Music: Out of the Box 26 (The Girl in the Box Book 36)

by Robert J. Crane

  Hopefully I wasn’t about to have to use any of them, but since when did things in my life ever go to plan?

  I swayed gently out in front of the door and hammered it with my palm again. For effect, I called out, modulating my voice so I sounded drunk, “Karen! Kaaaaaaren!”

  “Echo One, this is Oscar Five-Five,” Spencer’s voice came over the radio bud in my ear. “We are approaching the back door.”

  “Understood,” I muttered under my breath, swaying away from the door so they couldn’t see me through the peephole. “I am wired for sound and good to go in a minute.” Footsteps echoed behind the door, so faint I could only hear them because of my meta senses. The door was thick, too, probably reinforced steel. I clicked my send mic. “Front door is super heavy duty, Oscar Five-Five. Be advised.”

  I reached out and gave the door another hard thumping, flashing irritation across my face now that I knew someone was watching me. “Karen! Karen, open up! It’s me. Meeeeeeeeee.”

  A guy unfastened the bolt and swung the door open. I blinked in at them, standing there in the darkness of the interior hallway, the sun over my shoulder causing the guy to blink. He blanched against the brightness, revealing some teeth that were so stained from tobacco and coffee they looked like they were almost green. I immediately designated him Grimy Teeth, and tried to withhold my internal revulsion.

  “I need to talk to Karen,” I managed to slur out, getting uncomfortably comfortable with my new (old) role as a drunk. “Go get her.”

  Grimy Teeth stared at me through slitted eyes. “There is no Karen here,” he said with hints of an Eastern European accent. “Go away.”

  “Hey, is that Russian?” I said, looking in at him. “Are you Russian?”

  “Go away,” he said, more firmly this time.

  “Not until I talk to Karen,” I slurred.

  He stared at me with rising irritation. “There is no Karen here.”

  “She’s totally here, dude,” I said. “Karen!” I called past him, then looked him in the eye. “Karen. You know, Karen? Punching bag of the entire internet. That Karen.”

  Grimy Teeth looked me over one more time in evident disgust and started to swing the door closed.

  I planted my foot on the door, interrupting his attempt to close it. Giving it a meta-hard shove, I launched Grimy Teeth staggering back into the house as I pushed my way in. “Karennnn!” I shouted, “Where are you?” This I said into the mic, so that Spencer and the others could hear me clearly, because it was the signal to start the party.

  Once I was inside, I got a quick lay of the land. To my left hung a curtain separating me from the living room, where some of the girls were supposedly kept and where some traffickers might be lurking. Through all that was another curtain that separated it from the dining room. Straight ahead lay Grimy Teeth, hurting from my blow, and a shadowy hallway that led past every bedroom in the house. One of those was to my immediate right, but the door was padlocked shut. I’d need to leave it that way for now, to avoid risking the lives of the girls who were in there while I went to work freeing them.

  Grimy Teeth was picking himself up from his knees. He was radiating fury. “There is no Karen here, I told you. Now...” He slid a hand behind him to a strap across his shoulder and started to lay a hand on the rifle across his back. “You cannot leave.”

  “Wasn’t planning on it, Grimy,” I said, dropping the slurring. He cocked his head in surprise and I threw a fast sidekick that caught him beneath the chin and changed his nickname from Grimy Teeth to No Teeth in about two seconds flat. He was going to be healing a severely busted jaw in the jailhouse hospital, but that was more his problem than mine.

  Plus, when he got dental implants, they’d hopefully be a lot more resistant than his real teeth to whatever corrosive business he was perpetrating upon those green meanies. Ew.

  “What is going on up there?” came a voice from down the hall straight ahead. Grimy-No-Teeth was already out, so I quickly ripped his AR-15 from his insensate body and checked it. It was a Rock River Arms gun, but looked pretty standard to the platform. I put the strap over my shoulder and checked the chamber. It had a round in it, so I adjusted the stock and then let it sag to my side while I drew my HK pistol. No point using the rifle and its highly penetrating rounds in a civilian area unless things went really sour in here.

  “I’m looking for Karen!” I called, playing the part of the drunk again. “I need to talk to her. Why won’t any of you just take me to Karen?”

  I ducked to the left, through the curtain into the living room as I heard footsteps thunder into the hallway. They were a second or two from finding Grimy-No-Teeth, at which point I was guessing things were going to get realllllllly interesting.

  Behind the curtain was a maze of more curtains. These were no sheer, lacy fabrics that were easy to see through. This was heavy curtaining, industrial strength, the kind you use when you’re a vampire and seeing a hint of sun meant guaranteed death. They were tacked to the ceilings with nails, cordoning the room. Anyone or anything could be lurking behind them, and I could tell they were set up to turn the house’s living room into a curtained ward.

  There was some chatter in the hallway behind me in a non-English tongue, loud and growing in alarm by the second. I was about to get some action, so I ducked through into the first curtain to my left—

  The smell was what hit me first. It was rank; disgusting didn’t begin to describe it.

  I found myself in a space that couldn’t have been any bigger than ten feet by ten feet. The curtains cordoned three sides of it, from where they hung, ceiling to floor. They’d been taken from somewhere else and repurposed to this.

  In the middle of the wall of curtains was a stained mattress without a sheet to cover it. Based on the level of grime upon its once-white surface, it had been in continuous, hard use for a period of years, and under operating conditions that were never intended in the factory where it had been made. If I looked hard, I could see hints of what might have been close to its original white or off-white color, but they were buried under layers of yellowy grime and stains of all kinds, most related to the sort of bodily functions that would have made any mattress I owned an immediate write-off.

  Not this mattress, though. Its owners were cool with letting it just keep on trucking. I stared at it for a good two seconds, mostly because I didn’t want to consider what was on it.

  But with the voices behind me rising as the men in the hallway found Grimy-No-Teeth and started to panic, realizing I was somewhere in the house...I really didn’t have any choice but to come to grips with what I was looking at.

  She was maybe...maybe...fourteen. She might not even have been that old, because the wealth of track marks in her arm suggested opioid use that would have aged even my meta-perfect skin. She’d been on the shit for a while, and her eyes were fixed on the ceiling in a way that told me she was in la-la land and would be for a while.

  I tried not to look at her for more than a second before I whirled and yanked down the curtain separating me from the next “room,” and away from the angry voices behind me. It tore from the ceiling easily and I stepped through, finding myself looking at another barely teenage girl-who-wasn’t-there, eyes fixed a thousand miles past the ceiling. She didn’t register my presence, nor my violently pulling the curtain down or stepping over her and ripping down the next one to reveal the final “room” in that line.

  Here I found something just a little different. Still another drugged out almost-below-teenager, but here the girl in question was being crouched over by a thirty-something man with big ears who was partially upright, looking around with wide, surprised eyes. He was reaching for an AK-47 when I tore down the curtain. His ears were big enough that I immediately tagged him Dumbo, and his hand was far enough from the AK that I could have kicked his teeth in before he got within an inch of it.

  He was hunched down, on top of the girl. I looked at her vacant eyes for a flash while he stared at me, fingers frozen a
foot from the AK’s pistol grip.

  She was pale, dazed, green eyes faded and dark in the low light of the hellish room. Her hair was clean, wet, as though she’d just been bathed, her skin free of the accumulated oil and grime of neglect I’d seen on the others. Still, the smell of bodily fluids and murk from the room was rank in my enhanced meta senses, making the place smell like some combination of a sewer and a nursing home, with a little brothel thrown in.

  “Okay,” he said, in that same Eastern European accent as the others. He started to slide his hand away from the AK. “Okay,” he said again, shooting me a nervous smile as he looked at my hand...

  Which was holding my HK pistol.

  Aimed at him.

  I looked at the girl one more time, then slid my gaze back to him. His friends were shouting behind me, about a second from ripping down the first curtain and discovering my handiwork. They’d shoot over these girls to get at me, and I’d need to be ready for it.

  “Okay?” He smiled and held his hands up. “Police, right? Okay. We make it easy.”

  “Yes,” I said. “We make it easy.”

  And I shot him right in the face. He toppled onto the girl he’d been abusing.

  She didn’t even notice.

  I spun to the shouts of the men behind me, so many more bullets to use...

  And I just felt cold.

  How many of them were there?

  I didn’t know.

  A hot flush of anger came flooding over me as I aimed over the two girls I’d stepped over to get this far.

  These were just the ones I could see.

  The rage burned in my veins, my own personal drug of choice.

  I knew what I wanted to do, and it was going to be so easy.

  Kill them. Every.

  Last.

  One.

  Yep.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  I ripped the curtains down as I dodged sideways, trying to clear the open field of fire between me and the front door. One of the bad guys popped a head—and a gun—around the hallway edge, sweeping clumsily to find whoever it was that had busted down their door and started shit in their sex trafficking house.

  “He’s got a gun!” I shouted, loud enough for them to hear me in the back of the house as I dropped to one knee. The shout was to cover my ass, so the team kicking in the back door would know I was up against someone who was armed. Hitting a knee wasn’t because I was worried about the guy coming around the corner shooting me; he’d be dead before he fully cleared it. It was to make sure that my shots didn’t tear through the wall behind him and rip into the girls held captive in the bedroom back there.

  Lining up my HK VP9’s sight picture on the sex trafficker’s head and squeezing the trigger was a cold, clear feeling. A pink mist puffed toward the ceiling and he dropped like a puppet whose strings had just been sliced clean.

  The next wouldn’t come so easily, I knew. A thump echoed to my left, and I tore through the aisle of curtains and plunged ahead into the next row of little divided “rooms.” I leapt over a mattress with yet another insensate girl on it, this one so filthy it took me a moment to register her natural hair color was blond.

  I ripped through the curtain and through an archway, going by memory of the house blueprints. This would have been the intended dining room, and Spencer and his team were due to bust down the door to my left at any moment. It looked to still be closed, which meant they were probably still gaining access to the garage through its reinforced back door. A muffled thump in that direction suggested I was right, and I veered right, my pistol pointing everywhere my eyes did.

  The dining room opened on my right into the kitchen, a small room centered on a folding table in the middle. It looked like it had been abandoned swiftly, three out of the four chairs overturned, one with a fresh bowl of cereal poured and waiting in front of it.

  I ignored the snap, crackle and pop as I slipped around it, keying in on the sound of grunts and whispers ahead and to my right. Around that corner were the guys who’d been eating here recently, all lined up at the front door where I’d come in. They’d be expecting me in the living room, but I’d just circled around and now I was coming at them from behind.

  Using my meta speed, I hurried forward, turned the corner at an angle with my pistol barrel braced against it for cover, and came around slowly.

  Three of them huddled in the hallway, stacking up like they were about to come around it. Looking for me, surely. Two bodies were on the ground already, one dead—the one I’d just shot—the other Grimy-No-Teeth, who was clearly out.

  They were talking amongst themselves, making ready to storm the living room where I’d just been. The tension in their muscles was plain, their weapons the ubiquitous AR-15.

  I checked behind me; Spencer and company still hadn’t crashed through the interior door, but the first sound of a crack came a second after I turned back.

  All three men heard it. All three jerked in surprise at the sudden, unexplained noise.

  And all three started to turn toward me, guns in their hands.

  I stayed behind the cover of the wall and started firing. I drew a bead on the first and stroked the trigger gently, bullets ripping up and through his chest. Switching targets, I moved to the next, peppering his chest. One sliced through his neck, making a mess that would only get worse with time and blood loss.

  The last guy threw his gun aside violently and put his hands up as his two colleagues dropped. He sputtered and shook, falling to his knees like I’d shot him even though I was pretty sure I hadn’t.

  Yet.

  “Please,” he said. “Please!”

  I kicked the guns away from his fallen comrades as I approached. “How many more men in the house?” I asked, keeping my pistol leveled at him.

  “None, none,” he said, shaking, hands just above his head, fingers curled in fear like he was arthritic. He pointed into the living room without lowering his hands, a strange tableau. “He dead there. All others, here.” He indicated the three dead bodies and Grimy-No-Teeth all fallen here in the hallway. “No other men. Just the...” His voice trailed off and he looked like he’d swallowed a frog.

  “The girls?” I asked coldly.

  He nodded, face twitching like he’d just had to admit something terrible. As if it wasn’t already blatantly obvious what this place was. What he was doing.

  “Spencer, front of house is clear,” I said, clicking my mic. I heard the door crash in behind me. “I am in the hallway with three tangos down, one injured and one captive.”

  “Understood,” Spencer’s tight voice came back over the mic. I could hear the team’s footfalls sweeping through the back of the house. “Moving through.”

  Something thumped against the door beside me. It was the master bedroom, and it had a padlock keeping it closed.

  I swept my weapon off Mr. Cooperative, toward the noise. “That the girls?”

  He nodded, swallowing visibly as he did so.

  “Cross your ankles, fold your hands behind your head,” I said, and he did so. I cuffed him and put him flat on his face. Not gently. Then I did the same to Grimy-No-Teeth, as the thumping from the bedroom door continued. “Stand back!” I called, checking up and down the hallway again. There was motion to my left, and I saw Spencer all the way at the end of it, at the back of the house, sidle up to a door there and prepare to breach it.

  I didn’t have the patience to wait, so I rammed my shoulder into the bedroom door and it crashed open. I kept my pistol up, just in case Mr. Cooperative had been lying to me and there were men waiting inside.

  There weren’t.

  The scene inside the master bedroom was the picture of squalor and despair. Where there should have been one big bed in the middle of the room, furniture arranged around it, there were instead a dozen military-style cots. My eyes swept the room, and I counted a girl for every cot.

  Not one of them looked as though they’d bathed this week.

  Some were in the same drugged-o
ut state as the girls in the open living room. I passed them quickly, confirming chests were still moving up and down. The girl who’d knocked her hand against the door was looking at me like I was an invader from outer space as I swept through into the small bathroom beyond where I found two more girls sleeping in the bathtub, one with her head at each end. The once-white tub was stained a brownish color through long use and zero maid service.

  “Master bedroom clear,” I said, taking a ragged breath and trying not to let what I was feeling right now bleed out into my voice.

  “Clearing last bedroom now,” Spencer’s voice came back to me. “No sign of tangos.” A muffled thump echoed through the house, and a faint scream came through the wall next to me. I left the bathroom and paused next to a closet, hit with a vague suspicion.

  I threw it open and found a girl huddled there in a stupor, curled up in a sleeping bag, hair as matted and filthy as any of the others.

  Leaving the closet open in disgust, I walked back to the only girl standing in the room, holstering my pistol as I did so. “What’s your name?”

  She blinked at me. She’d watched me the entire time, never said a word.

  Nor did she start now, exactly, because whatever she said, I didn’t understand.

  “Spencer...we’re going to need a translator,” I said.

  “Copy that,” Spencer’s voice came back, both over the radio and faintly, in the distance. I could hear him and the others arguing with the girls to get moving. They were getting everybody out of the house, I guess. Probably for medical treatment. I thought that was kind of a lost cause, given the state of some of these girls.

  Movement out in the hallway caught my attention, and I stepped out, hand hovering over my weapon.

  It was Grimy-No-Teeth, coming back to wakefulness. Or at least semi-consciousness.