“Fine,” Neil said, though clearly it was not fine. He worked his siphon hose into the tank until it struck bottom. Then, after taking a few deep breaths he began to suck. There was a moment when he pulled enough fluid into the hose to create a touch of suction, but then he hit nasty fuel-tasting air and wound up with nothing more than a bad taste in his mouth. He stood bent over at the waist, spitting onto the street.
“You see?” Neil said, wiping his lips and looking more pale than usual. “These cars have all been siphoned to the point where there’s too little to bring up.”
“Maybe we try next town,” Nico said. He pointed at a distant water tower. “Is that direction, three miles according to map.”
Sadie heaved herself up. The euphoric sensation she had experienced when she had first woken up was long gone. Still, she vowed not to slow the group down.
That would be Jillybean’s job. The group shouldered their packs and started walking, all save the little girl. She raised her hand, and when that went unnoticed she called, “Mister Neil?”
A weary sigh escaped him and he stopped. He didn’t turn around. Sadie saw Jillybean’s pursed lips and said, “Maybe Ipes has an idea.” This caused everyone to turn expectantly, but Jillybean dashed their hopes.
“No, Ipes is being a butt,” she said. “He says he won’t help because he doesn’t want me to go to New Eden. But I have a question. You say there’s too little gas to suck up. How much is too little?”
Neil rubbed his head, clearly feeling the effects of the fumes he had breathed in. “A few ounces, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter because, like I already said, we can’t get it up.”
“What about getting it down?” She squatted on her haunches and pointed under the vehicle at the gas tank. “I had a fish tank once with goldfish but it gotted a leak and all the water came out and the goldfish died, which was very sad and I cried, but if we can make a hole in the tank on purpose we can get the gas.”
Without saying a word, Neil rushed back to the Beetle and stared at the tank. “I need a rock! Or a brick.” As Nico ran for a rock, Neil pulled out a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and worked the inch long screw driver from where it sat snuggly in with the other tools.
When he had his rock, he sat down cross-legged as close to the back of the beetle as he could and then hammered the screw driver into the tank. It took a dozen strikes from the rock before he got through the metal but, when he did, gasoline began pouring out over his hands. He jabbed his thumb onto the hole and cried: “I need something! A pan or a pot or anything to catch this.” Even with the spilled amount they collected close to half a gallon.
“It’s not that much,” Jillybean said as Neil began to laugh out loud.
He grinned at her. “You’re right, but look at all these cars.” He waved his hand. They were at the edge of the town and still there were thirty-two cars in view. “I think you solved our fuel problem, Jillybean.”
Chapter 18
Sarah Rivers
Easton, Maryland
Inwardly she swore at her own stupidity. First, she had allowed this guy to sneak up on her and then, by flinching, she probably gave away the fact that she knew the name Sadie. Lying in any manner wasn’t something she was good at, and now lives depended on it. She would have to convince this evil beast of a man that not only did he have the wrong person, but that he wasn’t even close.
“How’d you know it was me?” she asked, making sure to keep her face turned away. She also tried to add a little toughness to her voice, something the four shots of vodka helped with. “You a mind reader?”
“Yeah, I’m a mind reader. I know when people lie. It’s a gift.” He reached around and took the rifle from her hands; she didn’t struggle. He had her at too much of a disadvantage. She would struggle eventually, that she promised herself, but only when the time was ripe.
“So how’d you know it was me?” she asked. “You didn’t answer my question.”
He turned the barstool so that she faced him, however she kept her chin down so that he couldn’t get a good look at her face. “Lucky I guess,” he answered. “I knew it was you on the highway. You’re not exactly traveling incognito. Though with all this crap on you it wasn’t easy. What is this, soot? Is that how you got away last night? Were you in that burned up house?”
“Yep,” she answered. “You were right above me and you didn’t even know. Not much of a mind reader if you ask me. Just like now. You think you got me, but you don’t got squat. I don’t have anything left, since you took it all already. Sorry to break it to you, chum.” For some reason, using the silly word “chum” threw off her train of thought. It felt like a mistake, however the mistake came a second later when she glanced up at the bounty hunter.
“Stop playing games. You know why…” He stopped in midsentence when Sarah lifted her chin. Even with her face a filthy mess, it was obvious she wasn’t seventeen years old. “What the…Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Sadie if it will get all my stuff back.”
The bounty hunter was in his cammo which showed nothing of him save for his furious grey eyes. He grabbed her by the tattered shawl and lifted her off the barstool with one hand. Behind her the railing seemed no more substantial that a pile of kindling.
“I don’t think you understand what’s going on here,” he said through gritted teeth. “I don’t care if you’re alive in five minutes. I really don’t. In fact, I’m thinking about pitching you right off this tower.”
He had her leaning well over the railing now, her ass resting only on air. “Please...please don’t,” she begged. Her tone was craven; his response was silence, yet somehow through it he conveyed his contempt. “Please, why? Why would you do that to me?” she asked. The terror in her voice wasn’t fake and neither was the sincerity in her question. He was a bounty hunter and a thief. Why would he kill when he didn’t have to?
“Because I don’t have time for games,” he said. “Tell me who the fuck you are or…” The “or” was obvious. He leaned her so far back that she couldn’t do anything but grab his arm frantically.
She blurted out the first name that came to mind: “I’m Brit. My name is Brit. I don’t know any Sadie! Please let me up. Please!”
Had they been sitting, calmly, eye-to-eye Sarah would never have been able to pull off the lie. Dangled off the edge of a building, her fear overrode everything but the lie. She knew she would either be Brit or she would die.
The bounty hunter didn’t pull her back up, not yet. “And what the fuck is all this? What’s with the gun and the fire?”
Lying about her name had been easy, since her daughter had been on her mind for weeks, but trying to come up with a lie about why she was in a clock tower with a high powered rifle was impossible. Without any choice she tried the truth.
“It was for you,” she cried. “You took everything from me. I was trying to get it back.”
“By setting a trap?” he asked, calmer. Traps and assassinations were things he seemed to understand. He pulled her back up so that the rail was once again shoved into the small of her back.
“Yes,” she admitted. “I wanted to kill you, alright? You left me with nothing. What kind of asshole does that to a woman?”
His grip had been relaxing, and his eyes softening as her motivations came clearer, but something happened when she said the word woman. His suspicion flared; she saw it clearly in his eyes.
Without explanation, he pushed her to her knees and then pulled out his canteen. He began pouring water all over her face and in her hair. She spluttered and coughed, and tried to blink the soot/water combination out of her blue eyes. As she did, he stared intently at her. He even pushed her head this way and that, looking for something.
“What is it?” she asked. “What are you doing?” Of course she knew. If he knew the name Sadie, then he probably knew the name Sarah Rivers.
“Where are you from?” he demanded. Now he held her by her butched haircut in such a tight grip that she
could barely blink.
Would it be smart to tell the truth? Did he know where Sarah Rivers was from? Or was he simply looking to see if she would lie. Again, eye-to-eye with this cold, reptile of a human she didn’t think she could pull off a lie. Besides there were a lot of people from Iowa, at least there used to be.
“Iowa,” she admitted after what she thought was only a minor pause.
His eyes went to slits, showing only a gleam of grey. “Where in Iowa?”
This time the pause was so long it was uncomfortable. “Danville,” she answered. She had wanted to lie, however with him staring so hard, the names of other towns simply vanished from her memory. Now, somehow, his stare intensified. It was as though he was boring into her skull with his eyes to discover the truth.
“Really, I’m from Danville,” she said. Was she digging her own grave by answering truthfully? It was true, he might really know Sarah Rivers was from Danville. It wasn’t like she had kept her home town a secret from anyone.
In her mind she went down the list of people who had known she was from Danville. One name stood out from all the rest: Colonel Williams. Would he have told anyone something so insignificant? If he had, it would’ve been only in passing, after all, he found her insignificant, something to be used and thrown away. Something with no more value or use than the butt of a cigarette. She was nothing to him so why would he waste even a thought on her?
With her mind on the colonel, the bounty hunter didn’t see what he was looking for in her eyes. She didn’t notice. Goosebumps ran down her arms as they always did when Williams came to mind.
Then she jumped with a cry. The hunter had a hand on her left breast. He cupped it roughly and without any pretence toward subtlety, he then slid the hand beneath her armpit and then down her side. Once there, it went across her waist.
Only when he found her hunting knife did she understand he was frisking her and not trying anything more. She breathed a sigh of relief until he tossed the knife over the railing. “Hey! That was mine.” His only response was to turn her around and kick her legs wide. Panic at the prospect of being raped again made her breath very light in her throat. She looked over her shoulder at him. “D-don’t do anything to me, ok?” It came out as a whisper.
Again, he didn’t answer. His hands were wide and rough as boards. They slid over every inch of her body, including right up between her legs, which elicited a whimper of fear that embarrassed her. For the last month she had been working a great hatred inside of her, one that would allow her to kill without a qualm, one that was supposed to overcome such a trifling thing as fear, but here she was whimpering!
The bounty hunter didn’t care one way or the other. He shoved her to her knees and then picked up the pack she had set aside. After a second of digging, he found the box of ammo for the rifle. It went into a hidden pocket beneath his camouflaged outfit with a brassy jingle.
“No…no I need those,” she said, the whimper still very apparent.
“So do I.”
He stole the round she had chambered in the rifle as well. She watched this with her head shaking back and forth in denial. “But you’ll leave me defenseless. You can’t do that.”
“I could kill you,” he answered in a quiet voice. “Do you want me to do that? It might solve a lot of your problems.”
“No, but…”
Just then he took out a clear plastic zip-tie, the kind police officers sometimes used in lieu of handcuffs. She began to stammer, “Ok, ok. You don’t need those. I’ll—I’ll be good.”
She didn’t know what good entailed she only knew that she was utterly powerless compared to this sociopath and that she was totally freaked out by the way he alternated between seething anger and cold resolution. Nothing she said mattered to the man. He yanked her to her feet and stuck her hand hands high up the middle of her back and tied them there. He then pushed her down to her knees again and squatted right in front of her.
“I’m looking for a girl named Sadie. She looks like you but with dark eyes and she’s much younger. Have you seen her?” Sarah didn’t trust her mouth to lie properly so she shook her head. “What about a Russian man? Tall, blonde, speaks with an accent?” Again a head shake. The hunter started to get mad. “Have you see anyone in the last few weeks?”
“No, no one,” she said a little too quickly. His eyes again peered hard at her and she felt her lip begin to quiver. “I mean yes, but I wasn’t thinking you meant these people.”
“Who do mean?”
“There wasn’t a girl. I saw two people and they were both men.” She paused thinking he would say something to that, but he only continued to evaluate her in nerve-wracking silence. She decided to go on. “There was a guy up the road, closer to Philly, only he was dead. He wasn’t a zombie. I mean he had killed himself.”
“What did he look like? Was he white? Black? Asian? What color were his eyes?”
“Um,” Sarah said, picturing the corpse as it dangled from the tree branch. “He was white I think. White or Asian. It was hard to tell because he’d been dead for a couple of days. He had dark hair, but I didn’t look to close at his face. Maybe if you…”
“Forget about him,” the man said, cutting her off. “What about the second guy?”
“He lives here in this town. He thinks he’s the mayor.” She tried to picture the crazy man; in her mind he was rather formless and faceless. Sarah had never liked crazy people. The crazier one was, the less likely she would look him the face. “I don’t know what he looks like. Except he’s white. I know that because…”
She broke off remembering her first conversation with the bum. She had very clearly given her name out, and not just once. He had repeated it to her: …there isn’t anybody named Sarah Rivers in Easton. What if he remembered the conversation? Or at least the name? What if it came up when the bounty hunter went to see him?
“Because why?” the hunter asked. He spoke so low that she had to lean in to hear, which made it feel like she was sticking her neck out for him to hack it off.
“He—he had rags and they moved a little so that I could see his face. But he really was a bum; he smelled like urine and everything.” The hunter’s eyes perked up at the word urine as if it rang false, which it might have with how she looked and had acted. Sarah tried to bury it. “I told him I was the Queen of England and he believed me that’s how nuts he is. You aren’t going to hurt him, are you? He really is just harmless.”
“You should be more worried about yourself.”
“I am,” she insisted. “That’s why I’m being so cooperative. You gotta let me go. You can have the bullets but please don’t leave me tied up.”
“You get tied up or dead. Those are your choices.”
“Tied up,” she said, dropping her chin. “Will you come back later after you talk to the bum? You’ll see I wasn’t lying. That should be worth something, right? Don’t you think? Maybe untie me then?” This was the best acting she had done so far. She didn’t want him to come back, ever. Not when she was unarmed and most certainly not when she was tied up.
“Like I said, tied up or dead, and that’s me being generous. After all you were up here with the idea of killing me. I normally don’t let that sort of thing pass so lightly.”
“Yeah, that was a mistake,” Sarah agreed. She let her body slump so that she had an excuse not to look at the bounty hunter anymore. “Sorry about that. You know I won’t do it...” In the middle of her sentence he got up and left, trotting down the stairs lightly.
When his footsteps faded, Sarah growled, “Fuck you.” A few seconds of grunting later she managed to get her feet under her body and push herself up. “Maybe it’s fuck me,” she said. Just standing up had been a chore and now that she was up she glanced down at her rifle, axe, and pack, wondering how the hell she was going pick all that stuff up with her hands tied behind her back.
Feeling like some sort of giant insect she lowered herself back down to her knees in front of her backpack and grabbed
one of the shoulder straps between her teeth. Gently, she lifted it so that it arced up away from the pack and then, with a squirming motion, stuck her head under the strap and sat up again.
Like a feed-bag the pack hung from her neck, the weight of it on her breasts made her lean slightly forward. “Well, this sucks,” she whispered. Where the pack sat on her was ridiculous; she couldn’t see a thing and it was as uncomfortable as hell. Her remedy, swinging her body out and to the side in order to shift the pack behind her, failed miserably.
Even when she was able to get the pack behind her, its full weight sat directly on her throat, choking her and worse, when she bent toward the hand axe and the rifle, the bag swung back wasting her efforts and completely obscuring her view. In order to see anything, she had to look over her shoulder rather than straight on. Whichever way she looked at it, she realized that, with her hands tied, she could only take one of the two.
The idea of leaving even a single item behind was gut-wrenching and yet a gun without bullets was useless. She went for the axe in about as awkward a manner as she could fathom—she basically had to lie on it in order get her hands within reach. Then came another grunting, swear-ridden attempt at standing.
She had just lost five minutes. Those were precious minutes. With all his ravings, the mayor would be found quickly by the bounty hunter. Even quicker he would talk. In her gut, Sarah knew the mayor of Easton would spill everything he knew, probably without even the threat of pain. The man couldn’t seem to keep anything inside and although he didn’t know much, what he did know was poison.
The bounty hunter would be back and this time he’d be far more thorough with Sarah, he’d take his time and there’d be blood and tears. And Sarah had just lost five minutes. She didn’t have many left.
Chapter 19
Sarah Rivers
Easton, Maryland
Compared to just standing up, the stairs were easy to handle, and yet she couldn’t speed down them with the backpack hanging just below her chin. It was in a side-stepping, tentative manner that she descended; she lost another three minutes getting to the main floor. Two more were spent getting outside where the afternoon was beginning to seem dim compared to the fire across the street. The heat of it made her blink and turn her head.
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