“Faster, damn it!” she growled up at him, glancing over her shoulder expecting to be shot at any moment. “They are coming!”
Cursing, Nick redoubled his effort, knowing the panic in her voice was real as fear for his own safety grew.
Once she was over the wall, he looked back down ready to drop the rope again. “Where are the others?” He looked back to Auska, but she was already sprinting down the stairway. “Fuck, what the hell is happening?”
Auska wasted no time for anyone in the way; if she couldn’t get around them in time, she pushed through them. She didn’t know who was trustworthy and who wasn’t and couldn’t risk telling anyone until the two people she knew she could trust had been told. As she forced herself around another person, she began to wonder why there were so many people awake and about at this hour. It was the middle of the night, only a handful of guards and night workers should have been about.
“There she is! There is Auska!” someone cried out from behind her. “Stop her! She is a murderer!”
Stealing a glance behind her, she saw four guards rushing across the courtyard. All eyes were on her now, some in shock and horror at what they had just heard, others began moving to intercept her. It dawned on her then, the reason she hadn’t met more resistance outside was that someone had already made it inside to alter the story against her!
She angled right, cutting away from the growing crowd and in-between two storage sheds. Speed was necessary above all else now. The whole compound would soon hear the lies, and none would believe her. No, in fact, she doubted those behind this would let her live long enough to blow the whistle on their ‘trading’. But if she reached Vincent and Kelli, she could at least tell them. They would know what to do; others would listen to them and then Conwell and the other council members would be exposed. Hopefully, the people would stand up as one and force the council out of power and new leaders could be chosen… or something… anything.
Taking the quickest route she could without encountering anyone, it was not long before she had reached the living quarters. She skidded between the towering box units, her goal in sight finally.
A hand lashed out grabbing her arm and pulling her from her feet to crash to the ground. “Gotcha now, you murdering bitch!” Jonas, the head plumbing engineer barked out, hefting a large pipe wrench up to strike her if she moved. “She’s over here! I got her!” he screamed for others to hear.
Without thinking, Auska snatched her axe from the ground and buried it deep into Jonas’s shin; causing the older man to scream out in agony and drop to the dusty ground, all thought about detaining her gone from his mind as he grabbed at his ruined leg.
Auska had no time to retrieve her axe; already others were coming into view. Pulling herself to her feet, she ran as fast as she could the last two hundred steps and slammed into the steel door screaming. “Open up! Hurry!” She pounded her fists desperately. “Vincent! Kelli! Open up, I need you!”
The metal locking bar shifted, Auska wasted no time and ripped the door open, throwing herself inside, angry voices close enough behind her to grab her. She tried to slam the door shut but a metal bar shot through the opening, making closing it shut impossible.
“What the hell is going on?” Vincent muttered, rubbing his eyes and staring at the blood and dirt covering Auska before realizing something major was happening; something bad.
“Give yourself up Auska! You have nowhere to go!” a commanding voice barked from the door as they tried to force their way in. “There’s nothing you can do, murderer!”
Auska’s grip was failing, and as more people came the door would be pried from her grip. She had seconds to get the information out. “They are trading the sick as slaves for supplies!” she cried out feeling the door handle slowly slipping from her fingers. “They’re not dead!”
“Auska, what have you done?” Kelli asked confusion and worry etched across her face. “What are you talking about?”
“Listen to me!” Auska pleaded, the door finally wrenched from her grip. “They’re not dead...!”
Before she could say more meaty fists and boots rained down on her, crumbling her small frame to the floor. She tried to defend herself, but there was nothing she could do. A hard boot kicked the side of her head and it slammed off the metal wall, her vision blurred then went dark...
“We got you now!”
As if waking up from a dream, Vincent leapt into action. “Get off her! What is the meaning of this! You’re going to kill her!” He pulled the five guards off the unconscious girl.
“Stand back, cook!” a bitter voice growled. A handgun leveled at Vincent’s chest.
Vincent lifted his hands in surrender. “Hold on, no need for that, Marshal! There has got to be a misunderstanding here!”
“Do not interfere,” Marshal ordered, no remorse in his tone. “Drag her out of here and get her to lock up!”
“What did she do?” Kelli asked, worried, as she watched two men drag the bloodied form from their home.
“She is a murderer,” Marshal replied, gun still at the ready, clearly on edge about what might happen.
“Impossible!” Vincent gasped out. “Who did she kill? Auska is many things, but a murderer she is not.”
“Tell that to Andy Sims, Matt Locke, Jennifer Romwell and Ross Anderson.” He watched as the others left with the prisoner, then turned an unwavering eye towards them. “What did she say to you?”
“What do you mean?” Vincent asked, growing even more nervous now as he tried to piece together what Auska had cried out to them in her last moments.
Marshal stepped in closer, his gun still gripped tightly as if the intent of use was unsure. “I asked, what did she say to you?” He eyed them coldly. “And don’t lie to me, I heard her yelling something to you when we pried the door open. Now, what was it? It could be important information.”
Kelli stepped forward and wrapped an arm around Vincent; she too realized something wasn’t right about the situation. “Just barged in here yelling for us to help her, that she needed a place to hide,” she lied. “Before we were even awake enough to respond, the door was being pulled open and here we are.”
Marshal eyed them both suspiciously. “What else did she said? She was crying something out as we pulled the door open.”
“I... I don’t know,” Vincent replied. “So much was happening all at once, I wasn’t really paying any attention to what was being said.”
Seemingly satisfied, Marshal holstered his gun and nodded. “Very well. If I have any more questions I know where to find you.” He made his way out.
Vincent stepped out with him. “What is going to happen to her?”
“She killed four of our own. She will likely hang for this or worse. I am sorry, I know this must be a shock for you, but it would be best if you accept it and talked little about it. I wouldn’t want her actions to negatively affect either of you in the eyes of others here.” With that he walked away into the night, shouting orders to all the onlookers to go back to their beds.
Stepping back into their small living quarters, Vincent closed and locked the door, while Kelli lit two candles.
“What the fuck has she gotten herself into,” he began to pace the small space. “What the fuck happened tonight?”
“If she killed four people, there isn’t even anything we can do for her this time.” Tears glistened down Kelli’s cheeks at the reality of what was going to happen.
“She wouldn’t just kill people, not from here, not even if she hated them,” he said out loud, “at least not without a real reason to. If this is true and she did kill them, something had to have happened, something bad. But what? Why?”
Kelli sat down on their cot. “She was hanging around the Jennifer girl this morning, which was odd. I have never seen them talk before and they seemed close this morning.”
“I don’t know... I just don’t understand it, any of this,” he replied, running his hand through his hair. “But we will go to the council t
omorrow morning first thing and do what we can for her. Find out what we can...” he sighed. “What she tried to say though, that really bothers me, but it’s all a jumble in my head right now. The sick are being traded for supplies?”
Kelli hugged him tightly. “What Marshal said rings true, my love. If we press this and make a spectacle, it will only make us stand out and then who knows what blame will fall our way.”
Vincent pushed her back at arm’s length, his eyes aghast. “What are you saying? Do you think we should just accept this? They’ll kill her, Kelli! We deserve answers. You can’t tell me you are just okay with this?”
“Of course, I’m not okay with this! I love her, even if she doesn’t believe it. But if they know she did this, she is as good as dead, Vincent. There is nothing we can do for her now, and to pull attention to ourselves is likely to spell disaster for our own lives here. I don’t like it but what is there really for us to do?”
“The truth, that’s what there is to do.” Vincent scowled. “I will find it, one way or another. I don’t believe for a second she killed anyone without cause or anyone for that matter. And I want to hear from her what she was trying to tell us.”
A soft, persistent squeaking of an ungreased wheel slowly pulled Auska back to the present. The rough swaying and jarring of rolling over bumps sent fresh agony through her bruised and battered form. She couldn’t remember a time when she had felt this sore and beat up before.
Her eyes shot open as the last images she could remember came back to her. Trying to move, she soon realized she was bound securely, hands and feet, with no give in them. She was on her back, looking up at a low hanging roof, that looked like the inside of a mine shaft, except bigger.
Dim torchlight flickered around her as she came to understand she was being pulled down a tunnel in a cart by a group of five heavily armed men. She was sure she recognized three of them; the other two she knew she had never seen before, but they had the look of dangerous men. Men like those she had seen at the pumphouse.
“Looks like sleeping beauty had finally woken up,” one of the men she knew said as he looked down at her. “You fucked up badly this time, girl, which is a real shame. You had real potential.” Rogan, from the council’s very own First Division, told her with a look of sadness that appeared to be genuine. “A few more years and you’d have really made a name for yourself in Sanctuary. Could have done a lot of good, had a really good life here.”
A short but heavily built man stepped over and glared down at her, his right side of his face pockmarked and red. “Oh, don’t worry, she still has plenty of exploitable potential for what she’ll be doing now.” He ran a rough hand up the inside of her thigh, grinning wider as she struggled against his unwanted touch. “I wonder how long it will take before the fire leaves those pretty little green eyes of yours?”
“Won’t matter,” Auska spat, “you won’t be alive long enough to see it, you fucking pig!”
“We shall see, little bird, we shall see,” was all he said before moving back to the front of the group.
Rogan shook his head in pity. “Would have been better for you to get killed by them when you attacked their camp. I fear what awaits you is going to be very unpleasant.”
Auska struggled against her bindings again, though she knew it was in vain. “Then let me go, Rogan, so I can die fighting! Not like some prisoner bound together! Let me fight and die like a fucking soldier!”
“I wish I could, really I do, Auska,” he told her in a whisper. “But your fate is sealed now, same as Ross, Jen, and the others. What the fuck were you doing out there anyway?”
Glaring at him with hatred, she spoke with venom-soaked words. “How could you do this? How could you allow this to happen? This is sick, even for the council! I used to think you were a man of at least a little honor, but this just proves you are nothing but shit. Selling your own people like cattle, people who look up to you to protect them! You are worse than the raiders beyond the walls.”
“It’s a dirty business to be sure,” Tavish, another of the elite First Division, cut in, “but survival always is. Had you not been where you shouldn’t have been tonight all this wouldn’t even be happening, and you’d be sound asleep none the wiser to the way things have to be.”
“You won’t get away with this!” she hissed back, pulling once more on her restraints. “People will find out and then you’ll all be as good as dead!”
A humorless laugh left Tavish’s lips. “Have been for the last decade or more, but you should be more concerned about yourself now.”
“You two will regret this, I swear it on my life.”
Again, Tavish laughed. “Knowing what awaits you and your attitude, you’re as good as dead within a month.” He shook his head and moved away again.
“For what it’s worth, I am sorry you got messed up in this, Auska,” Rogan told her.
“Fuck you, Rogan.”
The butt end of his rifle connected with her skull and all went dark again...
Vincent and Kelli moved their way through the crowd of people. Nearly every single inhabitant of Sanctuary’s population was there in the crowded courtyard awaiting the news of what had happened the night before. Guards had gone around that morning bearing news of this mandatory assembly. It took little convincing for people to gather; rumors and stories were already on nearly everyone’s lips.
After the council had spoken, Vincent and Kelli planned to meet with them, to discuss what would happen to Auska, and what could be done to prevent the execution. If all else failed, they hoped to buy some time and try to help her escape. Better for her to be wandering out in the world then dangling from a rope, or worse. And if it came to it, they would all take banishment.
Vincent’s heart pounded against his chest as he watched Conwell and the other three council members stroll out onto the causeway. He silently whispered a prayer that what happened last night was all a mistake, that Auska would be freed and what she had said to them had been terrified rambling. That somehow, someway, whoever was responsible for those deaths had been found and caught, clearing her name. But inside, he knew that wouldn’t be the case. He knew this was bound to get a lot worse before anything got better.
“My good people of Sanctuary,” Conwell began, with his powerful voice, “it is with a deeply heavy heart that I stand before you this gloomy morning. For, as I am sure you have all heard, last night tragedy struck our little community, not once but multiple times in many horrible forms.”
Dozens of voices murmured out through the crowd but with a raised hand Conwell took full focus again.
“Sadly Dr. Brown has informed us that all those who had last week been quarantined due to a strange and fierce illness have passed away in the night. No matter what treatments the doctor and his staff seemed to give, the illness simply would not relent. Medical supplies and medicines are in short supply and so proper treatment couldn’t be done and for that, I am truly sorry. But those are the times we live in now.”
Once more the crowd erupted into the conversation; several mournful wails of family members of lost loved ones cut through the air like a knife. The mood among the crowd grew darker, the air almost thickening with their anger and grief.
“Know that the council mourns with all of you who have lost beloved members of your family,” he paused, “of our family. Cremation has already taken place, as we couldn’t risk the spread of such a vile illness, but the remains will be reunited with those of closest family within the week once all is done.”
Conwell paused letting the news sink in, letting the people digest the tragic news before he continued.
“I wish that horrible, tragic news was the worst of the news I must bear to you all this morning, but sadly it is not, and it would be hard to judge which of these things are worse. Further catastrophe struck out last night in the form of one of our very own residents, who it seems for some time was plotting devious deeds to cause devastation to us. We all knew her and now, considering rec
ent events, it seems obvious due to her very nature and attitude towards life here, but sadly, we didn’t see it until it was far too late and several more loved ones were taken from us. It burdens me that I must inform you, Andy Sims, Matt Locke, Jennifer White, and Ross Cooper have fallen prey to the murderer Auska Morgan.”
He waved his hand to the side door that they had entered from minutes ago and four armed guards pushed out a dirty and bloodied form of a girl, a bag wrapped tightly around her head. The crowd erupted into an angry frenzy. Violent shouts and jeers were screamed out, even the odd rock was thrown in hopes to hit the murderer. Quickly the mood went from mournful to violent and baying for blood. The air around the compound burned with vehemence and it grew dangerously by the second. The people of Sanctuary were peaceful and casual in nature, but the bitterness of human nature still showed its head now.
The prisoner was stopped before an opening on the suspended causeway, looking down twenty feet to those in the crowd below. A thick, short rope was looped over her head and pulled tight. The figure struggled and fought to pull away, but the four men held her firmly in place.
Vincent tried to push himself forward. “Sweet heavens, no!” he cried out, but the crowd around him showed him no mercy and held him back. Remorse shone in some of their eyes, hate in others as they pushed him back.
“This can’t be happening, not like this!” Kelli gasped. “We need more time!” But her words were drowned out by a hundred others demanding death.
“It is hereby within the councils ruling right to sentence this traitor, this murderer and fiend, betrayer of hope and cause, to hang from a rope until dead. May God show her no mercy!” Without another word, he nodded to the guards surrounding her. With a violent push, the figure was dropped from the causeway, where the rope snapped tautly. Her legs kicked and jerked for mere moments before all going still.
“No!” both Vincent and Kelli cried, knowing it was over before a chance could even be taken.
The crowd went wild, cheering and screaming, throwing rocks and whatever else they could find. Soon several guards had to make their way into the crowd to ensure things didn’t turn riotous.
What Remains (Book 2): What's Left Page 7
