by Sam Sisavath
Reese didn’t reply, maybe because she was too busy trembling. Her entire body was like one vibrating object pressed against Gaby’s side.
“I promise,” Gaby said. “Everything will be okay.”
The horsemen galloped onto the beach and surrounded them. There were actually five in all, and there were even more men on foot walking through the fields, some lingering behind to stare at the burning wreckage of the chopper.
When the mounted men saw that she had tossed her weapons, they seemed to relax, and some even holstered their guns. One of them had bright red hair—it was clearly a dye job—and he leaned forward in his saddle as he walked his mount toward her, stopping just a few feet away, close enough that she could smell every warm breath his big black horse took.
The man smiled, and she didn’t like the way he was nonchalantly holding the 1911 pistol in his right hand, like it was a harmless twig instead of something that could easily accidentally discharge and put a bullet through her or Reese.
Gaby stared back at the redhead, and even before he said a word, she already knew who he was. The hair color gave it away.
“Jodie, I presume,” the man said.
“Redman,” Gaby said.
“Nice to finally meet you.”
“Can’t say the same, unfortunately.”
Redman chuckled before sitting up straight in his saddle and holstering his weapon. “Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of time to change that. Pretty soon, we’ll be the best of friends.”
Not unless I kill you first, Gaby thought, but kept her mouth shut.
Seven
The Sikorsky MH-60T Jayhawk usually flew with a crew of four, including the machine gunner in the back, but not counting however many men were catching a ride on it at the time it was blown out of the sky. That was four dead men for certain, with the possibility of more depending on what the helicopter had been doing when it was rerouted to come searching for her missing team.
Four, at least. Probably more.
The numbers hung over her head like an ever-widening gray cloud, and Gaby wasn’t sure what was worse, all those deaths and she had been captured anyway, or the fact that she was still alive and they weren’t.
Geoff, Kylie, Martin, Berryman, Lightning Two…
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. There had been no evidence that Kohl’s Port was in any danger of attack. The townspeople had been just as surprised by it as she had been.
What would Will say if he knew just how badly she had screwed up?
He wouldn’t chastise her. Not Will. He would know there was no point, that it would result in nothing that would help the situation.
“Buckle up, Buttercup,” he might say. “This is no time to wallow in your failures. Put on your big girl pants and focus. Stay alive and look for your windows of opportunity. And there will be opportunities; you just have to see it. So pay attention.”
She did that now.
She looked, and listened, and most of all, she trusted her instincts.
You’re still alive. So make it count.
She was in the back of a moving vehicle, the wind whipping mercilessly at the exposed parts of her face. Her eyes were covered by a thick black cloth, and zip ties kept her hands restrained behind her back. Her legs were similarly bound at the ankles, and she was sitting on hard metal ridges that didn’t do her ass any favors.
She recognized the sound, smell, and feel of an Army Jeep.
There was someone sitting across from her. Reese. The girl’s legs occasionally brushed up against her own, usually when the vehicle made a slight turn or hit a bump in the road. They were moving on smooth pavement now, which was a welcome relief after the almost ten minutes of potholes and uneven dirt path they’d been on after she and Reese were tossed into the back. There was more gasoline in the air behind them, so they weren’t the only car. It was a caravan of at least two, possibly more.
Voices from her left, where the front seats would be. The driver hadn’t showered in a few days and reeked from every pore. The man in the front passenger seat was cleaner, and whenever he spoke, she recognized Redman’s voice. There were two other men in the back of the Jeep with her and Reese. One of them sat to her right, on the wheel hump. The other was across from them, probably next to the teenager. Neither men had said a single word since they began the drive.
“Where are we going?” Gaby asked after a while. She had to shout to be heard over the wind.
She waited for a reply, but there was none.
“Where are we going?” she shouted again, louder this time.
“I heard you the first time,” Redman shouted back. “Don’t you worry about where you’re going. You’ll see when we get there.”
“Where’s the girl?”
“She’s right in front of you.”
Gaby already knew the answer to that one, but she wanted to keep Redman talking, to get the flow of back-and-forth between them going.
“Is Redman really your name?” she asked.
“Is Jodie yours?”
“Maggie,” she said. “My real name’s Maggie.”
He laughed. “Bullshit. You know how I know you’re lying?”
“I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
“Because your mouth is moving,” he said, and laughed.
Someone, maybe the driver, chuckled, but the other two didn’t join in. Maybe because it wasn’t funny or overly original, and the driver was the only one who felt the need to humor his superior.
She remembered what Bollman, the man she’d shot in the woods, had said about Redman:
“Redman’s one of Buck’s lieutenants, that’s all. He just thinks he’s more. He can be a little delusional, but it’s not hard when you spend that much time sniffing Buck’s jockstraps.”
“Why did you attack Kohl’s Port?” Gaby asked.
“Didn’t we already have this conversation?” Redman said.
“You didn’t really give me an answer then, either.”
“That’s a matter of opinion.”
“What’s the M on your vest stand for?”
“You don’t know?” Redman asked.
Why would I know? Gaby thought.
Then, But it looks familiar. I just can’t put my finger on it.
She said instead, “No. I don’t have a clue.”
Redman didn’t say anything, and she got the feeling he was staring at her, maybe trying to read her face for the truth.
They were moving in open country now, with the sun beating down on her. There was even more wind and she had to turn her head slightly to spare her skin.
“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t,” Redman was saying. “But we’ll know for sure soon enough.”
Gaby didn’t like the sound of that. She had no doubts whatsoever that they were going to interrogate her when they finally reached their destination.
Interrogate? You mean torture, don’t you?
But there was no way out of it. She was alone out here. Well, that wasn’t entirely true; she had Reese, but she might as well be alone. Even if Black Tide were to send a rescue attempt, they would have to track her movements from the beach and the carcass of Lightning Two. And they would do exactly that as long as they thought she was still alive.
Gaby wasn’t sure if that was a good thing, though. After all, these people had shot down Lightning Two with a shoulder-mounted missile launcher. What other kinds of weapons did they have? She already knew about the machine-gun-mounted technicals. With so many Army forts and unguarded depots around the country for the taking, God only knew what people were running around with these days.
It was taking them a while to reach their destination, which wasn’t too much of a surprise. The fact that Kohl’s Port hadn’t seen the attack coming probably meant they weren’t aware of the dangers Redman and his group posed, likely because of the distance between the two groups. This was very much a shock and awe surprise attack, and Kohl’s Port had no idea it was coming until it was too late.
Gaby felt sorry for the seaside town. For people like Reese, for her dad. But she had seen a lot of good people die or get hurt since The Purge. It was a fact of life, even more so now that there wasn’t any kind of law to answer to. Lara was trying to change that, but there was still so, so much left to do…
Right now, though, she was just hoping to survive the next twenty-four hours.
“Let the girl go,” Gaby shouted. “Let her go, and I’ll tell you everything you wanna know.”
“Why would I do that?” Redman shouted back. “You’re going to tell me everything anyway.”
“You won’t get shit out of me. I promise you that.”
Redman laughed. “We’ll see about that. Everyone thinks they’re tough until they meet Sloan. That guy can make anyone sing. So you keep your secrets for now…Maggie. There’s no rush.”
Gaby gritted her teeth. “I’m going to kill you, Redman.”
“Is that right?” Redman said. There was amusement in his voice—or, at least, something he wanted her to think was amusement.
“That’s right. I think it’s only fair you know that right off the bat. So when it happens, don’t say I didn’t warn you ahead of time.”
“I appreciate the warning.” There was a brief pause before he added, “Bill, shut her up for me, will you?”
Aw, hell, Gaby thought, when something heavy and hard struck her on the right side of her face and she slumped sideways.
It was less the pain and more the abrupt contact with the dirty and cold metal floor of the Jeep that overwhelmed her senses, but it didn’t take long for the pain to rear its head like a million stars exploding, just before she blacked out.
She regained consciousness to sledgehammers raining blow after blow on her temple, and voices talking in the background.
“This is her?” a voice asked. Male, but not Redman.
“Yeah,” another voice said. This one was Redman.
“She’s a tiny little thing.”
Redman chuckled. “Five-seven or so. Not that tiny.”
“I mean, to have done what she did,” the other man said. He sounded older than Redman. “You sure it was her?”
“There was no one else. Trust me, it’s her.”
“The last time you told me to trust you was before you took forty men to take Kohl’s Port, only to come back with half that number.”
“It wasn’t my fault. They had a helicopter. It chewed us up.”
“Who had a helicopter? Where did it come from?”
“I would tell you if I knew,” Redman said. “But I bet she knows. It was going to pick her up when Tavers shot it out of the sky.”
“What did it look like? The chopper?”
“Green. Big.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s all I saw. Didn’t really get a good look. Like I said, they had a machine gunner, and I was too busy trying not to get shot the first time.”
Gradually, the headache began to subside, though the pain didn’t go anywhere. Gaby clenched her teeth through it, doing her best to focus on the situation outside her body instead of inside because her life probably depended on it.
Probably? There’s no probably about it.
She was sitting in a chair. A hard, metal chair in some kind of room. She knew she was inside a building because there was no wind and the air was thick and musty and...there was a strange odor to everything. There were also no metallic echoes to their voices, so that meant she was surrounded by thick wooden walls.
And that smell? What was that smell?
Hay. And horse droppings.
I’m in a horse stable.
Now that she knew where she was, she could easily identify the other strange sounds: the shuffling was horse hooves scraping against a dirt floor, and the crunch-crunch were those same animals chewing dry hay.
Warm fingers touched the side of her head, and Gaby reflexively jerked away—or as much as she could with her arms and legs bound to the chair’s backrest and two front legs with duct tape, the constraints wound so tight that she could barely move her body at all.
“Relax,” Redman said before the blindfold was ripped from her head.
She could see again: Redman, stuffing the black cloth into his pocket before straightening up next to a taller and older man with a shock of short white hair. Piercing hazel gray eyes stared back at her, and Gaby swore he was trying to see into her soul.
She was in a stall, heavy wooden walls surrounding three sides of her, with an open door to her right. But the only thing she could see when she glanced in that direction were more stalls. Gaby didn’t think it was possible, but the smell seemed to double in intensity now that she could see, and it was all she could do to shift from breathing through her nose and over to her mouth. It helped…a little.
“Where the hell am I?” she asked. “And which one of you assholes am I going to have to kill to get out of here?”
The man with the white hair chuckled, while Redman said, “I told you. She’s a fighter.”
“I can see that,” the other man said. He leaned forward slightly. “You’re in a horse stable, but you probably already know that. Sorry about the accommodations, but we’re running out of space. This will have to do for now.”
Gaby stared back at him, if just to let him know that he didn’t intimidate her. “Well, as long as you’re sorry…”
“My name is Buck.”
“Maggie.”
“Not Jodie?” Buck said with just a slight smirk.
“It’s Maggie.”
“She’s lying about that,” Redman said.
“I’m sure she is,” Buck said, pulling back.
“Where’s Reese?” Gaby asked.
“Who?” Buck said.
“The kid that came in with her,” Redman said. “She’s with her people, the ones from Kohl’s Port.”
“She didn’t come with her?” Buck asked.
“Definitely not with her.”
“What else did she tell you?”
“Not much. Not that I would have believed anything she’d say, anyway. I did promise to introduce her to Sloan, though. He’ll get the truth out of her. I’m dying to know what that patch of hers is.”
Buck’s eyes shifted to the inguz on her left shoulder, but if he knew what it meant, he remained quiet.
“Where is he, by the way?” Redman was asking. “I didn’t see him around.”
“He’s busy right now,” Buck said.
“Doing what?”
“He’s busy.”
Redman looked annoyed—for just a split second.
He knows who’s in charge, all right, Gaby thought. That would be Buck.
The man was in his forties—maybe late forties—and stood with his hands on his hips, watching her like a hawk. He wore the same type of black assault vest as Redman, with the circled M drawn onto one of the pouches (What the hell does that M stand for?). He wasn’t quite intimidating, but she realized now that was only because he wasn’t trying to be. Guys like Buck didn’t walk around puffing up their chest because they didn’t have to. Gaby had been around enough alpha males to know one when she was in their company. Buck, despite that stupid name, was one.
“A helicopter, a team of trained shooters,” Buck was saying, more to himself even if he was looking straight at her. “We don’t need Sloan to know the answer to where she’s from.” He leaned forward again, tilting his head slightly. “You’re from there, aren’t you?”
“Depends on what ‘there’ is,” Gaby said.
“Out there, in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Does he know? Gaby thought, but she said, “What, Atlantis?”
Buck smiled before turning to Redman. “Go get something to eat. I’m going to need you to go back out there again.”
“Where to?” Redman asked.
“Farther south this time. Jonah’s.”
“I thought we’d already dealt with those bozos?”
“So did I, but there’ve been complications. The
second team’s also gone dark.”
“That’s not good.”
“No, it’s not. Go find out what happened to them. Verone and Miller are already arranging the party. I want you to lead them.” He glanced at his watch. “If you haul ass, you should be able to get everything done and return before nightfall.”
Redman nodded. “Thanks, boss. I’ll get it done.”
“I know you will,” Buck said. He patted Redman on the shoulder, and the younger man beamed.
Someone’s a teacher’s pet.
Redman hurried off, looking so excited that she wasn’t sure if he even remembered she existed. The stall they had put her in must have been near the back, because Gaby had no chance of seeing what was out there when Redman opened a door somewhere on the other side of the building a few seconds later to leave. Even so, for the brief second or two the door was opened, she caught plenty of other voices, loud machinery, and engines revving.
How had I missed all of that before?
She blamed it on the thrumming pain in her head, limiting her recognition of her surroundings. But now that she knew there was another world out there, she continued to hear faded echoes of it even after the door closed back up.
Buck had walked over to the corner on her left and sat down on a small stool. He took a bright red apple out of his pocket and drew a tactical knife from a sheath behind his back. He began making one continuous unbroken peel by turning the apple while the blade barely moved. The man didn’t say a word as he worked. He had, she noticed, heavily lined hands. Worker’s hands, as her dad would say.
Gaby waited.
Seconds ticked by.
Then a full minute…
Finally, unable to stand the silence, she said, “Who do you think I am?”
“I don’t think, I know who you are, and where you come from,” Buck said. He only let the peel drop to the dirt floor when he’d completely skinned the fruit. He sliced off a piece and slid it into his mouth, then chewed on it for a few seconds before swallowing. “I don’t have to know your name to know everything else about you.”
“I doubt you know quite as much about me as you think you do,” Gaby said.