If I’d only thought to bring along Bruce’s multitool, I might have been able to make it to the fence and use it to cause a short in the circuit of electric fencing. But there was no way to go back now without being seen.
Maybe I could try creeping across to the base of one of the guard towers, climbing up to the hut, overpowering the guard somehow and leaping to the ground beyond the fence off the back of the hut, bypassing the electrified lines that way?
But even as I weighed that possibility, the moving spotlight stole inexorably towards the fence where Quinn still clung like a paralyzed monkey. One moment more and it would find him, illuminate his outline and contrast, highlight the shine of his weapon.
Another choice that wasn’t really a choice.
I stood up, thrust my hands up into the air and began shouting. The spotlight swung back to pin me in a circle of cold light.
“Help!” I screamed, as loudly and as shrilly as I could, drawing all attention to me. “Help me!” I waved my arms over my head.
A trio of armed guards stormed up to me.
“On the ground! On the ground!” they yelled. “Hands behind your head!”
I stretched out on my front in the dirt, laced my hands behind my head and turned my face so that I could fix my sniper’s eye on the darkness beyond the fence. In the distance, I saw the faintest flash of motion. My pirate needed just a little more time.
Thrashing about on the ground, I struggled as if about to rise, and screamed hysterically.
A punch of pain to the side of my head. A pop of light behind my eyes. I fought the blossoming darkness, squinted at the fence. Nothing. No one. Quinn was free.
My words came out as a mumble past the smile that twisted my mouth.
“What’s that you say?” a guard shouted down at me.
I lay in the dirt. Stones pressed into the softness of my cheek, and fear contracted my gut. My right hand was trapped beneath my chest, and I pushed down onto it, so that my fingers could trace the circle of Quinn’s silver earring beneath the soft fabric of the awful dress.
Circles never end.
“Failure — s’not an option,” I repeated. “I will not quit.”
— End of Book I —
Dear Reader,
First of all, thanks for taking a chance on this book — I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoying writing it.
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- Joanne Macgregor
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank all my wonderful beta-readers for their invaluable help and feedback, and express my special gratitude to James Bristow of Magnum Shooting Academy for his patient advice on weapons and shooting — any mistakes are on me!
REFUSE
(Recoil Trilogy Book 2)
OTHER YOUNG ADULT BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR
Scarred (2015)
Recoil (2016)
Rebel (2016)
Fault Lines (2016)
Rock Steady (2013)
Turtle Walk (2011)
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First published in 2016 by KDP.
Copyright 2016 Joanne Macgregor
The right of Joanne Macgregor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
ISBN 978-0-620-70291-1
ISBN:978-0-620-70292-8 (e-book)
All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form of by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission from the author.
www.joannemacgregor.com
For Jan and Lorna,
I wish you could have been here to read this.
“We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose.”
- Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right.”
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Part One
Chapter 1
Eyes open
When I open my eyes, I am blindfolded, traveling in a vehicle, with my hands tightly bound together and lying in my lap.
I know that my hands are tied because when I try to rub at the tickle of something trickling down the side of my face, both hands move together. They must be secured to something else as well, because I can only lift them as far as my chest before some restraint kicks in. I yank hard, but it holds firm.
I know that I am in a vehicle of some kind because I hear the engine and feel my body lurch against the seatbelt when it accelerates and brakes.
I know I am blindfolded because I can feel my eyelashes brush against something as I blink, and even though my eyes are open, everything is still dark and unfathomable.
Kind of like my life.
I have never seen clearly, never fully grasped what is actually happening, even when it is happening in full view and all around me. I have been like a mushroom — kept well and truly in the dark and fed a load of crap. About my father, about ASTA, about Quinn.
The tickling sensation continues. It must be blood still oozing from the place where the guard hit my head. The fog clouding my brain begins to dissolve, only to be replaced by a throbbing headache.
“Hullo?” My voice is hoarse in my dry throat.
No answer.
I am not alone in this car or van. I can sense the presence, just about hear the breathing, of someone sitting to my left. I am totally alone, though, in my predicament. I helped Quinn escape, but it came at the price of my own capture, and I suspect that things are about to get rough.
At the thought of what I know must lie ahead, my heart kicks into a faster rhythm, and a flush of adrenalin tingles through my fingers. I am not brave, just an ace with a virtual reality gaming console, and a highly skilled expert with a sniper’s rifle. But I have no rifle now. No rifle, no tranquilizer dart gun, not even a freaking pea-shooter. I will need to use my brain to get through the next few hours. Or days. Weeks? I swallow hard. I am thirstier than I can ever remember being.
“Can I have some water?”
More silence.
“Please?” It can’t hurt to try the magic word.
“Shut up,” says a voice to my left. It is deep, male and completely unfamiliar to me. “We’ll let you know when we want you to talk.”
A bubble of fear releases itself from somewhere deep in the pit of my stomach and begins to rise up through my chest. I fight against it. I need to stay calm and clearheaded, concentrating on the present moment rather than on some possibly painful near future. And the skill of staying focused is one I have in spades. Accurate marksmanship was not the only skill that we sniping cadets were trained in by our instructors at the Advanced Skills Training Academy of the Southern Sector. I force myself to slow my breathing, pursing my lips as I exhale to allow the air to trickle out gradually. Within a minute, my heart rate steadies.
I shift my attention to my senses, determined to regist
er any details I can about this journey and our destination. The cadets in our unit at ASTA were also trained to be exceptional observers, drilled to notice and memorize details. It’s time to kick that aspect of my instruction into gear.
The vehicle slows, turns, moves forward more slowly — down a driveway? — turns again, and then stops. The engine is turned off. Silence. The click of a seatbelt clasp and then I am jerked forward.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“Duck,” says the voice.
A hand presses against the top of my head — I guess to prevent me banging it as I stumble out. So they do not want me hurt. Not yet. All pain will be inflicted deliberately and intentionally at the right time and for the purpose of extracting maximum information from me.
I yank my thoughts back to the present, force myself to concentrate on the details of our walk. Gravel crunches underfoot, then my feet are on a more level surface — paving? I scan my senses. I can smell the sharp scent of male aftershave or deodorant coming off my captor, but nothing beyond that. The air is cool on my face, and I don’t hear birds calling, so it’s probably still night then.
“Four steps up,” says the man.
I make out the sound of a big car or truck somewhere not too distant. I reckon we must still be in the city, off the street, perhaps at the back entrance to some building where no one will see or wonder at the appearance of a sixteen-year-old girl with long blond hair tied up in a ponytail; wearing a pink dress, a blindfold and restraints; and being hauled, stumbling, up a set of stairs.
“Where are you taking me? Who are you?”
Aftershave says nothing, just shoves me through what must be a doorway, banging my arms painfully against its narrow frame.
“We need to take her straight up. They’re already waiting.” A new voice, female.
I distinguish two sets of footsteps, apart from my own, clicking against the floor — marble or tiles, judging from the hard, smooth surface — and echoing through the open space. Are we in a foyer?
It occurs to me that we haven’t passed through a decontamination unit. Then I register, belatedly, that I am not wearing a respirator and, judging from the fact that his voice does not sound at all muffled, neither is my escort. According to President Hawke’s government, the Rat Fever virus supposedly lies in wait, patient as death, on surfaces and in the air, ready to infect and reduce its human victims to gibbering, hemorrhagic bags of pus and blood. But we are not wearing even the most basic of protective masks.
We cross the open space and wait for a few moments, and then a chime sounds the arrival of an elevator. Three paces inside. The doors swish closed behind us, and I am spun around. Going up, three soft pings for three floors.
Already I am noting our route and committing it to memory, forming a picture in my mind’s eye of our course through the building. The doors open, and I am tugged forward. Left on exit, twenty-one paces, right turn, a long walk of fifty paces, another right, seventeen paces, left, thirty paces, and then we halt. I use the pause to memorize the route — L21, R50, R17, L30.
I hear a door open to my left, and I am pushed inside and onto a chair. Something fastens around my waist, securing me in place. With a brief tug of hair at the back of my head, the blindfold is pulled off my eyes.
“Where am I?” I demand, squinching my eyes against the sudden brightness. My only answer is the sound of a slamming door and a clicking lock.
It is several moments before my eyes adjust to the light and I can look around. It takes only one swift glance for me to know where I am. I have seen a room like this before. Was it just last night that I sat beside Quinn on my bed in my quarters at ASTA — my heart full of hope about the two of us, my head full of doubts about everything he had just told me — and stared with growing horror at the illicitly obtained video footage on the screen of his phone? I watched as a man I had immobilized with a tranquilizer dart was questioned and tortured in a room just like this. Perhaps in this very room.
Now I am the one sitting under a bright light, on a steel chair bolted to the floor, in the center of an interrogation room.
Now I am the one about to be interrogated.
Chapter 2
Firewall
The floor of the interrogation room is made of polished concrete which slopes down towards a small drain in the center of the room. All the better for cleaning up afterwards.
Two walls are blank of anything but a no-smoking sign, and the door is in the wall to my left. Across the width of the fourth wall — the wall I face — is a large mirror. It must be one-way glass, and I wonder who, even now, might be standing behind it, observing me.
Sarge — our tough and demanding drill sergeant and sniper unit instructor, the squad leader who tried to turn me into a cold-hearted angel of death? Roberta Roth — the head of ASTA, the outwardly compassionate woman who showed me footage of my father being infected with the rat fever virus in an attack by bio-terrorists, and dying a gruesome death? Or perhaps Leya, my fellow cadet in the sniper unit and my friend? Correction: the mole in our unit, and the girl I had thought was my friend.
Together she and I had suffered through Sarge’s brutal boot camp drills, learned to shoot and reconnoiter and camouflage ourselves into near-invisibility. She comforted brokenhearted and miserable me when Quinn dumped me after discovering that I was a sniper, and urged me on when I struggled to shoot the mutant rats that had been genetically engineered to spread the plague, and which had grown resistant to poisons. Leya encouraged me when I recoiled at darting M&Ms — the so-called plague-infected Mike and Marys who were ill with rat fever and posed a risk of infecting others — so that they could be brought in to hospitals. She reassured me when I had doubts about shooting suspected terrorists with tranquilizer darts, so that they could be brought in for debriefing. Debriefing — ha! She’d done a great job of keeping me on course, and no wonder, because Leya, I discovered this afternoon, is a spy for Roberta Roth. And God knows who else.
There is nothing else to look at but my reflection in the mirrored glass. I am still wearing the awful pink dress that makes me look like an innocent young girl, and allows me to get close enough to suspects to dart them. No one expects blond, pigtailed little girls to be steady-handed snipers or black-ops agents. It is the perfect disguise and the reason, no doubt, why ASTA chose to train teens rather than adults.
I look like I’ve gone a few rounds in a fight cage. The shin on my right leg is swollen and blue, the knee scraped and puffy. The right side of my face is swollen and smeared with blood, and my eye is starting to blacken. The cut on my cheek has stopped bleeding, but the shiny wetness of the blood in the hair on the side of my head suggests the wound there still oozes. My forehead and upper lip glint with a sheen of cold sweat.
I am still wearing the pink polka-dotted latex gloves and my steel ID band around my left wrist, but my watch has been removed, probably to make me feel even more disoriented. Mechanical restraints gape open on the arms of the sturdy steel chair, but my hands are still bound together with white plastic zip ties in the front of me. My captors made a mistake there. I am bound to the chair with the metal restraining band around my middle, so they probably think there is no need to take the extra precaution of tying my hands behind my back, since there is no way I can escape. No doubt they are right about that. But having my hands in front of me allows me to raise them and press them against the silver earring looped around my left bra strap.
Quinn gave me that earring, back when he still loved me. Or said he did. It’s the twin of the hoop he wears threaded through his left eyebrow. I took it out of my ear when he ditched me, but ever since I’ve worn it over my heart. I press it now with my thumbs. To the eyes behind the mirror, it must look like I’m praying, but really I’m reminding myself of why I’m here, why I did this.
The zip ties pinch tight over the steel ID band, and it hurts where it’s cutting into the flesh of my wrist. It’s ridiculous, given what I’m facing, to be bothered by a discomfort as sm
all as this. Soon things will get much worse.
Soon they will begin.
I remember the order of the process from the footage Quinn showed me. First, the unnerving wait. Then the polite, almost gentle, questioning. Next the repetitions, the accusations, demands and commands. The shouting and shaking awake, the denial of food and water and rest. Then the blows, the shocks, the near-drowning.
I must have my story straight before they start. I figure I should either confess immediately, or not at all. There is no point in suffering if I just end up giving them the details anyway. I need to prepare my version of events and tell them the whole of it up front, sticking as closely to the truth as possible.
I close my eyes and visualize stuffing what I’m determined not to tell them into a steel locker, padlocking it shut, and burying it deep inside me. Then I cover it with layers of the story I will tell them.
I prepare my account in my mind, peppering it with facts and keeping it simple. Silently, I tell myself the story over and over again, visualizing it, making it so real in my mind’s eye that it’s like a clear memory. I add images and sounds, amplify certain aspects, minimize others, and skip over a few entirely. My twin brother Robin would be proud of my storytelling abilities. If only he could write one of his elegant pieces of code and program me to say no more than I intend. If only he could implant a torture-resistant firewall around my brain.
I think about what questions they’re likely to ask me and formulate my responses. By the time they come into the room, I am as ready as I’ll ever be.
The Recoil Trilogy 3 Book Boxed Set: Including Recoil, Refuse and Rebel Page 22