Black Holiday (The Black Chronicles Book 2)

by J. M. Anjewierden

  “You got something to tie her with, Ernest?” the one who had held the syringe at her neck snapped back. His hands shook as he gestured about the air car, probably from stress and adrenaline.

  “Gotta do everything myself, I guess,” Ernest said, grabbing Morgan and shoving her towards the couch mounted into the wall opposite the big door.

  From the feel of his grip on her Moran was sure she was stronger than this Ernest. She let herself be moved, for the moment. It did her no good to overpower him when there were… four others in the car.

  Five, Morgan corrected silently. Someone has to be driving the vehicle. I don’t think I’m lucky enough to be kidnapped by people so stupid that they’d let the auto-pilot take them to and from their little murder spree.

  Ernest grabbed at Morgan’s jacket, and she stiffened and brought her hands up defensively ready to attack him, five other men or not.

  “You’d best stop moving if you know what’s good for you,” he growled, finishing yanking the jacket off, then shoving her back down into the seat.

  Grumbling under his breath something Morgan couldn’t catch he pulled out a knife, cutting a strip off of the bottom of the jacket and rolling it up tightly, a crude but effective enough cord. Then he grabbed both of Morgan’s hands in one of his large ones, wrapping the strip of fabric around them tightly enough that it bit into her skin, and then tied it in place. A second strip was used to bind her feet, and then a third to tie the two bindings together. He left barely a couple dozen centimeters of fabric between her hands and feet, so that she had to sit almost doubled over.

  “Remember, I got more cloth where that came from. Any yelling from you and I’ll gag you too,” he said as he put one last strip over her eyes, blindfolding her.

  With a different kind of cloth it might have worked. But her jacket was made of a very light material, and Morgan could still make out the contours of the air car around her, even in the dim light.

  Not that I’m going to point out his mistake, Morgan thought, her fear starting to ebb as it was replaced by anger. Tied up with her own clothes. Not just her own clothes, but her favorite jacket, even! That realization gave her a momentary urge to burst into giggles. Worrying about my clothes, honestly, how ridiculous can I be?

  With nothing to do but awkwardly sit there, Morgan looked about the air car as best she could, without moving her head and of course still semi-blindfolded.

  She had been right. There were five of them: two with rifles, one to fly, and the last two probably to man the large weapon they’d hastily hung up in the middle of the air car.

  One of the men on the big gun – and Morgan noticed now they were all men – who she hadn’t got a look at before and now could only mentally dub ‘Big Arms,’ spoke up as the rode.

  “What are we going to do…” he started, only to be cut off by Ernest hitting him in the shoulder.

  “You be quiet too,” he said angrily. “We don’t want her overhearing anything. For that matter, no names.”

  “But Ernest, you were the one to start using…” Bert interjected, only to also be hit by Ernest, harder than Big Arms had been, from the sounds of it.

  “And that was a stupid thing for me to do. Just because I screwed up doesn’t mean you all should too. Now everyone just shut their mouths, and we can let…” there was a momentary pause as Ernest caught himself, “the Driver concentrate on getting us out of here in one piece. Or did you all forget that we probably have at least the police trying to track us?”

  Morgan wanted to ask what they planned to do with her, to try and talk with them. There was at least a chance she could make them see her as a person, rather than just a hostage, if she got them talking.

  For the moment, though, she kept her mouth shut. Not because of the warning Ernest had given her, there was no way she was going to meekly accept whatever they wanted without a fight, but because it was the wrong time and talking too soon would only make it harder for her later.

  They were still too keyed up from the fight earlier. Morgan’s memories of the minutes after her own life-and-death fights were hazy at best, but she did remember how jittery she had been, how anxious and worked up the adrenaline and everything else coursing through her system had made her.

  Let them calm down a bit first. I don’t think taking me was part of their plan. If the only person they wanted to hurt was Emily, I can use that. But only if I don’t anger them. Morgan thought to herself, watching Bert pace back and forth the short length of the air car’s cabin, ducking as he reached each side where it sloped down enough that his head brushed the ceiling.

  Wherever they were taking her it wasn’t far from the spaceport. The rest of the flight passed in silence, and in only a few minutes.

  Then again, Morgan didn’t really know how fast the air car was going. Sure, she had helped fix them to help put herself through school, but she’d only actually ridden in them a handful of times.

  Morgan had expected them to untie her feet so she could walk, but instead they just removed the strip connecting her hands and feet. One of the men, mentally dubbed Long Hair, then just picked her up, grunting at her unexpected weight.

  Once he had manhandled her out of the air car, he threw her over his shoulder like she was nothing more than a sack of corn.

  Or rather, he tried to.

  He got her up more or less, but without distributing her weight properly, resulting in him overbalancing and tumbling sideways. Morgan painfully slammed into the hard ground on her side, followed immediately by a bony elbow hitting her in the stomach.

  “Stop messing around,” Bert grouched at Long Hair, coming over and helping him stand up.

  “She’s a lot heavier than she looks. That short, reckon she’s from a heavier world than Albion?”

  “I don’t care if she’s from the heaviest world out there, she can’t be more than a meter and a half tall, get her up and get moving. We don’t want to linger in the open.”

  “I could just walk, you know,” Morgan said, quietly.

  “And let you run away? Do you think we’re stupid?”

  Very, Morgan thought, before adding out loud, “I can’t see, and I can’t outrun a bullet, and I don’t want to get dropped again. I am heavy.”

  Morgan winced internally. She had almost said that the gravity was only two-thirds what she’d grown up with, which would have been a mistake. That would get them thinking, maybe let them realize she was probably stronger than any of them.

  She suspected it when Ernest had first touched her, but now that she had seen them move, seen how much Long Hair had struggled to carry her, she was sure. They were all weaker than her.

  It wasn’t because of the gravity difference either, though that was a big part of it. Ernest and Long Hair had smooth hands, completely free of calluses. These men were strangers to hard work. They were soft.

  “What should I do…?” Long Hair said, barely stopping himself from saying Ernest’s name.

  “You should hurry, is what you should do. Can you carry her?”

  Long Hair shook his head.

  “Then untie her feet. Be quick about it.”

  Out came a knife from a pocket, and Long Hair cut the fabric binding her feet.

  Guess you won’t be using that again, Morgan thought, though she quashed the hope that this meant they wouldn’t tie her back up once they got where they were going. They had left what was left of her jacket in the air car, but surely they would be able to find something else to tie her up with later.

  That was a consideration for that later, though. For now she could get some circulation back in her feet. If she followed along quietly she could hopefully make them think she wasn’t likely to try anything.

  Not that she had been lying. She really couldn’t outrun a bullet, and each time they dropped her was another chance to be injured in some way.

  It wasn’t time to try and escape yet, but she needed to be as ready as she could be.

  Long Hair grabbed her by her bound
hands and hauled her onto her feet.

  Dropping her hands Long Hair instead grabbed her by the back of the neck, standing uncomfortably close behind her.

  “Now walk,” he barked.

  Using her neck to guide her they did just that. Morgan tried not to let on that she could see through the blindfold, which unfortunately meant bumping into a couple of the crates scattered around the floor.

  She could feel a breeze on her skin, so they weren’t in an enclosed building. It was still quite dark.

  Still surrounded by towers, perhaps? Morgan thought. The only lighting was low, on the ground, so she couldn’t tell if there was a roof above them or the open sky.

  She would have assumed a roof, since it had still been daytime when they had landed, but Morgan realized she didn’t actually know. She hadn’t updated her uplink to local time before the attack happened, so it could just as easily have been an hour before dusk as an hour after dawn when they landed.

  There didn’t seem to be anyone else using the space, not even compatriots of the men holding her. She wondered if there were others waiting inside, or if these men were all there was.

  Behind them Morgan could hear the air car spool up its engines. She hadn’t noticed anyone get back in, but she could easily have missed it when she’d been dropped.

  Morgan hated being blind to what was going on – and in more than the physical sense.

  She assumed for the moment these men were tied to the fellow on the space station who’d yelled at Emily, but who were they? They were mad at her for something she’d done, a battle by the sounds of it. But against whom? When? The answers to those questions almost certainly would factor into Morgan’s chances of surviving the next hours or days, and she had no way to get them.

  For the moment she just needed to pay attention and try not to antagonize them.

  They reached a door leading inside, and Long Hair shoved her forward, apparently impatient to get her inside.

  As she entered the room she was momentarily actually blinded, not from any darkness, but because the room was so bright that the transition caused her to squeeze tight her eyes against the painful flood of light.

  Long Hair tossed her to the floor just inside the doorway. With her hands still bound Morgan couldn’t catch herself and she landed painfully on her shoulder. She rolled so her back was to the wall and she could see the room, at least as much as the blindfold allowed.

  “Don’t move,” he gruffly ordered, before stepping away from her.

  “What is that doing here?” A cold woman’s voice said, somewhere off to Morgan’s right, away from the doorway. Her accent was not one Morgan had heard before.

  Which is more likely? Morgan thought. That she’s an offworlder, or simply has an accent from a different part of Albion I haven’t run into before?

  Given that Ernest, Bert, Long Hair, and Big Arms all had the same basic accent she figured the former. She tried not to think on the significance of being referred to as ‘that’.

  “Had to improvise. Grabbed a hostage to get us out after the plan fell through, someone young and pretty, tug at the heartstrings of the police and the Butcher Bitch,” Ernest answered. Morgan thought he stressed the word ‘someone’ slightly, but it could have just been wishful thinking on her part.

  If the woman’s voice had been cold before, now it was positively icy.

  “The plan. Fell. Through?” She said slowly. “And when exactly were you planning on telling us this?”

  “Just now. Relax. We still have Plan B.”

  “Isn’t that a bit premature? After all, your Plan A should have worked. I got you everything you could possibly have needed for a clean kill. Given your failure, it is interesting that you assume I’ll let you try Plan B. Now, you will tell me exactly what happened, and what your plans are. After you take that outside of town and deal with it.”

  Morgan’s heart froze. She had been scared up to this point, but had assumed they weren’t planning on just killing her, otherwise they already would have. But if the men who had grabbed her weren’t really in charge…

  “Woah, woah. That’s not the way we do things in the movement.” Big Arms said, coming in the doorway.

  Morgan opened her eyes just a bit wider. It wasn’t as blinding anymore, but she’d still need a moment to adjust. She could make out a few of the closer human shaped objects, but couldn’t tell if that was all of them in the room.

  “And your little movement has failed time and time again for four decades, has it not? Remember, without my help you would never have had the resources to even attempt your little ‘statement.’”

  Big Arms just grunted, and then Long Hair spoke.

  “And without us you’d not have someone to do the dirty work so you can get your paycheck,” he said, spitting out the last word.

  “Yes. ‘Dirty work.’ Work I am completely capable of doing without you. Don’t mistake convenience for necessity, amateur.”

  “If you wish to end our partnership,” a new female voice said, entering the room from the archway opposite the door Morgan had come in, “That is, of course, up to you. But we will decide what to do with our prisoner, not you.” The woman had the same accent as Bert and the others and, of course, her words made Morgan assume that she was with her kidnappers rather than the cold woman.

  “Enough of this. She is a threat to me, and I do not tolerate threats. From anyone.” Morgan could see the woman pull something out of a pocket, a weapon, judging by how several of the others pulled things from their pockets and pointed them at the woman.

  Morgan couldn’t wait any longer, risks or no.

  “I am no threat to you, whoever you are,” she said, quietly, letting her fear come out through her voice. “I don’t know who you are, who you are after, any of it. I’m not even from around here.”

  “You have no idea who we are? I find that hard to believe,” the second woman said, stepping forward, subtly positioning herself by the door with her back to the cold woman and between her and Morgan.

  “It is the truth,” Morgan said, trying to sound as genuine as possible. It helped that it was actually the truth, of course. “I’ve never been to Albion before. I’m just a starship mechanic.”

  “Pick her up,” the woman said, gesturing at one of the men, maybe Big Arms. As he complied the woman turned back to face the cold woman. “I will question her elsewhere, after my men report on what happened. Then we can decide what to do next. Calmly, quietly, and without any more of your melodrama.”

  The cold woman must have returned her weapon to her pocket – Morgan couldn’t see with the other woman standing over her – because she could hear what was presumably a bunch of weapons being put back in holsters and pockets.

  Big Arms shoved his hands under her arms and hauled Morgan to her feet.

  “Put her in the briefing room. Tie her to one of the chairs. Don’t overdo it. If we do end up dumping her somewhere we won’t want any injuries that could turn the public against us.” The woman addressed one of the other men, “Get him some proper rope.” She then raised her voice, addressing everyone. “I don’t think I need to say this, given all of your outstanding revolutionary zeal and commitment to the cause, but just so there are no misunderstandings: No one touches the girl. Anyone who does will beg for the sweet mercies of the Butcher before I’m through with them.”

  Big Arms led Morgan through the room quickly, denying her a chance to get a better look at the rest of the room before they were out in a halfway, doors on either side.

  They entered the tenth door on the right, suggesting whatever this place was, it was big. Big Arms sat Morgan down in a cold metal chair all the way at the back of the room, away from the large table surrounded by chairs that took up most of the space.

  He then just stood there, holding her in place with his hand on the back of her neck, waiting.

  The silence was unbearable, and felt unending, but it was probably no more than a couple minutes before someone else came in and
handed a coil of rope to Big Arms.

  He secured her legs to the legs of the chair rather than tying them back together and only then cut the cloth holding her hands together. Since the chair had no arms he tied her right arm to the back right leg of the chair, with the newcomer holding her left arm still in the meanwhile.

  Despite the softness of their hands, Morgan recoiled at their touch. Do they have anyone working with them who has ever done hard work? Morgan wondered. She knew it was only her imagination, but her skin felt slimy where they had run their hands along it, and of course her outfit meant that her arms and legs were completely bare.

  As they worked they quietly chatted between themselves.

  “Would you check out the scars on this one,” the newcomer said, running a finger along one of the longer scars on Morgan’s left arm, tightening his grip as Morgan tried to pull it away from him. “What do you think, some kind of fashion thing wherever she’s from?”

  Morgan said nothing, not wanting to give them the satisfaction. She knew she needed to try and get them on her side, that it could only improve her chances of convincing them not to kill her, but in the moment all she could think was the last thing she wanted from them was understanding or pity.

  “I’ve heard of planets that do that, but don’t they usually go for patterns, or at least symmetry?” Big Arms answered.

  “If they’re not fashionable then, what are they?” the newcomer asked Morgan directly.

  Morgan just turned her head away from him as well as she could manage.

  “Silent treatment, huh? Well, it doesn’t matter to me anyway. You’re just another posh bint, come to our home to exploit the people of Albion.”

  “Ah, leave off. Let’s go get some food.”

  They left the blindfold on and, all four limbs secured, moved to leave.

  “One bit of advice, girlie,” the newcomer said. “Trying to get loose will only end up knocking the chair over. You do that and you won’t be able to get back up. Being tied to a chair is not exactly comfortable, but being tied to a chair that is sideways on the ground is much worse. And that’s if you’re lucky and don’t land on your face.”