Sealed With A Death

by James Silvester

  “I knew SIS were struggling with the funding cuts, but I hadn’t realised they’d stooped so low as to start hiring mongrels!”

  “I’d be careful if I were you,” Lucie spat back. “You haven’t exactly caught me on my best day.”

  “But I have caught you,” he countered. “And it’s your own fault we did. When you first started poking your nose around the Camden whore house, I was content to just have you killed, like I tried with your friend Algers, but you proved so bloody persistent. You wanted so badly to know what happened to the French girl, that it seemed only fair to show you, and besides we needed a replacement after you and your Muslim friend managed to spirit away the one we were after. Who’d have thought it eh? A Muslim working for a white woman; what would the Daily Mail say?”

  “He doesn’t work for me.”

  “Well he certainly doesn’t anymore.”

  “What have you done with him?”

  “He went for a swim.”

  Butcher played with the words, a smile spreading on his face as he spoke them, his enjoyment of Lucie’s reaction plain for her to see.

  Though she had expected the blow, the words thumped home harder than the punch of any hired thug, and she turned her head away from the murderous bastard before her and clenched her eyes against the onrush of tears. The pain in her throat and the rage in her lungs screamed at her to be released but she refused. There would be time to holler her outrage to the heavens for Ismail’s death when she had got what she needed from his killer, and she fully intended to do both. Ismail would expect nothing less of her.

  “You’ll...,” Lucie began, before stopping to push the cry that was forming back down inside. “You’ll regret many things when this is all over Butcher, but you’ll regret that most of all.”

  “Alas,” he answered, running his hand through his dark hair and straightening his tie, “in three days you will either no longer care about the late Mr Ismail, or if you do, you’ll join him in deportation to the undiscovered country.”

  “Three days?” Lucie spat.

  “That’s the Biblically ascribed period for rebirths, isn’t it? Today you died, at least to the world. You have three days to learn obedience; I usually give two weeks but having a priest occupy my little town brought out my sense of irony.”

  “Three days for what, exactly?”

  “Three days for me to break you,” he answered. “Believe me, I’d rather break your will than your body, but the choice is yours. In your new home I have provided instructions on how you will behave. They cover everything from what you will eat, how you will dress, what time you’ll go to bed and wake up. A few buildings along from your flat, you will find an office. You will go there each morning, perform the tasks left for you, after which you will receive money from the Post Office over there to buy your meals. You will make no effort to cover or hide yourself from the cameras when dressing, showering or attending calls of nature, you will make yourself visible to the cameras at all times. At the end of each day you will be rewarded for good behaviour, and if after three days you have proven yourself, you will make a covenant of loyalty to me, and become my…, well, ‘pet’ I suppose, along with the others who passed the test.”

  Finishing, the MP stood, framed by the light from behind the door. Lucie was tempted even more than earlier to risk the ear-splitting screech of the alarm and charge into him, but the silhouettes of others behind him persuaded her now was not the time. His pointed tongue was flicking serpent-like across his lips as he watched her through eyes that seemed to Lucie to be glazing over, as though in anticipation of an evening’s voyeuristic pleasure. Sadistic he may be, Lucie thought. Evil? Perhaps. But what was more obvious to her than either epithet was his state of mind. This man was not well.

  “So much for the great Adam Butcher,” she laughed, her own tone mimicking the mockery in his, breaking him from his perverted trance. “So much for the Hard Man of the Right. It’s all just a con isn’t it? Forget all the grand speeches, all those flag waving rallies; at the end of the day you’re just a dirty bastard sat behind a screen watching women you could never hope to bed get their kit off. The only thing hard about you is what’s going on in your pants when you’re sat behind a monitor. You’re pathetic.”

  The words came unnaturally to her, but Lucie knew they were necessary. She suspected an ego as big as Butcher’s would be susceptible to popping, and so it proved, the grin disappearing from his face, which twisted into anger as he took a step towards her before stopping himself and breathing the cold air of the warehouse into his lungs.

  “We’ll see how pathetic I am in three days,” he said, turning his back on her to walk away.

  “Wait!” Lucie shouted after the politician, who turned around and stared back at her, all smugness removed from his face and replaced with something close to hate.

  “What’s all this got to do with WaterWhyte, with the Red Mako?”

  Butcher sneered once more, latching onto her need for an answer and using it to further demonstrate his ‘control’.

  “Let’s just say it’s my ‘bung’,” he said. “Your three days have begun.”

  “I’ll see you then,” she said through a smile dripping with sarcasm. “Oh, and Adam? When you finish up in front of your laptop and start planning your new dog-eat-dog paradise, just remember who it is you’ve just put in a kennel.”

  Butcher wordlessly scoffed and spun on his heel, and the warehouse shutter creaked down behind him, Lucie watching it as it closed, her brain processing everything, from his ludicrous ‘covenant’ to the fragility of his ego.

  Turning back and heading into what would at least for the moment be her home, she wanted nothing more than to drop to her knees and weep for Ismail. She would not give Butcher the satisfaction of giving in to her anguish, instead, the emotion she was prepared to let loose, if only for a short while, was her rage.

  At the end of this plywood street of nightmares stood a mannequin dressed in a business suit, a briefcase attached to its ‘hand’ and an archaic and dead mobile phone glued quite literally to its other. It was as unconvincing as the rest, its body chipped and worn, and its features crudely painted; but to Lucie, it was for that moment Butcher himself. She picked up pace, running towards it as the scream that had built inside her for days erupted from within, drowning out all else and echoing around her. Clenching her fist, she slammed her knuckles at speed into the model’s face, breaking her skin and cracking the ancient dummy’s neck, sending its head spinning off it and onto the road, where it rolled into the path of the perpetually looping car, the vehicle crushing it as it continued on its never-ending journey.

  Lucie flexed her bruised and bleeding hand and heaved air into her burning lungs, watching with pleasure as the wax split and crunched under the weight of the moving metal. Butcher might think he had her trapped, but Lucie had been trapped before, and she reminded herself that her last captors had paid dearly for their abuses. As she walked away from the broken waxwork, she made a promise to Ismail and the others, that this time would be no different.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Lucie woke with a jolt. The pain in her head was finally gone, along with the rage that had consumed so much of her previous day, replaced though with the pain of cramped and sore muscles and a determination bordering on murderous.

  After her confrontation with Butcher and her assault of the unfortunate dummy she had chosen as his proxy, Lucie had explored what remained of the ‘Playpen’. Another model had graciously provided a well worn but oddly comfortable pair of trainers, which at last gave her feet some protection against the cold floor, and she had returned to the deli to hastily finish her sandwich and make another for the following day. In her flat she found Butcher’s instructions for how she was to act during her period of ‘testing’; lights out at 10:30pm, awake at 6:30am, when she would shower, dress in the clothes provided and proceed to the ‘office’ to perform the duties assigned to her. Having checked out her supposed new employment, Lu
cie found it to be another bland room, occupied by rows of desks, all empty and none with working computers, save for one, albeit with internet connection and next to which lay a hardback copy of Shakespeare’s complete works and instructions to copy them out. Ignoring them, Lucie had continued her inspection.

  Estimating that the warehouse was around fifty thousand square feet, the Playpen took up probably a quarter of its total size and had been built closer to the entrance than the rear of the structure. There was no fence around the perimeter, but having risked several tests, Lucie was sure that the alarm-triggering sensors existed all around it, and that she was in fact trapped. She could find no utensils of any kind that could be used for any attempted break out, and neither was there any obvious trap door she could locate, and she had cursed herself for imagining that there would be.

  There had been nothing of use in the other buildings, though on the counter of the ‘bar’ stood a bottle of rum with enough still inside it for two glasses. Not standing on ceremony, Lucie had lifted the bottle to her lips and swallowed the contents in full, before fatigue had begun to overcome her, her tired eyes longing for sleep. Returning to the room she had woken in, she had jumped in surprise when a voice that didn’t sound like Butcher’s began speaking to her from the grill in the wall, telling her to dress in night clothes and settle down for the night. When she had responded with profanity and pulled the sheets and pillow from the bed, intending to sleep outside on the pavement as a small act of rebellion, the voice followed her to a grill on the wall of the deli she had earlier visited, warning her that she was ‘breaking the covenant’ and to expect punishment. Responding defiantly, she had pulled the blanket over her head, only to be woken from unsettled slumber by the sound of the warehouse shutter creaking open.

  Throwing the sheet back and running to the edge of the Playpen perimeter, she had seen the silhouetted figures of two men approaching her, which meant the alarm was off! Not waiting a second, Lucie had charged towards the pair, aiming to fell them and take her chances with whatever lay beyond the shutter, but before she even drew level with the figures, her body was stricken with absolute and all-consuming pain.

  The twin barbs of a taser had pierced the skin of her abdomen and sent twelve hundred volts of current into her body, leaving her crumpled in agony, her muscles screaming at her as they spasmed and pulled. Forcing her eyes open as the initial pain began to subside, she saw her attacker standing over her, his finger on the trigger of his device, ready to unleash another burst of pain into her system. His colleague soon appeared, carrying with him a bin liner filled with the vegetables and breads from the Playpen deli, her only source of food. Passing her, the man had reached into the bag and pulled out a handful of the salad leaves, tossing them to the floor in front of her.

  “Feeding time,” he spat.

  Lucie, pushing herself with spent and sapped muscles to her knees, had scooped up the wet mixture and hurled it back at him, splattering it against his trousers, and earning herself a second jolt from the taser. The pair had reached the shutter before the pain let go its excruciating hold on her body, mocking her as they went, leaving her to stare after them in frustration. Mere seconds after the shutter locked down, the wail of the alarm had sounded again, cutting through her senses and causing her to force her bruised muscles to work and crawl back behind the perimeter, where she had struggled to her blanket and allowed exhaustion to drift her into a painful and tormented sleep.

  There was no clock near her when she awoke, though she guessed it was still early, the projection of sunrise not quite yet reaching the warehouse walls, and there was none of the sound of simulated activity which she had grown used to so quickly. She stood and stretched her still aching but rested muscles and took a brief reconnoitre of the Playpen. All food was gone, the shelves in the makeshift shop and deli bare, as she had expected, save for a tap of cold water, from which she drank heartily. Discipline, she reasoned, was the focus here, or more accurately, ‘training’; she was being trained as an owner might a dog, and her anger began to boil at the thought, before she supressed it with rational calm. This set up was designed to humiliate and terrify, through daily indignity and the threat of punishment. The only way to fight it, she reasoned, was to give in to neither and to do that, she must retain control of her emotions.

  After spending her first minutes of the day in prayerful meditation, Lucie ate the second baguette she had prepared the day before, before returning to her ‘apartment’ across the street. Though the overalls she had taken from the mannequin already stank with sweat and grime, she again refused to wear the business suit laid out and went through instead to the bathroom. As expected, the cameras in the room were in plain sight and no curtain hung from the shower rail. She found nudity neither embarrassing nor shameful, and her first instinct was to simply defy their expectations of timidity and go ahead and shower but doing so would detract from her plan.

  No amount of compliance over the next couple of days would free her Butcher’s clutches, whether or not he deemed her to have successfully made a ‘covenant’ with him, and she had absolutely no intention of joining his own personal harem, or ending up dumped behind a brothel in the early hours. The only way to avoid those fates, she reasoned, was to break the rules of the game she was in as often and as flagrantly as she could. If the psychology of the torture was intended to instil a fear of punishment and therefore a lack of human contact for the period of captivity, then Lucie would do the opposite.

  Collecting the blankets from the pavement, she knotted the corners together to form a rectangular canopy, trapping one corner in the bathroom door and tying another around the shower rail, providing a makeshift but effective screen across the toilet and shower. Though she made use of both as quickly as possible, it still wasn’t fast enough to avoid the water turning from hot to ice cold as she washed; the punishment for erecting her screen as expected as it was swift.

  Dressing again in the rough and uncomfortable overalls and trainers, Lucie continued in her acts of rebellion while concentrating on the problem of how to get out once she had pissed them off enough to open the shutters. She had ignored the voice with all its fatuous talk of covenants and promises for so long that its warnings of dire consequences went almost unregistered, even when it raised several levels from its customary quiet and sinister level to almost scream demands for her to proceed to the ‘office’. She did not do so, instead sitting cross legged by the perimeter in still concentration.

  The shutter remained closed hours later, as though matching her own defiant intransigence in a waiting game to see who would blink first, and Lucie realised she was being starved into submission. She had gone hungry before, and the pain in her belly as her hunger pangs increased perversely gave her the focus to keep her mind calm and on the problem at hand. Lucie could not escape until the door was open, and shut it remained, as though her watching it for the slightest move was an extra torture for her captors to enjoy. It was when she broke from her vigil that she heard the creak of movement, and she rushed back in seconds, only to see it close again. She was being toyed with, and she would not make such a mistake again. If they wanted her, they would have to come for her, and Lucie knew that one way or another, she was wanted. Lacking any obvious weapon, Lucie retrieved the now empty bottle of rum from the plywood bar and placed it under her blanket with her as the projections rotated once more into twilight; she allowed herself to drift lightly away, her hand gripping the bottle neck and facing the shutter, ready to strike.

  It was not the jolt of electricity that woke her but the scream of a siren and the glare of lights so bright they bore through her eyelids and into her fractured dream. The sensations did not lessen when she sought cover inside the buildings, the noise only amplified through the speakers that surrounded her prison. With no respite, Lucie returned to her bed and wrapped the blanket as tightly as she could bear around her head, clamping shut her eyes and shouting back in almost manic recalcitrance, before the siren ceased
and the lights cut off in a glorious instant as quickly as they had arrived.

  These tactics too she had experienced before, exhausted and broken in the Afghan cave; a sleep-deprived mind was a suggestible mind, and she knew this would not be the only time that night that those sirens would blaze. Returning her stare to the shutter and allowing her eyes to close once more, Lucie let her thoughts to drift to the heavens, preparing her senses for their next assault. Her prediction proved accurate as the sirens wailed repeatedly throughout the night, Lucie each time resisting despair and bellowing her passions in response.

  When morning arrived, she was weary and fatigued, but took advantage of what seemed the cessation of the attacks to grab the few hours sleep she would need to refresh herself. Her hunger had tipped over into nausea and there was again no food to counter it, Lucie instead taking more water and contemplating her situation. She had neither the desire nor intention to go through such a day again, or more accurately such a night, and she knew that the motives of her captors were purely sadistic. Butcher had said it took two weeks of conditioning to ‘train’ his other victims, yet he had given her only three days; the purpose could only have been torture, unless there was something special about the date that had eluded her. Either way, it was obvious to her that simply refusing to engage was not an option which would leave her the strength to fight off any ultimate attack, and she had no intention of begging for for relief. Rather, she thought to herself, she would bring it to a head.

  After freshening as best she could, Lucie resumed her position at the shutter, only this time not in quiet defiance.

  “Hey!” she shouted over the soundtracked birdsong and revving of engines. “Hey, Butcher! Come and get me; you win!”

  A crackle sounded from the speakers and the sinister voice returned, triumphalism masking the obvious puzzlement within it.

  “You wish to concede…?”