by Tia Archer
My gut churned and I felt sick at the thought of me going free because Ben would be caught. He and his father were completely innocent of any crime, and didn’t deserve to be in the Facility. Hell, none of the vampires deserved to be there. The things I’d seen General Edwards and the guards doing to the inmates was inexcusable, and the more I thought about it, the more I became certain that the testing Edwards had wanted me to do would only lead to worse things for the vampires. The last thing I wanted to do now was to be responsible for creating more weapons and methods of torture to use against them.
Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Ben had used me to get out of the Facility. It was too hard to know if he’d actually used his powers on me or not. I felt an incredible connection to him, and even in that horrible moment I wanted him to be there with me, but how was I supposed to know that I wasn’t still under his thrall somehow?
The door banged open and Agent Colleridge barged back into the room. Two men in guard uniforms followed him and took up position on either side of me. One held my arms and yanked me up out of my chair while the other undid the lock on the chain attaching my wrist cuffs to the table. My bicep hurt where he grabbed me, his fingers digging into my flesh.
“What’s going on?” I asked, frantic. “What happened to Ben?”
“Jennifer Hastings, you’re under arrest in accordance with the Vampire Indictment Act Section 8b: assisting in the escape of a vampire. You are not required to acknowledge these charges, as you will be held without trial at a private government facility, and you are hereby no longer entitled to any rights as a United States citizen.”
“No, you can’t do this to me!” I shouted, trying to pull away from the guards that held me. “I didn’t do anything wrong! I told you what you wanted to know!”
“Only one boat left in the past 24 hours and our team searched the boat in question and found no signs of the escaped vampires. Your information was useless to us, and my superiors believe that you’re still working with the vampires in an attempt to lead us away from their trail. We don’t look kindly upon those who try to deceive us, as I’m sure you’ll grow to understand in the coming years.”
“Wait,” I said before he turned to leave. “Don’t I get a phone call or a lawyer?”
Agent Colleridge laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous, Jenny. You’re not in a movie, and no lawyer is going to come save you from the mistakes you’ve made. Your life as you know it, is over.”
Chapter2
They threw me back in my cell and left me alone. I lay down and closed my eyes. It could have been the middle of the day for all I knew, but I was exhausted and almost immediately fell into a deep sleep. My mind drifted for a while, spinning from one hazy dream sequence to another while it tried to deal with the stress and anxiety of the last couple of days, but then things clarified in a way that felt immediately familiar. I could recognize these moments easily now, and as my dream took on the crisp detail that made it almost indistinguishable from reality, I knew Ben was there with me.
At first, I was in my prison cell, as though I’d sat up and woken from sleep. It was so vivid a dream that I wondered if perhaps I hadn’t actually woken up, when the edges of my vision faded to an inky blackness that swallowed everything before me. I stood up and felt my way around the cell, hands reaching out in the pitch black trying to find the door.
What I found was a body. I couldn’t tell you how I knew it was him, but right away I knew it was Ben. I slipped my hands around his torso and hugged him close, nestling my face into his neck while he wrapped his arms around me. I tried to talk to him, to tell him what I’d done, but no words escaped my lips. I couldn’t make a sound.
The floor rumbled and shook, as though bombs were going off outside the prison, or like an earthquake was rumbling beneath our feet.
“Hold on, Jen,” he whispered in my ear. “Hold on tight.”
Squeezing tighter, I waited for the shaking to pass, and tried to speak again. No sound came out, and I felt Ben pulling away from me. Our hands slipped past each other, and I heard him say it again just as my fingertips danced past his in the darkness. “Hold on tight, Jen. Hold on tight.”
The darkness receded and I was left alone in my cell. The dream went sideways from there, taking on the weird difficult to understand shapelessness that dreams often do, and I can’t remember anything from that night other than Ben’s voice telling me to hold on in the darkness. I had no idea what it meant, but when I woke up sweating and panting in my prison cot, I was flooded with regret for telling Agent Colleridge what I had. I couldn’t believe that Ben had simply used me and run away. Like other times when Ben had visited me in my sleep, this dream was impossible to understand out of context, but I was beginning to learn that I’d recognize the moment when it came to me.
If Ben was telling me to hold on, then hold on was what I’d do. I didn’t know how, and I didn’t know when, but I could feel it in my heart that Ben was not going to leave me like this.
A slot on the heavy metal door of my cell slid open and a tray of food slid through. While technically calling it food was probably true, it tasted more like recycled newspapers than anything else. The grayish mush was watery and disgusting, but my body felt emptied out after not eating since they’d first put me in here, and I forced myself to choke it down. The only benefit of the meal was that the guard had called out “lunch” when he’d passed it through the slot, so at least I knew roughly what time of day it was.
After washing down my meal with the carton of warm milk they’d provided, I sat back down on the bed and looked at my surroundings. The cell was about five feet by eight feet, with my cot, the toilet, and an industrial metal sink taking up most of the space. I had nothing to read, and nothing to do, so I sat there wondering if this was what I’d have to look forward to for the rest of my life.
I’d always been a bit of a loner, but at least before I’d had my work to keep me busy. It wasn’t so much the idea of being stuck in that cell with no company that bothered me, but the idea of not having anything to do was almost too much to bear. I cried for a good long time, until finally I felt I had nothing left in me to cry out. My eyes were raw and puffy, and my nose hurt from all the sniffling and wiping at it with the thin and scratchy toilet paper I’d been provided. There was no way I’d be able to do it. I had to find a way to get out of here. There had to be someone I could talk to.
In an effort to calm myself down, I stood at the sink and splashed water in my face. I looked at my reflection in the polished metal plate that served as a mirror, and I almost burst into tears again. I didn’t belong in a prison cell. I was a doctor, and a damn good one. It seemed like a complete injustice to lock me away for what I’d done, but hadn’t I known the risks before helping Ben? That was the real truth of it. I’d risked everything to help him free himself and his father, and now I was locked up while they were out there. I had risked everything for the prospect of love, as silly as it sounds.
The door to my cell opened behind me, and I whirled around to see who was there. Two guards stepped in and grabbed me, yanking me out into the hallway to face Agent Colleridge.
“You’re to be transferred to a black site for permanent holding,” he said in a lazy monotone, as though reading a take out menu. “Any attempt to resist or disobey the officers overseeing the transportation will be met with with appropriate force.”
He stepped in to attach handcuffs to my wrists, and there was a soft rustling sound behind my head a second before the world went dark. One of the guards had put a cloth bag over my head, and I sucked in air, feeling claustrophobic and like I couldn’t breathe. I forced myself to calm down and slow my breathing, and I found that air traveled through the fine mesh fabric with little trouble.
He ordered the men to take me to the van, and although I had no idea where they were taking me, I knew it was no place I wanted to be. There was nothing I could do though, and I didn’t resist when they led me through the prison and past a series of
checkpoints. I heard them explain that they were removing me for transport, but they didn’t say anything else to give me a clue of where I might be headed.
“Step up,” said a guard, prodding me in the back.
I lifted my leg and climbed up into something that sagged just slightly as I put my weight on it. When I was inside, the guard pushed me down onto a hard wooden bench, and I heard the sound of a door close off to one side. I must be in the van, I thought. There was a clinking of chains, and a yank on my hands that meant I was being locked into the vehicle. I’d seen these setups during my training when I’d had to learn about the prisoner intake process. Prisoners were shackled hands and feet, and then those cuffs were chained to the transfer van’s floor. I had almost no freedom of movement, and no idea how many guards or other prisoners were even in the back of the van with me.
The van rumbled to life and I felt it pull out of the prison loading bay. It was nauseating being inside the hood while the van accelerated and made a sharp turn that made me slide on the bench until my chains caught me. I braced my feet a little better and tried to breathe deeply.
“Can I get this hood off? I think I might puke in here.”
“The prisoner will remain quiet at all times,” said the stern voice of the guard. “No exceptions.”
Knowing when to follow orders, I shut right up and focused on not bringing the disgusting gruel of my lunch back up inside my hood. I had no idea how far we were going, and the last thing I wanted was to spend hours in the back of a van covered in my own vomit.
It was impossible to tell time from the back of the van, and I didn’t dare ask how long it had been. Bile rose in my throat with each swaying turn of the van as it smashed up and down on its suspension. I couldn’t remember ever having been so carsick before, and when the van started to vibrate and shake like we were driving over a rough country road, I was choking down vomit with every jarring bump.
A muffled shout came from the front of the van, and I heard the guards in the back with me murmur something quietly to themselves. The van lurched to one side and then back again, almost pitching me forward off the bench and onto the floor. If it hadn’t been for the chains, I would have gone flying for sure.
The van careened to one side again, and it felt like we were driving on a rough unfinished shoulder. The vehicle bounced violently, and in the darkness of my hood I remembered the words Ben had said to me in my dream.
“Hold on, Jen. Hold on tight.”
Figuring now was as good a time as any to take his advice, I pulled up the slack in my chains and braced my feet hard against the floor until my back was levered into the wall of the van. I held on as tight as I could, straining against the point where the chains were anchored. There was a loud bang and a jolt that shot through the hull of the van, but still I held on tight.
For a brief moment, there was complete silence and stillness. Not even the soft sound of rubber running on pavement hummed through the van, and my stomach flip-flopped even harder as I realized we were spinning through the air. I braced myself as hard as I could, and then the van slammed back into the ground so hard that my teeth clacked down hard against each other, narrowly missing my tongue in the process. My head banged hard against the metal interior of the van, and I fought to keep from losing consciousness.
We bounced hard and started to roll, or at least that’s what I thought was happening. In the darkness of the hood, it was impossible to tell what was going on, but when the movement stopped, I was pretty sure I was lying on my back with my feet in the air.
Dull pops of gunfire sounded from outside the van, and I wriggled my body trying to get the hood off of myself. Patterns of light swirled at the edge of my vision and I knew I was seconds away from blacking out. I heard the creak of the van door opening and there was a glimmer of daylight shining through my hood.
But then, everything went dark...
Chapter3
The air smelled of hay, dirt, and animals when I finally came to. My head throbbed violently, and my vision was blurry and unsteady, making it difficult for me to focus on anything but the intense urge to vomit. I probed gently around the back of my head, feeling a massive swollen contusion that reminded me of how I’d ended up here. Wherever here was, exactly.
I remembered my head slamming against the metal van wall as we spun in space in some manner that I didn’t understand. In the darkness of my hood, I’d known only fear and confusion as I was bounced around the back of the transport vehicle. Now I was in a barn of some sort, and my wrists and ankles were free of the restraints that my escorts had used to bind me in place. I looked around myself, taking in the dimly lit wooden walls and piles of hay that surrounded me. I heard muffled voices coming from somewhere nearby, and as my eyes adjusted to the light, I realized that it was Ben and George instead of the guards who’d been riding in the back of the van with me.
“Looks like she’s awake,” I heard George say.
Ben walked over and crouched beside me. He ran his hand carefully over my hair, avoiding the tender spot where I’d banged it. “How are you feeling?”
“I feel awful, but I think I’m okay. What exactly happened out there?”
“We rigged a large tree to fall as a roadblock and forced the transport van to swerve around it onto the rough shoulder. While it was trying to regain the road, we came out from a concealed side road and slammed into it in a car we stole last night. After that, it was pretty easy to take out the guards to get to you.”
“You… you came into my dream to warn me, didn’t you? You told me to hold on tight.”
“I did.” Ben said as helped me sit upright. “It’s not the most reliable method of communication, and I’ve yet to be able to fully master it, but I’d hoped you would understand the message clearly enough. As you might recall, it’s not the first time I’ve created a psychic link to your dreams.”
“I could never be sure it was really you controlling those moments,” I said. It didn’t seem possible, but then again, vampires were by their nature impossible beings made real.
George cracked the cap on a bottle of water and handed it down to me. As a doctor, I knew I should have sipped it slowly and taken it easy, but I was so thirsty that I upended the bottle and drank greedily, water dripping out and running down my chin. I regretted it almost immediately, my stomach contracting with violent cramps and threatening to revolt by letting loose with the vomit I’d fought so hard to keep down in the van.
“Easy now,” said Ben. He dabbed at my chin with his sleeve. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
“I’d rather be sitting here with a headache than locked up in that cell, or worse, in whatever black site they were taking me to.”
“We knew we had to get to you before they transferred you,” said George. “If they’d taken you to one of their facilities, it would have taken us years to find you.”
“I’m so sorry this happened to you,” said Ben. “I should never have involved you in this mess. I should have found a better way to escape without dragging you into our problems.”
“We all made our own choices,” I replied. “What’s done is done. Besides, I couldn’t stand by after learning what was really going on in the Facility. That place should be shut down for good, and I couldn’t just let you two rot there while I moved on and tried to ignore the problem.”
“Well I for one am glad you decided to take a risk on my Ben here,” said George. “I’d rather be on the run for the rest of my life than spend another day locked up at the mercy of those guards.”
I drank from the bottle again, this time sipping a little more slowly. When the bottle was empty, I passed it back to George and happily accepted another. “There’s one thing that’s still bothering me though. Why take Trevor King with you? He’s probably the only one who deserves the hell that is Facility 47, so why did you free him?”
Ben shook his head. “That should never have happened. It was out of our control, and I swear to you that I never intended to let hi
m leave the Facility grounds alive. He’s more powerful than I ever anticipated, even on the whiteblood, and he unfortunately got the best of us and escaped.”
“So you didn’t mean to bring him with you?”
“Not for a second,” said George. “I can tell you honestly that Ben has been quite upset about the matter. If it hadn’t been for us having to come rescue you, we’d probably be tracking Trevor King down right now.”
“So is that what we’re going to do?”
They both looked at me with serious expressions, and I understood that I was what they’d been discussing when I woke up. Clearly I was a liability to them.
“It’s too dangerous,” said Ben. “You’re a fugitive from your own government now, so we can’t risk having you out in public. All of us need to get out of here to find some place safe, and we’ll help you get to wherever you need to go.”
“But not with you? I’m just supposed to disappear to some country with a non-extradition treaty while you two bug out to Bermuda?”
“Please, it’s not like that Jen. They’ll be looking for you, but not in the same way they’ll be after us. We’re not only fugitives from the law, but we’re vampires as well. It’s for your own good.”
I stood up with the help of the hay bales around me and brushed myself off. I knew I looked like a mess and felt like I’d probably fall over at any second, but I stared at them as defiantly as I could. “I think I’ve earned the right to make my own decisions about what’s best for me. I have no family, no friends, and nowhere to go. The least you could do is take me with you to whatever safe haven you’ve arranged for yourselves.”