by Erik Carter
Dale looked at Sonya. And she looked right back at him.
Neither one of them moved. There was a long, uncomfortable moment. Sonya’s lips were parted. Her eyes widened.
“Well, come on, now!” Hendrix said. “What are you waiting for?”
Dale gave his wrists a tug, seeing if there was any give in the rope. He knew how to work his way out of a few knots. But these knots weren’t going to budge.
He watched Sonya. Intently. The stunned expression remained on her face. And she started to shake.
“Go!” Hendrix shouted.
They stared at each other.
Dale could hear her breathing.
“Go! Now!”
Sonya took one step forward, shaking harder. And she raised her hands up. She clearly hadn’t been in many fights. If any.
But that didn’t mean Dale could let down his guard. He had seen the way she gazed at Hendrix when she first came down the stairs. It was a look of awe. A follower. Dale had seen this before at the CAE, the look of mindless adoration on the faces of Glenn Downey’s minions. It was a demented sort of devotion, and people would do anything to appease it.
Including, he ventured, attacking a bound stranger.
Dale staggered his feet and put his weight into his hips. He raised his bound hands. The fact that they were tied up actually wasn’t a complete disadvantage for him. It brought the combined weight of the hands together, kind of turned them into a big club. The rope would also brace and pad his wrists. And, should he need to take a swing at her—which he truly hoped he wouldn’t—he could hit her with the rope, not his hands. That might cushion the blow a bit. Like a boxing glove.
“Come on, Sonya,” Hendrix said. “The man’s tied up. You’re still afraid of him? You’re gonna need to show a whole lot more bravery than this.”
She took a step toward Dale. Her brow furrowed. It was clear that she was getting into the spirit of things, that Hendrix’s words were impacting her.
She took a small swing, openhanded. Dale stepped to the side, easily avoiding it.
Then she rushed at him, head lowered, both arms outstretched before her, hands in fists. Dale didn’t have time to avoid it, and he couldn’t bring himself to retaliate. Not yet. So he let it happen. She struck him in the chest. A flash of pain. He shuffled back a few feet.
There were cheers from Hendrix and Cody.
“Now, that’s what I’m talking about,” Hendrix said. “Harder, next time!”
There was a couple feet of separation between Dale and Sonya, and she was circling him, arms outstretched, fingers spread out wide, like a swiping cat. Her face had lost all fear. There was menace there.
Things were getting interesting now. And much more dangerous.
She took a big swing with her right arm. Her nails were a fan of blades swinging past Dale’s face as he leaned back, avoiding the strike by inches. Her missed swing brought her arm across her body, leaving her side exposed and vulnerable.
Dale pushed off his heels and drove his shoulder into her rib cage. He hit her at only about half strength, but it had surely hurt like hell. She made a small yelp and staggered back several feet.
“There ya go, Tommy!”
Sonya’s mouth was now open in a big, shocked O. Fear had returned. A purer, more primal fear. Before, it had been fear of the situation. Now it was fear of Dale. He’d given her a small taste of his strength, and she knew this could go south for her fast.
But as quickly as fear had reformed on her face, she bared her teeth and brought back that gritty resolve she’d summoned up moments ago. Dale had to hand it to Hendrix. Those wicked mind games of his sure had an effect on her.
And she was getting more and more dangerous. Dale needed to do something drastic. And soon. So he did what he’d been avoiding.
He swung his bound hands at Sonya.
Cheers from Hendrix.
He hit Sonya hard in the stomach, which was soft and seemed terribly fragile. It felt like Dale’s hands had smashed all the way through to her spine. She bent in half, screamed. Dale felt immediate remorse. He had to have done some damage to her.
She fell backwards, one hand on her stomach, the other latching onto Dale’s ropes. Her weight pulled him down with her. They hit the dusty cement hard, Sonya absorbing most of the impact. She locked eyes with him. Her gritty determination had now turned to pure, raging fire.
Dale looped his bound hands behind her neck. She pulled her thighs around him. They twisted at each other, and their violent motions rolled them around on the floor. That soft body that Dale had, moments earlier, been worried about injuring felt nice and warm against his, even in this moment of extreme, possibly mortal, danger—those long legs wrapped around him, squeezing tight.
Dale couldn’t help but be turned on by the whole thing.
Damn, he was weird.
But he needed to bring this to an end. And he was going to have to get creative.
Because there was no way he was going to knock this girl unconscious.
Sonya went to put her hands around his throat, and Dale used this moment to his advantage. He twisted away from her grasp and used his bound hands to push her arms to the floor. He pressed his left thigh against her torso, gaining total control. She was pinned. Had this been a pro wrestling match, the ten-second countdown would’ve started.
She looked him in the eye. Fear had returned.
Dale reared his head back, tightened all the muscles in his neck.…
But before he brought his head crashing down toward hers, he gave her a small wink.
She noticed. And there was the tiniest of reactions from her.
An affirmative.
Message received.
Dale swung his head down towards hers viciously, making a nice flick of his hair for effect. He came within a half inch of her forehead.
Sonya sold it well. She whipped her head back in reaction. Snapped her eyelids shut. Let her whole body go limp.
Cheers from the side of the room.
Dale rolled off her, plopped his back onto the cement, kicking up dust. He coughed. There was the sound of clapping to his right. Getting closer. As Dale caught his breath and stared up at the wooden beams in the ceiling, he let his gaze turn to the side.
Hendrix approached, looming over Dale, clapping his hands. He stopped when he was a few inches away and looked down.
“Welcome aboard, Tommy.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Back at the cabin, Dale followed Cody Ellis up the steps to the second floor. The opulence of the place still astounded him. Expensive light fixtures on the walls. Everything polished and shiny. Hardwood floors with plush carpets scattered here and there, under tables and chairs.
The second-floor hallway was lined with bedroom doors. Four of them. They stopped at the first door on the left.
Cody opened the door, stepped to the side, and gestured toward the room.
“This is you,” he said.
Dale stepped in, turned back around.
“Sorry about this,” Cody said.
“About what?”
Cody shut the door. There was a click from the doorknob. Dale tried it. Locked from the outside.
Great. Three times now. Three times in one day he’d been locked in a room by himself.
It was a simple lock. A basic interior doorknob, reversed so that the lock tab faced the hallway not the bedroom. It would be easy to pick. He walked to the window. It was sealed shut but positioned right above the awning over the front porch. The window, too, offered an easy potential escape. His locked room was by no means a maximum-security prison cell, which meant that his being caged in was as much a psychological ploy as it was a physical incarceration.
Dale could break out, yes. But he wasn’t going to. He would continue with the plan. This strange assignment that had been so suddenly thrust upon him was now an undercover mission. Dale had little idea why he’d been summoned to Tennessee — and he still had no clue who did the summoning by sending the newspaper mess
age — but he knew for sure that it was Asa Hendrix who he was supposed to be investigating. What better way for Dale to check him out than by imbedding himself in the man’s organization.
The room was all golden wood, just like the rest of the cabin. There was a queen-size bed with a dark wooden headboard and a bedspread printed with various outdoorsy images: a trout, some pine trees, a canoe with crossed oars, a maple leaf. A pair of lamps flanked the bed, each of which sat on a small nightstand made of dark wood that matched the headboard. A dresser was against the back wall, also in the dark wood, and hanging above it was a framed print.
Dale stepped over to the dresser and looked at the print. It was a watercolor of a moose drinking at the edge of a lake, a shoreline of pines in the background. Dale chuckled and wondered where the print had come from, who had chosen it. It fit the outdoor theme, yes, but it looked more like Alaska than East Tennessee. There were deer in the area but not moose.
At the back of the room was the doorway to a small bathroom. The door was open, and through the doorway Dale could see a claw-foot porcelain tub. He eyed it with zeal. It had been a hell of a day. And he needed a hot bath.
After he’d soaked away some of the aches and pains of the day’s scuffles, he finished toweling off and slid into bed.
He turned off the bedside lamp, but the room was still far from dark—streaks of bright light from the parking area slipped past the edges of the drapes. As soon as he pulled the blanket to his chest and his head sank into the pillow, his thoughts went sour.
In the past twenty-four hours since arriving in Tennessee, Dale had been in several dangerous situations, none of which had truly frightened him. He just wasn’t that sort of person.
But right then, lying in bed, was a different story…
At that moment—alone and inactive and quiet—he could no longer distract himself from how similar his current situation was to the time he spent at the Collective Agricultural Experiment. How alike the people were. The blind followers. And the patriarchal messiah. Doing terrible things.
This frightened Dale. Not the uncertainty of his mission. Not being chased by armed men. Not being dragged by a car.
At the CAE, Dale and the intern with whom he’d gone to the camp had been unwilling members of the cult, but everyone else was there of their own free will. Toiling during the day and reflecting during the night, all in praise of their leader, Glenn Downey.
Downey had housed them in small cottages, and at night, they were locked in. Just like Dale was now. And he would lie quietly in his bed, trying to ignore the voices around him and their inane chatter, their discussions of the glorious mission in service to Glenn Downey.
Once, when he and the intern had tried to escape, they’d been stripped and tied to beds. Beaten. With people standing over them, screaming. People who could have been anyone out in the real world. Accountants. Teachers. Waiters and waitresses. But Downey had said some magic words, and they’d become monsters.
And that’s all it takes. Magic words. Or a symbol. Or a few lines on a map. Or a team to admire. The simplest of things could band people together, align them against their fellow man, convince them to completely forsake reason and objectivity.
To devastating effect. Dale was convinced that not all of 1940s Germany was inherently evil. They hadn’t been born wanting to shove people into ovens. Hitler had used magic words.
And yet when these effects came out in more benign ways, society just chuckled. Oh, it’s just good, clean fun. Dale thought again of the orange T on the back of the pickup truck. He thought about riots after championship games. Overturned cars. Looting. He thought of soccer hooligans in Europe taking tire irons to each other’s heads. He thought of screaming Elvis fans in the ’50s. Girls passing out in the crowds. He thought of Beatle Mania.
Mania.
What scared Dale was the instability of the human condition. How easily a group of people could be manipulated. The lengths to which manipulated people would go.
Lying there, alone, he remembered his nights in the CAE cottage.
And then he heard a voice.
Outside his door. Somewhere farther down the hallway. Coming from one of the other rooms.
The voice was muffled. He couldn’t make it out.
Were they discussing Asa Hendrix? Were they talking about his glorious mission? Were they asking how they could impress Hendrix, how they could get into his good graces?
It’s just a voice, he assured himself. They could be talking about anything.
He thought back again to being tied to the bed at the CAE. There had been voices then. Those voices screaming down upon him, faces red and wet, saying the most asinine, unreasonable, passionate, illogical things. And bringing the whip down upon him. Again and again.
Dale opened his eyes and looked at the door, focusing on the doorknob. Then he turned to the window. Earlier he’d determined it would be easy to break out of the room. And for a moment he considered it—to flee this insanity, to go running away into the cold night chasing after something, anything that could reassure him there was reason in this world.
But he quickly pushed the impulse away. That would be the coward’s way out. Dale didn’t run away from anything.
He felt something going on with his hands. They were jittery. He rubbed them together, squeezed them, calmed the shaking.
Just get some sleep, Dale.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Asa turned the knob, opened the door, and found her standing in his bedroom.
Sonya had done exactly as he’d instructed, waiting dead center in the room.
She was clearly frightened. Shaking. Her eyes looked right at him, then quickly looked away. She had her arms folded across her chest, hands nervously rubbing her upper arms. Her skin was covered in goosebumps.
He gave her a smile then shut the door behind him and stepped a few feet away from her, outside of her space, giving her a bit of breathing room, some level of comfort.
She looked really good. Those long legs of hers fidgeted delightfully with her absentminded movements. The way her arms were folded in against herself put the squeeze on her breasts, pushing them together. She bit her lip, eyes darting left and right.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. “I think we need to have a talk.”
She forced a smile. “Could we talk somewhere else? Somewhere we could sit?”
He moved closer, poking into that bubble of personal space just a bit. He put a genuine look of concern on his face.
“Is there something wrong? Do you feel uncomfortable?”
This apparent sincerity had the intended effect. Her trepidation lessened slightly.
“Not uncomfortable,” she said. “I just… Um…”
Asa shook his head. Like a disappointed father.
“Sonya, listen, this uncertainty on your part is simply not going to play well tomorrow. I’ve chosen my inner circle very carefully, but with you, I trusted Cody Ellis’s judgment. Have I made a mistake?”
“No!” she said and reached out, almost as though to touch him. “You haven’t. I desperately want to be a part of your team.”
“From what I’ve seen tonight, you’re constantly nervous. Scared. Unwilling to step up. And you failed your test. Watson wanted it more.”
“He was bigger than me, and—”
“And his hands were tied. Please don’t give excuses, Sonya.” Asa shook his head, the disappointed father once more. “I could see it in your eyes. You didn’t want to hurt him. Did you?”
Sonya looked to the floor and shook her head.
“No, I didn’t.”
Asa put his index finger under her chin, tilted her head back up. Her skin was angel-soft. He looked into her eyes.
“If you can’t attack a bound man in a controlled environment, how will you be able to do what’s needed tomorrow?”
“I can. I promise. I can be tougher.”
He put his hands on her upper arms. More smooth skin. Soft, shaking muscles.
>
“Oh, Sonya. You don’t have what it takes, my dear.”
“I do!”
“This is my mistake. I shouldn’t have trusted Cody’s judgment.”
“Don’t…”
“My mind is made up.” He paused a long beat for dramatic effect. “Please leave.”
“No!”
She’d practically screamed it. There was anguish on her face. A tear fell down her cheek.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Please! Let me prove myself to you. What can I do?”
He put his hands back on her arms, back onto that smooth skin. He’d finagled things expertly to this point. And now it was time to wrap things up, to get to his real objective for this encounter.
He stepped in closer, inches away, keeping his hands on her arms.
Sonya gasped. Her mouth opened, lips quivered. She shook harder.
He slid his hands up her arms to her shoulders.
“There’s one more way you can prove yourself.”
He put a bit of gentle pressure on her shoulders.
She looked up at him. Hesitated. Then took his meaning. And went to her knees.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Becker pulled his coat in tighter against the cold and lit a second cigarette.
He stood outside the entrance to his building. Before him was the massive Y-12 complex, a small city within a city, walled off from the outside world. 11:30 at night, and still it was alive. Cars driving through the streets. People coming and going. All the buildings were lit up brightly against the dark nighttime sky—towers and warehouses, short buildings and tall buildings, metal and brick. They stretched out so far away from him that they disappeared from sight. Y-12 sat on a wide swath of land a couple miles in length. After all these years, Becker was still dumbstruck by its sheer size. And Y-12 was only one of the three major complexes in the ORR. They were all massive operations with massive structures—even record-setting. At the time it was built, K-25 was the largest building on the planet.
Becker took another drag from his cigarette and let his eyes bounce around the blinking lights atop Y-12’s various buildings, noticing the radical height differences. Of course, Becker knew all the buildings’ names and had a vague idea about what went on in each one. But as to the science of it all—what really went on behind all those doors and windows—he hadn’t a clue. This was a strange and almost surreal feeling, not understanding what he’d been guarding so vigilantly for so many years.
