husband until now. She sat pondering for a few moments. “He’s been in the military for years now. He is part of an elite squad in the Special Forces. They teach him things. With that knowledge he has a responsibility that others do not have to bear.”
“What he do in military?”
“To be honest, I don’t know. He is never allowed to talk about his missions. I have often longed to hear about his experiences, to share in his successes and his pains. He has nightmares, but he refuses to talk about them.”
Something thumped on the roof. “It’s just a tree branch,” she said.
After a moment of thought she went on. “I suppose he is afraid to talk about even his nightmares with me because he could accidentally give away classified information. There are things he does that I don’t think anybody, but a few select military officers, know about. I know that his orders come from very high up, and that nobody I have ever known besides Adam has the security clearance to see those orders. About the only thing I know is that he is home for a short time now and then, and has to disappear at a moment’s notice, sometimes for many months at a time. Oh, and that his training is outrageously beyond the norm. I have never seen or heard of anyone else that can do the things he can.”
“What things he do?” He was enthralled.
“For instance, he can scale a cliff without any rope or anything special that most wouldn’t dare even try with special equipment and rope.
“When we’ve gone to the shooting range he likes to practice with several types of rifles as well as pistols. I have never seen him miss with any of them. Sometimes he’ll shoot a high-tech bow and arrow, and never misses with that either.
“And then there were simple little things I have observed about the ways he does things that could not be just innate abilities. He has a collection of rare and unusual skills that I have no explanation for.”
The wind was howling through the roof as Perle took hold of her index finger as if keeping a silent count. “When I talked about some old childhood friends that I had lost contact with, he left the kitchen and I
would swear it hadn’t been three minutes when he came back with their contact information. I hadn’t seen them in over twenty years and had tried for months to find them. After that I never bothered to look for anyone that I’d lost touch with. I’d just asked him, and he never failed to reconnect me.”
She moved her hold to her middle finger. “He can repair anything. He built this house. He knows how to do electrical wiring, carpentry and plumbing. He can repair the electronics on everything from a watch to a mainframe computer.” She had gone through her ring finger, little finger and thumb. Taking her index finger of the other hand she continued. “Give him ten minutes in a building and he can sketch out the blueprints for it as if he had been the architect that had designed it.”
“He has uncanny perceptive and communication abilities.” Moving down the fingers of the other hand she went on. “He can tell me how much anyone I see weighs, just by looking at them. He can read lips. By watching non-verbal signals, he always seems to be able to pick up on what people are thinking, regardless of what they say. He can see through any lie. I thought he only knew English and Spanish, but one day heard him speaking Arabic on the phone and another time Farsi. I realized he had learned a lot more fighting in the Middle East than I had thought.” Having exhausted all her fingers, she let them drop.
“Without him I am at a loss.” Her voice dropped off, as if by running out of fingers she had exhausted all her solutions.
“We be better off if he here. But he not be here. You can call him, yes?”
“No. I have no way to reach him. He is on a mission right now.” She could hear the despondency and anger at his missions rising up in her voice even after she so recently had felt remorse for her behavior toward him. She tried to correct her attitude. “When he is on a mission he cannot be reached. If I were to communicate with him it could put everything he does in jeopardy, so they can only pass messages to him, and then only if they are urgent.”
“This urgent!”
“Yes, it is, but it might be days before he would get the message anyway.”
“You no have other person you call?”
“Well, I called my dad when we first came in the attic. He would be a huge help also. He used to be in the military too. He is tough and knows how to fight.
“One time after my mom died, he went to a bar to get a drink. He was depressed and angry. When he came home, I did not think he was drunk, but I could tell something had happened. He did not want to talk about it.
“The next day the police showed up at the house. They said he put two guys in the hospital. But when they heard his side of the story, they said it matched what several other witnesses had said. The two guys were harassing him, trying to start a fight. He wouldn’t respond. One of them pushed him. He still did not fight back. But then one of them swung at him.
“He told the police that normally he would not have fought back so hard, but he had been depressed because of losing my mom and brother and sister. He went to the bar to get away from the turmoil, not to encounter more. These guys just picked the wrong time to start a fight with him.”
The wind outside was whistling through the cracks in the eaves as the rain beat still more furiously.
“Your father sound tough. Him and I take these guys. How soon you think him come?” There was excitement in his voice, maybe the first sign of hope he had been given since his ordeal began. Susanna was reluctant to dash his hopes.
“That’s the problem. He is in Montana.” She knew that the excitement in his voice would be gone as she waited for his response.
“Then he be here soon, right?”
Susanna felt the humor and the sadness of the situation both at the same time. He had never been to the States, and obviously had no idea where Montana was in relation to Arizona. Even less would he understand that her father was somewhere out in the middle of the wilderness with no roads nearby. “You don’t understand. It will take him days to get here.”
As the thunder growled like an approaching monster the house was engulfed in howling winds. The house shook so much from the violence of the wind that it almost seemed as if the roof was about to come off. Could things get any worse? The storm outside seemed ready to rip her house apart, while the men inside her house were tearing apart the interior in order to find her and kill her. Susanna had to laugh at herself. A few hours previously she had been distraught at how alone she had been feeling, and now that her world was coming apart, she did not feel so bad. It was as if someone had pressed a button that said, “Enough is enough. Your elevator has hit basement. You can’t go any lower. It’s time to get off the pity party and get moving!”
Watching his eyes intently she could see that the horror of their aloneness was finally sinking in with him. They were in this dungeon of darkness alone. There was nobody that would come to their rescue. They were stuck, waiting for death to sniff them out. It might not be long now. At any rate she had a plan.
CHAPTER 23
Break Out
Alicia could not tell how long she had been down in the cellar waiting for Antonio and his henchmen to leave. The cellar seemed more like a tomb to her, the house a graveyard.
What should she do? When would it be safe to come out? Had they left? Had Antonio left men behind to watch for her?
In spite of her mind racing from adrenaline she was beginning to feel an overwhelming sleepiness. She felt like she could fall asleep for days. Dreading the possibility of machine guns aimed at her should she try to escape, and the horror of seeing Artie dead, falling asleep was an appealing alternative, calling her into deeper darkness like the sirens of the “Odyssey”.
Then it hit her like an alarm clock: she was suffocating. If she didn’t exit the cellar now, she might never be able to.
With a nervous breath her hand lurched upward, staggering along the panel above her, feeling blindly for the latch. Artie had instructed her to use the emergency latch upon entry, saying that the door would be nearly invisible to the unknowing eye, but that if they discovered it, they would doubt it was a door if she latched it. She hoped it was the only lock to the door.
Her fingers blundered along the crack of the panel until they came upon the latch for which she had been searching. It took her a couple of awkward minutes to carefully unlatch the cellar. She felt clumsy and was frightened to death someone would be guarding the house and would hear her unlatching the door.
Slowly she pushed the cellar door upward with her head, peeking around and letting the fresh air revive her. She only went up as far as her nose for precaution. Her eyes blinked straining at the rush of light. As they were able to adjust, she could see that nobody was in the kitchen, at least not in view of her line of sight.
The door began to feel heavy on her head and neck, but she persevered in her position, listening intently for any footsteps, voices, breathing or any type of noise in the house. There was nothing. It was as silent as a mausoleum.
Gathering her courage, she pushed up on the door with her hands, lifting it all the way up. Stepping completely out of the cellar she quickly closed the door again. Her first relief was that there was no man waiting behind the cellar door to grab her. Tiptoeing across the kitchen floor she peered around the corner to take in the adjoining rooms.
Room by room she made her cautious search, truly surprised to find none of Antonio’s thugs waiting to snatch her and make her once again his prisoner. After several minutes of investigation, she was fully assured that she was alone in the house. It was an awful mixed feeling of relief and trauma. The last room she checked out was the living room where she stumbled upon Artie’s dead body.
She went down on her knees sobbing, truly grateful and full of remorse at his having died to save her. The bitter anger toward Antonio also welled up inside of her. How could the man she had loved, be so evil?
She had left her life in the market to be with him, only to be turned into his sex slave. Once she discovered that he was a pimp it was too late. The repugnancy she
felt toward him when he forced her to be with other men in order to earn him money could never be adequately expressed.
Nevertheless, she continued to love him after a fashion, because it seemed he loved her. She could never understand why her love for him would be rekindled like a dying ember whenever he would have her spend a special night with him. Whatever he did to revive that spark in her worked, until…. She shivered with repulsion at that horrific night when he made her watch her friend being tortured in his dungeon. She was sure that had completely squelched the embers of passion that had remained.
But now…that lingering desire to be in his arms, to fill her senses with his cologne, a desire that had refused to die even after that nightmarish night… had finally lost its heartbeat. She knew that her heart would never beat again for him.
Every person that she had seen Antonio torture and kill had been in some way evil themselves. But this man had rescued her, fed and sheltered her, had done everything possible to restore her to health and life. And in the end, he had unselfishly given his life to save hers. What’s more he had not been looking for sexual favors. His was a true love, an unselfish love; one that had nothing to do with a love between a man and a woman.
In her grief she longed for the special moments they shared as he read to her from the Bible. Even though her English was limited she had somehow understood him. The strange words came back to her as she had heard him softly reading them to her: “Greater love has no man than to give his life for his friend.”
She remained on her knees for several minutes heaving as the tears gushed. It seemed a lifetime of pain was busting the dams and the floods had been let loose. Would she ever know true friendship without it being taken away? Would she ever find a man who truly loved her? Would this beast Antonio ever leave her alone? Why did he have to snuff out the life of this innocent man? Did anyone’s life ever mean anything to him?
********
It had been a murmur in the distant sky, but now it was a deluge collapsing their tent. But that was the least of Sky’s worries. Perle’s words screamed in his mind. “Men are in my house that want to kill me! I am hiding in the attic. Hurry!”