by Layla Wolfe
GUDRUN
“I can see where some people would fall for it.”
I was just trying to stimulate a peppery conversation with Wolf Glaser, really. I was chopping garlic at the cutting board in the kitchen, and he was studiously standing over a pot of water, waiting for it to boil.
“No,” he said. “No way. A leader named Xenu who took the people billions of years ago and put them in pods?”
“Don’t forget,” I goofed, “they had a society similar to ours in the 1950s. They had Chevy cars with giant fenders, and little girls with bobby socks.”
“Yeah,” snorted Wolf. “Only, it was fifty-three billion years ago. And they had Sinclair gas stations.”
“And hula hoops. Can you get me a can of tomatoes from the cupboard?”
Wolf abandoned his water-boiling job to look in the cupboard. “I still say no halfway sane person would fall for it. Scientology is just too whack.”
“Well, I got the impression that most people don’t find out about Xenu and the pods and volcanoes until they reach a higher-up level. Up until then, it seems to be mostly about auditing, which actually sounds sort of practical. I’ve heard of similar methods to alleviate PTSD, going back to the traumatic memory and reliving it to take the power out of it. At least, that’s what I took from the TV show.”
“I don’t see a single can of tomatoes,” reported Wolf from the depths of the cupboard. He slammed it shut and went back to his water. “I’m not buying it. Why wouldn’t the people on the higher-up levels pull the coats of the lower-down people? Let them know what to expect?”
“It’s all completely top secret.” I put the garlic in the cast iron pan to sauté, but we had no fucking tomatoes. “I can’t make this sauce without any fucking tomatoes. Maybe Reg Eastwood has some in his garden.”
“No. Remember the time I asked?”
I turned the garlic pan off. “Well, can you go to the store and pick up several cans? We always seem to need them.”
Wolf put his hand on his hip. I knew what he was going to say. He was like a broken record. “I can’t leave you alone in the house.”
I waved him away. “Oh, go! Go. Jesus Criminy,” I cried, using Roman’s phrase, “nothing’s going to happen. The house is locked, and I can hear a vehicle coming a mile away. Besides, I’ve got that little pocket rocket that I practiced with at the range.”
“Once. You practiced once.”
“Oh, just go. Besides, didn’t you say you were out of shampoo? And you’re not using mine.”
Maybe it was the shampoo, or maybe Wolf’s sudden craving for Ben and Jerry’s. But I convinced him to go down to the market, which was no quick jaunt being way up there on the airfield. It took about twenty minutes just to get down the hill to the market, so the entire trip would be at least an hour.
Still, I wasn’t worried. I was becoming complacent in my imprisonment. They’d already nabbed the two Bamboo Boys, sending a giant message to the rest of them, to Tony Tormenta. When it had occurred to me that Roman had ended one of the Chinese boys, a chill had settled in the pit of my stomach. This is what you’re going to have to get used to. I was a nurse’s assistant, used to caring for the ailing, not ending them. That Bamboo Boy had been a real person, wearing a Fitbit, jogging around a meteor crater.
Then I remembered he’d also provided the “bath salts” that had nearly ended me, and he’d taken Shannon into some inhumane world of human trafficking. Why the fuck was I feeling sorry for him? It was ingrained in me, that was it. I’d seen abuses and suffering of the most horrific sort at the nursing home. We were understaffed and underpaid to begin with. But I’d seen seniors who had fallen and lain in their own excrement for hours before we even got there because they hadn’t been able to reach the pull cord. I’d seen people on so many drugs they didn’t know what day it was. Who knew how lucid those people might be if they weren’t on so many damned drugs? And then the relatives who come to visit once a month and think that makes it all right. I’d seen so many poor elderly people pine away after their thankless relatives went home. There was a lot of loneliness and suffering, and I was attuned to it all.
But I had to start drawing the line between suffering patients and asshole gangsters, especially if I was going to move in this world with Maddy and Ford…with Roman.
So I became a bit relaxed. I poured myself a glass of wine and took my book—I think it was The Heart is a Lonely Hunter—out onto the back patio. I even waved to Reg Eastwood, out there watering his damned cacti garden again. Weren’t you only supposed to water cacti like once a month? But I waved, and eventually he climbed down into the dry wash that separated our houses.
He was wearing one of those button-down shirts that made it look like he planned on golfing. What did Reg Eastwood do all day long? I knew he worked for the Corps of Engineers, was their on-site rep, and handled all the facilities. But he sure seemed to always be at home…watering.
“Gudrun!” he called cheerfully. “How’s it going?”
I sat up in my lawn chair. “Oh, you know. Just relaxing.” I wasn’t sure how much Reg Eastwood knew about my situation. I knew the Bare Bones trusted him. He did things like clear squatters out of buildings for them, call contractors to fix potholes that were ruining equipment, deal with the electric company if someone cut through a power line. He knew I was Slushy’s daughter, but I didn’t know if he actually knew I was hiding from anyone or just needed a place to live. I’d been going with the “place to live” theory. “This house has an awesome library. I’d completely forgotten about some of these books.”
Reg ignored my opening to discuss books. “Where’s Wolf? I needed to ask him something.”
“He just went to the store for some tomatoes. You know, the one at the bottom of the hill on Hangar Avenue.”
“Of course. My home away from home. Speaking of, do you mind if I take one of your bottles of wine from your cellar?”
“Oh, no problem.” Setting my book face down on the chair, I rose and went to the back door, Reg following. “I don’t plan on being here much longer,” I confided.
“Oh? You found a place to live?”
That sort of threw me for a loop. It made me think, and with my hand on the wine cellar doorknob, I turned to face Reg. He was texting someone, but quickly hit SEND and looked apologetically at me. “No, no place to live. That’s a pretty good point. I guess I was just thinking that there’s an end in sight to my ordeal. Ford’s wife came up with a solution to my hip pain problem, and she got me enrolled in nursing school starting September.”
Reg Eastwood was overly enthusiastic. “That’s excellent, Gudrun! See, things are coming along for all of us. You know which wine I was thinking of having? I noticed a bottle of Stag’s Leap ’09 cab. I’ll show you exactly where it is.”
“All right.”
You know, looking back, it’s so easy to say I should’ve done this or that. Isn’t it always that way—hindsight? Hindsight is so fucking wonderful because you see everything coming a mile away, as clearly as if someone had shown you the video preview beforehand. I’m telling you, it’s not like that while it’s happening. It’s muddy, and confusing, and terrifying.
I didn’t even think to question when Reg shut the wine cellar door behind us. Why would I question it? There was no lock on it. Apparently parents in the forties didn’t worry about their children busting into their wine cellar and breaking out their Boone’s Farm or Night Train or whatever teenagers drank back then. Of course the overhead bare light bulb was turned on, so I innocently went to the shelf I thought Reg referred to.
I was saying, “I think Wolf and I took one of the bottles you’re talking about. As you know, it gets kind of boring up here—”
“All right, sister.”
I swear, Reg said “sister,” like some kind of skeevy gangster. I had just barely started picking up the bottle I thought Reg wanted, and when he yanked me by the wrist, the bottle smashed with great force to the cement floor. I was so taken by
surprise I didn’t even fight back. That sounds stupid and lame in retrospect, I know. It just wasn’t the sort of thing I expected to encounter with a neighbor in a wine cellar, him yanking both of my wrists behind my back and securing them with something.
“What the fuck, Reg?” was all I could think to say. Already the heady aroma of a whole bottle of broken red wine was wafting up into my sinuses. It sounds incredible that I didn’t even think to kick him yet. I think the brain wants to understand what’s going on before taking action. The brain likes to command action, to solve problems—it just likes to suss out the situation before doing so.
“Dumb bitch!” Reg snarled, hurling me onto a three-legged stool. He tossed me so hard the stool tottered, and I had nothing to catch my fall with, my hands being bound, I presumed with zip-ties. My ass just teetered against a row of bottles, though, so there I was, helplessly kicking my feet, my entire balance resting in my ass. “You’re going to get us all in trouble now!”
“Why the fuck would I get anyone in trouble, Reg? Why are you doing this?”
Reg had gone from a handsomely smooth, silver fox neighbor to one of those procedural scumbags on TV who are more than slightly cracked. “You tease me for weeks! You sit out there making out with your alleged fucking brother, letting him squeeze those juicy tits while making eyes at me? Well, no fucking more!” Wielding what turned out to be a corkscrew, Reg grabbed the neck of my T-shirt in one hand and ripped a new neckline with the other, right down the center of my chest. In his haste he ripped the skin too with the pointed end of the screw, gashing an angry welt that already oozed.
Was that was this was all about? He thought I’d been teasing him this whole time, so he was out for revenge? It was all starting to make sense—crazy, whacked sense, but sense all the same. I’d watched enough procedurals, enough Criminal Minds episodes to know that the unsub had always had some childhood trauma. Something always set him off, and in this case it appeared to be Roman macking on me in the backyard.
With wild eyes that almost rolled in their sockets like plastic balls in a bingo cage, he stood between my thighs and tore my shirt in two halves. The push-up bra didn’t accommodate him, but he paid it no mind, just yanked it so my boobs popped out the top. The elastic nature of the too-small bra acted like a shelf, actually, displaying my jugs even more proudly, as if I were trying to seduce him. The way my hands were bound at the small of my back jutted my tits forward even more proudly, and it was that that finally oozed into some primordial part of my brain.
I knew I didn’t want my tits to jut, yet there they were, so I kicked that motherfucker. Something was happening to me that I did not approve of. I whacked him so hard with the stiff toe of my ankle boot—and I know I got him right in the crotch—that I went flying off the stool. I crashed to the ground right along with him, and for a few seconds we were a little bit tangled up together, him in the fetal position.
So I kicked him again, right in the old family jewels, right in the old Master of Ceremonies, as Wolf would say. I got to my feet before he did, so I was able to stomp on his wrist with my boot heel while my brain made a bunch of quick calculations. I think my brain decided to make a run for the stairs that led to the kitchen. With no hands, I could never defend myself against him. Running, I might stand a chance.
I remember pounding up the first several steps. But Reg Eastwood reached me before I reached the door. Yanking me by my bound elbow, he slammed me on my back on the cement stairs and flung himself on top of me, pinning me. In this position I couldn’t even knee him in the balls, and my body pinned my own hands beneath my tailbone. It was a hugely vulnerable position to be in, and Reg must’ve known it.
“Let me go!” I shrieked at the top of my lungs. Already my throat was scraped with the power of my voice.
“You fucking bitch! I was supposed to gag you.”
With that, Reg tore away some more of my pitiful T-shirt. Oh dear Lord. He’s making strips out of it. He tied one white strip around my head so tightly it felt my nose was broken, and all I could do was shout against that hot strip of cotton. Only a muffled, feebly cry came out, satisfying him enough to dip his head to my bloody chest and start slathering at my tits. He actually made feeding wolf noises, or more appropriately, zombie noises—the snarling, slathering drooling of the moronic mindless creature feeding at the trough. His tongue painted giant patterns across my two peaks, as though he didn’t mind mixing saliva with blood.
All I could do was rock and roll back and forth. The wooden railing prevented me from falling back down into the wine cellar. But the rocking only served to offer him better access to my tits, and I was starting already to despair of ever getting out of that situation. Surely he’d zip-tie my feet and carry me kicking to his fucking house where no one ever went.
Until the door at the top of the stairs opened. A rectangle of indirect light fell on our horrible scene. I looked upside-down at my savior, no doubt Wolf having forgotten something at home. Hope welled inside me, but only for a brief second.
“What the fuck?” roared a complete stranger. “I told you to fucking zip-tie her hands and ankles, not fucking rape her! You fucking asshole. Do I have to do everything around here?”
The guy stomped down the top couple of steps. He simultaneously yanked me by cupping a hand in my underarm while kicking Reg in the face. He kicked him right in the face with those steel-toed engineer boots all the brothers wore. Reg went tumbling like the sack of shit he was almost all the way to the bottom of the stairs.
So Reg was only doing someone else’s bidding…? I know it sounds incredible that it didn’t occur to me instantly what was going on. It wasn’t until the newcomer wrapped an arm around me and held me to his chest and I got a whiff of…that smell…It’s difficult to describe how women’s senses instantly pick up on a man’s pheromones. It could be a mixture of natural body odor, what the guy ate or drank, or the sort of nature he’d recently been riding through. Sometimes a man’s natural scent can arouse you unbelievably, and each man’s different.
This guy’s mixture of B.O., bad breath, motorcycle exhaust and motor oil nearly had me choking, so I kicked him too. I couldn’t hit or bite but that idiotic Corps engineer had neglected to tie my ankles. I’m sure a part of me knew this would just rile the guy even more. I only managed to backward kick him in his knee, so he swore and spun me to face him.
“God damn cunt,” he growled.
I finally bought a clue when I was face to face with a doctor’s pen light in the top pocket of his cut.
Alcatraz. Holy shit.
My brain felt like it was bleeding as I struggled to piece together how the fuck Riker could possibly know Reg Eastman. My IQ suddenly dropped about fifty points as I strived to put two and two together.
Meanwhile, Riker shook me like bad medicine and yelled down the stairs, “Do her ankles too, you fucking scumbag!”
The two men tussled when Reg tried to zip-tie my ankles. We wound up all three of us prone on the stairs, a knot of limbs and horrible smells. Logically I knew the men would prevail. Men are always stronger than women. The weakest man is practically stronger than the most buff, bodybuilding woman—it’s just the way they’re built.
Once my ankles were tied, I lay there like a mummy, my torso draped over Riker’s thigh. He fondled my bared tit, panting from the exertion. “Good job on getting her ready for me,” he commended his henchman, pinching my nipple.
“You’d better fucking go,” panted Reg. “Wolf’ll be back any second now.”
“Good thing this neighborhood’s dead as a dodo.” Riker stood, sort of carrying me like I was a violin case, or a battering ram. “Take her feet. I’ve got a van out front. You sure no one’ll come up?”
“Just Wolf. He’s been gone about half an hour.”
So it was that simple, really. I watch enough crime shows to wonder how this shit could actually happen. Now I know. Yes, it can. It can fucking happen to you. You can struggle like they’re taking away your firstb
orn son. You can gouge eyes and piss them off even worse. Bottom line. If you run up against a nasty, evil man with a corrupt, vile soul, this can happen. You could be doing nothing—you could be utterly innocent. Or, like me, you could be partially to blame for having met the devil in the first place. Either way, you are powerless because they are stronger than us.
So they carried me, screaming into my little rag and struggling like a fish on a hook. Turned out Riker had a van—yes, one of those windowless things of serial killer lore, and they dumped me in the back. I could still see, so I noted everything I could. I cursed myself for just having had a fucking glass of wine.
“Look,” said Riker, “go down the hill and slow that moron down. Make something up, your power is out and you both should check on some transformer or other.”
“All right,” said Reg Eastwood, “but I want the rest of my money now.”
Riker laughed. His mouth was a yawning chasm of corroded, broken teeth ruined by meth. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You didn’t even tie her feet. How fucking useless are you?” He slammed the back van door then, but I could still hear their muffled talk.
“You’re trying to tell me you’re not going to pay me? I fucking had to take her down, you asshole. I had to tie her hands. I had to lure her in there. I fixed her shirt for you!”
Now Riker opened the driver’s door. “Fuck off, asshole. You’re just a fucking cog in the machine. I don’t need you anymore.” He started up the van.
Reg was shrieking by now. Why the fuck not, in a neighborhood where the nearest person was eight blocks away, a navy wife watching her toddler ride his big wheel? “You motherfucker! You said five thousand dollars for the entire job and you only gave me half!”
“That’s the way things roll, dude,” Riker said calmly. He drove off just as calmly, too, as though Wolf Glaser wasn’t riding up the hill with my cans of tomatoes.
I clung to a hope that Reg Eastwood would turn against Riker. As I heard the growl of a distant approaching motorcycle, I finally realized.