by David Archer
The footsteps came down the hallway, but the voices had stopped. They seemed to be checking the doors on the cells, opening and closing them quickly as if checking to make sure that each of their prisoners was still present and accounted for. When they got to my door, it opened only long enough for them to look in and see that I was there, and then slammed shut again.
“It might have nothing to do with us,” Frank said, “but we’ve got to move them. You heard that cop, they’ll be back first thing in the morning. We’ve got to get them all out of here, now.”
“But where are we gonna take ’em?” Michael asked. He sounded like he was almost whining, completely at odds with his muscular, tough guy appearance. “We got nowhere else to go.”
“We’ll go to my house, for tonight,” Frank said. “We can keep them in the basement and see if this blows over. If it does, we can bring them back tomorrow night and pick up where we left off. Once they search this building, they won’t come back to it again. Just make sure we don’t leave anything behind that connects any of them to it.”
Michael started to whine again, but Frank began cajoling him. “Come on, it’ll be fine. Trust me, I’ve been through this before. All we’ve got to do is take them to the house and keep them out of sight until this search is over, then we can come right back and pick up where we left off.”
“I guess so,” Michael said. “It just makes me nervous, Dad. Last thing in the world I ever want is to go back to the joint.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to let that happen. We just need to move them for tonight, that’s all. Now, let’s take them up one at a time, just like always. Grab that bag of zip ties, we’re gonna need them.”
A door down at the other end of the hall opened up and I heard Connie’s voice. She was obviously frightened, and was begging. “Please, please no, not again tonight,” she said. “Please?”
“Shut up,” Michael said. “We just gotta move you all somewhere else for a little while. We’ll come back here tomorrow, so just shut up.”
Connie fell silent and I could hear them all walking away. I heard them go up the stairs, and then it was about ten minutes or so before the men came back down again. This time, they took Bernice up the stairs, and there was another slight delay before they came back to get Wanda. As soon as they were gone with her, Candace called out, “Emily?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You think this is it? You think this is when they’re going to kill us all?”
“I don’t really think so,” I said. “They were talking down here by my door, and I could hear them pretty clearly. There’s something going on, something about a search. Frank says they have to move us out before morning when the search starts up again, but he said they can bring us back here tomorrow after it’s over. The way he was talking to Michael, I think he was being truthful.”
“You think maybe the police really do have some idea where we are? Maybe that’s what the search is all about, you think?”
“Could be,” I said. “Like I said, they claim they had a lead, so maybe it was true.”
Inside, I knew in my heart that whatever was going on was because Dex had tracked me at least part of the way. The police had some idea of where we were, or they wouldn’t be searching in this area. Despite the gravity of the situation, I confess that I felt a surge of happiness inside.
The men came back a few moments later and took Candace upstairs, but then it seemed to be quite a while before they came back after me. I decided to take the chance and picked up my cell phones, then quickly guzzled the rest of the water in my bottle. I didn’t know when I might be able to get a drink again, but I knew I needed to stay as hydrated as I could.
According to my phone, it was almost 20 minutes before Frank and Michael returned. I shoved the phone into my coat pocket and was sitting against the wall once more when the door opened.
“Come out here,” Frank said, the pistol in his hand pointing directly at me. I got up carefully and walked slowly toward them. The sleeves of my coat, because I was wearing it loosely, hung down to cover my hands, keeping the burned left hand out of sight for the moment.
As soon as I stepped out the door, Frank grabbed me by my left arm and started walking me toward the stairs. Michael stayed behind and went into my recently vacated cell for a moment, then came out and followed.
“Nothing in there,” he said. “She’s still got all her clothes on, and I already got rid of the other ones. Ain’t nothing here for anybody to find.”
“Good,” Frank said as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “Let’s get her in and get the hell out of here.”
As they turned to start up the stairs, I managed to turn slightly and got a look at Michael. As far as I could tell, he was unarmed, but the man looked strong enough to wrestle a bull, as my daddy used to say. Frank was still holding onto my left arm and walking up the stairs right beside me, while Michael was a few steps back.
If they get me up the stairs, I’ll have to deal with both of them at once, I thought. If I’m going to do this, it has to be now.
I coughed once, then lifted my right hand to cover my mouth and coughed again. Frank glanced at me, but then looked up the stairs once more, and I decided that was my cue. I dropped my hand to my neck and then thrust it quickly down into my bra, caught the grip of one of my plastic daggers and drew it out, then shoved it as hard as I could into Frank’s right eyeball.
Everything seemed to go into slow-motion at that moment. Frank screamed and let go of my arm, and I grabbed for the gun but it flew out of Frank’s grasp and tumbled over the handrail to drop down below the stairs. I turned and shoved Frank backward with everything I had, putting all of my weight into it, and saw him fall directly onto Michael. The two of them began tumbling down the stairs together, and I turned and began running up them. I burst out into the big room where they had brought me in the building earlier, then turned and looked back down.
The two men had hit the bottom, but Michael was on his feet and coming up the stairs, his face a mask of pure rage. I grabbed the big steel door and slammed it shut, then looked around for some way to keep him from opening it. There was a simple slide bolt on the door and I shoved it home, but it didn’t look nearly strong enough to delay Michael for more than a few seconds.
The door frame had hooks for a crossbar on either side of the door, but I didn’t see anything close by that could be the bar. I heard a commotion behind me and glanced over to see the van, and it dawned on me then that the other women were inside it. I was trying to decide what to do when Michael reached the top of the stairs and hit the door. The slide bolt held, but I knew it wasn’t going to for very long.
I turned and ran toward the van, snatching the driver’s door open and leaping in behind the wheel. I checked quickly for the keys, but they were not in the ignition. I looked around inside the van and didn’t see them, then checked over the sun visor. Still no keys, but I knew I was about to run out of time. Michael would get the door open at any moment, and I didn’t think I was going to be able to handle him if he got loose.
I jumped out of the van again and looked frantically around for something to use as a weapon, but the place was surprisingly clean. The only thing I saw was several stacks of wooden pallets, and I instinctively sprinted toward them. I skidded around beside them just as Michael hit the door one more time and the slide bolt went flying. The door slammed open and Michael came running out.
He went first to the van and looked inside, then climbed out again when he didn’t find me there. He stood there beside the van looking around for a moment, and then spotted the same stacks of pallets. He walked toward them, trying to see around them, but it was obvious that he was sure I had to be hiding there.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he sang. There was a slight noise from behind the pallets, and Michael began to smile. “Come on out, bitch,” he said. “You got nowhere to run to. All the doors are locked and only I have the key, so there’s no place you
can go.”
He kept walking slowly toward the pallets, his smile growing wider as he leaned his head from one side to the other, trying to figure out just where I might be. He just knew I had to be behind them somewhere, it was just a matter of where.
“I don’t like to play hide and seek,” he said, his voice sounding almost playful. “I’ll tell you what. You come on out, and I won’t kill you tonight. You make me come in there and get you, and I’m going to snap your pretty little neck, you hear me?”
When I was a little girl, we used to get most of our feed on pallets, and Daddy had a pair of forks that fit on the front of his tractor. I remembered how he used to stack them up out behind the barn, and how I used to play on them. He would always yell at me to be careful, because a stack of pallets is one of the most unstable things you’ll ever see. Because of broken stringers or missing boards, they never stacked perfectly straight. Even a small child up on top of the stack could easily make it tip over, and I got to be very good at it. A stack of pallets fifteen feet high is easy to tip, and I could ride it all the way down as it fell and land on my feet.
Once, however, I wasn’t paying enough attention to what was going on around me. I was up on the pallets and getting ready to ride them down—which really irritated my dad, by the way, because then he’d have to stack them up again—and just as I stepped on the forward edge to make it fall, one of our goats came out of the barn and stopped right in front of me.
It was too late, and I couldn’t stop it. I rode the pallets down, screaming all the way, because I knew what was going to happen. Those pallets weigh forty or fifty pounds apiece, and when a dozen of them hit you all at once, there is no doubt it’s going to hurt. Our poor goat didn’t have a chance. By the time I got the pallets off of her, she was bleeding so badly that all I could do was watch her bleed to death.
Michael had been too busy looking for me at the van, and he hadn’t seen me climb carefully up onto the pallets. I was laying on top, watching as he came toward me, playing his little game and trying to get me to come out. I waited until he was right in front of me, just the way that goat had been, and then I jumped up and stepped forward.
It was like riding a bicycle, and I rode the stack down like a surfer coming down a wave. I landed on my feet and took a couple of steps forward to make sure I was out of the way, then turned and looked back. Michael was tall; he had been almost ten feet away from the stack. More than twenty of those pallets had struck him, had driven him down onto the concrete floor. I couldn’t see clearly, but there was obviously blood pooling around his head.
I waited a moment, looking for any sign of life, but there wasn’t so much as a groan. I started pulling pallets off of him, ready to drop them and run if he so much as twitched, but by the time I got enough of them off to really see, I knew that Michael Rawlings wasn’t going to be doing anything anymore. The weight of the pallets had done a lot of damage of their own, but catching his skull between them and the concrete floor had cracked it like an egg. There was so much blood that I had to walk on the pallets to get to his pockets and look for the keys he had mentioned.
I found them, in the front pocket of his jeans, and pulled them out. I was looking to see if the van key was on the ring when another sound made me look up. There was a huffing noise coming from over by the stairs, and I stared in shock as Frank came through the door. He had his right hand over his ruined eye, and was holding the gun in his left as he looked around.
It took him a moment to see me, and I knelt there on the pallet, dumbfounded, as he raised the gun and pointed it at me. He squeezed the trigger once, but the bullet flew off to my right, and I knew that he must be right-handed. He aimed the gun again, and I did the only thing I could think of. I ran around behind the remaining stacks of pallets.
I peeked through the pallets at him, trying to stay in enough shadow that he wouldn’t be able to see me, but he was so enraged that I doubt it even occurred to him that he might. He stomped over to where Michael lay and looked down at him, then screamed in fury.
“EMILY!” he bellowed, and then he bent double at the waist. I heard what sounded like sobs for a few seconds, but then he screamed out at me again. I was staying behind the pallets, just watching him and trying to figure out what to do. Frank had eight inches and at least a hundred pounds on me; I’m not sure there was any possibility of any kind of fair fight between us, but I’m certain he would do his best to make sure I didn’t get one.
I reached into my bra and pulled out my remaining little dagger. I had already managed to take one of his eyes, and I was thinking that if I could move quickly enough to get the other one, then I had a pretty good chance of avoiding getting shot. The only problem was that he would literally be shooting blind, I was sure, and if he happened to be pointing the gun at the van, any of the other women could die.
Trying to climb the pallets again was out, because he was simply too close. They creak and squeak when you climb them, and while Michael was too far away to notice before, Frank was less than ten feet away. There was no way I could make it up them without him hearing me, and I didn’t think those old pallets would offer much protection against bullets.
I made my way to the end of the stack, where I could stay just out of his sight if he happened to turn my way, then waited a moment before quickly looking around at him. He was facing toward the van, and there was a look of evil in his face that almost made me wonder about demonic possession for a moment. He glanced around at the stack of pallets once more, but I was on the other end from the one closest to him.
“Emily,” he called out. “Come out now, or I’ll kill all the rest of them. Do you want them on your conscience? You got five seconds.”
I braced myself, ready to rush out and attack with my flimsy little weapon against his heavy, automatic pistol. There was nothing else I could do, I knew. Only this time, I wasn’t going for his eyeball; I was going for the throat. I know that if you can sever the carotid artery, a person will lose consciousness within a matter of seconds, and death follows shortly after. If I could drive the blade into his throat and rip it back out, then I could do my best to just hold onto that gun until his brain was starved of oxygen-rich blood. He would fall, then, and this nightmare could come to an end.
I stepped quietly out from behind the pallets and readied myself to lunge, but I must’ve made a sound that I didn’t notice. He spun and looked at me, and the sadistic glee on his face told me that I was about to die. There was no way I could get to him before he could aim the gun and pull the trigger.
“I’ll give you this,” he said. “You’re the first one out of more than fifty women who ever managed to put up a fight.” He raised the gun and pointed it toward my face, and a roaring noise filled my ears. I waited for the shot to come, but an even louder sound broke through both my concentration and Frank’s as a car came crashing through the sliding door that he had used to bring the van in earlier.
Frank turned and pointed the gun toward the car, and I screamed as I recognized the Buick that Dex had been driving. I launched myself at Frank with everything I had, but he swung the pistol at my head like a club and knocked me to the floor. I skidded across the concrete for a couple of seconds, stunned by the blow to my head, and watched in horror as Frank tried to turn the gun back toward the car, but he never made it. The smashed front end of the Buick scooped him up as it ran over the top of the pallets covering the body of his son and plowed into the stack behind him.
The car’s horn started blaring and I forced myself to my feet and ran as quickly as I could around to the driver’s side. Dex was there, his head reeling as he tried to shake off what the exploding airbag had done. His nose was bleeding and I was fairly certain he was going to resemble a raccoon by morning, with two black eyes.
He looked at me and it took a moment for him to focus his eyes. “Cassie? You okay?”
I nodded, and tears started to flow from my good eye. “I’m okay,” I said. “How are you?”
He pointed through the shattered windshield at Frank, whose upper body was laying on the hood. His remaining eye was open and staring, and it was pretty obvious to me that he was dead. “Is that Stan?”
I nodded. “It was,” I said, still crying. “The other one was his son, and he’s down there underneath your car someplace.”
He looked at me as if he was having trouble figuring out what I just said, but then he nodded. “Good place for him,” he said, and his apparently broken nose made him sound like he had a bad cold. “What about da women?”
“They’re all over in that van. They were about to take us all somewhere else, but I decided I didn’t want to go. This place blocks cell signals; I guess you lost the signal from the tracker, right?”
The look in his eyes would have frightened me if I thought for a moment it was aimed in my direction. “I’m going to kill Alfie,” he said. “That damn thing quit before you ever got this far. We took a wild guess that he might be using one of the old buildings around here, and the cops were searching all day long, but they had to stop after it got way too dark. They were gonna start again in the morning, so I just stayed here, and then that phone lit up again about ten minutes or so ago and said you were in this building. I came driving back here and I heard a gunshot, so I figured you might need help.”
He unbuckled his seat belt and pulled the door handle, but the wreck had jammed the door. He pushed and I pulled until we got it open, and then he stepped out and looked at the car.
“I take it back,” he said. “Alfie’s going to kill me. I promised not to hurt his car.” He shook his head. “You think my insurance will cover it?”
“Who cares?” I asked. “I’ll buy him a new one.”
TWENTY-FIVE
I heard a siren off in the distance, and Dex waved a finger in the air. “Oh, yeah,” he said “I called the cops. I called Alicia, and told her I picked up the signal again, and she said she’d be out here as fast as she could. That’s probably her.”
