Red Queen

by Christopher Pike

  Steadily, she moved the Taser toward my head, the burning green light glowing in her cold green eyes. Again I tried to strike but my hand caught the sparks and an unforgiving current shot up my arm and into my brain.

  For an instant, I felt as if my mind was on fire.

  Then everything went black.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I AWOKE IN THE DARK AND COLD.

  I was lying on the floor. I felt the ice with my fingertips and the skin on the back of my skull before I opened my eyes. After the oppressive heat of Las Vegas, cold was the last thing I expected. But this freeze went deeper than a change in the weather. I knew in an instant it could be fatal.

  Opening my eyes, I saw a dull orange light shielded by a band of small steel bars. It was high up, on a metal ceiling twenty feet from the frosty floor. It was one of a series of lights; they gave off a faint glow. Nevertheless, there was enough light to see that the room was large and filled with a grisly cargo.

  I was in an industrial-size meat locker. Dozens of rows of beef hung from hundreds of steel hooks. The meat slabs were red and white, thick with muscle and fat. A huge slab hung inches to my left. I touched it; the meat was hard as stone. I knew what that meant. The beef was not being kept cool to sell in the near future. It was frozen solid, which in turn meant the room temperature was below freezing.

  How far below, I didn’t know. I didn’t know how long I had been unconscious, but the fact that I was still alive indicated it had not been long. I was still dressed in my red silk blouse and black skirt, and losing body heat at a terrifying rate. As I briefly fingered the slab of beef, the tips of my fingers got even colder. Soon my hands and feet would be numb. I knew I had to act quickly.

  Sitting up, I groaned in pain. Whoever had handled me while I had been unconscious had been rough. I felt as if my entire spine was bruised. The bastards had probably thrown me from one place to the next, until they had finally dumped me on this floor.

  It made me wonder why they had chosen this place. Obviously they meant to kill me, but they could have done that while I was unconscious. I wondered—it was more of a hope, actually—if this was part of an elaborate ritual. Was it possible someone was trying to scare me into . . . what?

  It didn’t take long to come up with a possibility.

  I stood and called out loudly, hoping someone was listening.

  “Hey! I’m awake! If it’s money you want, you can have it! It’s in a safe at the MGM! The key’s in my purse! Let me go and I’ll take you to it!” Not that I knew where my purse was.

  Silence. No one answered.

  “I’ve got a hundred grand in cash!” I yelled.

  Complete silence. My disappointment was crushing.

  I couldn’t be sure but it felt like no one was there. It was probably their plan—whoever they were—to let the cold do its work and then return later for my corpse. Then they could dump me anywhere: in a shallow grave in the desert; on the street where that bitch had picked me up. I didn’t know if an autopsy would reveal if I had frozen to death, especially if they gave me time to thaw out before disposing of my remains.

  It was hard to think of being a corpse.

  I circled the freezer, searching for a way out. There were no windows, only one exit, located at the far end of the long building. The door was a thick steel monster. I tugged on the handle but I might as well have been yanking on a boulder. It didn’t budge a fraction of an inch.

  There were straps mounted on the back of the door, where I assumed an ax was supposed to be fixed in case of emergency—such as mine—but my captors had been alert enough to remove it. Bless their hearts, they had thought of everything.

  But why? Why me?

  The only one I knew who hated me was Kari, and she had mysteriously appeared at Lake Mead. She had tried to warn me, it was true, that I was in danger, but her warning had been vague and rambling. She’d made no sense. She had been acting like a crazy person and crazy people did crazy things.

  Yet to arrange a kidnapping as elaborate as this was way beyond her scope. She was a blond cheerleader, for God’s sakes. How could she have managed to hire the taxi driver—I had no doubt he was part of the plan—and the woman in the Porsche? Kari might have been pissed I had stolen Jimmy away but she simply wasn’t smart enough to have arranged such a complex scheme.

  Few people on earth could have arranged such a scheme.

  Yet I had met such a man the previous night. The one person in the whole world who had known I was about to run downstairs and catch a cab.

  “Take a taxi, don’t walk. It’s a thousand degrees outside.”

  If I had to create a short list of who was behind my abduction, Russ’s name would be at the top. His sitting at our blackjack table couldn’t have been by chance. It was all so clear now. When I had tried to leave, he had done everything in his power to keep me there. Indeed he had suckered me with the oldest bait in the world. The promise of free money. And he had delivered, he had won a hundred grand for me as casually as I had ordered room service afterward. On top of that, he had won more than six hundred grand for himself.

  But had he really won any money at all?

  No one in the world could beat the casinos. Was it possible the people at the Tropicana were part of this scam? It was difficult to believe. The more people I added to my list, the more complex the crime became. Yet if Russ was acting alone, with only a few hired thugs to help with the dirty work, then I was still left with the mystery of how he had beaten the casinos.

  Hell, I was left with a much more pressing mystery.

  Why he wanted me dead.

  My fingers were freezing, I couldn’t stop shivering, and my feet were going numb. I stomped on the floor to stimulate the circulation, but it only worked as long as I kept it up. The moment I stopped, the cold returned to my toes.

  The numbness in my feet scared me more than my freezing fingers. I knew if my feet failed, I wouldn’t be able to stand, to move around, and that was the only thing that was keeping me warm. I would be forced to sit down, beside the dead steers, and I’d probably black out fast. I wasn’t exactly a candidate for Jenny Craig. I weighed at best a hundred and ten pounds.

  I jumped up and down, sang to myself, tried to keep my spirits up. Most of all, I struggled to figure out a way through that damn door. It was made of steel; I was flesh and blood. Okay, I told myself, I had to level the playing field. How did I do that? I needed tools, steel tools.

  I searched the locker again, more closely this time. The only things that remotely resembled instruments were the hooks holding up the meat. Their points were extremely sharp. I wondered if I could get one free, if I could use it to rip the hinges off the door. It was worth a try. The chances someone would burst through the door in the next thirty minutes and rescue me were pretty remote.

  I thought of Jimmy then. He must be looking for me by now, worried where I had disappeared to. He had probably spoken to Alex and she might have gotten spooked and told him about the man we had met the night before. Yet Alex wasn’t someone who panicked. She might wait before saying a word. Her virtue might be my curse. She might wait to talk about Russ until long after I was dead.

  I ran into problems getting a slab of beef off the hook. I didn’t know where these steers had been raised but there must have been plenty to graze upon. The meat was heavier than I could lift.

  Yet my fear gave me added strength, and trial and error taught me to use more of my leg strength to lift rather than just my arms. I finally managed to free one of the smaller steers and drop it on the floor. Immediately I set to work trying to unscrew its hook.

  Unfortunately, by now I could feel only two fingers on each hand, and none of them was a thumb. I couldn’t get a grip on the hook. Plus the hook had either been screwed in place by a machine or else it was frozen in place. Whatever, it refused to budge.

  “Damn!” I screamed. “God damn you!”

  A minute later I got a brilliant idea.

  I prayed to God
it would work.

  Yeah, so I was a hypocrite, so what. I was dying.

  I had made a mistake removing the meat before the hook. The reason was simple. The hooks were deeply ingrained in the meat. The beef had bulk and weight. If I could get my arms around one of the smaller steers and rotate it, I should be able to multiply my leverage tenfold.

  I had already bumped off the smallest steer. I tackled the next one in size; it was substantially larger. But I managed to get a solid grip on its ribs and hindquarters. Looking up, I assumed the hooks had been screwed in clockwise. I began to twist counterclockwise.

  I talked to the steer as I worked, like it was my partner in escape.

  “Don’t let that hook rip you apart inside. You were born for better things than to help fatten a bunch of fat tourists. Even in death you can save a life. You can be a hero. You and I, we’re a team. Just hold together and help me tear your hook out of the ceiling.”

  Wrestling with the steer, trying to get it to spin around, proved exhausting. I was just about to quit when suddenly the hook screeched. It did more than that; it twisted more than a half circle around. After that it was easy to unscrew the hook, I just had to give the steer a shove every now and then.

  Two minutes later the meat fell to the floor, and the impact helped shake the hook free of the beef. Grabbing it by its pointed end, I hurried to the door, finally ready to try out my plan.

  I discovered I had another problem.

  While struggling with the meat and the hooks, I had managed to keep my fingers warm. But I had forgotten about my feet. I had spent too long standing in basically the same spot.

  Now, I couldn’t feel my toes. Worse, the soles of my feet had gone numb. It was weird, the instant I realized how bad they were, I began to have trouble standing. I shot out an arm to keep from falling. I was tempted to sit down, to rest and rub them and try to restore circulation that way. But it was a fool’s temptation. If I sat down I knew I would never get back up.

  The door waited for me but I had to turn my back on it and try walking away. Jumping was no longer an option, but I felt if I could just keep using my feet, they would return to me. My walk looked more like a side shuffle. I had to keep both hands planted on the wall to maintain my balance.

  I ended up circling the meat locker before I began to feel a tingling in my feet. A second lap restored feeling to my soles and I even began to feel a few of my toes again. At last I was able to stand without having to use the wall for support. I swore to myself that, while working on the door, I would take a break every two minutes and walk around. Stomping my feet was still an effective method of stimulating my circulation, but it had begun to hurt. I wondered if that meant I was getting frostbite.

  The door, the steel door, the damn door. It was so thick and strong! It was like the thing had been built to withstand an atomic blast, when all it was really doing was keeping a bunch of dead cows cold.

  But there was good news. The tip of the hook was sharp enough to slip in behind the door hinges. Also, the handle of the hook was long, which provided me with plenty of leverage.

  I started work on the lower hinges, figuring they would be easier to break because I could use the power in my legs to press on the hook. Now that I was finally using my feet for more than support, they began to wake up even more, and I was able to jump on the end of the hook. Once more I heard a reassuring screeching sound as the screws in the hinges began to tear free. Pressing my palms against the door for balance, I leaped again and again onto the flat end of the hook.

  The lower hinge broke, snapping free of the wall.

  Unfortunately, I fell on my last leap onto the hook, and ended up twisting my right ankle as I went down. Sorry, no mild sprain for you, babe. I heard a pop just before I hit the floor. Granted, it might have been the hinge snapping free, except the sound came from deep inside my ankle and a thunderbolt of agony shot up my right leg. The agony was both numbing and burning. I couldn’t decide which was worse. All I knew was that I had hurt myself at the worst possible time.

  Rolling on the floor, cursing, I tried to stand by clawing at the wall, but the second I was up and put my foot down, I screamed. The bone was broken. There was no doubt. The pain throbbed with my heartbeat. It pounded in my skull, in my mind, as waves of dizziness and nausea swept over me. I bent over and vomited but nothing came up. It had been a long time since I had eaten. I felt as if I had been in the freezing locker forever.

  I had no choice—I had to sit, to rest a few minutes and try to recover. I hoped that my ankle had simply popped out of its socket and would somehow magically pop back in. There was nowhere to place my butt except on the icy floor, and I sat with my back to the door, my spine pressed against the frozen steel.

  I tried focusing on the busted hinge, which lay beside me. I had come far, I told myself, I was halfway to safety. All I had to do was break the top hinge and I would be free. I promised myself the instant the pain in my ankle stopped pounding I would stand and go at it. There was no way a little hinge was going to end my life. Not when my friend the steer had given up his life to free the hook so I could use it to snap the hinge . . .

  “My friend the steer?” I said aloud. What was I thinking? What the hell was I doing? The broken hinge had vanished from view. Why? Because my mind had wandered off and I had closed my eyes. The danger of my predicament hit me like a boxer’s blow. I was sitting with my eyes closed in a meat locker where the temperature was in the twenties. I was setting myself up to pass out.

  To die. I was going to die unless I got off my butt.

  Forcing my eyes open, I sucked in a series of fast breaths and tried pushing myself up with my good ankle. It seemed to work, at first, I started to slide up. But then I slipped and fell back down. The reason was horribly clear. Even with my uninjured foot, I couldn’t get a grip on the floor because the sole of my left foot was numb. The pain in my ankle was decreasing because my right foot was also going numb.

  I had broken my promise to myself. That I would not sit down under any circumstances. I had broken it because the cold was playing tricks with my head. It had convinced me I had to sit down because I was injured. But the cold was not my friend, it was my enemy. It was trying to kill me. It would kill me unless I got moving.

  Rolling onto my knees, I pressed the top of my head against the door and tried to stand, reaching up for the door handle. For a few seconds I was able to pull myself up to where I swayed on what seemed to be invisible legs, when I suddenly slipped and smashed face-first into the door. My fall to my knees was not far, not as far as when I had twisted my ankle, but a dark trail followed me back to the floor. My nose had struck the door and I bled all over it.

  “Damn!” I screamed at no one. “God damn you!”

  I raised a hand to my nose and felt the warm blood oozing over my face, but then it was like someone threw a switch and the blood stopped. At least that was what I thought happened. Then I realized my fingers had gone numb. My hands and feet were now both numb, both useless.

  “I have to get up, I have to get up,” I kept repeating as I rolled over once more onto my butt. I had come too far to quit. The hook was right there. The top hinge was a mere five feet above the floor. If I could get off the floor, slip the hook behind the hinge, and hang on it with all my weight, it would probably bust. If only I could stand up. If only I had not hurt my ankle.

  If only I had not trusted Russ.

  “Goddamn bastard, Russ. You’ll pay for this. I’ll make you pay.”

  That’s the last thing I recall saying aloud. At some point I must have closed my eyes again, although I don’t remember doing so. My thoughts drifted back to the previous night at the blackjack table, when I realized that Russ had offended Alex on purpose. He had caused her to lose money so she would get pissed off and leave. He had admitted as much. Yet he had been confident I wouldn’t leave with her. Strange how sure he was of himself. She was, after all, my best friend, and I didn’t know him.

  Why would
he assume I’d stay with him?

  Why had he seemed so familiar?

  This guy I had never met before.

  I noticed I was no longer shivering. That was a relief. If anything, I felt as if warm liquid were being pumped through my veins. Yet a part of me worried if that was a good thing. I seemed to recall that when people froze to death, they started to feel warm first.

  Yeah, I had read an article about this high-school girl who had gone skating on a lake that was supposed to be frozen over, but which had broken and swallowed her up for like ten minutes before a fireman had rescued her. The girl had been my age, we could have been friends . . .

  She had been dead for more than ten minutes. More like fifteen.

  But the fireman had brought her back to life. It was a miracle.

  I tried focusing on what else the article had said but my brain got bored with the subject and wandered to Jimmy, to the one place where it had spent the better part of the last six months. Jimmy, my poor boyfriend, he must be real worried about me now. He was probably calling the police, maybe even filling out a missing-persons report. But I knew what the police would tell him. All the cops always said the same thing on TV. “Sorry, but we have to wait at least twenty-four hours before your friend’s disappearance is official.”

  They would look at Jimmy with pity but secretly they’d probably think the chick had run off with some older guy with money. Especially if Alex told them about Russ.

  “Are you saying you didn’t take a shower with me?”

  “I did. But it wasn’t after I got off work.”

  That had been a strange discussion we’d had up at the lake. How could Jimmy forget the first time we’d had sex? Why, that was like him forgetting when my birthday was. Of course, he had forgotten my birthday. It was in November, November twelfth, and I had told him it was coming up but it had come and gone before he remembered. I hadn’t yelled at him or anything. We had just started dating and I didn’t want to annoy him and come across as a bitch, and besides, it didn’t really matter when I had been born, the date. What was more important was the date I died, which was going to be today, unless I got my butt in gear and . . .