Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked

by Christa Carmen

  Olive pulled over on Warren Street and put the car into park, but did not shut off the engine. She reached for her cell, opened the door, and stepped outside, her shiny heels out of place on the trash-lined street. Circling the front of her car, Olive lifted her eyes to the third floor window of the building before her, squinting in the glare.

  Something whizzed by her and clattered to the sidewalk on her right. When, on reflex, Olive turned to look, a swatch of black fabric was pulled over her head. Panicked, Olive reached out, but powerful arms encircled her, forcing her own arms to her sides and thwarting any further movement.

  She tried to scream but the air caught in her throat. Before she could think, before she could reinflate her lungs, she was yanked backward with devastating speed, the arms around her torso joined by another set of hands at the ankles. Olive felt her feet lose contact with the earth at the same time she heard the Accord door open, and then she was thrown into the backseat of her own idling vehicle.

  Olive sensed someone climbing in next to her before they rolled their impressive weight onto her lower body. She was lifted to a sitting position and something—duct tape?— was wound around her neck, effectively fastening her shroud. Her hands and feet were bound in a similar manner. The weight across her lap receded. The back door slammed shut. Both driver and passenger doors opened, then shut, and two male voices conversed in whispers too low for her to make out through her hood.

  The driver pulled the Honda back out onto Warren Street, moving at what felt like an average but steady speed. Olive could hardly breathe, tensing every muscle in her body as if she’d been strapped into the car of a rollercoaster against her will and was about to drop over the first freefall.

  Some section of Olive’s brain as yet untouched by panic commanded her to pay attention to the direction the car turned in, if at all possible. They turned left at the end of the road, but thirty seconds later, Olive had lost all sense of direction in a city she knew well enough only to get to Warren Street, the clinic, the coffee shop, and the pharmacy. Olive bit her bottom lip to keep from crying out. She tried to calm down enough to think.

  Someone will notice when I don’t come back to the clinic. Steve will think the incident with Eddie upset me more than I let on and call to check in. But she knew this was not the case. There were plenty of afternoons that passed without anyone challenging her closed office door, patient or no patient. Steve may have expressed concern over the incident with Eddie, but Olive knew that at the end of the day, West Street’s Clinical Director was more than ready to leave the facility, and all its drama, behind him.

  Before she could catastrophize any further, the Accord slowed, then came to a stop. Olive allowed herself a small measure of relief at the relatively short distance her captors had travelled. If she had to bet, she’d wager they were still in Chelsea; maybe an escape route would present itself, and she could find a recognizable landmark to guide her out of this nightmare.

  “Get her out,” the voice from the passenger seat said. There was no denying who that voice belonged to.

  It was Eddie Vance.

  “The fuck, man? What the fuck do you think this is? I snatched her. I drove. This was your idea. You want her out, you get her the fuck out.”

  Olive thought she recognized the voice of Eddie’s accomplice, but she couldn’t place it without seeing his face. The driver and passenger doors opened, then shut. The door at her head opened. Rough hands jostled for position beneath her armpits, clamping together a half inch below the underwire of her bra. The hands became fists and dug painfully into her ribcage as she was dragged headfirst from the backseat.

  Deposited onto the pavement, Olive wobbled on her heels. The hands moved from under her breasts to her shoulders to steady her, but the gesture was devoid of benevolence.

  “Walk, bitch,” Eddie commanded. Something cold and hard was pressed into the small of her back. “Don’t make me unsheathe my pocket knife.”

  In spite of her fear, Olive almost laughed. No doubt Eddie was enjoying this real-life version of Grand Theft Auto.

  She staggered forward, each blind footfall more anxiety-provoking than the last. As she walked, she felt the unexpected sensation of the tape giving way at the back of her neck. The restrictive hood became a piece of flapping fabric, loosely-fastened. Eddie couldn’t have noticed, for he continued guiding her forward. Olive tried to move in a way that would facilitate loosening the fabric further without attracting his attention, an effort made easier by her lurching, tentative gait.

  The pavement ceased. Olive faltered, her heels spiking through the gravel to the layer of soft dirt below. She pressed on, fighting for balance. Her shroud was not completely opaque; she sensed the moment when she was led beneath the shadow of a looming edifice, the sun extinguished like a candle snuffed out by a too-eager breath on a birthday. Fear moved in to fill the spaces in her brain made vacant by departing rationality. Fear that, though primal, had been tinged with confusion and hope; now that fear was short-circuited by a bolt of panic; if she disappeared into whatever structure waited ahead, she was as good as lost.

  Olive jerked to a halt and tossed her head forward, slipping the hood. Her lack of hesitation, the refusal to consider what would happen if her plan backfired, giving her the advantage of speed and therefore, surprise. Eddie reached down in a clumsy attempt to reclaim his grip on her shoulder, but grabbed a fistful of pearls instead. Olive faked a turn to the left, ducking out of Eddie’s reach. She felt a mild sensation of resistance, and then the necklace gave and she was free, an explosion of pearls raining onto the gravel below. She darted right. She did not waste her energy on a scream.

  In an adrenaline-fed state of hypervigilance, Olive took in her surroundings: it could have been any street, in any town, east of the city. Two-family houses lined both sides with cold indifference, their empty windows witnessing her flight without producing a blink of shutter or streaming sash.

  Olive reached the road. The swell of adrenaline had converged; her pupils widened to take in all available light, twin pools that have overflown after a deluge of rain. She risked a ninety-degree glance to her left, but the empty street offered nothing by way of escape. Nowhere to hide. Unwilling to waste another second, she sprinted to the right. She thought she detected the whir of an engine coming from that direction. The muscles in her thighs bunched like loaded springs. The acidic, yellowy taste of bile crept up the back of her throat.

  I can do this. There was no sign of Eddie in her periphery, no pounding of footsteps over the rush of blood in her ears. The road curved and Olive could see a through street running perpendicular to the road on which she ran. She could almost make out the street sign up ahead. Another few strides and it would become visible through the low-hanging branches of a massive oak. Cars whizzed by at frequent intervals. Olive’s heart leapt. She did not see the flash of white through blue blossoms of a rhododendron on her right.

  Eddie’s tackle blindsided her. The last thing she saw before his weight took her to the pavement in a crushing wave of knocking bones and tearing flesh was a van crossing the intersection. It sped through like an image on a movie screen, the sun catching the lacquered metal and turning it into liquid gold.

  —

  The sound drifted up through the black water of her subconscious like the cranking of a great barge. Coupled with her nausea, it occurred to Olive that perhaps she was being lowered into the belly of that barge, and her limbs searched for purchase like those of a panicked dog heading toward the dreaded bathwater. Her fingernails caught the wall, where the craterous concrete tore the nails from her middle and ring fingers in one smooth rip. Olive shrieked, but found her throat produced no sound. Something filled her mouth, pressing her tongue into the backs of her bottom teeth so that all she could manage was an animalistic growl. Her eyelids flickered. The black water became an ocean of grey at the same moment the pressure around her ribcage increased. Olive squirmed. The pressure shifted.

  “Fuck,” a voi
ce said. “She’s awake. Hurry and get her down.”

  The pressure resumed its previous intensity. The pace at which she was being lowered quickened. Olive felt her feet slap off one gritty, wooden stair after another. A protruding nail pierced the soft flesh below her ankle bone, drawing blood. The angle of her descent was altered. Her boat coasted over calmer seas. The two men scrambled to cross the room’s not insignificant length with their human baggage before dumping her into a pile of foul-smelling bedding on the floor.

  Like a fish left on a dock, Olive flailed, gagging at the musty fabric pressed against her mouth. She sucked in a lungful of fresh air through her nose to find it was only slightly better than the mildew clinging to the comforters. The smell reminded Olive of the pumpkin that had rolled off her porch last Halloween, left to fester in a pile of damp leaves after a rainstorm. When she’d unearthed it by its near-putrefied stem, the smell that had accosted her was akin to what she smelled now. The sickly-sweet smell of rot, unsusceptible to even the most astringent of cleaning products. It was the smell of rats that had died between walls, sealed up to decay at their leisure.

  She shook her head, trying to evade the stench and clear the panic that infiltrated her grey matter like cobwebs. Eddie was dragging something across the cement floor to the center of the room. Footsteps disappeared up the stairs behind her. Or was it to the left? The echoes that bounced off the basement walls like children playing hide-and-seek played tricks on Olive’s ears. She was in a basement, that much she could discern.

  And she had to find a way out.

  Olive’s hands tingled behind her back. She rolled forward to take the weight off her wrists and flexed the fingers. The injured nailbeds protested vehemently. She tested her binds; the rope which held her felt no thicker than the drawstring of a hooded sweatshirt. She strained against the knot, working it loose.

  “I don’t fucking think so,” Eddie said.

  Olive flinched and opened her eyes.

  “Pull all you want, but this time, you’re not going anywhere.”

  Eddie reached for her. Olive shrank back, but he’d already taken the edge of the sodden comforter in his hands and begun dragging her along the concrete toward the center of the room. There sat a solitary chair of the patio furniture variety, poised like an unwanted throne. Olive tried to scramble backward, but Eddie caught her ankle and reeled her in. He scooped her up without effort and deposited her into the chair. A roll of duct tape materialized like a prop in a macabre magic trick.

  Eddie the Magnificent. Olive’s brain recoiling from the reality of what was happening. Watch as he makes the counselor next door disappear, right before your eyes!

  She made a last ditch effort to launch herself from the chair, but Eddie pushed her down, turned, and sat, pinning her beneath him. He peeled the edge of the tape free with his teeth and wound the roll around each of her wrists. Still on top of her, he bent forward to secure her ankles.

  He sat up and leaned back, pressing the side of his face to hers. When he spoke, his lips moved against her cheek like slugs. His breath was hot, smelled sour.

  “Not a bad seat I’ve got here. You know, for a snotty bitch who doesn’t know half as much as she thinks she does, you’re still one hot piece of ass. Too bad part of my plan is to get back with Nicole, otherwise I’d take you for a spin myself. See if that fancy diploma of yours is good for more than book smarts.”

  Olive’s expression remained wooden. She was desperate to mask her fear, but knew Eddie could feel her shaking beneath him. Mercifully, he stood, smirked, and retraced all four tape jobs with a meticulousness she couldn’t imagine he employed within any other facet of his life.

  With each decisive tear of tape, the bleakness of her predicament grew. Anything short of a recently-sharpened box cutter would be insufficient in facilitating her escape. Even if she’d had a tool, she knew Eddie would never give her an opportunity to use it.

  He rolled the tape toward a set of shelves, where it disappeared into a murky crevasse curtained by cobwebs. He scanned the basement, betraying no more concern for the woman bound to a chair at the center of the room than any other item in the dimly-lit cellar. It was coming, now, whatever it was he had planned for her. She braced herself for pain, for degradation and terror, humiliation and despair.

  To her tremendous surprise and relief, Eddie turned, and disappeared up the basement steps without another word.

  Bound, gagged, terrified, and alone, the distinction between seconds, minutes, and hours ceased to exist. The squat basement windows were too coated with grime to note any change in the sun’s position, or if the sun still shone at all. Olive’s dungeon—Olive’s morale—existed in a vacuum of the blackest night, void of sun, moon, or stars.

  So Olive sat. Besides worry, she could do nothing. Her bones ached. Her stomach churned. Her eyes smarted with each new bout of tears. She tried to empty her mind. She tried not to panic. She tried to avoid imagining what Eddie had in store for her. She couldn’t fathom the possibility that he would kill her. But what would stop her from going to the police if he let her go? Still, how many times had Nicole Price filled an entire session by discussing Eddie Vance’s lack of initiative?

  If he wasn’t going to kill her, what then? Olive’s brain churned out one appalling prospect after another until her body was unable to sustain the elevated epinephrine and cortisol levels, and she crashed into depression. She might have slept, but the numbness she was suspended in was probably closer to a state of shock. When footsteps fell on the bulkhead stairs—the ones she had been dragged down either two minutes or two hours earlier—Olive did not register them until the descending sneaker-thuds hit the bottom two steps.

  The gag had dried in her mouth and her throat felt like a tunnel of cast Paper Mache. Eddie moved into her line of vision. Again, Olive thought of a magician stepping onstage to greet his audience. He placed something behind a plastic bin of Christmas decorations before coming at her with the loose-limbed gait of a man in the throes of a hefty dose of narcotics. He loosened a strip of duct tape from the roll, and pulled it taut. He inspected her as if she were an ant; Eddie was the bully with the magnifying glass.

  Olive’s wrists, ankles, and mouth were already restrained. Before she could guess at which body part Eddie planned to tape up next, he had slapped the adhesive across her chest and wound it around her back, pinning her upper arms to her sides tight enough so that breathing was a concentrated effort. Olive tried to flex her muscles while Eddie circumnavigated her torso, remembering something she had read once and hoping that if she loosened her muscles by degrees, air would flow into her lungs more freely.

  “Well, well, well,” Eddie said. His stubbled face was flushed. “I told you that you’d be sorry, didn’t I? Look at you. Not so high and mighty without your boss or your body guard to bail you out.”

  He moved at her with a speed she would never have imagined he’d possessed, synthetic-opioid-slowed speech and a flabby physique masking some innate, inexplicable agility.

  “I made up my mind to teach you a lesson after Nicole broke up with me. The bullshit at the clinic today was the final straw.”

  He jammed his hands into his pockets and glared at her. “I know your type. Just because you wouldn’t give me the time of day doesn’t mean I don’t know what you’re all about. I wouldn’t want a girl like you anyway. High-fucking-maintenance, oodles of that student loan debt, never satisfied, always whining about things not being good enough when you have everything.

  “I’d take a girl like Nicole over you any day. Nik’s down for whatever. She’s easygoing, but works hard for what she has. At least, she used to be. Until you ruined her with your ideas.”

  Eddie reached behind the bin of holiday cheer to retrieve what he had hidden there. Though his sausage fingers dwarfed the object, and the light in the basement was dim, Olive could see what he held. The color gave it away. The same color as a Dunkin Donuts straw. Her session with Nicole that morning seemed like it had be
en months ago. With effort, Olive tore her gaze from the hypodermic needle to look Eddie in the eye. She mumbled something through the gag.

  Eddie stepped forward and ripped the tape from her mouth. Olive goaded her sluggish tongue to life, eradicating the bunched-up cloth from between her lips like a Novocained patient post-root canal.

  “Wha—wha… why?”

  “I told you why.”

  It did not take long for Olive to discover the reason Eddie had applied the last layer of duct tape. No matter how hard she tried, no matter which way she manipulated her body, she was unable to thwart his impending efforts. Worse, the tape itself was acting as a tourniquet; the veins in her arms were already pronounced. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

  Still, she struggled, until Eddie, needle poised an inch over her arm, pointed out in a matter-of-fact tone, “You will take your medicine. The only thing thrashing around like that is going to do is cause me to miss my mark. Do that enough times, and... you ever seen Requiem for a Dream?”

  She stopped struggling.

  Eddie inserted the needle into her vein.

  Olive watched as her blood exploded in the chamber like a tiny fireworks display.

  He pressed the plunger down.

  The fireworks display was in her head.

  Waxy lids closed over dilated eyes. Goosebumps broke out along her exposed flesh. A small pinprick of blood lay in the crook of her elbow like a pearl in the milky dish of an oyster shell.

  Eddie took an uncertain step back. The look on his face suggested he’d considered this plan only up until the moment of injection and now had no idea how to react to the woman ascending to the highest peak of euphoria before him.

  Olive’s eyelids flickered. Concern flashed across Eddie’s porcine features. He stepped toward Olive, one hand outstretched as if to take her pulse, then stopped. Olive shuddered, turned to one side, and vomited a stream of brown liquid onto the concrete floor. Her chin rested on her chest, which rose and fell slowly.