“No,” she pleaded, and tried to back up out of the way. Ben caught her by the shirt, lifting it up so I could see her scarred thighs and bruised womanhood, and jammed the needle into her shoulder. She didn’t squirm much, just sort of took it out of fear. To be safe, Ben put a hand over her mouth and flattened himself against her to keep her from moving. It only took a few seconds for her to fall forward in his arms, her eyes rolling back in her head.
“Ain’t that a sight,” Bob said, licking his lips.
“What did you give her?” I asked. As if I’m some kind of doctor and would know whatever drug was in the needle anyway.
Bob pointed at me. “He talked, Ben. Take off a finger.”
“You talked first,” I replied. “Fair is fair, Ben, take his first.”
“I did not talk first!”
“Did too. You said it was a pretty sight.”
“Listen, you little--Ow!”
Ben smacked Bob in the back of the head. “Shut it! Both of you.” Then to Bob specifically: “Just sit here while I talk. Can you do that?”
Bob nodded, rubbing the back of his head.
Ben unlocked the cage door with the ring of keys on his belt, came in and stood over me. “Give me your hand.”
“No.”
He pointed the gun at me and I figured it would be a swifter death than the wire cutters would grant me so I didn’t really flinch. “I can shoot you in your dick and then take your hand. Understand?”
Yeah, well, he had a point there. Not that my dick saw much action in my life but I kind of liked it where it was. I held my hand out to him in a fist.
He grabbed it and twisted it sideways near to its breaking point. Now I flinched because it frigging hurt.
“How did you get in?” he asked.
“Back door. It was unlocked.”
“Must have been Cary,” Bob said, then went tightlipped.
“Who knows you’re here?”
“Everybody. The cops, the president, your mother--Ah!”
I heard something pop in my wrist as he twisted harder. “Tell me what you’ve seen?”
“Saw the buffet upstairs, if that’s what you mean. Saw Marshalll and his friends eat that girl alive.”
At this Bob went a bit wide-eyed. I guess he hadn’t known what was going on upstairs after all.
“Did you, now? And do you know who you are dealing with?”
“Look, I just needed to take a piss, saw the door open and came in to use the bathroom. I have a really bad memory so you can just let me go and forget this whole thing. Cool?”
“You’re brave, boy, but not as brave as you think.”
“‘Boy?’ I’m thirty. Don’t you see the gray hairs on my head?”
“If anyone is coming after you, or if anyone else is here with you, you’re death will take days. Tell the truth now and I can make it swift.”
“The truth is I’m used to this type of situation . . . so do your worst.”
“Fine. I will assume you have complicated things for us tonight, which is going to make Marshalll very unhappy. The police were already here once and I suspect you have something to do with it. I will be back in a bit, and when I come, we will see how long you can hold out. I will even let Bob join in.”
With that he went back and carried Victoria out of her cage. He took my shirt off her and threw it on the ground, then carried her unconscious body back out toward the cellar, leaving me alone with Bob.
“Just you and me, buddy,” Bob said when the hallway door closed. “Just you and me and this here gun and, oh, look, some drugs to make you a little sleepy.”
CHAPTER 17
Time seemed to speed up now, the seconds bursting away in my mind like a lit brick of firecrackers. Bangbangbangbang. Gone. I was trapped in a cage in a room with a guy who wanted to beat me alive, the girl I was in love with was on her way upstairs to be eaten, and there was a house full of maniacs surrounding me. All I could do was curse God, pray that Victoria would be saved by a miracle. Helplessness is the worst feeling in the world, especially when you know your own inabilities mean someone else’s pain. It all felt so unfair.
But what could I do? There were no police procedurals that I knew of for getting out of this type of situation. You basically needed Michael Bay to write some really convenient plot twist, and Will Smith to be muscular enough to carry it out, so that the film ends on a high.
Now welcome back to real life.
I reached up and tenderly felt my nose to gauge how bad it was. The word grapefruit came to mind. A glance at my wrist showed it was swollen as well. Maybe not broken, but sprained at least. Felt like the tendons had crisscrossed under the skin. It was my right hand, the one I aimed with, so that was not a good thing. I flexed my finger to make sure they could still move, and they did, but it sent fire all the way up to my shoulder.
Good ol’ Bob was being his usual idiot self and went and got the first aid kit, took out the needle and filled it with whatever knockout juice was in the little bottle.
“Only a little,” he said. “Wouldn’t want you to miss the experience.”
“Tooth,” I said quietly, “if you’re listening, if you’ve been hanging around and I’m really not crazy, I could use some help. I know I’ve asked you a bunch tonight and maybe that was you with the mosquito and the road sign, maybe not, but either way, help me out. I mean, he’s got your hat, man.”
“The fuck you talking to?”
“Imaginary friend. You’re wearing his old hat. Just thought he might like it back. So how are we gonna do this? You coming in here or should I go out there?”
He took his gun out of his waistband. “Funny. You stay right there behind them bars. Stick your foot out so I can inject you.”
“Are you serious? You think I’m going to do what you want? You’re not that stupid. How well did you do in school?”
“Fuck school. Dropped out.”
“You’re kidding me. Took you for a scholar. You remind me of a teacher I--”
Bang!
The bullet threw me backwards and slammed me into the wall, knocking the breath out of me. I’m pretty sure I screamed but I was so far beyond broken-nose pain at this point I couldn’t even be sure it was me. I slumped down to my ass, waiting to die, thinking of Victoria upstairs, but could still feel myself breathing. I looked at my chest and realized I hadn’t been hit there, but rather in the left arm. It was a big red mess and it hurt like hell.
“You’ll live,” Bob said, laughing, “just a flesh wound. It’s only a 9mm. Hurts like a bitch though, huh?”
It was more than a flesh wound, believe me, it was a crater in my left bicep. Blood was pumping out so fast I felt it running down my sides into my pants.
“Well, maybe it’s more than a flesh wound. I don’t have the best aim. Now stick your foot out.”
I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. You might think you’re tough but in this type of situation you eventually cave. Bullets hurt like nothing you can imagine, and they can kill you. And no matter how many times I wish for death to just take me out of this crappy, violence-filled life, I still have an innate sense of self-preservation. If letting Bob inject me with a sedative was going to prolong my life, I was going to take it. I’ve said this before, but wishing for death and actually letting yourself die are two totally different animals. I wish it wasn’t so.
Wincing, I slid my foot out of the bars as I pressed my sprained hand against the bullet wound in my arm, trying to staunch the blood and just generally hoping that holding my hand there would ease the pain.
Bob bent down near my foot and flicked the tip of the needle with his finger to get the air out. Why the hell he cared about that precaution was beyond me. The idiot probably just saw doctors do it on hospital TV dramas and figured it was part of giving someone a shot. What did he care if he gave me an embolism?
“Hold up,” I said, my heart just about ripping through my chest now. It was all I could do to generate saliva in my mouth.
“What? I ain’t gonna kill you yet, just have a little fun.”
“What about Ben?”
“He just wants to talk to you some more. I’ll leave enough of you for that. He won’t care. And if he does, so what? I have my failsafes in place in case something goes wrong with these people tonight. See, I’m not as big of a moron as you think.”
“I dunno, I’m thinking pretty big. But what about that guy at the door?” There was a face peeking in at us. It was the same guy I had seen in the basement, the bald guy with the black suit.
Bob turned his head to look, saw the guy, said, “Who the . . . ?”
That was when I kicked. My foot hit Bob’s hand and drove the syringe up and into the bottom of his chin. He screamed and yanked it out immediately, but it was too late. I saw the plunger had pushed up. Was it enough? I hoped so.
The face at the door suddenly disappeared and I was betting dollars to donuts whoever it was was on their way upstairs to report what just happened. My life was just one happy ticking clock after another.
“Son of a . . . bitch,” Bob moaned, his voice slurring. “Why did . . . you . . . do that?”
He blinked a few times, then raised the gun at me, staggering a bit.
“Wait! What about Ben!”
He didn’t’ care. He squeezed the trigger. I threw my hands up in front of my face. But the drug was fast and he sort of fell sideways as he fired, hit the cage next to mine and dropped to the ground. The bullet pinged off one of the bars and ricocheted into the wall near the first aid kit.
I moved as quickly as I could, reaching through the bars with my good arm, and grabbed the gun out of his hand. He was fighting the effects of the drug and tried to hold on to it but his muscles weren’t really obeying him. I yanked it away. One shot at the cage’s lock set me free, but the recoil of the gun jerked my ruined wrist backwards enough that I dropped the gun and screamed in pain. Firing it again was going to be tough; I had one useless arm on my left side and a bum hand on the right. I picked it back up anyway because I sure as shit wasn’t going to leave it around for Bob to get and, well, you know, I wasn’t going to get very far without it.
On the floor in front of me Bob was trying to get to his knees with eyes half closed and a mouth that was a big drooling maw. I stepped over him, took my hat off his head and put the gun to his head. He rolled over and looked at me with a sort of resignation that almost made me mad. “What’re you . . . some fucking . . . superhero?”I fixed the Red Sox cap on my head once more. “If I was a superhero I’d bring you to the police, Bob. But you don’t deserve such niceties. But tell you what, I won’t kill you. You’re too pathetic and defenseless lying here like this. I’m not cold-blooded.”
“You’d better . . . kill . . . me or . . .”
“Stop talking, Bob. I’m not gonna kill you, but I won’t live knowing what you did to Victoria, knowing what you like to do to girls.”
I lowered the gun, looked into his eyes, and shot him in the dick.
Twice.
Warm blood spit up and stained my face. There was something satisfying in that. Almost made me forget the agonizing pain I felt in my wrist once more.
Oh, man how he wailed. Even in his drugged-up state, he was like a deafening siren, holding his hands to his crotch and rolling back and forth like a man on fire. Before I left the room I took a look at his downstairs area and saw nothing but gristle. The mound of bloody meat that had been his genitalia was now on the floor, blown into bits near his knees. He rolled over onto it as he screamed and squished it all.
“Fuck you, Bob. See you around.”
I grabbed my shirt and left.
The door to the underground hallway was easily opened from inside. I was back in the basement in a heartbeat, weaving through those weird statues again. Wolf upon wolf upon wolf, this one with a spear, this one with a sword, that one with an ax. I tied the shirt around my arm wound as I went. It helped stop the blood flow, but just barely.
The layout of the basement was becoming familiar to me now, at least this part of it. Where the other rooms and hallways went I didn’t care. I found the stairs leading back up to the kitchen and took them slowly, listening for movement or breathing from above. Nothing told me anyone was waiting for me but that didn’t mean a surprise wasn’t ready to pounce on me from the top.
Ben was obviously a fool to trust Bob because he hadn’t locked the door at the top. For that matter, neither had the strange man in black who’d spied on me in the cages. Or maybe it just didn’t have a lock. Who knows?
I pushed it open into the kitchen once again, hearing the familiar chamber music coming out over the house’s PA system. As quickly and quietly as I could I maneuvered back down the servant hallway toward the room with my painting. Soon I was back near the chaise lounge I’d hidden behind earlier, looking into the dining room, which was now empty. They’d said something about going up to the Observatory, and since I had no better leads I figured I’d find Victoria there. I stopped once, skulking past the dining room, to pick up a phone that sat on an antique cabinet near a room with an impressive Steinway piano. Call me brave but I’m not stupid. I needed to get the police back here stat.
There was no dial tone.
“Surprise, Roger. That would be too easy,” I said.
I went further down, listening for goons with guns. A wide staircase was directly in front of me down the hall, the kind of staircase rich people love to walk down in expensive clothes. A plush red runner ran up the center of the stairs as if it ascended toward some type of throne room.
I checked behind me to make sure no one was coming, saw the trail of blood I’d left from the gunshot in my arm. “Great.”
I went up, step by step, sticking to the side, letting my arm bleed through the shirt bandage all over the expensive woodwork. Voices suddenly became audible as I went higher. There was laughing, burping, general merriment. The cocktail party of the damned was still in full swing, and dessert was on the way. When I was nearly at the second floor I stopped in the middle of the staircase, my eyes were level with the floor ahead of me, and I saw one of the gun-toting goons pacing in the wide hallway. If I’d had a silencer I might have shot him but then again the vibrations of his massive body hitting the floor would have shaken the house like an earthquake and driven everyone in a panic right to me.
There was something about this goon’s eyes that frightened me, something focused. Unlike when I’d seen him earlier, this guy looked a bit twitchy, as if he were on guard. Which of course made sense if Ben had told his underlings someone had been captured sneaking around the house. He had that shoot-first-ask-questions-later look in his eyes.
You sure you don’t want to just shoot him in the face, Murderboy? You’ve racked up quite the body count tonight as it is. Your bloodlust rivals even my own. Soon enough you’ll be raping and cutting, and I’ll be right by your side, waiting to congratulate you.
“Not real,” I whispered. Pressing my fingers to my nose shut off Skinny Man’s voice for a second but he was back lickity split.
Imagine if your lovely sis was still alive. The things we could do to her together. The things we could stick in her. Like the razor wire I used to cut through her cunt to her ass. You know, the razor wire I wrapped your buddy’s head with.
Need my meds, I thought. Holy crap I need to get back on the meds, I don’t care what Dr. Marsh said.
The guard in front of me was suddenly met by another goon, and together they talked for a few seconds. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but there were some hand movements that looked like directives. Somehow I was keeping time in my head--ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds--and started willing them to move off to another hallway less I fail to make it to the third floor before Victoria was laid on a table.
I don’t know if it was my Force powers or what, but they did break up and move down to another corridor. They had their guns raised as if they’d heard something or were stalking someone. Didn’t matter to me wh
at they were after or what their motives were for moving, it gave me a window of opportunity to rush up to the next flight of stairs. As I rounded the railing I caught sight of something startling in a mirror on the wall.
I saw Tooth.
Well, what looked like Tooth, wearing his Red Sox cap. I’m sure it was just me. I mean, I was wearing the cap now, and I am prone to strange voices and hallucinations when I’m not on my meds. I’ve been talking to him and seeing him for ten years now. Yeah, I’m loco.
Still, it looked an awful lot like Tooth.
On the middle landing of this set of stairs was another one of those creepy wolf statues. This one was a bit more hybridized than the others I’d seen, with different animal parts for arms and legs, maybe part horse or deer, I couldn’t tell. It had one massive eye above a wide, fanged mouth, and someone had draped a red sash over its shoulders. It was holding a woman’s head and howling up to the ceiling. This one was also anatomically correct--which they all may have been for all I’d noticed--with a massive barbed dick that hung down to its knees.
There were words carved into the stone base, but I couldn’t read the language. Lots of Ks and Cs and Vs which made me think it was Slavic or something. That word was in there again: PSOGLAV. The one from the painting downstairs.
Marshalll’s voice drifted down to me, quiet and rushed, and I realized he was in the room right off the hallway at the top of the stairs.
“I don’t want anyone here to know what’s going on in the basement. I’ve gone to great pains to have this night be a release for all of us and I will not have some fucking kid ruining it.”
“Yes, Marshalll.” Ben’s voice. They were obviously discussing me.
“Keep the little shit locked up in the cage until after the guests leave. Then I want to talk to him. You didn’t drug him, did you?”
Born To Bleed (The Roger Huntington Saga, Book 2) Page 15