He almost smiled. “You’re different than the others. I can tell.”
Although I dreaded his meaning, I had to ask. “What’s that supposed to mean?” My voice was a tremulous whisper. Though flashes of me semiconscious and a glass of water against my lips—partial memories I could barely recall—came to mind, my mouth was still dry, so dry it hurt.
He eyed me a moment longer than I liked before answering. “You’re stronger, more powerful.” He looked at me with an unabashed, entertained grin. “I can feel your mind in mine, poking around.” But as quickly as it appeared, his smile faltered and he stared through me once more. His eyes were glazed over, like he was lost in memories, memories I desperately wished I could see.
The fact that he could sense my Ability at all made both my stomach roll with alarm and my heart flutter with hope. Although he had the upper hand, at least my Ability wasn’t gone, just subdued. And now I understood. “You’re nulling me,” I said. “That’s why I couldn’t sense you in New Bodega…why I couldn’t sense anything before the accident.” I gazed around the bedroom, only seeing a cage. “It’s why I can’t feel your mind now.”
The man said nothing.
“What were you doing in New Bodega?” I asked, figuring I might get more information out of him since he appeared to be somewhat drunk.
He studied me. “We trade with them sometimes,” he said after a moment. I could tell he hadn’t wanted to divulge anything, but it seemed that, whether it was the vodka or something else, he decided a partial truth was okay.
“And why did you pick me—”
The bedroom door opened, and a taller, short-haired man with bright blue eyes and a goatee stepped inside. “Is she ready?” His eyes shifted from me back to the scarred man. I assumed this was Randall. “She doesn’t look ready, Carl. Her food’s still in her damn bowl.”
I glanced to my right, finding a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of orange juice sitting on the nightstand.
“What the hell’ve you been doing in here for the past hour?”
Though I didn’t sense that Carl had any predatory interest in me, my stomach rolled again at the thought of him being in the room with me while I was unconscious.
“She was sleeping,” Carl said.
“Well, hurry the hell up. Sandy’s ready.”
I tried not to outwardly react to the clue that there were at least three people in the house, but I didn’t like the odds stacking up against me. Had the world been different, I might’ve taken comfort in the fact that there was apparently another woman in the house with me, but it almost made me feel worse. It was easier to manipulate a man than it was a woman, especially if they were all Crazies. So far, though, it seemed Randall and Carl were simply survivors with an Ability, like me.
Like it was nothing out of the ordinary to have a helpless woman tied up in a bedroom, Randall turned and left, swinging the door shut behind him. Unlike Carl had done, Randall didn’t pull the door closed to make sure it latched.
With a sigh, Carl climbed to his feet. He placed the empty bottle of booze on the dresser once more and walked toward the bed. He didn’t look at me, as usual, but through me, and I thought I vaguely registered a misty cloud of guilt in his eyes.
He sat on the edge of the bed, causing my body to slide toward him as the mattress gave way. “Lift up your head,” he said, pulling another pillow from beneath the bedframe.
“I’m not hungry,” I said, too scared and stubborn to eat whatever else might be mixed in the bowl.
Carl was unconcerned. “You’re going to eat because if you don’t, you’ll die,” he said. “It’s simple.”
My simmering apprehension flared. I lifted my head, and he slid the pillow beneath my neck, propping me up and affording me a clearer view of the room. A roll of duct tape sat on the dresser top, along with a small framed photo of a little girl. She was in the arms of a smiling man and a short woman in a nurse’s uniform, who was laughing beside them. The man looked like Randall, so I assumed Sandy might be his wife or his daughter. I was in their home, it seemed, and it made sense, given Randall’s apparent authority. But I wasn’t sure how Carl fit into the family.
I opened my mouth and let Carl feed me a spoonful of oatmeal. His hands shook a little, and his nailbeds were dirty, stained maybe, like he might have been or might still be a mechanic of sorts. The skin around the tips of his fingers was chewed, but despite his rough appearance, he was unexpectedly gentle as he placed the spoon in my mouth.
The oatmeal was cold and thick and bland, but I ate it willingly, scared of the alternative. “What does Sandy want with me?” I asked, licking my lips.
Carl’s eyes shifted to mine. “She doesn’t,” he said with a brusque edge. His lips pursed.
I took another bite off the proffered spoon. “Then what does he—”
“Stop asking questions,” Carl growled. “I’m not going to hurt you unless I have to, but that doesn’t make me your damn friend. Just be quiet and eat.”
Narrowing my eyes, I wanted to refuse the next bite, but I conceded, surprised to find I was starving, and my concerns of whatever the oatmeal might be laced with became a distant curiosity. “Will you at least tell me how long I’ve been here?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Why would it hurt to?” I said with a little too much impatience.
Carl’s lips pursed. “Watch yourself, woman.”
Though I knew withholding my frustration was the smarter route, it seemed attitude was all I had left in my defense. “Whatever you’re going to do, just do it already!” I turned my face away from him.
“It’s been two days,” he finally said and exhaled like he’d spoken against his better judgement. “And trust me, you’ll need your strength. You need to eat.” He brought the spoon up to my mouth again.
“Trust you?” I said without thought.
“Enough!” Carl shouted and stood up. “If you don’t eat this, I’ll make you regret it,” he promised. My impromptu defiance cracking, I took another bite of oatmeal. Truth be told, it was like I could feel it making me stronger with each bite.
“And drink all of this,” he said. “You’ll need the sugar.”
My panic returned. “Why?”
Carl’s deep, brown eyes fixed on mine, but he said nothing as he held the glass of orange juice to my lips. I was incredibly thirsty, but taking a drink somehow felt like I was sealing my fate. I turned my face away again.
“Fine then,” he growled and slammed the glass down on the side table. Orange juice splashed all over the place. He yanked the pillow out from under my neck, and my head fell back.
“Ouch!” I cried.
“I’m not the one who will feel like shit after.” In an instant, he reached up to my wrists, pausing when he laced his fingers in the rope around my right hand. “Don’t even think about trying to get away. I promise you, you’ll regret that too.”
Carl had downed enough booze, I wasn’t convinced he had the wherewithal or reflexes to best me. When he untied my right wrist and reached over for the left, I pulled it from his grasp, prepared to punch him in the nose and then in the groin, but a knife was under my throat as my hand slipped from his. I froze.
“What the fuck did I just say?” His voice held the echo of a beaten and bloodied soul that was so desperate, so impatient it fought to stay in control as a knife I hadn’t even seen on him pinched the sensitive skin of my neck.
Holding my breath, I closed my eyes, trying to hold back my tears of frustration.
“Try that again and there’ll be blood,” he warned.
I nodded slowly. This time, I believed him. His reflexes were better than I’d thought. Though he was clearly intoxicated, he was weathered and well trained in this, that much was obvious. My skin crawled and a thick blanket of sweat coated me as, once again, I considered how many others he’d done this to. How many others have lain in this bed? Where are they now? But I was afraid that I already knew the answer.
“You tr
y to kick me,” Carl said as he untied my ankle, “I’ll cut your leg off. We don’t need your leg. You got it?” After a few yanks and some manhandling, my ankles were tied together, just like my wrists.
“All of this attitude, you struggling—you’re making all of this more difficult on yourself,” he said, double-checking the ropes. “You can’t change your fate,” he said. “None of us can.” His tone was dull, hollow, and I wasn’t sure if he was saying these things for my benefit or his own.
Carl lifted me out of the bed, and as he carried me by the window, I caught a glimpse of what looked like a church steeple from the gap in the boards, but Carl moved too quickly for me to see anything else as he carried me over to the wheelchair in the corner of the room. His body was well honed, like most of ours were now that we were survivors. I briefly wondered what exactly Carl was capable of. His arms were secure around me, his grip painfully tight.
“Are you going to throw yourself out of the chair and flop around when I wheel you down the hall? Or can I skip tying you to the damn thing?” Carl was panting a bit, out of breath, though I figured it was more from the booze than it was from being out of shape.
I narrowed my eyes at him, not gratifying him with a response.
The corner of his mouth quirked into an ever-so-slight smile, and he set me in the seat. He pulled the chair out, away from the wall, and pushed me to the bedroom door. I couldn’t tell if my heart had stopped or sped up. It was like I couldn’t breathe as the possibilities of what awaited me outside the relative sanctuary of this room became too horrifying and far too imminent.
Carl opened the door and cool, bleach-scented air caressed my face. It burned the inside of my nose. “Please tell me what you’re going to do, Carl. I’ll beg if you want me to. Please.”
Though I could tell he was trying to ignore me for a few heartbeats, he seemed to change his mind. “We’re just drawing blood.”
I craned my neck around, eyeing him as he grabbed the handles of the wheelchair. “You want my blood?” That didn’t seem so bad—but then again, it probably wasn’t for reasons that were very good, or I wouldn’t have been kidnapped and tied up.
Carl pushed me out into the hallway, the shotgun against the wall I’d seen before now out of sight, as was the chair. It was still daytime, and light filtered into the hallway. There was a closed door beyond mine to the right, only a bathroom separating them, and everything else appeared to be to the left, the direction we were headed.
Carl rolled me down the hardwood hallway and out onto the second-story landing. We passed through a den with vaulted ceilings, and my eyes scoured the family photos in different-sized frames, most of them cracked and the glass broken; they were barely hanging on, like they’d borne the brunt of someone’s anger. The wood floor was covered in dust, save for a fresh pathway of footsteps and what looked like wheelchair tracks leading into the room at the end of the hall.
I whimpered, and my eyes burned. Something told me Carl wasn’t simply taking me to get my blood drawn. What’s in the room at the end of the hall? He wheeled me past an open door, to what appeared to be a personal office. Sunlight shone in through the blinds too brightly to see beyond and illuminating the books and stacked papers littering a desk and the floor around it. Dishes were strewn all over, like someone—probably Randall—spent a lot of time in there, locked away…mad. Unbidden, I thought about the Colony and the horrible things they did to people there.
“Carl,” I rasped. “I’m scared.”
I wasn’t sure why I told him that, perhaps hoping he’d take pity on me and turn me around, but he didn’t say anything. There was the sound of footsteps ahead and then Randall was standing in the doorway of the room at the end of the hall. He was wearing a white medical coat, but he looked menacing and severe, nothing like Harper when he was dressed in his doctor attire. I wasn’t sure if I should be petrified or reassured that Randall at least looked like he knew what he was doing.
His eyes narrowed on Carl. Like before, it was as if he didn’t even see me. “Hurry up, Sandy’s prepped. We’re wasting fuel.”
“Carl,” I whispered again, my body shaking. He was the closest thing I had to an ally in all of this. But Carl remained silent and picked up the pace as he wheeled me through the bedroom door.
In front of me, Randall searched through a dresser drawer for something. The scent of bleach was strongest in the room—sterile to the point of burning my eyes and the back of my throat instead of just my nose. Breathing through my mouth, I took in the room around me; it was big—the master bedroom, I assumed—and there was a large picture window, undraped and letting in the afternoon sunlight.
Hope and desperation swelled as I peered through the window, outside to the freedom that was just beyond my reach. I could see the side of a blue house, part of a broken window, and a roof obscured by a tall maple tree. I tucked that information away for later, in case it came in handy.
Then my gaze fixed on her—Sandy—and I paled. A woman with a few thin wisps of graying hair hanging from her head was propped up in a hospital bed. There were IVs in her arms and breathing tubes in her nose. I barely recognized her as the woman from the picture I’d seen with the child and Randall. Her green eyes were dulled, almost deadened as she stared at the wall behind me. She didn’t blink, didn’t move, though her chest rose and fell rapidly, as if she’d just run a mile. I knew that wasn’t possible. She was too frail to even walk, her skin too sallow. Her features were strange, fallen and twisted on one side. She was barely human. Barely alive.
Tears pricked my eyes as I thought about what they’d done to her—and what they were going to do to me.
When Carl stopped the wheelchair at her bedside, my eyes latched onto an open, well-worn and bound notebook with a scribbling of notes and lines connected to a list. My nostrils flared and I shuddered as I scanned what seemed to be a list of one Ability after another. Electricity, revival, healer—there were at least a dozen of them. I was trying to understand, to fathom what I’d been brought into, when my eyes clung to the last Ability on the list: mind reader/finder. I wrung my hands in my lap, faintly aware of the fiery wound still fresh on my arm. “There are so many,” I said under my breath, unable to look away from the piece of paper I assumed was responsible for my fate.
Randall whirled around, glaring at me and then at Carl. “No duct tape? Jesus, you’re slipping. You know I don’t like to hear them talk.” Randall shook his head and reached for Sandy’s arm. He tossed the notebook onto the dresser, then checked the tubes that ran from her forearm into an empty IV bag… Ready for my blood.
“I can’t help her,” I said. “You don’t even know my blood type—if we’re even compatible.”
“You’re compatible,” Randall said with an alarming amount of certainty as he addressed me for the first time. He grabbed my arms, still bound together at my wrists, and stretched them out beside Sandy on the bed. When I saw a few dried-up drops of blood on the sheet beneath my arms, I instinctively shrank away. “No—”
A clammy, powerful palm collided with the side of my face, making my neck crack, my jaw sing, and my head spin so much I almost forgot to breathe.
“Move again, I dare you,” Randall snarled. “Actually,” he started, then hit me again, this time higher, his knuckle meeting my temple. And for a moment, I could only see blackness. “That one’s just in case you forget.”
My face was branded with pain, my vision veiled with tears as Randall yanked my arms toward him again. I felt the wound in my arm tear open beneath its bandage and I winced. Randall picked up three additional IV bags and laid them out on the bed beside Sandy, who sat there oblivious as he checked the hoses. He attached the first one, and then the others.
My head was shaking, I couldn’t stop it. “Four pints?” I breathed. I knew that was extremely dangerous, borderline deadly. I pulled my arms back into my lap, no longer worried what he might do since I’d likely die anyway.
“This will shut the stupid bitch up,” C
arl said behind me right before rough terrycloth scraped against my mouth and nose, and a sweet smell carried me into blackness.
26
DANI
DECEMBER 14, 1AE
The Farm, California
“Am I doing this right?” Carlos lowered his pruning shears and backed away from his chosen apple tree, surveying his work. He’d been snipping branches off the dormant tree for the past half hour.
I paused with my own shears primed on a branch of my very own apple tree and studied his. “Hmmm…” I gave the shears a squeeze and—snip—the end of the young branch fell about seven feet to the ground. Carefully, I descended the stepladder I’d been using to reach the higher branches and picked my way through the overgrown ground cover to stand at Carlos’s side. My rubber boots squelched in the mud created by the previous night’s brief but abundant rain shower.
Carlos crossed his arms over his chest and cocked his head to the side. “It just looks so…”
“Clean?” I offered.
With a soft snort, Carlos shot me a sideways glance. “I was gonna say ‘pathetic,’ but sure, ‘clean’ works.”
I shrugged. “It looks like the picture in the book, and it does only have five main branches, and I think you could describe it as goblet-shaped.” My voice slowly rose in pitch, highlighting my absolute lack of certainty.
Carlos snorted. “Maybe if we lived in that painting with the melting clocks by that guy with the crazy mustache.”
I laughed; I couldn’t help it. I’d been fretting all morning, trying to keep busy around the farm to stave off feeling utterly useless while so many people I loved were in danger, and now that it was well into the afternoon, my nerves were frayed beyond belief. Chris and Grayson should’ve been back by now.
The laughter died too quickly, and I reached out and gave Carlos’s arm a squeeze. “Thanks.” I smiled briefly. “I needed that.” I narrowed my eyes. “So where’d you learn about Dalí, anyway?”
“Oh, you know…around,” Carlos hedged. He moved on to the next tree in our small but abundant orchard—another apple tree, though there were also pears, plums, peaches, apricots, figs, an avocado tree, and a bevy of various citrus, all planted years before we’d arrived. Mase and Camille had returned to the farm the day after Zoe and the others left, and they were slowly working their way through the smaller citrus trees on the other side of the orchard.
The Ending Series: The Complete Series Page 153