Meet Abby Banks VOLUMES: 1-3

by J. A. Cipriano

  “No!” I cried, reaching out, desperately trying to grab something, anything. The only thing my fingers found was the steel walls, and somehow, I doubted that was going to do much.

  25

  “How’s it feel?” the masked man asked, torqueing my body so hard it felt like he was bending me in half.

  I screamed in response as he wrenched my spine in a way it wasn’t designed for, the pain in my overly stretched abdomen making me want to submit. I couldn’t do that though. I had to escape… but how?

  I reached back, smacking uselessly against him as he torqued even harder on my body. I don’t think I’d ever been in so much agony before. I needed a weapon, something to make him let go. Only… only I didn’t have anything. I reached out for one last desperate attempt to hit him somewhere vital when my suit thrust a pen in my hand. I jabbed it into the guy as hard as I could.

  He cried out, releasing his grip enough for me to slip free and crawl away. Everything inside me hurt as he reached down and tore the pen from his thigh. Blood dripped down his leg as he whirled, flinging the writing implement across the room.

  I rolled, trying to get out of the way as he tried to stomp a mud hole in my ass. Somehow, I managed to get to my feet as his leg buckled. It wasn’t enough to make him fall, but it was enough to let me catch my breath and drive the pain from his submission hold deep down inside myself. I put my fists up, dropping back into a Muay Thai fighting stance as he came forward.

  “Come on,” I said, making the ‘bring it’ gesture.

  He did. One hand snaking out incredibly fast and grabbing me by the damn throat. My breath cut off in an instant as he hauled me into the air until I was a couple feet off the ground and slammed my choking body onto the steel table. Everything inside me screamed in agony as I lay there, barely able to move.

  He picked up one of the steel folding chairs and raised it over his head. “Goodbye, Abby. Lights out.” He swung the metal chair at my head.

  I moved out of the way. I don’t know how. My body hit the ground with a thud, pain flashing through my shoulder like fire as his chair impacted the table and bounced back, clocking him in the face. He staggered backward as I scrambled to my feet, trying to ignore all the popping and aching my bones did.

  I put one foot on the table and leapt off of its surface, launching myself at him. My thighs slammed onto his shoulders, and I wrapped my legs around his neck, trying to cut off his air supply. My muscles felt like fire as he slowly staggered backward, hands gripping my thighs as he tried to pry my legs apart so he could catch a breath.

  He started to slump and I squeezed tighter as he put his hands around my back. I realized he was going to slam me down backward onto the table. As he tried to do it, I sort of let him, only I swung my body around, flipping backward and using our momentum to launch him across the room. He slammed awkwardly into the table with the center of his back and slumped to the ground on his hands and knees. I knelt there, panting so hard, I could barely believe it as he started to recover. How was that possible? Was his suit absorbing all my attacks? That hardly seemed fair.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I growled as the folding chair caught my eye. Without thinking, I grabbed it and smashed it into his face as he launched himself at me. He hit the ground like a sack of potatoes. Then, before he could recover, I sprinted toward the far hallway on the other side of the room.

  I didn’t even look back.

  Which was good because as I tore around the corner, I found myself face to face with a giant robot that sort of reminded me of Dale, the security drone back at the agency base. One giant piston came at my face, but I dropped into a baseball slide that carried me beneath the blow and between its massive treads.

  It was a little harrowing, but as I popped to my feet on the other side of the robot, I tossed a sticky grenade over my shoulder and kept going. The explosion echoed down the hallway as I reached the end of the corner and a wave of heat washed over me. I smirked, somewhat pleased with myself until I slammed into an invisible wall like I was a goddamned hummingbird.

  “Again, seriously?” I muttered, clutching my eye as my brain rattled around in my head. I harrumphed because I wasn’t sure what else to do and took a couple steps backward, then I ran at the wall as hard as I could.

  I smashed through it and glass rained around me as I hit the steel floor in a roll and came to my feet in time for the hallway to go completely dark. Red light filled the room making it seem like a crazy sort of obstacle course and sort of reminding me of those scenes in movies with all the laser beams you don’t want to trip.

  My HUD beeped, letting me know the lasers were in fact the temperature of the sun and I scowled. Then I cracked my neck and stretched. Why? Because I was going to do something stupid.

  I launched myself forward because if I thought about it for even a second, there was no way I was going to even try. Instead, I trusted the instincts downloaded into my brain and the training I’d received at the hands of Chuck. I twisted, turned, and pirouetted. I got so close to the lasers, I could feel the heat of them singing my hair even through my suit, but in the end, I stood on the other side of them.

  “See, James Bond has nothing on me!” I snapped, shaking my fist in triumph just before the floor beneath my feet opened up, and I fell into an abyss. I smacked into the water below with a splash. The heat was sucked from my body as cold filled me and my HUD went all kinds of blurry.

  My arms flailed wildly as I swam upward toward where I hoped the surface was, my lungs burning for air because evidently, my suit didn’t help with breathing underwater in the cold. Good to know.

  I broke the surface a moment later, but it was so dark I couldn’t see anything. I tried to adjust my HUD to switch the night vision but it was too wonky, so in the end I turned it off. The cool breeze on my face made me shiver as I treaded water in the dark. That’s when things started brushing by my legs. I screamed, I couldn’t help it, and searched frantically for a flashlight. Thankfully, one popped into my hand, and I switched it on.

  Part of me wished I hadn’t. The water was filled with leeches. They were busy attaching themselves to my suit and sucking at me, and while I couldn’t feel them directly, it made me realize one thing. My suit no longer covered my face. I ran one hand through my hair and nearly had a heart attack when I brushed away a handful of the squirming, wiggling creatures.

  “Mommy,” I whispered before realizing how stupid that was. Both my adoptive mother and my biological were dead. They wouldn’t help me. I steeled myself, and scanned the room with my flashlight, ignoring the wiggling slimy things all over my body. It was one of the most difficult things I’d ever done.

  Near as I could tell, I was in some kind of pool, but the edges seemed far away. The closest one was over ten meters from me. I shivered again, and as I began to swim toward it, something brushed by my leg again. The same thing from earlier. I’d dismissed it, thinking it was the leeches, but what if it wasn’t? I shined my light into the depths but saw nothing. Great.

  “Screw this,” I cried and began swimming toward the edge as fast as my frantic, wounded seal-like strides would carry me. Michael Phelps, I was not. I was almost to the edge when a purple tentacle wrapped around my flashlight and tugged it from my hand. The light went out, leaving me alone in the dark.

  “It’s only an octopus,” I told myself like that somehow made it better as my heart tried to hammer its way out of my chest. I bit my lip to keep more horrible thoughts away, like maybe it was some kind of giant squid about to eat me and moved to where I thought the edge was. It was hard because I could barely make anything out.

  The feel of warm breath on my neck gave me a start because it had been so frigid and because, well, something was breathing on me. I whirled around, thrashing like a crazy person and wound up punching an octopus in its face. At least I think it was an octopus because I couldn’t see it, but it sort of felt like this time I’d poked an octopus.

  Tentacles wrapped around my bo
dy and jerked me under the water. I swallowed a mouthful of water that tasted like slime and bugs, hurting my throat and making me gag, which was no bueno under water, let me tell you. Especially because slimy, wiggling things filled my mouth.

  I kicked, my limbs lashing out as I felt myself getting pulled further down. Nothing was working. No. No this wasn’t happening. I was not going to die being drowned in a pool by a ginormous octopus. Absolutely not.

  So what did I do? I pulled out my last grenade and flung it in the direction I was being dragged. The thing exploded, illuminating the water for a split second and blinding me to the point of hopelessness. Still, the tentacles loosened with that sort of slackness that told me the thing holding me might be dead. Not one to wait around to find out, I pulled myself free and made my way to the surface as the blood in my brain pounded and my body started to slow down.

  I exhaled under the water and was surprised at how few bubbles there were, though I couldn’t see so maybe I imagined it. Either way, I had to make it to the surface and fast.

  When my head cleared the water, my first breath was like Christmas morning. I sucked in another lungful, which burned all the way down and tried to make it toward where I thought the wall was, but I was so turned around, I could have been swimming back toward the center. Still, this was a pool. I’d reach an edge eventually.

  I tried to ignore the feeling of leeches on my throat and face as I forced one numb hand in front of the other. After what felt like forever, I bumped into an edge. No sooner had I hauled myself out of the water and flopped over the wall, did I fall several feet onto the ground below. I wasn’t sure what it was made of but it felt like concrete. Awesome? Not really.

  I lay there, my hands scrabbling over my face and trying to pry off the leeches as I sucked in breaths and tried to keep from vomiting with each fattened bloodsucker I pulled off. I wasn’t sure how long it took, but I was sure it had been way too long. Still, why hadn’t anyone come down here to find me? Surely someone must have, oh, I don’t know, heard all the commotion. Besides, I had been dropped into that tank, hadn’t I? Someone had done that…

  Not wanting to wait around to find out, I pushed myself onto my feet and began staggering forward blindly. After about three steps, I tripped and stumbled over something. My arms shot out as I found for balance, but it was no help. I crashed to the ground and lay there for a moment trying to remember how to breathe.

  Then I was blinded in the face by a spotlight.

  “Hope that didn’t hurt too much. The walls are kind of high,” Graham said. “There’s a warning sign around here somewhere…”

  “No problem, the concrete broke my fall,” I muttered trying to blink away the spots in my eyes.

  There was a snort of laughter, and as I turned toward it, he decked me across the face. The world sort of faded and my mouth filled with blood. I tried to figure out why it hurt so much when I remembered I wasn’t wearing my helmet because the cold water had shorted out the screen. Then the second blow sent me spiraling into unconsciousness.

  26

  I woke up tied to a chair. It wasn’t super fun, let me tell you, especially since, unlike last time, I hadn’t planned on getting captured. Sitting across from me was Graham, his angular face tight and drawn with deep bags beneath his eyes so he looked quite a bit older than I’d thought he was originally. Before, I’d thought maybe he was in his early twenties, but sitting this close to him made me think mid-thirties.

  He had his chair backwards so he was leaning across the top of it with his eyes barely visible over his muscular arms. When I stirred, one of his brown eyebrows arched up and his lips shifted from a bored smirk into an annoyed frown.

  The room was pretty empty aside from our two chairs. There were some lights embedded in the ceiling, but it looked like they were covered by some sort of protective glass. That was new. It made me wonder why.

  “It’s to keep people from trying to break them,” Graham said, evidently watching where I’d been looking. “You’d be surprised how many operatives seem to think the dark is their friend.” He tapped his temples with one slender finger. “They’d be wrong of course. I can see in the dark.”

  I swung my gaze to him and tried to speak but it came out more like, “Mmph mmph mmph,” which was probably due to the duct tape over my mouth. From the feel of it, they had had actually wrapped several strips around my entire head. Damn. It was going to be hell trying to get it out of my hair.

  “You’re probably wondering why I brought you here, Abigail de la Mancha, when the smart move is to put a bullet in your brain and dump your body in a hole somewhere.” He stood and began walking around me. I followed him as far as I could, but because I was tied to the chair and it seemed to be welded into the ground, there wasn’t much I could do when he moved behind me. That was oh so lame. “At first, I’d thought about doing just that, but what kind of revenge would that be? See, it was always about revenge for me because your mother destroyed Jerusalem. You didn’t think there weren’t going to be consequences, did you?” He leaned down close to me so his breath was hot on my neck. It made a shiver run down my spine and not in a good way. “My mother lived there. She was a baker. Made the best damn cookies… You’d have liked her, you know, if your dog of a mother hadn’t nuked the entire city.”

  “Mmph,” I replied, and he rubbed the top of my head like I was a little kid and laughed. It made me hate him and not just because his strange cavalier attitude rubbed me the wrong way. There was just something about his delivery that made me think he was either heartless or the story was made up. Even though, so many people had died there, it still made my insides hurt when I thought about it… but then again, I hadn’t done it. Gabriella had. So blaming me was sort of pointless. Then again, vengeance could be stupid that way. I knew from experience.

  “Even still, I wasn’t inclined to do anything about it. I have reasons why, but suffice to say, I knew Stephen was helping you, and I didn’t want him killed. As long as he was with you, I couldn’t make a move because he might die. I couldn’t have that.” He circled back around so I could see him, and his eyes narrowed into thin slits as he leaned in close to my face. “See my dilemma?”

  When I didn’t respond, he slapped me across the face. While it stung, it also pissed me off. Was he really saying the only reason he hadn’t tried to avenge me for Gabriella blowing up Jerusalem was because Stephen had been with me? That sounded a little nutzo.

  “See, and now you’re making me hit you, Abby.” He shook his head like it was my fault he was battier than a belfry. “I don’t like when people make me hurt them. It makes me feel bad because I’m a naturally nice guy. You can see how this affects my self-image, can’t you?” He shrugged at me.

  I waited, wondering if he’d hit me again. He did. His fist connected with my stomach, and my breath exploded against the duct tape over my mouth. It was a weird feeling. I didn’t want it to happen again.

  “But now, here we are, and I have everything I wanted. I have Stephen, the director, and you.” He punctuated the last word with another slap that left my ears ringing. “I’ve even taken the liberty of removing your suit. Fascinating stuff.”

  “Mmph,” I growled, and he nodded like he knew I had told him to piss off.

  “So anyway, here’s the thing. I don’t want to just kill you.” He shrugged again. “It doesn’t seem fitting, exactly, but you’re so damn dangerous. Do you know how many highly trained people you’ve killed? You even beat Winston in a fight, and I don’t think he’s lost a fight before.” He smirked. “Did you know the analysts want me to have the two of you fight again, just to see how the rematch would go?”

  I glared at him, partially because the idea of fighting the invisible guy with the strength enhancing suit chilled me. I’d gotten pretty lucky the last time. I couldn’t imagine what the fight would be like if the man caught me in another submission hold. My back still ached from the last one.

  But something about Graham’s meanderings to
ld me all I had to do was wait, and if I did, an opportunity would present itself. Hopefully, it didn’t involve the guy I’d fought earlier, but if it did, well, I’d take that chance. I was sure I’d get my chance soon because Graham seemed like he was gearing himself up for something big. He wouldn’t do that just to put a bullet in my head. Hell, if that was the case, I’d be dead already. I wasn’t dead, so he was definitely up to something. The only question was what?

  “So I’m left with a sticky situation,” he replied, leaning over his chair so we were eye to eye. “I want to kill you but not make it quick. However, not making it quick invites the possibility you will escape.” He stood back and held his hands out in front of himself. “You see my dilemma.”

  “Mmph,” I replied, which in Abby language meant, “You better hope I don’t get free because I will tear out your spleen, and while I don’t know which organ that is exactly, I’ll tear out most of them to make sure I get it.”

  Instead of replying, he pulled his metal folding chair off the ground and smacked me in the face with it. The metal rebounded off my teeth in a spray of blood that left me barely conscious. My head fell forward until my chin rested on my chest as stars whirled around my head.

  He grabbed me by my hair and hauled my head up so I was looking into his eyes. Unfortunately, I saw two of him. It was disconcerting because that meant two maniacal grins.

  “Did that hurt?” he asked before leaning in to lick my cheek. His tongue left a trail of saliva behind. “Yum. You taste like copper pennies. Did you know that when I was little, I used to chew on them?” He shrugged. Then he licked my other cheek and released my hair. I kept my head from falling forward, but only barely. Everything inside my brain felt sort of squishy and unfocused.

  “Is that creepy? I sort of meant it to be—” I cut him off by smashing my forehead into the bridge of his nose. He cried out, flopping backward as crimson dripped down his face, running between the fingers he clasped across his face.