by SLMN
“I don’t…”
Rosa cut Ralston off mid-sentence “Here, Mr. Ralston. This point was always our end game with people like you. You were being groomed in the same way as your daughter.”
Rosa let that hang in the air too.
The underground room was sucked free of air and the temperature felt like it had raised to fifty degrees. Lainey sensed her certainties being hollowed out by Rosa’s words. Hollowed and roasted in the heat. Surely being dead would be better than this? Surely that would be a blessed relief, so that Rosa’s words would stop, and Lainey’s view of the world could stop being torn down.
“Eventually, when your usefulness to us had been fully realized we would have had this DNA conversation. It’s why the people I represent set up Enchanted Holdings, the shell companies hidden behind it, and the facility on the island in the first place. Is it becoming clearer now Mr. Ralston?”
“I…I…”
Rosa continued as if she were explaining something to a slow child. “Your daughter wanted to live the way she wanted, wanted to do the things she wanted to do outside the orbit of your controlling influence. She wanted to be away from your drunk wife’s inability to walk past a bottle of vodka. Surely you can see that is why she rebelled against you. And yet, hypocritically, you Mr. Ralston, wanted exactly the same as Alaina.”
There was just the ragged breathing of Lainey’s father from the speaker now. He had no words.
“For you, the controlling influences were societal norms, and your drunken, fickle mother, was the electorate. You had your secret desires to torture and maim young girls to your sadistic hearts content and we offered, like Lainey’s “Pippa” profile, a place for you to live them. We groomed you too, Mr. Ralston. As I said, our only miscalculation was having to move things forward, because of your daughter. But we’re putting that to rest, right now.”
“You can have everything I own. Please. Everything. Just let my daughter go, and let us walk away from this. Please.”
“Mr. Ralston, we are going to have everything you own. That’s a given. And you’re not going to walk away, you’re going to work for us. From this day forward, through to your election in November, and onto your Presidential run in twelve years’ time. Mr. Ralston, from this day forward, we own the very air you breathe.”
Lainey’s stomach was twisting with anxiety, the heat in the room beyond unbearable. The knots in her guts hurting like kicks and punches.
And then the scream and the gurgle and the spray of fresh, hot blood across her body. She couldn’t look but she could hear Parrish struggling in his chair, the wheeze of wet blood from his opened throat, and the terrible sounds of him dying.
“Shhhh Parrish, shhhh. It’ll be over soon. The more you struggle, the quicker your blood will flow. If you want to marshal your thoughts. Make your peace with your God, do it now, Parrish. Death is your punishment for losing the girl, but you can if you wish to go to it without fuss. Perhaps your death will have more meaning than your life. Keep praying, Parrish. Speak to your Lord.”
The struggling in the chair slowed, and Parrish eventually settled into a rough breathing, his lips pattering with prayers as his body wound down. Eventually the sprays of blood that had covered the back of Lainey’s head, neck, and shoulders stopped, and she could no longer feel the droplets hitting her, just the gentle tightening as the thick fluid began to dry where it had landed on her exposed skin.
Lainey dared still not turn her head look at Parrish. The last thing she heard before she slipped into the welcome unconsciousness brought on by insurmountable fear, was Rosa saying, “And here endeth the lesson, Mr. Ralston.” Then the clink of the straight razor being put down onto the tray.
Lainey woke from one nightmare into another.
The first thing she heard were children crying, their sobs loud and filled with distress. Lainey was surprised she could move her hands and feet. The chains had been removed at some point and she could feel she was laying naked on a mattress. She chanced opening her eyes.
Lainey saw she was covered in a thin white sheet and that she was laying on the bottom layer of a metal framed bunk bed. The room was dimly lit. There were barred windows, and through the nearest window she saw what could only be the night sky.
Lainey sat up, the sheet falling off her thin shoulders as she examined her skin. While she’d been asleep, someone had cleaned the blood from her body, tying her hair back in a ponytail. At the end of bed was a pair of functional flip-flops resting on a pile of white underwear, a cotton bra-top, and beneath what looked like a folded up orange jumpsuit.
But Lainey’s nakedness and clothing requirements were not the most pressing matter for her right now. On the other side of the dormitory, along a second row of maybe ten or so bunkbeds, were two of the girls she recognized from her boat trip to the island. One was about Lainey’s age, the other slightly older. They hadn’t been allowed to talk on the steamer as it chugged through the waters leaving the jungle port and airstrip behind, so she hadn’t been able to find out their names, or any information about them. Their eyes had met though, and those looks had bonded the girls in the shared purgatory of their situation. Right now they were clinging to each other screaming and sobbing.
There was a dragging sound, and Lainey saw two guards walking away from the girls, dragging a third girl between them. This third girl was kicking and trying to punch at the guards. They were oblivious to the attack as if this was something to be expected. The girl was dressed in an orange jumpsuit like the one that was at the end of Lainey’s bunk.
Eventually the guards yanked the girl to the dormitory door. One punched a code into a pad, and it was opened from the outside by another guard. They hauled the girl out, and the door was slammed behind them.
The two girls on the opposite bunk continued their crying. Lainey thought about getting up to go and comfort them, but then she saw everyone else in the room, and they were ignoring the girls in the moment of great distress.
Like Lainey, they were either looking at the girls from their bunks, or they were turning away, their faces blank.
Why was nobody helping them?
Lainey reached for the jumpsuit and stood. She put it on without underwear and did up the zipper. The material was freshly washed, and was stiff. It was made from the kind of material that Lainey wouldn’t have been seen dead in over at the clubs in Houston, but now it was just serving a purpose.
Lainey wasn’t going to stand by and let the other girls cry without being comforted. She just wasn’t. She took a step.
“No. Don’t.”
Lainey spun around and saw that there was someone on the top bunk above her. A beautiful Indian girl, with black hair tied back in a braid and eyes like brown pools of liquid chocolate. She was reaching out to Lainey, trying to touch her shoulder.
“They’re crying. I can’t just leave them.”
“You have to,” the girl hissed. “We’re not allowed to cross from this side to other. There was an escape from one of the other wings. Two girls attacked a guard. Stole his keys and his gun. One girl got away. So they’ve brought in new rules. We can only talk to the person in the bunk below or above us. We cannot go to any other bunk at any time. We cannot approach the door without permission, and anyone tampering with the new entry coders will be taken to the punishment block.” The girl sounded like she was reeling off the items on a menu.
Lainey couldn’t stand the crying, but conversely she didn’t like the sound of the Punishment Block—not after the conversation she’d been forced to listen to in Rosa’s hole in the ground, about how her father liked to get his kicks.
So she tried, against all her better instincts, to shut the sound out. Lainey sat back down on the bed, and looked along the rows of bunks on her side of the dormitory. All the other girls she could see were trying to do the same: ignore, shut out, deny. She could see it in their faces, and she knew that they could see it in hers.
Eventually the sobbing subsided, and the girls o
n the other side of the aisle were reduced to the occasional sob and pathetic sniffle.
Lainey had no idea what the time was, but the windows were still showing darkness outside the building.
The ceiling lights were dim, emergency orange, or like the distant sodium glow of the highway at night. There was air conditioner whirring somewhere overhead, but the room was still too hot to be comfortable. There didn’t appear to be any noise leaking in from outside, but Lainey had no reason to believe she was anywhere but still on the island.
The disgust hit her then, as the memories of what she’d learned about her father came back in sickening whirls in her guts and jagged thoughts in her head. How could she have not known that her father was like this? How could he have kept it hidden from Lainey and from her mother, Brenda? Perhaps he hadn’t been able to keep it from his wife. Perhaps that was why she wanted to be drunk all the time.
For the first time in a long while, Lainey felt a tinge of remorse about the way she had always gone up against her mother. Maybe the woman was doing the best she could with the life she had been given. Maybe she only stayed around to make sure that Lainey was safe. Maybe she wasn’t such a fuck-up after all.
Lainey, in that moment, missed her mom, more than any other time she could remember.
The bunk above her creaked and the face of the beautiful braid-haired girl appeared. “How are you feeling?” she whispered.
It was the first kind words Lainey had heard since Daniel had put her into the Buick outside her home. “I don’t know. It’s…all too much. I just want to go home.”
“Me too. But I fear that’s not something that is going to be happening very soon.”
“No.” Lainey sat up, and reached a hand out, she suddenly felt the need to feel some warm human contact. A tight hug was what she needed right now, but in the absence of that, she’d settle for a handshake.
The girl on the top bunk seemed to understand immediately what Lainey needed, and reached out her hand too. They clasped palms in the darkness, the warmth of the girl’s hand more appealing and generous than the humid heat of the dormitory. Lainey clung to it like her life depended on it. Perhaps in time it would.
“Lainey, Lainey Ralston,” she offered.
“Gairola,” The girl replied. “Bimala Gairola.”
21
Passion ducked and pushed Mary-Joy’s head down as the bullets thudded and the glass flew around them. Without raising her head, Passion started the Hyundai and stamped on the gas pedal, hoping that just going forward would help them to build up speed before anything else hit them.
The bullets started thudding again into the back spaces of the SUV, missing the tires but zinging around the metalwork with crazy sparks, “Stay down!” Passion yelled at Mary-Joy as the Hyundai gathered speed.
Passion looked up through the steering wheel and over the hood, thankful that the parking lot was not filled with more obstacles. She risked raising her head higher, as she heard the bullets smacking into the tarmac behind, ricochets bouncing up and tanging on the bodywork of a Chevy and a Ford ahead.
Passion turned the wheel and drove diagonally across the lot, drifting left far enough that she hoped to get the Chevy between the Hyundai and whoever was behind with the machine gun. There was a break in the rat-tat-tat growl of their assailant’s gun as he or she changed mags.
One shooter. That was something at least.
“Why are they shooting at us?” Mary-Joy said, her head all the way down in the foot well. After what Mary-Joy had told Passion about the island, and the fact she had seen Lainey Ralston there, there could be a hundred people with a vested interest in keeping the location and nature of the island a secret.
The strip of stores and gas stations was thankfully light on traffic, as they screeched onto the street out of the parking lot. Passion figured it was better to head out of the city right now, and turned onto the expressway, heading north.
The rearview mirror was shattered, but there were still enough crazy shards for Passion to make out if they had been followed out of the parking lot. Nothing was following as of yet. The traffic that there was, was heading into the city, not out.
Passion picked up her smartphone as she drove, “Mary-Joy, you can get up now. I need to call for help, and we need to change cars. I might be able to do both with one call.”
Mary-Joy sat up in the seat, her hands moving in front of her belly with clear signs of anxiety. Poor kid, Passion thought as she hit the button to call Bryan. After all she’d been through on the island and beyond, to nearly get tagged like that in a parking lot was the ultimate in unlucky.
Night had not even fallen.
Someone wanted them dead and dead quickly. If whoever that was had used someone who would attack while the sun was still in the sky, that exposed a level of stupidity or confidence in the assailant that was difficult to fathom. Either way, hitting in daylight was just a no-no among the professionals. The exposure and the chance of witnesses giving an accurate ID to the cops made it the hit choice for only the desperate or the amateur. On the other hand, if the early evening hit had been called because Houston PD, FBI, and the NSA were cool with it—as the presence of Detective Myer at the meeting with Ralston had suggested—then the situation was far more dangerous than could reasonably be measured.
She had to speak to Bryan, and she had to speak to him now.
The call would not go through.
NUMBER NOT RECOGNIZED the screen flashed back at her. The shock of that almost made Passion swerve the car across the central reservation.
Shit.
The phone still had full signal, the bar at the top of the screen told her so. But the number was not calling.
Passion thumbed the contacts list for the number of the hotel where she’d been staying.
Her contacts list was empty.
As an experiment, she thumbed 911 onto the key pad.
NUMBER NOT RECOGNIZED.
Passion knew the NSA and CIA had developed a number of counter espionage virus bombs they could send as invisible push notices to suspect phones. They’d been developed when the IEDs of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan had been set off by mobile phones sending a trigger signal. The plan being that if they disabled everybody’s phone in the area they’d stop the terrorist from exploding their device or having the suicide vest strapped to their body, detonated remotely by some other fucker with an iPhone.
It seemed obvious to Passion that as she hadn’t taken her cell phone through any MRI scanners recently, the chance it had been hit by a virus bomb was a good one.
“Is your telephone not working?”
Passion threw the smart phone out of the smashed side window where it tumbled to the blacktop, spinning and disintegrating as it bounced. “Well it is now.”
In the same way Fake-Jake’s telephone had been zeroed to the Roman Field airstrip, the phone may have led the assailant to the parking lot to attack the Hyundai. Passion judged getting rid of the machine now that it was completely useless was the best course of action.
And because the Hyundai was new, a rental, and top of the range, it was certain that it would have a tracker hidden somewhere in the chassis.
It was either the telephone or the Hyundai which had brought the assassin to the parking lot. The phone was gone, and now the Hyundai had to go.
Night fell fully as they took the 336, circumvented Conroe, headed out on the 105 towards Montgomery. Five miles from the town, Passion spied a derelict lot set back from the highway, overlooking Lake Conroe. It was a convenient place to stop, so she pulled in and ran the Hyundai around the back of what was left of the building.
The garden was overgrown, the dwelling that had once stood there, a dilapidated ranch style house had fallen to near rubble. There were chain link fences around it and signs declaring it was going to be redeveloped into a complex of featureless apartments sometime in the next year.
Passion pulled the Hyundai onto the grass behind the house so that it could not be se
en from the road. If it had a tracker, it was a moot thing to do, but just in case it had been the telephone that had triangulated their position, Passion thought it was worth doing anyway. Behind the derelict house was a densely overgrown wooded area which had been left to do its own thing for a good few years.
“But I don’t want to stay here, I want to come with you.”
Passion pushed the girl back down into the grass. “There’s a gas station and a motel back the way we came, half a mile. I’m going to go back there now and get us a new car. I’m going to try to call my friend from a payphone and I’ll get us some food. If the cops are looking for us, they’re going to be looking for an adult and a girl. I need you to stay here for now, while I try and find us a way out of this mess, okay?”
Mary-Joy opened her mouth to protest, but Passion put a finger on it. “Please.”
She pointed back down the highway, “If I’m gone more than an hour, come looking for me okay?”
Passion took off her watch and handed it to the girl. “Take this. One hour. Please.”