Extreme Danger

by Shannon McKenna

  He hit the bottom floor. It seemed symbolically appropriate.

  The door ground open onto another corridor, but this one was less finished, with snakelike tubes running along the ceiling and a gray concrete floor. On the left, the corridor dead-ended after twenty yards. On the right, there was an L turn after fifty.

  They turned right.

  The sound of frantically slapping feet froze them in their tracks. Rasping, panicked breaths. A man careened around the L-turn, wild-eyed, knees pumping high, gun in hand. A maniacal goblin of a man with greasy blond locks straggling from his oily pate.

  He screamed shrilly at the sight of them, reeled back, and jackrabbited off the way he came.

  Nick and Tam gave chase. A door slammed. They peered around the corner. They were blocked by heavy duty doors, with a small window of wire reinforced glass. They sprinted for it. Locked and barred.

  Beyond the window there appeared to be nothing other than still more of that endless fucking corridor. Nick smashed the glass with the butt of his gun. There were kids wailing, far away down the corridor.

  Nick slammed the door with his fists. “We’ve got to get in there! He’ll kill them so that they can’t testify!”

  Tam yanked his elbow. “Get back around the corner.” She lifted the gem studded grenade necklace off her neck. “It will blow the door, but that’s all. The kids are far enough away to risk using this.”

  She pulled out the jeweled pin as they turned the corner, and bowled it on the fly with graceful skill. It slid to the end of the corridor and came to rest against the door.

  Tam sank down next to him. “Five…four…three…ears, Nikolai!” He stuck his fingers in his ears as she mouthed one.

  Just in time. The sound slammed every molecule of his body against every other molecule. They looked around the corner. There was a jagged, twisted hole where the door had been. Cinder-block rubble, a cloud of choking dust. They sprinted through it. The yellow-haired man lay on his face about thirty feet from the door, screaming hoarsely in Ukrainian.

  “My ears! My ears!” he howled.

  Blood ran out of both his ears and down his neck. He pawed at the air like a maddened animal and stared at his bloody hands, trying to grab them as they passed. “My ears!”

  “Where are the children?” Nick yelled in Ukrainian.

  The guy just reared up onto his knees, howling and gabbling and sobbing. Tam made a disgusted sound, plucked out one of her earrings, gave it a brisk twist. She stabbed it into his shoulder.

  He groaned, toppled slowly to the ground and lay still.

  They ran on, slowing to listen as a new sound became audible. A baby, wailing behind a door. More than one. The closer they came, the stronger it got.

  The door with the screaming behind it was locked and bolted. They threw the bolt, but the lock was a good one that would take an expert hours to pick. He couldn’t shoot it out with kids behind it.

  Movement, flashing in the corner of his eye. He and Tam turned, and took off after a big, bulky blond woman who was sneaking out a door and sprinting towards the hole they’d blasted.

  Panic made the woman fast, but she was heavy and stubby-legged, no match for the infuriated Nick and a thoroughbred racehorse like Tam, even when the chick was sporting four-inch silver heels.

  They caught up with her at the stairwell. Nick took her down with a flying tackle. She grunted as he landed on top of her. She was soaked with sweat. “Not so fast, lady. I want the key to that door,” he told her.

  “No understand,” she said. “No speak English.”

  A garnet-handled knife suddenly appeared in Tam’s fist. She grabbed the woman’s coarse blond hair and wrenched her head back, and screamed in Ukrainian. “The key, bitch!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about—”

  The tip dug in. Blood welled up, trickled down the woman’s neck. “I suggest you figure it out, before I cut off your ear,” Tam hissed.

  “No! No cut. I give you keys,” the woman gasped out in English. She struggled under Nick’s weight to get her hand into one of her pockets, dragged out a small bunch of keys. “Here. Keys. Take. Take.”

  Nick and Tam glanced at each other.

  “We’ll let you open the door, you donkey-faced hell-witch,” Tam said. “If you gave us the wrong key, we can renegotiate, no? Maybe I’ll go for an eye. God knows you can’t get any uglier.”

  They hauled the woman to her feet and frog-marched her back to the door with the screaming kids behind it.

  “I did nothing wrong,” the woman protested, sounding put upon. “I take care of children, I feed, I wipe bottoms, I no hurt!”

  “Shut up,” Nick snarled.

  They shoved her up to the door. As soon as the locks gave way and the door handle turned, Tam pulled out her hair clip, twisted a small nozzle, and squirted the woman’s face.

  She fell sideways against the wall, eyes rolled to the whites, and slid down. Good. Two down, ready for custody.

  Nick blew out a sharp breath, and pushed the door open.

  The first impression he got was that there was a single malformed organism, with multiple staring eyes, multiple clutching limbs. Then the mutant being resolved into a tight knot of dirty, terrified-looking kids.

  They were scared into silence except for the smallest one, who squalled lustily in the arms of a tall young man. The guy was naked but for boxer shorts, his face battered and bloody.

  The heavy fog of piss, vomit, unwashed bodies and rotten food made it hard to breathe. Nick let his gun hand drop to his side.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” he said quietly in Ukrainian.

  A scrawny little kid who looked about ten tried to speak, and coughed. He tried again. His voice was hoarse and scratchy. “Where are Marina and Yuri?” he replied, in the same language.

  “Outside,” Tam said from behind him. “The police will take them away and punish them. They can’t hurt you anymore.”

  They stared at each other, at a loss. The children were paralyzed with shock. Nick was struck dumb by the squalor of the room.

  The toddler wiggled in the guy’s arms. He put her gently down, and she toddled forward on dirty little legs, huge eyes locked onto Tam, who glittered under the fluorescent lights with supernatural brightness.

  “Pretty,” the toddler lisped in Ukrainian. “Mama.”

  Tam shrank back. “Oh, no. Not me,” she told the kid. “I’m not your mama, little one.”

  The kid lifted up her thin arms. “Mama? Mama?”

  Tam backed up. Nick had never seen Tam intimidated, or even at a disadvantage since he’d known her, but this two-year-old seemed to terrify her. “No,” she said, shaking her finger. “Not me. Not your mama.”

  The tiny girl’s face crumpled with woe. She started to wail.

  Tam began to swear viciously, in some thick, obscure language that Nick could not immediately place. “Hell,” she muttered. “Come here, then.” She picked the kid up.

  Nick went in and looked them all over. Half-starved and pale but they were all on their feet. Except for one older girl slumped against the wall dressed in her underwear, who looked very weak and ill. The rest of the lot were smaller than the ten-year-old.

  “Is Sveti all right?” asked the kid who’d spoken before.

  “We got to her just in time,” Nick told him. “She’ll be fine.”

  The kid put his hands over his eyes. His shoulders began to shake. From behind, he heard snippets of Tam’s conversation with the kid. “Stop that! Oh, God, don’t touch that, it’s filled with sulfuric acid!”

  “Pretty,” the little girl gurgled. “Pretty.”

  He looked at the stained mattresses, the wall lined with plastic bags stuffed with rotting trash that no one had bothered to haul out. “Holy shit,” he murmured softly. “Those filthy assholes.”

  The tall young guy stepped forward. “Hey! You speak English, mister?”

  Nick swung around, startled. “You’re an American?”
<
br />   “Hell, yeah! Me and my sister Carrie. The rest of these kids are Ukrainian, I think. They dumped us in this room today. And there was this other girl, too, Sveti. They took her away a couple hours ago. Look, man, have you seen my sister Becca around here?”

  Nick’s chest flash-froze. The world fell away, whirling and shifting, everything changing around that phrase. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I’m Josh Cattrell,” the guy said. “That fat guy, the mobster dude, I think he’s got my big sister Becca locked up someplace too. Maybe she’s here. You haven’t seen her around, have you?”

  Nick stared at the kid’s wide-set green eyes. Just like Becca’s. So were the reddened eyes of the girl hugging her knees on the floor. Josh and Carrie. Holy fucking shit. What had he done?

  He swallowed hard. “She’s not here.” His throat closed tight around the words, strangling them so they were barely audible.

  “How do you know, if you don’t—hey.” The kids’s eyes narrowed to wary slits. “Wait a sec. You know Becca. Don’t you?”

  “You could say that,” Nick said, his voice raw. “I thought I did.”

  Suspicion dawned on the kid’s battered face. “Wait a freakin’ minute. You must be the thug,” he said. “Becca’s boy toy. The one Becca was having the hot affair with. You’re that guy I talked to on the phone, right?”

  “Yeah. Did she meet you today? At a house on Gavin Street?”

  “Yeah, that’s where Nadia took me,” Josh said. “She said it was her place, but I guess it was this mobster guy’s house all along—hey, man, are you OK? You look like you’re going to be sick, or something.”

  Nick was so fucked. More than fucked. He was doomed.

  “So where the hell is my sister?” Josh demanded.

  He tried to suck in enough air to answer. “Somewhere she shouldn’t be,” he said. “I’ve got to haul ass to go fix it.” He turned to Tam, who was trying to throw her deadly pendants over her shoulder.

  The baby was grabbing for them, chortling with glee.

  “Becca was telling the truth,” he said. “I have to go get her. Zhoglo had her tagged. He could trace her to the place where I left her.”

  “Ay. That’s bad. Go, then.” Tam’s eyes went bleak. “We’ll finish here without you. Run like the devil is after you, Nikolai. Because he is.”

  He did, spurred on by bone-chilling fear, and wild, crazy hope.

  Chapter

  33

  There was screaming in the room behind the picture window. Something shattered against the wall. Zhoglo was in a bloody rage.

  Eventually he would take it out on her. That was going to be bad.

  But it hadn’t happened yet. One thing at a time. Becca still had a few moments to smell the pines, throw her head back, look up at the moon lighting the holes in the clouds, and weep for joy.

  Josh and Carrie were safe. She’d seen it with her own eyes on the monitor. Seen Nick, bursting in at the last moment and stopping those monsters from cutting that poor girl. And if Sveti was saved, then Josh and Carrie were, too. And all the rest of them, too. Free and clear. Saved.

  Zhoglo’s henchmen had forgotten the monitor, which kept on transmitting the live video feed. Sveti still lay on the table, with a woman in scrubs bending over her, checking her pulse. Seth stood next to her, half visible on the screen, grimly holding a gun on someone or many someones, all of whom were off camera. Someone was moaning and babbling in pain. Not Sveti. Seth didn’t appear at all concerned about it.

  Becca was crying, but she didn’t care. She flung her head back, sniffling, listening to the trees rustle above her head. Dragging in lungfuls of the sweet breeze. A big circle opened in the clouds, lined with light. Stars, clouds, moon, trees. Beautiful.

  Carrie and Josh would have to live it for her. Love it for her.

  She ached with sorrow for her own loss, but Josh and Carrie would go on. They would grow up, choose mates, make families. Ripen into strong, happy people. Live long, full lives. She hoped for it desperately. Wished it for them, with all her strength, all her love.

  And when it came to living fully, well. She may have skimped on life experience up to a week ago, but her affair with Nick had been so intense, it was like years of living crammed into a few short days.

  She’d loved him. Fully. Not wisely, but well. That was a blessing. More than a lot of women had to look back on at the end of their lives.

  She would cling to that as best she could, when the time came.

  Nick had never driven so fast in his life. He floored it through the interior of the warehouse complex, his flesh creeping at the thought of Becca, staked out in the dark. The virgin sacrifice. Innocent.

  He fished in the glove box for the flashlight. He should’ve left it with her in the first place. Hell, he shouldn’t have left her at all.

  Moonlight came and went as clouds scudded by. Inside, that place would be as dark as the pits of hell.

  And he was the one who had chained her there.

  Stop. Focus. No point in flogging himself for fucking up again. He had the rest of his life for that. Becca herself could do the honors. For now, he was focused on making it right. As right as it could ever be.

  This kind of wound was the kind that never healed. He knew about wounds like that. He’d watched them inflicted, seen them fester, for his entire childhood. Until love was just a distant, bitter memory.

  She would never want to see him again. He knew that. But it would be enough to know that the Becca he loved still existed on earth, exactly who he had believed her to be the first time around. Even if he wasn’t worthy of her himself, cold, suspicious, screwed-up, brain dead bastard that he was.

  But even all alone, the idea of her existence would comfort him.

  He heaved the doors open, with a rattling roar. The beam of his flashlight sliced through the cavernous dark, and caught a small, furry body that scurried for cover. Rats. Oh, Jesus. Another nail for his coffin.

  “Becca?” he called out. “Hey!”

  No answer. That chilled him. No way could she be asleep. Maybe she just didn’t feel like speaking to him. He could hardly blame her.

  “Becca!” He sprinted down the center aisle towards the fifth bank of scaffolding where he had chained her. “I know you’re pissed, but—”

  He rounded the corner and skidded to a stop, his heart squeezed tight to bursting in a claw of icy terror and dismay. Rats scattered.

  Not there. The bags were there, the water bottles, the scattered protein bars, but Becca, the handcuffs and the chain were gone.

  He wanted to vomit. Oh, fuck. He had no idea where to start, where to turn. What cliff to jump off of.

  He wanted to howl like a mad dog.

  There was no sound, but the air behind him shifted and moved, alerting him just in time to spin around—and take the length of metal pipe on the front of his skull, rather than the back.

  A burst of blinding, white-red light, and he slid right down a long, agonizingly painful slope, into an oily black nowhere.

  Becca had thought that what had happened in the warehouse would burn away the tender feelings she had for Nick. That she could fall no further. She was dead wrong.

  Kristoff and the man that Zhoglo called Mikhail had hauled Nick in, unconscious, trussed up and bleeding. Zhoglo began taking out his rage by kicking him—back, legs, belly, groin, face. Every awful thud of contact against Nick’s limp body was like a blow to her own flesh.

  There were depths left to come. That was Zhoglo’s specialty, after all. Untold depths of pain, of shame, of despair.

  Nick’s hands and feet were bound before him with a ratcheted plastic cuff. Another tie fastened hands and feet together, folding him in half.

  Zhoglo kicked over the table that held the snack foods that Pavel had brought out to them. Crystal goblets smashed, food scattered and flew, wine glugged from the bottle, dark and heavy as blood.

  Becca flinched as Zhoglo hauled off for another violent kick to Nick’s ribs,
which drew the man’s attention to her own unlucky self.

  He swung around and hung over her, panting. “Hundreds of millions of dollars!” Spittle from his wet red mouth hit Becca’s face, making her flinch again. “Do you have any idea how much money you and this bleeding piece of shit have cost me? Can you even conceive of the magnitude of waste?”

  “The important things were saved,” Becca said softly. “Money is nothing.” Her sane side cringed at her own brash idiocy. Where had that come from? A fatalistic desire to speed up her own death? God.

  “Nothing?” Zhoglo shrieked. “Nothing?” He slapped her hard across the face. “Arrogant bitch! Who are you to say that money is nothing? Have you ever survived without it?”

  Yes, she wanted to say, but she didn’t have the nerve to speak when she looked into that maddened face, livid with rage, those staring white eyes, pupils contracted to pinpoints.

  He whacked her again, backhand. Her eyes teared. “Have you ever had to steal it?” he bellowed. “Have you killed for it? Felt hot blood well over your hands for it? How hungry have you ever been, you goddamn American rich bitch?” Whack. “Have you fought rats to eat rotten meat from a garbage dump? Have you bent over in an alley and let yourself be buggered by swine for a crust of bread?” Whack. “Have you?”

  His voice rose to a grinding scream of fury. He grabbed thick handfuls of her hair, and flung her, chair and all, onto the deck. Right next to Nick’s booted feet. She could almost touch them.

  Food lay all around her. Smashed grapes, apple peels. Crumbled water crackers, little triangles of cheese. A slice of ham lay next to her face, spread out like a panting dog’s long, pink tongue. The fatty, meaty smell of it made her stomach heave in protest.

  And the fruit knife. It gleamed and flashed before her eyes, catching the light. The little paring knife that Zhoglo had used to peel his apples and his grapes. Right beyond reach of her fingertips.

  Zhoglo turned away from her, kicking at the metal stand that held the computer monitor, knocking it to the ground. She lunged for the tiny knife while he occupied himself with kicking the portable computer into ruins. His henchmen were watching him, beady eyed and cautious not to pull any more rage down on themselves than they had to. No one watched her as she strained her body, pulling against the tape until it cut against her skin, reaching—