by R. A. Rock
“Where. Are. They?” I asked again, keeping a tight hold on my temper.
“I think he put them in the safe.”
“Where’s the safe?” I said.
She gestured to a painting above the bed.
Seriously? Was he that much of a cliché?
She must have caught the look on my face.
“Brett used to watch movies all the time. You know. Before the solar flare. He’s kind of obsessed. Still talks about them all the time.”
I moved to the painting and shoved it aside. The damn safe wasn’t even locked.
She shrugged.
“Didn’t say he was the sharpest tool in the shed,” she said.
“You don’t care if we’re stealing from Brett?” I said, as I reached into the safe.
“Don’t give a rat’s ass,” she told us. “Can I put my hands down now?”
“No, keep them in the air,” Audrey said. She saw Shiv staring at the door.
“Put something on,” Audrey barked at the woman, her voice irritated. The woman moved to pick up her housecoat that lay on the bed and shrugged into it.
I counted the bracelets. Five. They were all here. I stuffed them into the pocket of the jacket Nessa had given me and zipped it up.
We had them. We could go.
“Are you Brett’s girlfriend?” Audrey said.
Okay, we couldn’t go because we were still questioning her. Maybe Audrey thought we could find out something useful about Zoe and Grace’s whereabouts. Just in case Matt’s scouts were wrong.
The woman snorted at the question.
“Brett doesn’t have a girlfriend,” she said. “He has a ghost that he’s been trying to catch for three years. And lots of women he fucks. I happen to be his favourite. That’s all.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “What ghost?”
Maybe she was talking about Zoe.
“I’m talking about that woman he finally captured. He’s going to marry her.” So she was talking about Zoe.
“Marry her?” I said, incredulous. “I don’t think so. She’s pregnant with another man’s baby. And Brett’s an abusive asshole. He beat her up in front of the whole camp. There’s no way she’d marry him. ”
The woman snorted again. I found it pretty unladylike and I’m so not a lady.
“I didn’t say she would marry him. I said he was going to marry her. You think she has a choice? He’s going to force her. He plans to keep her his prisoner forever. He’s a complete nut job.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I scoffed.
The woman raised her eyebrows.
“Look, I don’t know where you’re from, Hon, but around here, Brett is king. If he wants to keep her a prisoner forever, there’s no one to stop him.”
“And why are you with him?” Audrey said. She mostly kept the censure out of her voice but the woman picked up on it.
“You think I have a choice, either? It was join Brett’s merry men or let my son starve. I chose to save my boy. We were going to be killed in town and after we left, we were going to die in the bush. It was an easy choice, really.”
“I see,” Audrey said, keeping her face completely neutral.
“You don’t see,” the woman said, getting angry. “Who are you to judge me?”
“So where’s the woman? The one he’s going to marry,” Shiv said, interrupting her before she could work herself up. “By the state of your… clothes… Brett only just left. Why isn’t he with the… ghost, as you called her?”
“She’s not here, so he’s blowing off steam with me. He sent her to the prison camp to teach her a lesson after…” Her eyes cut over to me. “…after you beat him up and the woman almost escaped with the red haired witch.”
“If he was going to marry her and keep her a prisoner forever, why would he send her off with some idiot guards?” I said, not believing a word she was telling us. “You’re full of shit.”
“Not idiot guards,” she said, shaking her head. “Hadley.”
I felt a shiver go up my spine at the way she said the name.
“Nobody’s going to touch that woman while he’s guarding her.”
“Why?”
“He’s…” She tapped her head. “Not right up here. When Brett gives him a command, he follows it. And we’re talking to the death, here. One time, he was told to catch a dog that ran away. Brett said to catch it and not let it go.”
She shuddered.
“They found him… he had caught it alright. It was dead from how firmly he had caught it and five guys tried to pry the dead dog out of his arms but they couldn’t. He carried it all the way back to camp and he only dropped it once Brett told him that he could let it go.”
I met Shiv’s appalled eyes. This was not good news.
“Why would this Hadley be so loyal to Brett?” I said.
“Brett saved him from some even worse people, if you can imagine. The guy worships him.”
None of us said anything so the woman kept talking.
“He’s mute, so he needed a new name, since he couldn’t tell us his old one. And like I said, Brett’s crazy about movies. He named him after the asshole Captain Hadley, a corrupt corrections officer in the Shawshank Redemption.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Where’s the red haired witch?” Shiv said, his eyes cutting over to mine and then back to hers.
Gracie.
“Her?” the woman shrugged one shoulder casually. “She’s dead.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
YUMI
“Dead?” Shiv nearly shouted the word at Brett’s woman.
The candle on the bedside table nearest him flickered casting eerie shadows around the dark room and I wanted to be anywhere but here in Brett’s bedroom at midnight.
But we were here and we had a job to do. Get the bracelets and get out. There was no place for out of control emotions on this mission.
I gave Shiv a calm-the-fuck-down look.
The bitch was surely mistaken.
Grace couldn’t be dead.
“What happened?” I said and Audrey took a step closer, drawing the woman’s attention back to the gun that had been trained on her all this time.
“They were caught escaping over the fence that night you fought him. It was around midnight. He was pretty beat up, so we weren’t doing our usual…”
Shiv held a hand up.
“We don’t details,” he said.
“Right. Anyways, we were interrupted, so I went and watched from the window to see what was going on. He dragged Zoe back to the house and threw her in the pantry and locked her in. Then he sent Hadley out to kill the red haired witch.”
“Hadley?” I said, feeling the tiniest bit worried. The way she had described the man, it seemed unlikely that Grace could escape him if he meant to kill her. But this woman could have been exaggerating. And Gracie was quite competent. I wasn’t worried about her.
Not much, anyway.
I bit my lip, watching Shiv. He was clearly doing his best not to freak on this woman.
“She’s not dead, Shiv. This woman doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
“Whatever,” she said, shrugging like she didn’t give a fuck what happened to Grace. “I know what I saw.”
“What did you see?” I said, skeptical.
“I was at the window, like I told you,” she said, indicating the window near the door with a tilt of her head. “I watched Hadley drag to the edge of camp and throw her to the ground. She struggled but he pulled a gun and shot her through the heart. After that, she lay still and he picked her up and threw her over his shoulder to take her to the dump.”
“The dump?” Shiv was horrified.
“To get rid of the body?” the woman said as if we were the stupidest people she had ever met. “What else were we going to do with it? Give it a proper burial?”
She snorted again and I put a hand on Shiv’s chest as he lunged for her. She laughed then and I knew we had found out all we
were going to get out of her.
We needed to escape with the bracelets.
Now.
We had wasted enough time with this woman.
“Where did Brett go when he left you tonight?” I said, wondering if he was going to walk in on us at any moment.
“To bed with one of his other women. I wasn’t pleasing him tonight. He won’t be back.”
“Let’s go,” I said to the others and we began moving out the door, with Audrey still holding the gun on the woman and backing out.
“Wait,” Shiv said, stopping in the doorframe to turn around. “Why did you call her a witch?”
“Because she had magic powers,” the woman said a smug smile on her face. “Maybe she knows how to catch bullets, too.”
Shiv drew a deep breath in through his nose and turned with deliberate movements to go out the door. Once outside we ran for the fence that was just beyond Brett’s cabin.
Halfway there, I nearly collapsed and Shiv came back for me, helping me till we got to the fence. We stood in the shadows waiting for the guard to pass and as soon as the coast was clear, we were through the hole that Matt had told us about.
As we moved through the dark forest, I suddenly realized something. I knew where the dump was and I changed course slightly.
A while later, we came out in the clearing.
“Where are we?” Audrey said, looking confused. “And what’s that smell?”
“The dump is on our way to Sipwesk,” I explained.
“Yumi,” Shiv said, from behind me, his voice tense. “What are we doing here?”
“Shiv, we have to find out if she was lying. We have to look.”
I turned around.
“Yumi,” he said, agony written all over his face. “I can’t.”
“Fine,” I said. “We will. You keep watch.”
He nodded. And there was more fear in his eyes than I had ever seen before.
Audrey and I moved towards the first section where they put the scrap metal. Or where they had put the scrap metal when the dump was functioning. She and I exchanged a long look.
And with a long shuddering breath, I began to pray.
Please let her not be here.
Please let her not be here.
Please let her be okay.
Please, please, please.
***
Audrey and I checked the entire dump before we moved towards the burning pit. Gracie wasn’t anywhere.
Audrey gave me a worried look as we walked side by side towards the dark looking hole in the ground. If it wasn’t such a sissy move, I would have grabbed her hand. If it was Grace beside me, I would have done it even if it was a sissy move. Because Gracie would understand.
She was the closest thing I had to a sister.
She couldn’t be dead.
Audrey and I stopped when we got to the edge. There was a dark pile in the middle of the pit and we climbed down and moved towards it. When we got about four feet away, I realized that the pile wasn’t garbage as I had originally thought.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I yelled, backing away with my hand over my mouth. I back-pedalled so quickly that I stumbled and sat down hard on my butt. I pulled my shirt over my mouth and nose and tried to get a breath that didn’t smell like death.
I’m sorry. I’m no coward. But I have never seen that many rotting bodies all in one spot before. I think most people could be excused for being horrified.
“Fuck, Yumi, what is it?” Shiv said, standing and looking down at us.
“It’s a pile of bodies,” Audrey said, standing as far away from it as she could get.
“No,” Shiv said. It came out like a moan.
“She’s not here,” I said, but it was more like I was trying to convince myself, than confidence that she actually wasn’t.
I made myself move forward towards the bodies and tried to figure things out. They could throw them anywhere but if I was on dead body patrol, I’d be getting rid of them as soon as I could. That meant the part of the pile furthest from the road probably had the older bodies. And the part closest was where they would be dumping the newly dead.
So, that meant that we were on the really old dead side. I walked gingerly around the pile until I got to the newly dead side. Neither of the others said a word or moved a muscle.
When I got to the other side, There were a few bodies that clearly hadn’t been here that long. One man and two women with long hair. I couldn’t tell the colour in the shadows but one woman had hair that was straight as a board. Not Gracie. The other had curls but she was lying on her face, a blood shot wound on her back.
Fuck, I was going to have to turn her over.
I took a step towards the body, then backed away three steps.
God damn it. I had to be brave. Shiv couldn’t do this. If that was Gracie he was going to lose his shit. And I mean seriously lose it. He loved Gracie almost as much as I had loved… Anyway. There was no way that he could turn the body over. And after what Audrey had been through tonight, I wasn’t going to ask her.
That left me.
I had done a lot of terrible and difficult things in my life. This surely wasn’t the most terrible or difficult. How hard was it to just tip a body over and look at the face?
It wasn’t hard from a physical standpoint.
But what if it was Gracie?
What if the woman who was like my little sister was dead? I mean, I was going to lose my shit if something so awful had truly happened, never mind Shiv. We would be a mess.
But she’s not dead, I reminded myself.
This is some other poor chick.
Just turn her over and find out.
I ordered my body to move.
It refused.
I took a step. Another step.
I could do this.
When I got close to the body, it twitched.
I screamed.
I couldn’t help it.
I was so full of adrenaline and fear that I shrieked at the top of my lungs for what felt like a long, long moment.
And then I heard something.
“Shut the fuck up, Yumi,” Gracie’s voice moaned in my head. “You almost melted my brain with that mental scream.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
YUMI
“Grace?” I sent more quietly to my friend, then repeated myself out loud.
“Grace?”
I stared up at the black sky and wondered if I had imagined her voice in my head. This night was turning out to be the worst ever. And it wasn’t even close to being over.
“What happened?” Shiv said as he and Audrey ran up. “Why did you scream like that?”
He was out of breath and had a new cut across his forehead with blood dripping down. I guessed it was from scrambling down into the burning pit a lot faster than he should have.
“I was going to turn that body over to see if it was Grace.” The words spilled out of me as fast as I could say them. “And then I heard her mental voice.”
“Grace!” Shiv sent on a broad band.
“I don’t think you have to broadcast that widely,” Audrey said. “She must be near here.”
“Audrey, you don’t have to worry,” I said. “There’s a few telepaths nowadays on Earth but most of them are only pretenders. We didn’t evolve the ante-prefrontal cortex in large numbers for another three hundred years. I don’t think you need to be too paranoid about sending.”
Audrey gave me a look of disbelief.
“You remember who we are and what we’ve been through, right? I think it’s probably impossible for me to be too paranoid.”
I sighed. She was right.
“Shiv,” I said, going to him. “Be quiet.”
“I can’t hear her,” he said, his voice frantic. “I can’t hear her.”
“First of all, you’re making too much noise to hear anything. Second, I’m a far more powerful telepath than you are. Be quiet. I heard her the first time. I’ll hear her again.”
I closed m
y eyes and listened with my mind for a long moment.
“Gracie? Where are you, sweetie?” I sent in a medium voice.
I have one of the loudest mental voices ever. Grace wasn’t kidding about me melting her brain. It’s totally possible. And don’t ask what sorts of experiments I was forced to take part in, in order to discover I could do that.
“Here,” came her weak mental voice.
I kept my eyes closed and followed the mental sound. I felt Shiv’s hand on my arm. He would make sure I didn’t trip and fall. I felt a surge of love for my friend. He really did have my back.
“Call again, Gracie,” I encouraged her.
Suddenly I heard humming. Gracie and Chad’s family is very musical. And Grace was humming so that I could easily follow the sound that never stopped until I found her. It would take less energy, too, since she seemed very depleted.
I was worried about what we would find when we got to her physical body. But at least she was alive. I walked with my eyes closed, following the humming in my mind.
There was actual garbage at the other end of the burning pit and it was rough walking, which was probably what made it seem to take so long. This pit couldn’t be that big. Shiv kept me from tripping quite a few times before I finally felt him let go of me.
“Grace,” he called out, his relief thick in his voice. When I opened my eyes, he was falling to the ground beside her, where she lay curled on her side. Audrey was right behind.
I took a deep breath to calm myself before I walked over to Grace. She had her eyes closed and looked unconscious, but she wasn’t.
“She was shot,” Audrey said, pointing to the hole in her shirt and the wound beneath it on the right side of her torso. Audrey was all business as she leaned over and checked Grace’s back. “Looks like it came out clean.”
“Yumi,” Shiv said, his hand on Grace’s forehead. “She’s hot. Like, fever hot, I think. What if she has an infection? Again.”
Grace had nearly died once from some wounds that got infected.
Fuck.
“Grace?”
She didn’t respond. She’d probably used all her energy just calling out to me and humming all that time it took me to find her.