by David Beers
He felt irritated as he dropped his bag on the floor. He walked to the living room, his feet carrying him faster than they had any other time during this day. He was headed to the master suite; that’s where the dogs would be. They typically slept there during the day until someone got home.
Robert was walking so fast—finally concerned about something other than himself—that he didn’t see the man standing just inside the living room. He was against the wall, next to the entrance. Robert went right by him.
He finally did hear him, but by then it was too late. The man was already at his back, and Robert tried to look over his shoulder, but then something exploded inside his head and he knew nothing further.
Robert woke with a thirst he’d never felt before. His mouth was desert sand and his tongue a sled made of sandpaper that rasped across it.
He opened his eyes, closed them, then opened them again. He wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at, but thought his thirst might be making his eyes play tricks on him.
The world beneath him shook.
Robert cleared his throat, blinked, and then realized he was staring at the ceiling of … well, he didn’t really know what. He tried to sit up, but his arms and legs weren’t working. Were they asleep? He tried rolling over, and managed a little bit of headway, but still his limbs weren’t reacting as they should.
Robert looked down.
“Thuh fuck?” he slurred out, then realized his head felt like he’d taken too much Xanax.
“There’s no sense in struggling,” someone said. The voice echoed off the walls, which Robert also didn’t understand. How the hell could a voice be echoing in his own house? The rooms were definitely larger than that.
Jesus, how many drinks did I have? he wondered.
He tried to sit up again, but his body wouldn’t work.
“Get against the wall, and try to push yourself up,” the voice said.
The wall? What the hell? Who the hell was here?
“Huh uh you?” he slurred.
“Alan Waverly.”
Robert froze. He completely forgot about trying to sit up; how many drinks he’d consumed no longer mattered in the slightest. Alan Waverly? He jerked his head in the direction of the voice, causing black dots to swarm his vision.
“Just calm down. There’s nothing either of us can do right now. Look. Roll over to the side of the truck, then push yourself up. You’ll be able to sit.”
Robert looked at the man and slowly began realizing what surrounded him. Not all at once, but Alan Waverly was certainly here, sitting against a metal wall. Robert looked to his right and left, seeing that he was in a small box.
The box shook again.
“Whuh is this?”
“You’ve been kidnapped,” Waverly said. “Me too, I guess. We’re on our way to get more people, if I’m right about what I think is happening.”
Kidnapping?
None of this made sense, but Robert tried to focus on what Waverly had said. He rolled across the wooden floor until his back touched the wall, and then pushed himself up so that he was sitting. He looked around and saw a large hanging door. It rattled with the shaking room.
“Is thush a ….” Robert couldn’t find the correct word. His mind was working slower than it should be, and he didn’t understand why. All of this, the whole damn enterprise, made no sense.
“It’s a Ryder truck. Or a U-Haul. I don’t know which but it doesn’t matter much.”
Robert’s head cocked sideways, which caused Waverly to chuckle.
“You sort of look like a buzzard. Anyone ever told you that?”
Robert ignored the comment and looked around the room again, seeing it for what it really was. Not a room at all, but a goddamn box truck.
“Who?” he asked.
Waverly leaned his head back against the wall. “Christian Windsor.”
Robert shook his head. No. That wasn’t possible. Windsor was missing.
“No,” he said aloud.
Waverly didn’t look at him. “Yes.”
Robert tried to swallow, but there was no saliva in his mouth. The truck rattled beneath him. The hard wooden floor jabbed at his skin. The whole entire thing seemed to want to attack him. Robert started breathing harder and could hear his heart thumping inside his ears.
His mouth opened and breath surged out.
“Calm down,” Waverly said, lifting his head from the wall. “Try to breathe. You’re panicking.”
Robert heard the words but they made no sense to him. None of this did. Things like what he saw right now didn’t happen to people like him. His whole life had been based off that simple belief, and yet, here he was, tied and unable to move.
“You’ve got to listen to me,” Waverly said. “Listen to my voice.”
But Robert couldn’t. The black dots he’d seen earlier grew larger and larger, until he saw nothing more.
Chapter 25
Waverly watched the senator slump over. He remained sitting propped against the wall for a moment, then fell all the way to the floor. His head bounced about an inch off the wood before coming down to rest again.
Waverly didn’t know how long he’d been in the vehicle, only that he’d been forced to piss himself a while ago. Not like it mattered much anyway, given his company wasn’t able to stay conscious.
He thought he knew where they were heading. If they started in New York and grabbed Franklin, then the next stop would be further down the east coast, at Veronica’s hospital. From there—and Waverly wasn’t completely sure about this—he thought they would pick up Christian’s mother. Christian hadn’t been lying about that, only in his resistance to it.
Once they had everyone, Waverly imagined they would go to Luke, and only God knew what would happen then. Death, for everyone except Christian? Waverly was concerned with how they would die.
He looked over at the senator, still slumped on the floor. Ultimately they would have two men and two women on their side, though one woman was older and the other mentally unstable. Besides the women, Waverly had this senator who pretty much tried imprisoning him. He didn’t know the man’s mettle; it couldn’t be judged off what Waverly just saw, but … he doubted Franklin had much steel to him.
Which meant Waverly was by himself. Perhaps Christian’s mother could help some by speaking to Christian, but other than that, the weight of survival rested solely on Waverly’s shoulders.
The truck started slowing before coming to a stop. At first Waverly thought Christian must be filling up again, but then the truck reversed some.
He heard the front door shut.
The padlock on the overhead door jiggled for a moment, and then light poured in, illuminating the darkness that had kept Waverly company for so many hours. The truck was parked against a cement wall, obviously to keep people from peering in. Waverly thought about screaming, but Christian wasn’t an idiot. He wouldn’t have pulled over in a populated area without sealing Waverly’s mouth closed, exactly as he’d done at the Senator’s house.
Christian climbed up into the truck; he had a bottle of water in his hand. He brought it to Waverly, flipping the lid open and then tilted it up.
Waverly didn’t resist. He opened his mouth and took the water, gently. Christian was careful not to spill, allowing him to drink at his own pace.
Waverly felt himself growing full—even though he wanted more—and cut himself off.
“That’s enough,” he said.
Christian pulled the bottle away and looked to the senator. “How long has he been out?”
“He came to and then went blacked out again. Free my hands and I’ll make sure to give him some water when he wakes up.”
Christian looked at him, his brow furrowed, and for a second he looked like the young man Waverly had hired. Someone who didn’t always get every joke; someone who said things he shouldn’t, because he couldn’t hold his words back.
“I’m kidding, Christian. Unless you want to do it.”
Christian
looked down at his feet.
“How did we get like this?” Waverly asked. Seconds passed without any response. “We don’t have to be.”
“We do. I know that now. He’s been planning this for so long. We never really had a chance. We thought we did, doing our little operations and chasing him around the world, but in the end, he was miles above us, watching from on high. Knowing that we would end up right here.”
“He’s not God.”
“No, not yet, but he might be one day,” Christian said, still staring at the wooden floor.
“What are you going to do?” Waverly asked. “Are we going to get Veronica, and then your mother?”
Christian said nothing.
“If you plan on doing that, Christian, then you are lost. That’s your mother and a woman that once loved you. You’re going to turn them over to Luke? Forget about me and this asshole, but those two?”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “You can’t.”
“I understand enough to know that you don’t have to do this. That whatever you’re facing doesn’t mean you have to sell your soul to defeat it.”
Christian laughed. “I’m not defeating anything. The people I’m seeing aren’t going anywhere, because there isn’t anywhere for them to go. That’s what you don’t understand. They’re me and I’m them. We’re going to Luke because that’s where we belong. That’s our destiny.”
“You don’t make any sense, Christian. Untie my hands. I promise you I’ll get you help. Whatever this is, we’ll make it through, together. But you don’t have to do this, not to your mother.”
Christian looked up slightly. He paused for a second as if thinking, and then he pulled his shirt up over his head, letting it hang from a finger. He stood in front of Waverly, his chest bare. Scars ran across his flesh like lines on a map. They crisscrossed one another, small ones moving over large gashes … roads crossing mountains.
Christian’s eyes went to his own skin. He reached up with his free hand and traced the one that Luke had done with a knife, large and straight up his ribs.
Waverly had never seen anything like it. The closest memory was of images he’d seen in books about slaves. Those black and white pictures of people that had been whipped nearly to death.
And isn’t that what happened here? Some of those scars are exactly that.
“There’s no help for these,” Christian said. He looked back up. “There’s no help for any of it. So just stop talking about it like you could ever understand. None of you know. None of you will ever know what I’ve been through. None of you have seen the things I’ve seen, or the things that I see now. So don’t fucking try and tell me that we’ll get help.”
Christian looked to his left. He stared for a second, though there was nothing for him to see but the truck’s wall. He nodded and then looked back to Waverly.
“It’s time to go.”
“Fine, Christian,” Waverly said. “Let’s say I agree with you, and that you’ve got to bring us to Luke. How the hell do you plan on getting Veronica? She’s in a hospital. You can’t just walk in and point a gun at her. You’re going to get caught, probably the moment you show your face inside. You’re everywhere right now, and everyone is looking for you. Use your head. You simply can’t do this.”
Again his brow furrowed as if he didn’t quite understand what was being said. A moment passed, and then the confusion dissipated. Christian smiled, and God … he was madness personified.
“I’m not going in there, Waverly. You are.”
For all of Christian’s genius, Waverly understood he could use brute force if needed, and he was doing so now.
“You’re going to go in there, and then you’re going to find a way to get her out,” Christian said. “If you don’t, I’m going to kill the Senator here, and then I’m going to march inside and start killing whoever I see.”
After their last stop, they’d driven for a while. The Senator finally gained consciousness before the vehicle parked again.
Christian had climbed into the back of the truck, taking a seat on the opposite wall as though he was playing cards, instead of plotting murder.
“HELP!” the Senator screamed. “HEEELLLPPP!”
Christian turned to him and chuckled, though his laughter couldn’t be heard over the shrieks. They echoed loudly in the small enclosure, and even though the door was shut, some of the noise surely escaped outside.
Christian kept staring at the Senator while he screamed, not moving. He didn’t even point a pistol at the man; he only looked on with a slight grin across his face, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Finally, Franklin understood the situation’s reality, and his scream caught in his throat. The last echo died inside the truck.
Christian turned and looked at Waverly, as if to ask if he believed these shenanigans.
Waverly saw only psychosis. Christian could apparently see more, though—a lot more. He looked to his left and right, taking advice from his invisible counselors.
“That’s not going to do anything for you, Robert,” Christian said. “There’s no one to hear you. That’s why I stopped here.”
How close has he become to Luke? Waverly wondered. Are they the same person?
Waverly knew they were closer to it than ever before. The man here spoke differently than from Luke, but the things they said were the same. Everything planned out. The evil that they would do always putting pressure on the other person, making it about the victim instead of Luke or Christian.
His gaze turned back to Waverly. “I know you’re going to think about alerting someone. Maybe a security guard, or perhaps a cop. Maybe you’ll want to use a phone and call someone. You could do all of that and you’d probably get away with it. At least partly. You know, though, that the Senator here would die before anyone arrived to stop me. I’m also pretty sure I could get inside and kill quite a few people, too. Yeah, they’ll take me down before I get all of us to Luke, but I guess that would be okay.”
Christian looked to his right. “I know. I know.” He turned back to Waverly. “Trust me. You don’t want the kind of weight on your psyche that comes from knowing your decisions killed people. It doesn’t go away. It festers. It grows until it’s a cancer that you can’t escape. It’s a cancer that sits inside your mind and demands you stare at it, forcing you to watch as it devours you. If that’s what you want, then go in there and tell the world I’m sitting outside. I promise, in the end, you’ll lose more than you ever imagined possible.”
Christian stared at him; a pleading hovered just behind the madness in his eyes. He wasn’t pleading for his own sake, but for Waverly’s. Regardless of the truth behind what he said, he believed it. It was his truth.
“And for you, Robert,” Christian said, breaking his hold on Waverly and standing up. “I’ve got something to ensure you keep quiet.” He pulled a sock from his pocket—the same one he’d shoved in Waverly’s mouth some endless hours ago. He went to the back of the truck for a second, bending down and picking up the tape that lay there, then headed to Franklin.
“No, please. No. I won’t say anything. I’ll keep my mouth shuuughhhh!”
Christian simply shoved the sock inside the Senator’s mouth on the last word. He wasted no time, practice making him skilled with the roll of tape. He wrapped it around the Senator’s head, zipping through the process as if he were a long term criminal.
Finally, with that finished, Christian said nothing else, but opened the back door and hopped out. He closed it behind him without even glancing inside. Waverly heard the lock snap home.
The engine started, and the truck rolled onto the road.
Waverly didn’t know how much time passed. He spent it trying not to look at Franklin. The man was sobbing and any thoughts Waverly once possessed about the man holding his own had now fled. He was weaker than anyone else Christian planned on kidnapping; all the others had faced much more than a sock, without so much blubbering.
They rode a
long for a short time, Franklin crying and Waverly staring straight ahead. The truck stopped, and once again the back door opened.
Christian was carrying clothes. Waverly recognized them immediately, and fear sank deep into his bones. They were his clothes, Waverly’s. Which meant Christian had gone back up into the hotel room and brought down Waverly’s suitcase. It meant the man was planning ahead at a level that Waverly hadn’t anticipated. Christian had understood long before Waverly did that he’d urinate on himself, and that he wouldn’t be able to steal Veronica in such a state.
He might be insane, but his mind is working fluidly. Or, at least more so than you thought.
Christian dropped the clothes next to Waverly. He pulled a knife from his pocket, one Waverly recognized as his own. Christian looked at him for a moment, his message clear: If you try anything, I will gut you.
He slid the sharp blade through the tape binding Waverly’s arms, then stepped back quickly. He pocketed the knife and pulled the pistol from the back of his pants.
“Change.”
Waverly looked at the clothes briefly, needing to make a split-second decision.
You’ll lose more than you ever imagined possible, Christian had said, his eyes showing he understood it better than anyone—the scars across his body screaming the truth of his words.
Waverly unwrapped the tape on his ankles and stood up. He looked at Christian, wondering if he could cross the distance before Christian pulled the trigger. There simply wasn’t any way. If Waverly didn’t do what Christian wanted, he would die here, in the back of this van, and then what? Christian would get what he wanted anyway. Luke would get what he wanted, because somehow, they would go in there and grab Veronica. The only choice Waverly had was to live, and maybe try to stop them later.
He disrobed. He didn’t know if the new clothes would fully mask the smell of urine, but they’d help. He put them on, dressing as the two men watched him and not caring in the slightest.
He was about to commit a crime. He would deliver a troubled woman to a murderer. What did being seen naked matter?