Loving Wilder

by Leigh Tudor

  What he saw was even difficult for him to rationalize.

  Dr. Vielle, recognizable from the myriad of M2M and FBI files that had, at one time, inundated his life, sat upright on a gurney with his wrists and ankles tied to the rails.

  Mercy was sitting on her knees on a high stool with what looked to be a surgical drill in her hands, her eyes unusually bright and her body in position to do some unspeakable harm.

  “Hey, Buttercup,” Trevor said, just as the drill bit was about to penetrate Vielle’s skull.

  She stopped as the doctor’s eyes homed in on his, wide as saucers and full of gratitude, considering the incessant groaning behind the duct tape.

  “What’s up, babe?” Trev added, slowly approaching the gurney and avoiding any sudden moves while ignoring Vielle’s desperate mewling.

  Hesitating, she turned the drill to face the ceiling.

  “Hey, Trev,” she said with a ridiculously wide smile that looked more clown-like than Mercy-ish. “Have you met Dr. Vile? This is the dude who drilled into Cara’s and my skulls and then trashed our fallopian tubes.” She leaned down to whisper into the doctor’s ear, “Say hello, you worthless piece of gray matter.”

  He whimpered and whined behind the duct tape as Mercy continued to flash her lurid smile. She pulled the trigger of the drill close to his ear, causing it to make a whirring sound and her victim to squirm in his restraints.

  “Think that’s a good idea?” Trevor asked, giving a head nod to the drill.

  Her shoulders sagged, letting off the trigger, as if having second thoughts.

  “Probably not.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather see this piece of shit rot in jail as opposed to, say, you ending up there?”

  “A solid point,” she said thoughtfully, then with more reflection added, “There’s not a single skin tone that looks good in orange. I don’t care what Netflix says.”

  She lowered the tool to rest it on Vielle’s shoulder, and he began to writhe as the drill bit was inches from his face.

  “Not to mention, I’m going to need your help raising the kids. Can’t do that properly if you’re incarcerated.”

  She sucked in unexpectedly, her foot inadvertently kicking a tray of surgical tools, which caused a couple of the scalpels to fall to the floor.

  “You’re just saying that so I won’t perform delicate brain surgery without anesthesia.”

  “Not true. I would say that even if you weren’t on the verge of committing a Class II felony.” He swallowed, shoving his weapon under his arm, and his hands into his pockets. “I’m sorry, Mercy. I’ve been a dick, and I owe you an apology.”

  Her entire face lit up and her head tilted to the side. “That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me,” she said, resting both hands, one still clutching the drill, on Vielle’s trembling sternum to lean closer to Trevor.

  “Well, that’s a problem then.”

  Pausing, she pulled back as if having second thoughts. “Why do I feel like I should stay mad at you for a little longer? Teach you a lesson, assert myself and all that. What kind of woman would I be if I cave every time your dimples erupt on your face, making me irrationally agree to cook your dinner and wash your underwear?”

  “First of all, it’s common knowledge amongst the townsfolk that the Ingalls women can’t toast bread. And the last time you washed my underwear, you mixed a red dish towel in the load and turned all of my expensive mid-length boxer briefs an emasculating shade of pink.”

  Slapping one hand on Vielle’s sternum as he continued to wail, she lifted her forefinger in the air. “That happened one time.”

  “I’d really love for you to stay and work through this, but maybe you should let me keep on eye on Vielle while you go look for Cara and Nate.”

  As if remembering Vielle was even there, one side of her nose lifted as if getting a whiff of a rancid piece of meat. “We’re not done here, Vile,” she said, squeezing both sides of his mouth in one hand, giving him duck lips.

  “You’re having a pesky problem with one of your incisors, so I’m just going to drill through your skull, dig through some of that whatchamacallit cranial goop, chisel a tunnel down your sinus cavity, and then pluck that infected tooth right out.” She let go of his cheeks. “Don’t you worry your little head about it,” she assured, giving him a harmless slap on the cheek. “You taught me everything I know.”

  “Okay, my little Harley Quinn wannabe,” Trevor chided. “Why don’t we let go of some of that crazy and find our kids?”

  Giving Vielle a hearty glare of stink-eye, she rounded the gurney, ignoring the sniveling doctor until she was standing in front of Trevor with a questioning look.

  “Tell me something—where are all of your buds? Why aren’t the Feds or M2M swarming the place? Or is this another one of your involuntary solo missions?”

  “They’re on their way. Right now, Madame is leading the charge against Amado. She just gave us an update, something we never got from you, by the way, informing us that Amado is dead, along with the men who helped her escape. Taken out by a rival cartel. Madame will be here with her personal SWAT team within the hour.”

  “Excellent,” she said.

  “Have you seen Billy Joe or Sam?”

  Mercy nodded. “They were supposed to bring Nate to Vile,” she said, turning and baring her teeth at the trussed man. “But they never showed up. I know every square inch of the compound, and even from the farthest point, they shouldn’t have taken longer than fifteen minutes.”

  “Alec’s looking for them. But you go on; you know this place better than anyone. And when this is all behind us, we’ll talk about all the ways I can make it up to you.”

  Then Trevor’s phone rang, and Alec’s name lit up the screen. He enabled the speakerphone.

  “Yeah?”

  “I found Sam and Billy Joe. I think you’re going to wanna see this.”

  The sound of several boots down the hall caused Trevor to peek his head out the doorway. “We’ve got backup.”

  Seconds later, Madame’s welcome face charged through the doorway, with several armed men and women following close behind.

  After a minute of Alec sharing his coordinates, Mercy confirmed she knew the location.

  “We’ll be right there,” Trevor said, pressing the end button.

  He turned to Madame. “Alec found Sam and Billy Joe.”

  “Take my team with you.” She turned her head toward Vielle and with a smile eerily similar to Mercy’s unhinged grin of a moment ago, she said, “Go ahead, I’ll attend to Le Docteur Vielle.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

  — Friedrich Nietzsche

  Mercy stood in the dank basement, the staircase covered in blood, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. And then she felt Trevor tug on her arm and pull her to the side when a couple of agents led Billy Joe up the stairs and through the doorway. His shaking hands covered his eyes, a sharp object protruding from his neck, as he begged for medical attention.

  She diverted her attention to Sam’s body with intermittent splotches of blood dotting his back and pooling beneath him.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Alec stood with his hands on his hips. “When I first heard Billy Joe and came down the steps, I almost tripped on a thin wire that was tied to each board holding up the handrail near the bottom step. Apparently, Sam wasn’t so lucky. He fell face forward onto another board attached to the floor with a number of nails hammered into it.”

  He turned toward what looked to be a doorway into a storage room with a workbench and picked up a hammer drill, silently communicating how the board covered in spiked nails was created. Then, he pulled on a string that illuminated the single bulb hanging from the inside ceiling and kicked at what looked to be pieces of… a piano?

  “The wire near the bottom step came from the remnants of this old piano,” Al
ec continued.

  Mercy glanced up at Trevor. “You don’t think Nate and Cara did this?”

  Trevor shook his head in disbelief. “If you would have asked me prior to seeing this, no.”

  Mercy had seen some pretty awful things, had only recently nearly executed her own number of atrocities, but somehow, thinking about Cara and Nate being pushed to such limits was so much more disturbing.

  They weren’t used to being put into these types of dangerous situations and had to be terrified. Who knew the extent of psychological damage that could be caused from going through something like this?

  And then it hit her as she grabbed Trevor’s arm. “They must be hiding.” She turned to Alec. “Have you looked for them?”

  “I was, until I heard Billy Joe and followed the screams. That’s when I found the door at the top of the staircase bolted shut with a streak of blood running down it, making sure whoever was down here, couldn’t get out.”

  Mercy ran both hands through her hair. “Let’s each take a section of the compound and start looking for them.”

  Cara was impressed.

  Nate had located his old sleeping quarters where he had hidden a number of food items for emergency situations—or for when Haley and Marleigh would wake up hungry in the middle of the night.

  He’d probably never imagined he would need to retrieve the nonperishable food months after escaping.

  Sitting on the blanket Nate had also confiscated from his room was a jar of peanut butter, a sleeve of crackers, and a bag of trail mix.

  Cara ate another cracker covered with peanut butter, perfectly curated by Nate himself. She pulled another cracker from the sleeve, noticing his neck had started to bruise.

  “So where are we exactly?” she asked, looking around.

  “We’re in a secret room within a room. This is where Loren had networked, stacked, and hid an entire rack of computers that housed all of the evidence against Halstead and his various unscrupulous counterparts.”

  “Where are the computers?”

  “Likely seized by the FBI.”

  “And you knew about all this?”

  “I didn’t know about it until I found schematics and network diagrams showing where this room could be found and what data it contained, in Trevor’s old case files. He failed to encrypt properly.”

  “How did Loren even know how to do all that?”

  “She’s an acquired savant. For some of us, it’s like we’ve opened up a whole world of knowledge that was in our brains all along, and just waiting for us to unlock it and let out.”

  Cara considered that, and had to agree for one day she’d woken up after surgery and knew what she needed to do musically and artistically. Of course, the tutors helped her discover new musical mediums and put a language to what she was imagining, but from that first day when she was in recovery, she could hear all these musical notes in her head and suddenly found she preferred to hum than to wander in mute space and time.

  While her sisters were off committing crimes.

  Her sisters had sacrificed so much for her.

  “Do you think that man is dead?” she asked, nibbling on her cracker. “The one I sprayed with the bug spray?”

  Nate shook his head. “He’s not dead, but… he might be blind.”

  “Shouldn’t I feel some way about that?”

  “No more than I feel about what I did to Sam.”

  “My sisters did a lot of bad things. But it was because they had no choice.”

  “Oh, they had choices,” Nate said, opening the bag of trail mix. “They chose to do everything they could to preserve what little family they had left.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it. Both Loren and Mercy could’ve found a way to sever ties with Halstead. To a degree, that was always an option. But Halstead leveraged the one thing he knew would tie them to him indefinitely. He threatened them with you.”

  “With me?”

  “Yeah, he told them if they didn’t do what they were told, you’d be the one to suffer the consequences.”

  “How is it that you always seem to know more than I do about my own life?” Cara asked, starting to get heated. “Did Mercy or Madame tell you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “I know because Halstead and that dipshit lackey of his, Bancroft, did the same thing to me.”

  “They threatened to hurt Marleigh and Haley if you didn’t do… what?”

  “Well, I wasn’t traveling internationally executing heists. I guess you could say I was being groomed. I had just started working with tutors and combat trainers when you and your sisters escaped the Center.”

  “Did you ever… refuse?”

  “Only once,” he said, staring at his cracker intently as if having difficulty revisiting the memory.

  “What did they do?”

  He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. “They said that if I wasn’t willing to provide them a return on their investment, then they’d make it so Marleigh and Haley did.” He hesitated and crossed his arms. “And then they showed me pictures and videos of you and Mercy during your first brain surgeries. At the time, I didn’t know who was in the pictures. Wasn’t even sure they were real. I thought they might’ve been photoshopped. But I guess I was unwilling to take the chance they weren’t.”

  Cara felt like her heart had stopped beating.

  How could grown men do this to kids?

  What was the matter with people?

  And Nate handled everything with Yoda-level wisdom and patience. Heck, he was more mature than the majority of the boys in her school’s senior class.

  Sometimes she would forget that Nate wasn’t a forty-year-old man, considering how smart, kind, and responsible he was. But in reality, Nate was just a kid. A kid who had seen some terrible things.

  Which made him wise and kind way beyond his years.

  Just like her sisters.

  Now she felt nothing but shame at how angry she had been with them, and how she had felt sorry for herself, and her childish feelings of inadequacy. If not for her sisters she, more than likely, would’ve suffered more experimental surgeries. Probably would’ve never made it to Wilder. And even though others might have considered her life idyllic as the world-renowned Charlotte Halstead, it was nothing compared to living in the small town of Wilder with her sisters and Madame.

  She owed Mercy and Loren nothing less than a lifelong debt of gratitude. And she prayed she’d make it out of here alive to make it up to them.

  Nate gathered the leftover items from their impromptu picnic.

  Always taking care of things.

  She held little doubt that one day, he would grow up to be a really good man.

  “You’re… a good person, Nate.”

  His face bloomed red as he became uncharacteristically distressed by the compliment.

  “Well, since we’re having a ‘moment,’” he said, hooking two fingers in the air. “Thank you for not running when I told you to and saving my life.”

  “Oh, that,” she said, batting her eyes dramatically. “It was nothing.”

  He grew somber, picking at the frayed edges of one of the blankets he sat on. “You know, I didn’t mean all that business about you not being smart. I was just trying to get you all riled up so you wouldn’t be so scared.”

  She nudged his shoulder. “I picked up on that.”

  Pulling the blanket around her shoulders, she asked, “How long do you think we should stay in here?”

  “Not sure. I think the only one left is Dr. Vielle. Unless this Amado person has arrived. There’s no telling how many men he brought with him.”

  “We could just stay in here.”

  Nate shook his head, “No, we’re going to have leave eventually.”

  Despite being relatively safer, Cara was starting to feel claustrophobic in the small room, although it was really no smaller than their sleeping quarters from when they lived in the Center.

  “Based on your
predictions,” she said, plumping her pillow and leaning against it, “shouldn’t Mercy be here by now?”

  Nate nodded. “I would have thought so. But maybe Amado got here first?”

  Nate pulled out another blanket and handed her a pillow he had thrown to the side. “Get some sleep, and in a few hours, I’ll do some reconnaissance. Figure out the lay of the land.”

  “No, neither one of us should go anywhere alone. We’ll both get a couple hours of sleep and check things out together.” And then, to seal the deal knowing his triggers, she went on, “I’m afraid to be in this room all alone.”

  “Okay, whichever one of us wakes up first will wake the other, and we’ll go together.”

  “Deal,” Cara yawned and crawled deeper under the blankets, trying not to think about the closet-like dimensions of the room and what was happening on the other side of the hidden door.

  Madame was pleased.

  Her team had provided an in-depth update as to what had been found in the basement at a remote section of the compound. With both Amado and Billy Joe out of the equation, everything was coming together. One might even say, coming to an end.

  Now if they could only find Cara and Nate.

  They might have fled the compound altogether. But if that were the case, there was no doubt they would find a way to get word to somebody.

  No, they had to be hiding inside the Center, after killing Sam and potentially blinding the notorious Billy Joe Vieja.

  Ironic how a criminal of his magnitude was ultimately taken down by a tween and a teenager with a woodworking tool and a can of bug spray. And she would ensure the underworld was fully apprised of the details—maybe with a few embellishments, save their identities, of course. Although, according to her team’s update, it didn’t appear that any such embellishments were necessary.

  She did however fear for Cara’s and Nate’s mental stability after having killed the father of a friend.

  Nate wasn’t as close to Samantha and her father as Cara. But he was just a boy, having to defend himself against a drug-altered monster and a seasoned criminal.