by R. J. Blain
The industrial lamps overhead, while offering sufficient light for the rest of the cargo bay, didn’t penetrate far into the window-fronted steel box. I’m pretty certain it had once been a shipping container modified to Brandon’s liking. I’d have to talk to Zachary about the office later. I held back a lot of money specifically for equipping my men and women with the best they could get. Brandon deserved better than a makeshift office.
Easing my way through the door, I slid my hand along the wall in search of the light switch. With my luck and Brandon’s enjoyment of pranks, he was probably lying in wait, ready and more than willing to scare a few years off my lifespan.
“Brandon, if you even think about jumping out at me, you’re a dead man,” I warned before flipping the switch.
The office was empty, and knowing my threats were futile, I stooped over to check under the stainless steel desk bolted to the floor. When I saw no sign of Brandon, I frowned and stepped forward, plunking the clipboard down on the desk.
I looked over his work; there was no sign of a note, which worried me almost as much as the spread of clutter. Instead of his usual neat stacks, sheets were scattered everywhere. Two pages had even made their way to the floor. Bending over, I scooped them up, setting them in the inbox along with the pages at risk of falling.
The creak of metal and the scuff of a boot warned me of the presence of someone behind me. Muttering under my breath, I spun to put an end to Brandon’s effort to startle me.
For a moment, I mistook the woman I faced for Evelyn; they were about the same height with bright auburn hair. I hadn’t thought green eyes were common, but hers were more of an emerald than jade. There was nothing pleasant or friendly about the way she glared at me. Her sickly pale skin set her apart from the Fenerec. If she had any beauty, it was lost in the way she scowled with her yellowed teeth exposed. A splash of red lipstick drew my eye, and the shade was too close to blood for my comfort.
She held her braided hair in one hand, the end fashioned into a hangman’s noose. Stepping forward, her frown deepened while she narrowed her eyes. She hissed, “You heard me.”
Between the disapproval in her voice and my certainty she was at least a little crazy, I jumped back, bumping into the desk. She pounced, swinging her noose in the general direction of my head. While I was fairly confident in the fact that Brandon had a gun stashed somewhere in the office, I didn’t know where. With a psycho attacking me with her hair, I didn’t have time to find it; even if I did, I doubted I could bring myself to pull the trigger. First, I’d miss. Second, I hated the thought of hurting a woman, let alone killing her.
My idiotic male ego was going to be the death of me, likely by the lady stalking me with her braid. The only real weapon I could access was the phone. Sweeping out my hand, I knocked it off the hook, sending the base clattering to the floor. Unless Zachary had changed the system, the phone would detect that no numbers had been tapped into the touchscreen display. After twenty seconds, it would page the ship’s security.
I didn’t have any time to do anything else before she was on me. Ducking away from her makeshift noose, I slid along the desk, stumbling into one of the office’s two folding chairs.
I was so focused on dodging her hair that I didn’t notice her foot sweeping out at me. Agony stabbed up my left leg as her boot connected with my knee. My yelp was cut off as she once again struck at my head. I fell back against the desk, my elbow cracking against the metal surface.
“Stand still, damn you,” she hissed.
While I drew the line at hitting a woman, I wasn’t about to let her kill me without fighting back somehow. The only thing nearby I could use as a non-lethal weapon was Brandon’s bottle of hand sanitizer. Snatching it up, I thrust it into her face, depressing the pump as hard as I could, squirting the blue-green gel into her eyes. Squealing in pain, she jerked back, rubbing her face.
“Sorry about that,” I said, lurching for the door. Her pain didn’t stop her from sweeping out a foot to trip me.
My chin cracked into the doorframe, followed by my shoulder. Instead of falling, I bounced off and staggered into the narrow passage between crates, office, and shipping containers. Leaving the woman to shriek curses in my wake, I hobbled deeper into the bay, hoping to lose her in the maze of goods.
Whoever she was, there was one thing I was certain of: she wasn’t an Inquisitor. The mad were put down so they couldn’t harm anyone. Unfortunately for me, by the time security investigated the off-the-hook phone, someone would be in a lot of trouble, and that someone was me.
~~*~~
I felt like the world’s largest mouse, and I had the misfortune of being stalked by an insane feline. My knee held my weight. but it hurt like hell, the pain made worse by the fact I had to be quiet or risk being caught. The woman screamed catcalls at me, pissing me off more and more by the minute. If she had used words, I might not have been bothered so much by it, but she vocalized in meows, hisses, and ear-piercing shrieks.
On rare occasion, when she managed to lose my trail altogether, she spat curses, most of which consisted of incomprehensible gibberish. The kindest one I made out was something regarding my mother and an anteater. Maybe if I had been someone else, the insult against my family would have held more sway, but I was pretty sure my mother would be quite content if the crazy woman with her hair noose managed to kill me.
I was seriously starting to regret my stance regarding violence against deserving and dangerous women. I also regretted not having a gun or some other weapon. My willingness to put an end to her mad ramblings and her stalking astonished and distressed me. I’d already assaulted her with hand sanitizer, and that hadn’t been enough to dissuade her. It hadn’t done more than slow her down for a few minutes.
Then again, she had her hair fashioned into a noose. Any expectation of sanity from her on my part was about as unreasonable as her presence in the cargo bay in the first place. Zachary had a strict policy against hiring the mentally unstable; with hundreds of lives in his care, his crew had their backgrounds checked out. Due to my affiliation with the Inquisition, the vetting process included both Federal and Inquisition databases, something neither Zachary nor I liked, but were forced to endure.
I couldn’t blame the Inquisition, considering the Wave Dream was the ship that carried the medical isotopes they needed.
I hunkered down between a shipping crate and a pallet of boxes enveloped in plastic wrap, grimacing as the woman shrieked somewhere not too far away. If I escaped with my head intact, I was going to have a long chat with Zachary about how someone had broken into the cargo bay. Unfortunately, who she was and what she was doing on board came second to figuring out how I was going to escape yet another bad situation with my life intact.
It just wasn’t my week.
To make matters worse, the company left a whole lot to be desired this time. While Evelyn wanted me, at least I was fairly certain it wasn’t so she could kill me. When a Fenerec wanted someone dead, they killed them. That was something I respected about wolves; they hunted to eat or remove a threat. Playing with their food—usually—wasn’t how they operated.
The lethal version of hide and seek I was playing didn’t sit well with me. My palms sweated, and it was a miracle I wasn’t panting, considering how fast my heart was beating. At the rate I was going, I was at risk of suffering from a heart attack long before she found me. My dignity—or what remained of it—took another beating.
There was a reason I wasn’t supposed to participate in field ops. Life and death situations and I simply didn’t get along. When I shot a gun, I had a tendency to close my eyes and flinch. The only martial arts I knew involved my knee and someone else’s groin, which I doubted was allowed in any school.
I leaned my back to the crate and slowed my breathing. Panicking wasn’t going to get me anywhere and panting like a worn-out racehorse wasn’t helping me any. Closing my eyes, I considered my options.
They were few and far between. All I could do was k
eep moving and hope Zachary could deal with her, because I had my doubts I could do anything about her.
The crate shifted behind me. Snapping my eyes open, I jerked in time to catch a glimpse of a pair of legs crashing down on me. Her knees hit my shoulders and sent me sprawling to the floor. My chin bounced against metal, clacking my teeth together.
Bursts of light danced in front of my eyes. In the short time it took me to shake off the daze from impact, the woman slipped a coil of her braided hair around my throat. Her knee dug into the middle of my back, pinning me to the floor.
“There you are,” she whispered in my ear. “Why don’t you just lie still like the good boy you are?”
The noose tightened and my attempt to reply ended in a wheezed croak. My ears buzzed, accompanied by a rushing in my head. Part of me knew I needed to struggle, but all I managed to do was make my fingers twitch. Her knee twisted against my spine. I tried to suck in a breath, but the noose cut off my air. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her pull a syringe out.
“See this?” She showed me the needle, a clear drop of fluid beading on its tip. “You’re going to take a nice little nap now, my lovely. Once you’re good, quiet, and tied up to my likings, I get to do whatever I want with you until you’re safely delivered. Aren’t I lucky?”
Her scowl had been hideous enough, but her smile sent shudders racing through me. Without loosening her hold on the noose, she jabbed the needle into my unresponsive arm and depressed the plunger. A chill spread up my arm from whatever drugs she pumped into me.
When my body went limp, the pressure against my throat eased enough I could suck in a breath. My throat ached. Despite the relief to my burning lungs, I struggled to keep my eyes open. As the cold from the drugs intensified, I was aware of her sliding off my back. My chest was one of the few parts of me I could feel; my lungs hurt. After another few moments, I didn’t feel anything at all.
As I fell into the dark, soothing embrace of the drugs, I heard a distant growl.
~~*~~
The problem with drugs, especially the ones not meant for general public use, was their relentlessness and unwillingness to ease their hold on their victims; in this case, me. I became aware of little things first, including a tingle in my fingertips and my throbbing throat. Something tugged at the stubble of my beard, which I hadn’t managed to shave. The yanks at the individual hairs anchored me to consciousness. Between my annoyance at the brief flashes of pain and my confusion over what caused it, I was able to remain somewhat aware.
For a long time, all I could do was cling to a single coherent thought: I didn’t want to sleep. I adamantly didn’t want to, though the reasons for my refusal flitted in and out of my head with the ethereal quality of a dream. As I won ground against the medication fogging my mind, the importance of why I needed to remain awake grew, until I was finally capable of focusing my attention on my situation.
A crazy cat lady had strangled me with her hair before stabbing me with a needle. I considered surrendering to the drugs she had dosed me with to alleviate my embarrassment over my predicament. Until the sedatives—if that’s what they were—wore off, I was helpless.
I hated being helpless. My annoyance deepened to anger.
I wanted to loop the woman’s noose around her neck and hang her. Considering that I couldn’t open my eyes, I evaluated my chances of escape without help at approximately zero. It was sometime between my contemplation of murder and contemplating how to escape that my knee reported it really hurt.
My instinctual desire to suck in a breath between clenched teeth was aborted by the lack of air. Panic set in, tightening my throat and chest until I remembered to breathe out of my nose.
Maybe it was the fright-born adrenaline rush or my increased levels of awareness, but I managed to force open an eye.
The red glow of emergency lighting bathed me. It took several minutes to force my vision into focus. Dark shapes coalesced into net-shrouded crates and shipping containers destined for some train yard.
Something warm wiggled against my back. Distracted from my surroundings, I tried to make sense of what was going on behind me.
“God damned stupid bitch,” someone muttered behind me, and with a mixture of relief and dismay, I recognized Brandon’s voice. “Did she really have to use so much fucking tape?”
I meant to grunt, but the act of drawing a deep breath burned my aching throat. I stiffened and shook in reaction.
“Shit. Are you awake?” Brandon stilled behind me.
Bracing myself for the inevitable pain, I forced the grunt out. It felt like I had swallowed barbed wire.
“Just hold tight for a few minutes, Boss. She didn’t do this right, thankfully. It shouldn’t take me much longer to get free,” my friend whispered.
It wasn’t until I looked down at my hands that I realized what Brandon was talking about. Duct tape was strong, but it had its weaknesses. Instead of securing my hands in a crisscrossing pattern, she had forced my wrists together and wrapped them in tape. If I could lift my hands over my head, I’d be able to tear my way free.
Judging from the way Brandon was jerking against my back, he was hard at work defeating the silvery material. With a soft, triumphant huff, Brandon relaxed against me. The ripping of tape accompanied hisses of pain.
“I am going to kick that bitch’s ass,” Brandon snarled, leaning against me. I suspected he was doing it to keep me upright. He confirmed my thoughts by saying, “You okay to sit on your own?”
I was, although moving triggered rolling waves of vertigo and nausea. Moments later, Brandon was kneeling beside me.
“Damn, Boss. You look like hell. Your eyes are all pupil. What the hell did she do to you?” He touched my cheek, and I winced at the tug of tape on my beard. “Give me a sec to figure out how to get this off. She wrapped it all the way around your head. All I got was a strip.”
I winced as Brandon started picking at the tape. He muttered curses as he worked while I took a good look around. Wherever we were in the cargo bay, it was secluded. Stacked crates secured with steel cabling obscured my view of the ceiling.
“I can’t tell if she’s stupid or overconfident. She didn’t take my pocketknife or my keys. She did smash my phone, though. Once I have this loose enough to slip the blade under it without cutting you up, I’ll get this off your mouth. Damn, I wish I had some oil. This is going to hurt like hell.”
In my drug-fogged state, it took me an embarrassingly long time to remember that certain oils broke down the adhesive properties of duct tape.
It took Brandon several minutes to work away enough of the tape so he could rip the rest off. I suspected when he was finished, I wouldn’t need to shave; he’d rip out all of the hair and most of my skin in the process.
“Don’t scream,” he warned.
I tensed and held my breath, and when I finally did exhale, Brandon ripped the tape off. For a stomach-churning moment, the cargo bay spun around me. The drugs, as though sensing my lapse, sucked me into their embrace once more. I slumped against Brandon.
It took him three or four slaps against my cheeks to get me to sit up without his help. “Sorry,” I mumbled.
“You’re not the one who should be sorry,” Brandon snapped. He held his hand in front of my face. “How many fingers am I holding up.”
I made it up to sixteen before his fingers blurred too much to count. “More than you have,” I dutifully reported in a slur.
“You sound like hell.”
“Thanks.” I agreed with him. Each word burned my throat, emerging as a rasp. I could barely understand myself, and I marveled Brandon was able to make sense of what I was trying to say.
“Do you know the drill, Boss?”
“There’s a drill for this?” I blinked at him, and for a sickening moment, there were three Brandons. All of them were frowning. A displeased Brandon brought trouble to someone, though I was relatively confident it wasn’t me this time. “Is there a drill for a crazy cat lady? She kick
ed me in the knee, choked me, and stabbed me with a needle,” I complained.
Brandon’s frown twitched up into a rueful grin. “Damn, all I got was her hair. She’s nuts. Lean against the crates, Boss. I can’t keep holding you up if I want to get you out of that mess.”
That mess proved to be the duct tape around my wrists, leaving me to deal with picking off the remaining strips while he went to work on my feet. The bandages covering Evelyn’s bites spared the wounds from the adhesive. They did, however, end up victim to Brandon’s knife.
“What caused that? You look like you were mauled.”
I couldn’t help it. I giggled. “She bit me.”
“She? The crazy cat lady bit you? Oh, wait. You mean that new girl of yours? Saw her up top earlier. She’s quite the gorgeous number. Bites hard, does she?” Brandon grinned at me.
“Fenerec have sharp, pointy teeth,” I warned him.
“So they do, Boss. So they do. How many fingers this time?”
The question annoyed me since I couldn’t even make a guess at the right number. “Too many,” I reported.
“Think you can walk?”
The thought of trying left me feeling queasy, but the alternative was to wait for the psychotic woman to return. “I’ll manage,” I replied, hoping I wasn’t lying. “We’ll find out,” I added after consideration.
I had at least fifty pounds on Brandon, and I doubted he’d be able to support me for long if I wasn’t able to walk on my own.
With a wince, Brandon got to his feet, pocketing his knife. “We’ll take it slow,” he promised, grabbing hold of my arm to haul me to my feet. He was stronger than I thought, able to get me upright with minimal effort on my part. “You’re big, but you’re not too heavy, thank God.”
The Wave Dream lurched under my feet more than I thought it should, but I managed to stay on my feet. “I don’t know what she drugged me with, but I feel terrible.”