by A. R. Shaw
Ace ran ahead of them, seemingly waiting at each door Sloane would open as if it were a game. Then he’d dart off to the next one.
“They must have her somewhere else,” Kent said, darting his attention back and forth.
“She’s got to be here.”
“Sloane, they’re coming.”
“There’s only two more doors.” She ran ahead, away from his protection, and flung open the next door. To her horror there was only a body in there, lying face down. The same dark raven hair as Wren’s. “Wren?” Sloane ran inside the room as a tingle of dread ran up her spine.
“Sloane, wait!” Kent said as she heard him fire off a few more rounds. They were gaining on them. She had to hurry. Rushing to the still body, Sloane revoked her own fear and pushed over the stilled form. The raven hair so much like Wren’s was not. This wasn’t her daughter. But she was someone’s daughter and she was dead. Wasted away.
More shots rang out.
“Enough of this crap. Brace yourself,” she heard Kent say and the next thing she knew she crouched low as one of their homemade ordnances exploded somewhere nearby.
“Sloane, now!”
“I’m so sorry, baby,” Sloane whispered to the dead teenager, praying her daughter did not also meet the same fate. She brushed the girl’s cheek as she stood and ran out of the room, flinging the second and last door open as the smoke still flooded the hallway.
“Move!” she shouted at a prisoner who wandered around the hallway, in a state of shock.
“If they can’t be useful, they could at least stay out of the damn way!” Kent yelled.
It wasn’t like him to utter such thoughts. But in times of strife, Sloane knew things changed on a dime. His statement would be funny in time, if they survived this ordeal. It wasn’t funny right now.
The last room remained empty. Not even a neglected body lay inside its open space.
“She’s not here, either. There was one opened room down another hallway. I didn’t open the door. Maybe she escaped somehow?”
Kent drew his eyebrows in. His eyes drove into her. “Sloane. No…she’s got to be here somewhere.”
“Rose is missing too,” Sloane spoke out loud.
“Who’s Rose?”
“She was my roommate. When I returned, she was gone.” She knew he wouldn’t understand all of her words right now and that didn’t matter.
“Sloane, we need to go.”
“I’m not leaving her!”
“No…we’re not leaving her.”
“I’m not going anywhere until we find her.”
“I know! I agree! I’m with you, Sloane. I mean, we can’t stay here in this hallway. We need to find where they brought you in. Were you questioned? Did you see anything else in this building?”
She shook her head. “No, they took Rose to some torture chamber.” Then her mind immediately flashed on Rose’s legs and when she looked up to her face, she didn’t see Rose, she saw her daughter instead. “Oh my God! We have to find her, Kent.”
“We’re going to find her. We just have to keep moving.”
“There’s only one way, back the way we came. This is where they housed all the prisoners, and she’s not here. We need to head back to their headquarters. I’m pretty sure they took Rose to the right of my room. We’ll head back to that position and go from there. Do we have enough firepower?”
Chuckling, Kent said, “Oh yes. And we’ll pick up more on the way.”
34
Rose
Once Rose cleared the familiar hallways with dread, her heart pounding in her chest, she entered the open area where only a table, chairs and a light remained in the center of the room. It was the same room she remembered on the first day they brought her here many months ago. On the other side of that room was the torture room. She always dreaded seeing the one lamp but now the darkened sides of the room aided her intentions. She willingly inched toward the fear and dread she felt. This ends tonight, she chanted the mantra. And then immediately slunk into the darkness again, flattening herself low against the wall as a guard ran through the room to the hallway leading to the cells. They were scrambling. That woman, Sloane, or someone else was giving them a run for their money.
That was a good thing, but they were naïve. She knew Hyde well enough and he wouldn’t go easily. No, she needed to make sure he was dead. She had to do this herself. If she didn’t, he would find them. He would find her family. She would die either way and that was of no consequence, but she’d make her death count this way. Paying that price for their safety was everything.
The guard ran off and Rose waited, just in case there were more to come. Just like deer, you never crossed a road, knowing the next one would leap right in front of you to follow their master. Waiting was the hardest thing to do when the door to demise lay right in front of her. Only thirty yards away.
Not one but two more men suddenly ran past her just as she made the decision to run for it. One ran for another door she hadn’t noticed. Turning back, the other guy spotted her in the corner but shifted his eyes away.
“Dave…I don’t care what he says, let’s go. This place is falling. Come on, let’s go.” The second guard took off his hat and both fled out the building.
A cold draft of night air spilled over Rose’s face. She smelled freedom there. Her family was out there somewhere, beyond the walls of pain. She could follow them. She could open up that mental door with their location locked away. The way out into the night remained only across the room. But the door swung closed again, this time with an audible click, behind the fleeing men.
Rose pushed herself up along the wall, dragging rifles she’d found along the way behind her, as if they were weighted by those ankle weights. Her body leaned forward with the effort as she trekked toward the door.
What she didn’t expect when she finally made it to the door was the sound of screaming. At first, she thought perhaps they were memories of her own wails, but they weren’t. These cries came from someone much younger. A girl.
35
Sloane
“We can’t take them all,” Sloane said as Kent bent down to grab another rifle from a dead body.
“Never thought I’d hear you say that,” he said as they picked up to a run down the hallway, as much as Sloane could run on her injury.
“This is it,” she said, pointing to her own room. “When they took Rose, they went in this direction.”
Kent’s gaze lingered on the horrid conditions inside, and he began to say something.
“No don’t. Not now,” she said to head him off. They didn’t have time. Hopefully that time would come soon. After Wren was found safe and sound.
He grabbed her arm a little tighter and together they continued on. Parts of the building were on fire by then, the explosions having done their damage. Then suddenly Kent pulled Sloane against the wall when they saw a soldier running past them. Kent aimed but the guard flung his arms high and shook his head. He darted out an exterior door. “Hey!” Kent yelled.
The young man turned to them in the dark.
“Have you seen a teen girl?” The young man just stared back at him, bewildered. “Where’s the leader?” Kent tried next.
Sloane stepped forward to get a better look at the guard. He was the breakable one. “Hey! I know you!”
The guard was merely a kid, Sloane realized. He jumped up and down in nervousness, just as frightened as many of the prisoners.
“Where’s my daughter?” Sloane seethed.
Without a word, the deserter pointed in the right direction and then turned and fled into the night.
Just a little farther now.
They crossed the hallway, looking back and forth, when Sloane stumbled.
“Hold onto me,” Kent said.
“Kent, I…” she began to say and the blackness began to flood from the sides of her eyes. “No!” Sloane said, resisting the blackout.
She felt Kent hoist her up by the waist. “Come on, baby. She’s not
much farther.”
“I can’t faint now,” she complained.
“You won’t. I won’t let you,” he said and lifted her gown, exposing fresh blood streaming down her leg. “The wound’s reopened, but it’s not an artery. Take several deep breaths, Sloane.”
Breathing deeply, somehow, her vision cleared.
“Keep doing that. More oxygen. Breathe. You can pass out later.”
She nodded.
“You okay?” he said, looking into her eyes. She suspected he was checking her pupils for signs of strength, like a meter.
“Yes. Let’s keep going.”
Ace let out a bark behind them and Kent knew now that meant the bad men were coming. The dog seemed to gain some useful tricks in a time of crisis.
Peeking around the next corner, Kent saw the hallway led to a lobby-like room. There was a lantern on a table in the center. “This way?”
Sloane nodded her head. “I think so. We’ve searched everywhere else.”
“Hang behind me,” Kent said and she looped her right hand through the back of his belt as they inched forward. Then they breached the open space. Kent led her to the right, circling the table. She watched behind them as Kent focused on the front. “There’s no one in here. But there’s another hallway on the other side,” Kent pointed.
When they reached the doorway, they found the door ajar. Through the opening, Sloane saw a metal desk facing them.
That’s when she heard her daughter’s voice for the first time in days, and her sobbing wasn’t a good sign.
“Wren!” Sloane yelled and she bolted forward, only to feel Kent shove her backward.
“No!” Kent yelled and when the door opened wider, she saw why Kent stopped her in her tracks.
Wren huddled against the wall behind some kind of sawhorse thing on a platform, bent over, her hands shielding her ears against a sluicing sound Sloane had not yet placed.
Not seeing them at all, Wren raised her head at her mother’s voice. Sloane gasped at the sight of her bloodied daughter.
She would only know the girl was her daughter by her cries. Her face was unrecognizable.
That was the first shock.
Sloane lurched forward to her daughter, but Kent stalled her forward motion again.
“Wait!”
Turning to the right, Sloane first caught sight of motion and then Rose and then what Rose was doing.
Ace dropped low and growled at the sight.
“Rose…” Sloane whispered out in slow horror. “Rose, stop. He’s dead now. You can stop, Rose. He’s gone. It’s over.” Sloane knelt down and began to inch to the woman bent over the body, but Kent wouldn’t have it.
He pulled her back. He shook his head. “Sloane, no. She’s gone. She’s not there now.”
Kent raised his weapon to the woman pulling the intestines like a rope slowly through her fingers and out of the disemboweled body before her. Blood covered her arms, her face. Blood was everywhere.
He raised his weapon at her. “Go,” he whispered without taking his eyes off Rose or what used to be the woman, Rose. “Get, Wren. Let’s go.”
Scrambling to Wren’s side, Sloane carefully touched her daughter’s head. Her hair lay strewn over her face. “Baby? It’s Mom.”
Wren jerked then. Her whole body shuddered. “Mom?” she cried.
“Yes, I’m here,” Sloane said and moved Wren’s hair to the side. Suddenly, her hand lifted. Shaking. “Oh my God...come on baby, let’s go,” Sloane said, seeing her daughter could not possibly see her out of her swollen eyes. She lifted her daughter to a standing position as much as possible.
Kent reached for them but never took his eyes from Rose and her gruesome work. He pulled them past him. Sloane knew a dilemma raced through Kent’s mind then. A terrible choice to make. Her daughter was her primary concern but Rose…
With a glance of his eyes, Kent asked Sloane an impossible question.
She gave a solemn nod.
And she knew what he was about to do.
He just wanted a little privacy for the act.
As Sloane led her daughter away from the carnage, she heard just one shot behind them. That one shot sent a jolt through her and somewhere in Wren’s mind, she must have also known too because she started and cried a little harder.
“All right. Come on. We’re not done yet,” Kent said, joining them. “Let’s get out of here.”
They again entered the room with the table lamp. A fire threatened any other exit now except for the one leaving the building. There were distant shots heard, most of them singles. “We can’t be too careful. Watch out,” Sloane said.
Kent opened the door to the outside. The cold air rushed in, hitting Sloane like a sledgehammer. She was fading fast and couldn’t afford to falter now.
“Stay behind me,” Kent said as he nudged Ace out into the night first. The dog looked back at him. Kent nodded his head forward, hoping the dog would take it as yes, you’re first this time, dammit.
He ran out and stopped about ten feet from the door. Nothing. Silence.
“Okay…we’re headed the same way I got in. Follow me.”
They were running to the old dump truck. Wren stumbled. “Just hold onto me,” Sloane told her.
A round went off somewhere in the distance as they crossed the empty space of night, and the newfound hope Sloane briefly grasped somehow ceased as she watched her daughter fall to the ground.
36
Wren
When he showed up at the door, Wren didn’t know what to think. At the time, she saw him through a small slit between her swelling lids. “Why are you here?”
He said nothing. Grabbed her roughly by the arm and pulled her behind him, dragging her down the hallway quickly. Later, he said, “He thinks you have something to do with the alarms. Just do what he asks. Give him the information he wants. It’ll be easier that way.” And then he whispered with a shaky jerk in his voice, “I’m sorry.”
He shoved her then, through an opened doorway and left. Left her to a monster.
That’s all Wren would allow her mind to wander into that darkened room alone with a psychopath. The betrayal of the guard who wanted forgiveness maddened her.
In later days, she never answered Kent’s questions. His gentle probing. She could not let herself go into that room again. Not in her mind. In her mind, that door remained closed. That’s where it stayed. That’s where it would always stay…behind that door.
“Wren? Are you awake?”
It was her mother again. Her incredibly strong mother now wept at night, during the day; at random times she broke down sobbing. She barely left her side. She’d lost something in there, too. It was me. Wren answered her own question. Losing me makes her weak? It was an answer that just dawned on her.
Not her fault. None of this is her fault.
They were shattered now. All of them.
They survived, but at what cost? What were they now?
Wren shook her head. Her eyes were healing a little every day. She’d see clearly again. Kent made sure of that. Mending them…her and her mother. The bullet that tore through Wren’s shoulder also tore through her already shattered soul, her confidence, everything. Kent healed her body. Though the abyss Wren found herself standing next to, day and night…no one healed from that.
“Time,” Kent had said, “will heal all wounds. All of them. I know that seems impossible now.”
“Wren, dinner,” her mother said, holding out a bowl of something with steam emerging from the top of it like a smokestack. “Please eat.”
With her right arm, she turned to her mother and grasped the bowl. Her left arm still ached when she moved it.
A gasp died on her mother’s lips; she could barely contain it. Wren knew her face was a shocking sight…even three weeks after the event.
“Is he back?”
“Who? Kent?”
“Yeah…who else would he be?” Still the zingers from daughter to mother. Why do I keep doing that?
>
“Yes. He’s gathering wood. He has the radio though,” she said, pointing to the unit on the table, like a lifeline that Nicole monitored night and day.
Nodding, Wren shifted her food around in the bowl. Rice and meat…some kind of meat. She didn’t ask any longer.
“Is the whole thing gone now? I can still smell the smoke drifting this way.”
Her mother favored her injured leg now. She stood like a stork most of the time when not moving around. Wren knew it must still hurt as much as her shoulder. She also knew her mother wanted to run on the beach like she used to. That would take a while. Not so much from the injury but from the mental prison she knew her mother found herself in, much like herself.
She nodded her head. “Yes, pretty much. He leveled the whole thing to send a message to anyone who tried to organize there again. Many of the prisoners and their families have come forward to help. They want us to form a community for safety. Stronger in numbers.”
Wren lowered her bowl to her lap, not having tasted the mystery meat yet. “But we’ve always avoided others in the past. Are we going to join them?”
Sloane’s eyes lingered on Wren’s face, on the bruising still turning fifty shades of green in circles around her eyes.
She lifted one shoulder.
Something stripped away from her mother’s strength now. Wren could barely stand it.
Once the strongest person she’d ever known, now her mother was a fraction of that strength and it killed her. More so, seeing her expression reflect her own misery made it worse.
Then Wren swished her spoon through the meal and that sound…something about that sound made her flashback on the room beyond the closed door again…it was after the woman entered. It was after the shots were fired into Hyde…then the slashing sounds, then the wet motions and smell of warm iron in the air. The wet noises…something inhuman happened in there, beyond the torture.
