by Joshua Guess
I fought as best I could with a rope tied around my ankle. I got in a few solid shots—fists, not guns, since I’d lost the Glock when I was pulled off my feet—but whoever had the other end of the rope was paying attention. After a few seconds watching me beat in the faces of his friends, he yanked on the damn thing again and threw me off balance.
I take a certain pride in the fact that it required four people to tie me up.
I was thrown into the back seat of a car. Someone put a bag or shirt over my head. I tried to kick out a window and got the barrel of a gun pushed against my cheek.
“I’d rather not, but if you don’t calm down I will.”
The words were spoken in an utterly calm, almost bored voice. I stopped fighting back. I wasn’t going to be outright murdered, or they wouldn’t have bothered tying me up. Which meant I could bide my time and look for openings. Weak points.
During that car ride I asked myself some important questions. Primary among them was why things had devolved so badly in such a short period of time. The world wasn’t even close to being finished with its ending. If human civilization was a tree felled in an old forest, we were maybe halfway through its fall to the ground.
Organized gangs murdering people, kidnapping, and who knew what else. All of it happening within a day.
And you know what? All those things happened before the dead decided to stand up and eat the living. Thousands of times a year since Cain decided Abel was a dick and smashed him with a rock. People can be divided into convenient groups when it comes to understanding the world around them. The first and largest group accept what they see, refusing to accept on a conscious level that the horrors they witness on the news are real. Bad things happen, but not here. Not to or around them.
That’s why those same people, bless them, always grow so distraught when reality steps in and smacks them in the face. Think about it. When a quiet neighborhood gets its first robbery in memory, there is always shock and dismay that it could happen there. As if some magical barrier has been breached, rather than simply recognize that people are shitty everywhere you go without exception.
Mayberry was never real. The pleasant white picket fences conveniently ignored the Whites Only signs, after all.
The second group of people envy the first. They are the police officers, the firefighters, the soldiers. They’re poor children forced to sell drugs in order to eat. They’re rape victims, abuse victims, or just people who’ve never had wool over their eyes. I’m one of them, and I hold no anger in my heart for people in the first group. Just the dual feelings that the world would be a better place with more awareness of how things really are, and a vain desire not to see innocence shattered. Mutually exclusive hopes.
Less generally, I suspected my captors were probably criminals. Call it profiling if you want, but another bedrock truth about the world is that once the rules grow fuzzy or are removed entirely, criminals are most likely to take advantage.
Wallace is relatively small, Louis County is mostly rural, and neither of those things preclude the possibility of some sincerely bad people existing here. I didn’t keep up with local news in more than a passing sense, but even I knew about the local methamphetamine trade. You couldn’t go a month without hearing of some new bust, this or that ringleader being arrested. Somehow there was always someone else.
With drug trade comes organization, and if there’s one thing I’m wary of more than any other—aside from zombies—it’s organized groups of people with vested interests and few scruples.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked after a little while.
“Be quiet,” came the response.
I hadn’t expected an answer to the question. I was more interested in how my kidnapper responded. Cutting the flow of information, putting up walls using silence especially, implied this was someone who had experience managing unwilling passengers.
When the car finally stopped and the door opened, I was hauled out by my feet. It wasn’t rough treatment, all things considered. He held my upper arm to make sure I found my balance and didn’t get handsy. A good thing, because I wasn’t in a great mood for being tolerant. I’d have thrown a wild headbutt and probably get a bullet for my trouble.
Without the ability to see, I had to focus on other things. The ground beneath my boots was gritty, but not sand or gravel. It crunched slightly, and I guessed it was bare dirt. Someone opened a gate with a long, metallic whine. The barest whiff of manure sneaked into my hood.
“A farm,” I muttered.
My vision flashed purple as something hit me in the head, my overly analytical brain deciding I’d been pistol-whipped just before I blacked out.
***
What followed was only a dream in the technical sense; it happened while I was asleep, but it was in almost every way a memory. I suppose it qualified as a recurring nightmare.
It was a lucid dream, but despite knowing what I saw wasn’t real I couldn’t change anything. I was a passenger only, forced to relive that day again.
I was sixteen. It was, in fact, my sixteenth birthday. The room around me was bare except for a sleeping bag, the white walls and short beige carpet utterly without markings. I had been in this room many times in my short life, an eight-by-four cell I was sure got repainted whenever an occupant left it behind.
This time was different. This day was different. The corner of the carpet to the right of the door was dog-eared up, untucked from its long residence beneath the edge of the wall. I sat in the middle of the room in lotus, one hand lightly cupping the other.
I could hear Kevin, the docent on watch, making his rounds. That’s what they called the person in charge of checking the cells: a docent. A guide. As if the cells were vessels on a journey for those held within.
Well, that was what we were taught. A fundamental tenet, actually. Every experience was a teaching experience, one the person having it must complete with no exceptions. I lost count of the days spent in this room or one of its clones, but I had decided this would be the last. Shoved in here a week before when I’d loudly and stupidly announced my intention to leave on my birthday, I made myself a promise that one way or another I would never come back.
Kevin opened the door of the cell next to mine. I lifted my wrists and looked at them carefully, waiting for the right moment.
The heavy oak door swung open in front of me. Kevin, a boy my age with the too-large hands and feet of a puppy with growing yet to do, settled eyes framed by a mane of curly black hair on me. It was an image forever burned into my brain, that face. One of those innocents who believed what they saw, what they were told. Wide blue eyes met mine, and I smiled.
I jammed the carpet tack into my wrist and drew it along and through my radial artery.
I woke up before the next part could play out, a small blessing. It only grew less pleasant.
In accordance with the strange turn my life had recently taken toward being filled with tired movie clichés, I came around to find myself tied to a chair. My head hurt a fucking lot and my wrists felt like I’d spent ten hours playing ping pong with Forrest Gump. The latter could be blamed on how I was secured to the chair, which put my slumped-forward weight on my wrists while I was knocked out.
Fact: getting knocked out for longer than a few seconds is much, much worse than movies and TV imply. The human brain is meant to be on, as long as it’s not engaged in sleep. When you’re knocked unconscious, it’s a pretty decent rule of thumb that the longer you’re out, the worse you got hit.
I still wore my armor, though my holsters were empty and the knife strapped to my chest was gone. No great urge to pee, meaning I probably wasn’t out for hours. I went through my concussion checklist—something every girl with hundreds of hours of fight training should have memorized cold—and decided that if I did have one, it wasn’t bad.
The relief didn’t do anything to lessen the aching throb in my head. I really wanted to shoot the guy who hit me.
I was in a basement, that
much was obvious. The shitty concrete floor was flaking everywhere, and water stained the walls from long-ignored leaks in the foundation. Overhead pipes and wires nestled between floor joists. Fortunately this didn’t look like a murder basement, but I suppose the best ones never do.
Rather than panic, which I assure you was on my list of go-to reactions just then, I took deep, calming breaths. An almost subterranean rage suffused my entire body and was at war with the impulse to start shrieking in terror. I knew if I gave in to either I’d have trouble stopping.
Been there before.
Not that those reactions were in any way wrong. It’s only insecure assholes who think that being afraid or angry when confronted with something terrifying is something to be ashamed of. For people with even a modicum of self-awareness, it’s easy to identify these as perfectly healthy and normal reactions.
It’s just that letting either guide me would be bad.
I heard muffled conversation through the floor above, then heavy footfalls. Someone opened a door behind me and walked down a set of squeaky old steps. You know the kind; warped from years of traffic, bending slightly in the middle from wear and age.
Whoever it was grabbed a chair and did the old ‘drag the chair behind them so it scrapes around the floor and unnerves the person tied to the other chair’ routine. It was super effective.
A man came into view. He sat his chair in front of mine and sat. My first impression? This wasn’t a man any longer. It was a zombie. The body language practically screamed it. His muscles were bunched, his movements stiff and jerky. He sat with an abruptness that could only be caused by a lack of coordination.
But it was a man. A living, breathing person. Especially the breathing part—his chest rose and fell in sharp, rapid stutters.
He wasn’t remarkably large or particularly small. A white man of early middle years, with a thick shock of salt and pepper hair and a plain farmer’s face. Other than his mannerisms, a single thing told me something about this guy was off.
Thick, dark lines overlaid the veins in his neck. I risked a look at his eyes and saw nothing out of the ordinary there, nor on his wrists. Whatever crept up from his chest, it only showed in the workhorse blood vessels leading up to his brain.
The common misconception that mental illness equates to violent behavior is a bad one, but that being said, I’ve seen a few aggressive and violent people with personality disorders. That’s what this guy reminded me of. Specifically I recalled the short time I’d lived in New Orleans, when a crazed junkie tried to rob me. This guy looked like every artist’s rendering of a pleasant rancher, but with a monkey on his back angry for a fix.
I had a sneaking suspicion drugs had no part in it.
The man stared at me, tendons in the sides of his jaw twitching as he clenched his teeth over and over.
“Where are the rest of your people?” he asked suddenly, as if he could surprise the information from me.
“No idea,” I said.
He grimaced, wide, clenched teeth showing. I got the sense he was trying hard to hold something back. “Yeah, right. You don’t tell me, I’m gonna have to knock it out of you.”
Though my heart tripped over a few beats at the words, I nodded calmly.
“You’re welcome to try,” I said. “Won’t be my first rodeo.”
12
“What’s your name?” I asked as the farmer slowly worked himself up to tearing my head off. He’d moved the chair out of the way and was rolling his sleeves up. My assumption was that whatever had killed people with injuries and brought them back to life had infected him in some way I didn’t understand.
There was clearly a fight going on in him between the person he was and the urge to harm his sickness pushed through his brain. While he might want to hit me, the rational part of him had to throttle up slowly. Otherwise he risked killing me through a loss of control.
Man, did I know what that was like.
“What’s yours?” he asked.
I just barely smiled. “If I tell you that, you might figure out where my friends are.”
It was his turn to smile. “So, they’re at your place.”
Damn. I outsmarted myself.
“I’m Len,” he said, standing before me in a twitchy, ready-to-fight stance. “I don’t want to hurt you, lady, but we need food.”
My curiosity was piqued. “We all need food, man, but it’s only been a day. You can’t be that hungry yet.”
Len crouched down in front of me, angling his jaw sharply and jamming a finger against the dark lines in his neck. “See this? Whatever the fuck is in our veins, it makes us burn hot.” In a surprisingly gentle movement that still induced an involuntary shudder, he placed the back of his hand against my face. It was hot enough to draw a surprised gasp from me.
“Yeah,” Len said. “I’m averaging about a hundred and four.”
I shook my head. “That’s impossible. You’d be on the floor, sweating yourself to death.”
Len shrugged. “I been sick before. I know how it feels. This is different. Point is, it makes us hungry. We eat and feel like we’re starving an hour later.” He belted out a humorless chuckle. “Like all we eat is Chinese food or something.”
I was beginning to regret leaving the house today.
Look, I’m a pretty capable person, but I know my limits and my flaws. Evidence was pretty strong that I overextended myself, maybe let my cockiness overwhelm my caution. Being tied to a chair while being threatened by a sick, violent dude is solid proof things didn’t go my way.
“I’m gonna be honest with you, Len. I’m scared shitless right now. I don’t know if that matters to you at all, but it’s the truth. I have a feeling I’m not going to leave this basement.” I paused, took a calming breath against the vise tightening around my entire rib cage. “Most people make it until the end of their lives before feeling the certainty of death. It’s not something you can really describe, that sense of crushing, inevitable finality. I’ve been there before. I’m there right now.”
I fought back the tears trying their damnedest to brim over my eyelids. “You’re going to have to beat me, and you’re probably going to kill me, because I’m not giving up my friends easy. I saw what you did to that apartment complex.” I meant to keep going, to spew any number of words if it meant delaying the end of my life, but my throat chose that moment to seize up on me.
Len, however, flinched. “That wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Things got...complicated. Messy.”
“Yeah, I saw how messy it was.”
He stood, backed away from me. His breathing went from the irregular, ragged inhalations to a deliberate and thoughtful rhythm. “You have supplies. Your Jeep looked packed with them. Give me what you have, and you can all walk away.”
“I really want to believe you, but I don’t.”
Len’s whole body tightened in a rolling spasm across his middling frame. It was the reaction of the bull when confronted with a waving flag. For a fleeting moment I expected him to fly at me in a rage, knock my chair backward, and turn my face into an example of abstract expressionism with his fists.
Instead he took those measured breaths again.
“Sign of good faith, then,” Len said, as if he’d forgotten his threats against me. “I’m gonna go upstairs and take a bath. Still have power and hot water for now. Might as well enjoy it. When I’m done I’m gonna come back down here and ask you again. I’ll have one of the others bring you some water if you want it.”
I carefully maintained a neutral expression and tone. “Your sign of good faith is postponing a beating?”
“Yeah,” Len said, his voice dry as dead leaves. “It’s the best you’ll get.”
I sat quietly as he left, and paid attention to the muffled words he shared with someone at the top of the steps. Whoever it was wasn’t in the room, but standing guard outside it. I filed the fact away with the countless others sitting in the neat stacks of my memory.
I surveyed the basement
, looking for ideas.
***
A twitchy woman brought me water in an old mason jar, which I drank judiciously. I was thirsty bordering on desperation, but I didn’t want to have to go to the bathroom. She said nothing as she tipped the jar to my lips and even wiped a drip from my chin, then went back to guarding the door.
From the outside.
I took stock of my situation and found it better than appearances would imply. My hands were tied behind me, but my ankles were only loosely bound to the chair. Enough to prevent me from getting any leverage with them, but not so tight I couldn’t work the chair out of the bonds if I could stand.
Not that I could stand, because of how my hands were bound.
So I worked on that. My gloves were gone, no idea where, and while it pissed me off to lose them, it turned out to be a blessing. Whoever took them probably did so to make sure I didn’t have any weapons tucked away inside them or my sleeves. I totally did—the right glove has a tiny slot for a tiny blade. Having found it, the people rifling through my unconscious body probably hadn’t been thorough. I was packing a fair number of obvious weapons, after all.
I pulled myself as far back in the chair as possible and arched my fingers through the wooden slats in the back. I fumbled blindly at my belt, managing to slide fingers into it after several painful seconds. I slowly worked the pads of my fingers along the inside of the belt until I found what I was looking for: a thin leather strap wrapped around my belt. Attached to it, on the inner face tucked next to my body, was a small clip.
It started life as a key chain, but I kept cutting my fingers on the damn thing every time I picked up my keys. It was a gift from Jeff, a single-piece multi-tool made to look like a hair barrette.
I removed it slowly, with infinite care. If I dropped it, I was boned. I left the tool attached to the leather cord, which I wrapped around two fingers, and twisted my wrists into a painful configuration that allowed me to reach the ropes binding them.