I could still get a sense of light all of that time. It wasn’t completely dark, so the lights must have been on in those rooms, and pretty brightly.
I only really noticed that after the light was suddenly gone, though.
I went over what felt like another doorjamb, then I found myself on carpet––a hard, thin carpet, so either really cheap/crappy carpet, or it was really damned old, or both. When I entered the carpeted room, it was suddenly as dark as night overhead. I turned my face so that I could see behind me, and I could make out a faint rectangle of light, what must have been the door leading to that more brightly-lit hall and the kitchen beyond it.
The European dropped the cuffs holding my arms together. Then, walking unceremoniously around my body, he kicked my legs and feet aside on his way back to that door.
Seconds later, that door closed behind him. The rectangle of light went away, too.
Then it was dark for real.
I lay there, panting, sucking in breaths through the cloth bag over my head. The cloth got pulled in and out of my mouth and nose as I fought to take in more oxygen, and I turned my head around, groaning a bit at my hurt side and hip along with the pain in my arms, which felt nearly pulled out of their sockets now that the pressure had finally let up.
I managed to roll onto my stomach, and immediately regretted it when the pain in my ribs turned into a sharp, glass-like stab through the chest. I worried I’d punctured a lung and fought my way back to my side and then my back, groaning in spite of myself.
Slowly, my breathing went back to normal.
After it did, I realized I wasn’t alone in the room.
I could hear breathing.
More breathing, that is. Meaning, breathing that wasn’t mine.
I froze, straining to listen from where I stretched out on the thin carpet. As soon as I went completely quiet and still...someone coughed.
Something about that cough sounded female.
My mind turned over that, and over what Boston and the European had been talking about in the car, and I had a sudden thought that maybe I had come to the end of one puzzle, at least. Of course, under the circumstances, I couldn’t be sure how much good that information would do me. I wasn’t in a position to effect a dramatic rescue of myself, much less anyone else.
Before I could decide if I should try to talk to whoever it was, I heard clothing rustle, right before someone moved over to where I lay.
I tensed at once, ready to fight.
I was still pretty sure I knew what this was, who they were, and that they weren’t likely to hurt me, but I had no idea if I was right. Besides, the fight thing is a reflex with me. For the same reason, I didn’t really relax until she spoke.
“Hey,” a young-sounding voice said. “Are you okay?”
I fought with how to answer that...then tensed again as I felt them move over me.
All they did was grab the cloth hood though, and yank it over my head.
In the same set of seconds, a light came on, in another part of the room.
The light was dim, nothing like what I’d glimpsed through the cloth hood before I got in here, but it was enough to see a little. The illumination itself flickered in a familiar but disorienting way. My mind latched on it being candlelight, or some kind of oil lamp. Something with an unsteady flicker of light, versus a light bulb, that is.
I found myself looking up at a weirdly familiar face, staring down at me in the orangish glow. She blinked, frowning a little as she looked back at me, examining my features as if trying to decide if she recognized me, too. She had a black eye, I noted, and what might have been a bruise on the opposite cheek. Otherwise, her face looked more or less like it had in the photograph I’d seen on her father’s mantle that day.
“Who is it?” someone else whispered.
My ears found the other girl over by that flickering light. I couldn’t see her as well, given the shadow behind the glowing bulb I could see.
“Just another girl,” said the girl hanging over me, her dark eyes shining with reflected light. “I don’t know her. She’s older.”
I snorted at that.
I couldn’t help it.
Even so, and despite the pain in my side, I grinned up at her, feeling a totally irrational wave of relief as it hit me that I really did know her face, that I wasn’t imagining things. Moreover, I knew exactly who she was. Even with the bruises, her features were impossible to forget, given how I’d first come across them.
I was finally looking at the real life edition of JìngYáng “Jazzy” Jiāng, apple of her father’s eye and model-aspirant-slash-high-school-sophomore-wild-girl.
And she was alive.
16
An Unwanted Complication
Of course, neither Jazzy nor her friend Hilary could do much to help me with the cuffs.
I directed them to look around the room for me, instead, if only to make sure they hadn’t missed some way out of here, or some kind of weapon we might use.
They hadn’t, of course. They’d been locked in here for days, from what I could tell, and neither of them was dumb, despite their age. They’d searched every inch of the small room, even ripping up the carpet in a few areas to pull out bent carpet staples and look for loose nails.
They hadn’t found much.
The room had no furniture at all, not even a closet. No windows. The ceiling was high and unbroken. The walls appeared to be made of concrete slabs and the lower areas also had been reinforced with sheet metal, probably to make sure no one got ambitious about chipping away at the mortar or whatever.
So yeah, it was a pretty solid-looking cage. One that had obviously been used before. It also appeared to be more or less soundproof, given the concrete blocks and so on.
They couldn’t tell me much, either.
“Why are you here?” I asked Jazzy, glancing at her friend, Hilary. Seeing the blank look that came to their faces, and the exchanged looks like they thought I was a moron, I clarified, “I mean why here. Why are they keeping you here, instead of...”
I hesitated, realizing I was about to ask them why they hadn’t been sold yet, or farmed off to a brothel or whatever. Or hell, chained naked to a bed.
Switching tacks, I looked at Hilary again.
“Where’s Marla?” I asked. “Isn’t she here with the two of you?”
There was another silence. Then tears began to roll down Hilary’s face, glistening and visible in the flickering light of the plastic, electric light that must have a loose wire. I’d been disappointed when I saw the lamp, but hell, I should have known they wouldn’t have left them in here with open flames. That would just be...dumb.
While Boston might have veered a bit on the dim side, meaning of the two thugs in the van, the European guy didn’t.
Either way, I found myself regretting asking the question about Marla.
“They took her,” Hilary said, wiping her face with a swipe of one hand. “They took her the first day...like a few hours after we got here.”
I frowned at that information, glancing at Jazzy, then back at Hilary.
Both of them had bruises on their faces, not only Jazzy.
The thugs who’d done this might be waiting for the bruises to heal before they put them on the auction block. Or there might be another reason. A far yuckier reason, having more to do with their age. Hilary’s sister, Marla, had been eighteen. Jazzy and Hillary were both under sixteen. Maybe that was a whole different market.
I looked at Hilary’s blond hair, then back at Jazzy Jiāng.
I realized in the same set of seconds that any further questions along that line probably wouldn’t yield much of value, and might just turn my new friends catatonic.
“How many are there?” I said, purposefully making my voice businesslike. At their silence, I sharpened my tone a little. “Have you heard voices? Accents? Languages?”
“Most of them are Russian,” Jazzy said, looking at me.
“Any idea of the number of different
voices?” I pressed.
I watched the two of them think. Hilary still looked a lot more out of it than Jazzy did, so I found myself focusing back on the latter.
“I know there were two in the car,” I said, trying to help her out. “An American from the East Coast, and one of your Russians. Tall guy. The one who dragged me in here.”
Jazzy nodded, her expression clearing once more. “Yeah, I know him. The others call him Pavel. He’s kind of in charge. Some of the time, anyway.”
I nodded, arranging my back on the thin carpet. “Okay, good. Any others?”
“There’s at least one more Russian,” Jazzy said. She looked at her friend. “The blond guy. Remember? He’s shorter,” she explained, looking back at me.
“Anyone else?”
“The bearded guy,” Hilary ventured, her voice more tentative than Jazzy’s had been. She looked at her friend, as if for verification. “You know...the kitchen guy.”
Probably the cook, my mind interpreted.
“Have you seen a tall, blond guy here at all?” I said, still trying to look between the two of them, despite the awkward angle at which I lay. “Blue eyes? Kind of psycho?”
Hilary immediately winced, enough that I could tell she’d run into Evers.
“He took Marla,” she said, her lower lip trembling once more.
When I looked at Jazzy, she nodded. “He had another guy with him,” she added.
“Another Russian?” I said.
Slowly, Jazzy shook her head, as if still thinking. “No,” she said. “He was just a regular white guy. Like from Seattle. He didn’t talk like the guy you meant...the one from Boston or whatever. He sounded like he was from here.”
I nodded, calculating in my head. That might be Razmun, but I doubted it. Razmun didn’t sound like he was from Seattle. Anyway, I knew they probably hadn’t seen everyone, locked in here, but what they had seen still gave me something to go on.
“Nik?” I ventured into the link. “Nik! Are you around?”
I didn’t hear anything in response.
I tried talking to the girls for awhile longer after that, but I didn’t learn much more.
From what I could tell, they’d seen at least eight or nine people total, all men.
The European and the Boston guy from the van. The cook. The other “Russian,” who was shorter. Seattle guy. Evers. They gave me a rough description of two others who’d brought them food. Apart from those guys, they’d only seen people like them, meaning girls who’d been locked in here for a time before someone came and took them away.
So maybe ten guys in total worked out here on a regular basis?
Eleven or so other women, including Hilary’s sister, Marla, had passed through here in the last few weeks. Most of those had been from the modeling show, too, Jazzy said. Half had been teenagers, half women in their twenties, “like you,” Jazzy told me.
Eventually, I ran out of questions.
Between every bout, I’d try getting an answer out of Nik again, but he never responded.
My body started to shut down a bit, probably a mild case of shock from the injuries and adrenaline and whatever else.
In any case, somewhere in that, I dozed off.
I only really knew I’d dozed off, however, when a loud bang woke me up.
My eyes opened in a flash.
A jolt of fear ran through me when I realized I’d fallen asleep. I instantly tried to calculate how much time had passed. I looked to the door, then my instincts had me looking back over my shoulder...not in the direction of the sound, but in the direction of the light.
There, in the corner of the room, I saw Jazzy and Hilary huddled, wide-eyed over the crappy electric light with its loose wires.
The orange glow lit the bottoms of their faces weirdly, and they looked both overly young and overly old for their fifteen years. It hit me that they’d never be the same after this. Well, probably not. At the very least, their view of the safe parameters in their suburban worlds had been irrevocably altered.
I looked back at the door when I heard shouting.
I heard feet running down the hall not long after that.
Then I heard gunshots.
Most of them were outside, on the other side of the old farmhouse walls. Some might have come from the kitchen, too.
More shouting followed, along with another crash from outside.
That time, the noise was a lot louder. In fact, it felt and sounded like something large and heavy had slammed into the side of the house, maybe not far from the concrete walls of our cell. The impact trembled the carpeted floor under my butt, hands, legs and arms. It made me wince, even as a fire ignited in my chest, filling me with relief.
“Nik,” I muttered.
He’d finally come.
That, or Gantry. Maybe both of them.
Either way, I’d spoken the name aloud, almost without realizing I’d done it. Well, not until Jazzy answered me. She spoke louder than me, raising her voice to be heard over the increasing intensity of sounds on the other side of the door. Which meant she had better than decent hearing, because those noises were getting a lot worse.
“Who’s Nick?” she said, half-shouting from her corner of the room.
Another volley of gunfire erupted outside the house.
I pressed to the floor, motioning towards them urgently with my cuffed hands.
“Get down!” I said, shouting that time. “Get the fuck down!”
I flattened my body to the thin carpet, rolling over on my stomach again and grimacing against the pain in my ribs. I started to crawl across the carpet towards them, writhing my way closer to where both girls huddled, straight-backed against the walls.
“Get down!” I snapped again, motioning more violently with my hand. “Now!”
That time, Jazzy looked at me.
The deer in headlights look didn’t leave her face.
Well, not right away. Something must have penetrated when she saw my expression, because life sparked back into her eyes, right before she grabbed ahold of Hilary and brought her down to the carpet. They both landed on their hands and knees, so still well up off the floor, but it was the right direction at least. When I reached them, I grabbed Jazzy’s wrist and yanked her the rest of the way down, hard enough that she let out a surprised sound, right before she face-planted into the carpet.
She didn’t fight me, though.
Grabbing Hilary’s wrist, I yanked her down, too, a few seconds later.
Another volley of shots broke out. I winced and ducked as I heard the shots plink against the walls outside. That time, I found myself happy about the concrete walls. They were aiming high so far, and not at us, but I saw a few holes in the upper part of the walls, so I knew it wasn’t concrete all the way up. Pressing my side against the wall, I continued to hold Jazzy’s wrist, and noticed that she didn’t let go of Hilary, either.
Slowly, the gunfire started to pull further away.
It also grew less frequent.
I focused on counting shots and directions, and decided there were only three shooters left now. Then two.
Finally one.
An explosion of bullets left what had to be a semi-automatic rifle––probably an M16 from the sound, or something similar––then abruptly cut off. The ricochet slowly tapered off a few seconds later. It sounded almost like the person continued firing even as they fell, or maybe as the gun fell, or maybe as both fell at the same time.
Either way, all of a sudden, after those last stuttered breaths from the gun, it got quiet.
Really quiet.
I knew this, because all of a sudden I could hear all three of us breathing again. Panting in fact, from where we lay flush on our bellies on that crappy, puke-green carpet, inhaling mouse turds and whatever else might be hanging around that musty, thin smudge of floor covering.
I also remembered how much my cracked and/or broken ribs hurt inside my chest.
I was trying to decide if I should get the two girls to p
ull me off the carpet and help me so we could get out the door...when that door suddenly slammed open.
My eyes jerked in that direction.
Staring up, my heart lifted briefly when I saw the tall, broad-shouldered form standing there. Nik’s face stared back at mine, his eyes a pale blue, shining at me even with his features in near-shadow from the light shining from the hallway behind him.
Then, even as I felt myself start to relax, my lips curl into a smile, that face transformed.
The features melted, changing in front of me.
Within seconds, a new, different face looked down at me instead.
Ledi.
Well...Razmun.
Some part of my mind still attached that face and body to Ledi, the person I’d met on Palarine, the one who had been Nik’s friend. And my friend, too, really.
I fought with what I was looking at, trying to deny it in some way, or maybe just make it mean something different.
When he spoke, the last flickers of that hope faded.
“Hello, Dakota,” he said, smiling wider.
He spoke Pharize, one of the main human languages from Nik’s home.
I recognized the voice, the tone, the inflection...the accent...the lilt at the end of my name. All of it. More than that, I recognized Ledi in his eyes and expression. I didn’t see anything at all of Nik in him now, even apart from the change in his features.
Somehow, just those two words drove it all home.
“...My heart hurts at the disappointment on your face,” Razmun said then, his irises melting rapidly from that light blue to a darker hazel, the color I remembered on him from Palarine. He gave a strange sort of bow, still smiling. “...And I apologize for misleading you into thinking your love had rescued you. I could not afford to have anyone here recognize me as I walked in. No one who might live to tell the tale anyway...” he added, looking at the two girls on the carpet next to me. “But I didn’t want to mislead you any longer than necessary, Dakota, dear...for I knew you would quickly surmise I was not your precious Nik.”
I swallowed, glancing at the two teenaged girls huddled on the musty carpet next to me.
Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two Page 24