Southern Cross

by Jen Blood

  THE IDES OF MARCH

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  DIGGS

  02:15:35

  Just as Barnel had promised, George Durham was waiting for me when Jenny threw me back into the room. He wasn’t the only one who’d joined us, though: our crew of eleven had swelled to twenty seething, bound, terrified prisoners. The room barely held us all, and it had to be eighty degrees in there, the air humid and stale. A woman in the back wailed, the hysterical gasps of someone long past reason. Everyone else was coiled tight, the tension ratcheted so high that breathing was a chore and violence seemed inevitable.

  As I waded through the bodies to get to George, Casey, and Danny, I spotted two of the tweakers I’d seen earlier crouched together in a corner, backs to the rest of us. The taller of the two—gangly, bearded, and shaking—cast a guilty look over his shoulder at my attention, then quickly looked away when we locked eyes.

  George had a patch of blood on his shoulder. Even in the surreal glow of our red light, I could tell his color was bad.

  “They got you?” I asked, nodding to his arm.

  “Clipped me when I tried to get away,” he said. As a kid, I’d always imagined George to be bulletproof. Another childhood fantasy shot to hell.

  The wailing woman transitioned from cries to screams—jagged, ear-piercing shrieks that shredded any equanimity I might have been feeling toward the others in our group.

  “Somebody shut her up!” a bearded, flannel-wearing guy shouted across the room. He was surrounded by two other men who may or may not have been his brothers.

  “Why don’t you shut up? How about a little compassion!” a woman shouted back. Flannel started to make a move, but one of the brothers held him back. The wailing woman quieted. I took a breath, knowing any peace we might have achieved would be short lived.

  I scanned the room, studying the motley assemblage. George was the oldest among us, but otherwise Barnel’s reach transcended socio-economic, cultural, and ethnic boundaries. Case in point: a small, sixtyish man in spectacles, undershirt, and tailored slacks stood to George’s left. He caught me looking at him and attempted an awkward smile.

  “Diggs,” George said. “This is Dr. Munjoy. He’s a professor over to Smithfield.”

  The surprise must have shown on my face. “How do you know Jesup Barnel?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I’ve never met the man,” he said. He was mostly bald, with just a sparse bit of whitish blond hair ringing his pink scalp.

  “But you know who he is,” I said.

  “Of course,” he said quickly. He had an accent—possibly British. Maybe South African. “I teach psychology at Smithfield. We’re doing a research project at the moment; I’ve done a great deal of work in the fields of Christian fundamentalism and cultist behaviors.”

  “Ah,” I said. “That would explain the reverend’s interest in you, I guess.”

  He nodded. A couple of twenty-something women stood beside him—good looking, intellectual, and terrified. He introduced them as his graduate students.

  “Do you have any idea what Barnel’s got planned?” I asked George.

  He shook his head. “I always knew Jesup was crazy as a bedbug, but I never pegged him for something like this.”

  “I’m not sure he’s actually calling the shots on this one,” I said, thinking again of Jenny Burkett.

  The others looked at me with clear interest. Before I could elaborate, the wailing woman screamed again—so suddenly that nearly everyone in the room jumped. The difference was, this time she didn’t stop screaming.

  “Shut up!” Flannel shouted again.

  I heard the woman who had come to her rescue before pleading for her to be quiet, but it fell on deaf ears. The screaming escalated until my ears rang and my head ached. Flannel lowered his shoulder and bulled one of his brothers out of the way so violently that he knocked a woman behind him to the ground.

  I lowered my voice and addressed Danny and the others in our little clique. “Stay back against the wall, okay? Don’t make eye contact. Don’t engage with anyone. Just stay quiet and keep out of the way.”

  They all nodded readily—even George, which spoke to how bad off he actually was. George didn’t take orders gladly from anyone.

  I stepped into the fray, headed toward the worst of the trouble.

  “We all need to calm down,” I said, raising my voice to be heard above the growing noise. “The only shot we have of getting out of this alive is if we don’t panic, and figure out a way to work together.”

  The woman who’d been knocked to the ground managed to right herself, hands awkwardly behind her, and stood. She was painfully thin. Forty-ish. Small and frail looking.

  I tried an encouraging smile at Flannel. “Just give me a second—maybe I can quiet her down?”

  He nodded.

  When I got closer to the source of the screams, I felt another shot of disappointment hit my bloodstream; we might be worse off than I’d thought. The wailing woman was hurt, crouched against the wall with her hands bound behind her back. The side of her head was bleeding—the result of her having beaten it repeatedly into the cement wall. She could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty, her dark hair pulled back from a gaunt face that I expected had been pretty once.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  Her eyes were vacant when she looked at me. The woman who had come to her rescue before answered.

  “Glenda,” she said. “There’s something not right about her—mental illness, clearly. Could be she needs meds.”

  She had grey hair pulled back into a long braid, her familiar face the worn leather of someone who’d spent a lot of time outside. She smiled as soon as she saw me.

  “Daniel Diggins. What in hell is Barnel doin’, rounding up every sinner that ever crossed his path?”

  Sally Woodruff. “I didn’t think he’d gotten you,” I said, thinking of Sally’s clinic: the cross burning in the yard and the broken fountain and the decimated garden. “I went by the place, but the dogs were gone.”

  “They didn’t burn the clinic down, then?” she asked. “Well, that’s something, I guess. I got a couple threats… then after they found Wyatt and that Dairy Queen blew, I figured maybe it was time to take a little vacation. I got the dogs off to the boarder and was on my way out o’ state when some gorillas in black ‘jacked my car and brought me here.”

  “Any idea where ‘here’ is?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Hell if I know. They knocked me out… Next thing I know, I’m in a room with the dregs of Kentucky, and Jesup T. Barnel’s telling me I best come clean about my sins.”

  Glenda the Screamer had settled down for the moment, her cries giving way to a low, incessant moaning while she rocked. I nodded toward her. “You know anything about her story?”

  “She’s got a Medical Alert bracelet, but all that’s on there is her name—Glenda Clifton—along with a couple numbers, and NBD. Stands for Neurobiological Disease. She could have anything from Attention Deficit to schizophrenia.”

  “I’m no doctor, but I’m thinking we can rule out ADD as the problem here,” I said.

  “A safe assumption,” Sally agreed. She looked around the room and lowered her voice. “You know, I worked with half the folks in here. Not bad people, but they’re not exactly the type you wanna have to rely on when push comes to shove, you know what I mean? Most everybody here’s comin’ off something right now. Rapid detox ain’t my choice in the best of situations.”

  “And this isn’t the best of situations,” I said.

  “Not by a long shot.” She studied me for a second, looking me up and down. “You look like you been through the ringer. Backwards.”

  “It’s been a long week.”

  She fixed her intelligent brown eyes on me for a long while, a slow smile touching her lips. “How long you been clean, sweetheart?” she asked.

  The last time I’d seen Sally, I was dropping Sarah Jennings off so we could sneak her ou
t of state and onto her new life far, far from Justice, Kentucky. I was three sheets to the wind and looking for a fix at the time. I smiled back at her.

  “Four long years,” I said.

  “Good for you.” She grinned, shaking her head. “I always said you’d be one hell of a catch if you could just get your head out of your ass and dry out a little.”

  “Well... I dried out. I don’t know about the rest of it.”

  Glenda the Screamer started up again. I crouched beside her. “We’re gonna try to get you out of here, Glenda,” I said quietly. “Can you try and stay calm for a little while? Just a little longer?”

  Silent tears tracked down her face. She slid to the ground, blessedly quiet for the moment. I straightened and looked at Sally.

  “If you can try and keep her quiet, that will help things as much as anything.”

  “I’ll do my best. That mean you’ve got a plan?”

  “Not in the traditional sense of the word,” I said. “I welcome suggestions.”

  She nodded toward the tweakers in the corner. “You might want to check in with Biggie over there—the tall guy. He’s a mess from the word go, but he’s got a good heart. Has three kids I know of, all different mothers; another couple pregnancies I took care of. Hooked on everything under the sun. Couldn’t hold down a job to save his life. However,” she looked at me significantly and lowered her voice, “I do believe him and his buddy Riley are working on tunneling us out of here.”

  It took me a minute to figure out whether she was kidding. I shook my head. “We’ve got two hours. You couldn’t have mentioned this sooner?”

  “And interrupt our reunion?”

  “Right. You mind doing a little introduction? I don’t want to freak the guy out.”

  She told Glenda she’d be right back, then led me over to Biggie and Riley, both of them still up against the wall, their backs to the group. For the first time, I realized there was a significant difference between them and the rest of us:

  Neither of them were bound.

  Biggie jerked around when Sally said his name, his body hunched in on itself. I fought between empathy and disgust. My drug of choice was always cocaine: fast acting, fun, toxically addictive, and—comparatively speaking—free of physical symptoms once I finally got clean. I’d seen buddies try to kick meth or heroin; it was the major reason I’d never gone down those roads in the first place.

  “Biggie, this here’s an old friend of mine,” Sally said quietly. “I want you to let him help you, all right? He’s good people.”

  She made hasty introductions and then left us to it since Glenda was starting up again. When she was gone, Biggie looked at me shyly.

  “We was thinking maybe we’d tunnel out,” he said. Beads of sweat rained down his face, his body shaking so hard his words came out in frenzied jerks. Beyond the physical manifestations of addiction and withdrawal, however, I saw a glimmer of intelligence from surprisingly soft blue eyes.

  “How?” I asked immediately. “The walls are cement…”

  “The floor ain’t, though,” he said with a pained smile. He nodded toward their corner. “There’s another room behind that wall. There’s gotta be a way out there, right? Nobody makes a room that ain’t got no doors.”

  “You have an idea what we should dig with?”

  He smiled. “Ground’s soft—it don’t take much. I been usin’ my hands. Riley’s got a spoon he found over there.”

  “I can’t help noticing you guys aren’t tied.”

  He smiled at that, producing a zip tie from his pocket. He fastened it around his wrists, pulling it tight with his teeth. A second later, I watched as he wriggled out of the tie again and it fell to the ground. When he showed me his hands with a flourish, there was blood dripping down his left thumb. I caught a glimpse of bone shining through, and my stomach turned.

  He caught the look. “You ever come off meth?” he asked. I noticed that his teeth were jagged, several missing, when he smiled again.

  “No—just coke,” I said.

  He laughed, still racked with tremors. “That ain’t nothin’. You come off something like this and you know: this here,” he nodded toward his hand, “is a relief, compared to the pain in my gut and in my head; the bugs crawling under my skin. A distraction. Now, have a look.”

  He nudged Riley, who stepped aside. Sure enough, they’d managed to make a dent in the dirt floor. Not a big dent—but if two tweakers in the throes of withdrawal could get this far in a couple of hours, we might actually stand a chance.

  “I need to get out of these,” I said, nodding over my shoulder to indicate my own hands. I had no idea whether we were being monitored in here, but it seemed likely since our captors had gone to the trouble of providing us some light. In all likelihood, Big Brother was watching. To compensate, I tried to make sure we were well concealed by the wall of bodies around us, and kept my voice low. “You mind giving me a hand?”

  “You okay with a little pain? Shouldn’t hurt too bad, but it might cut a little.”

  I lowered my voice further. “Do what you need to do.”

  He grinned. “Yes, sir. I reckon we got ourselves an escape plan.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  SOLOMON

  01:50:22

  The party had gotten even bigger by the time Juarez and I got back to headquarters: another batch of National Guard, a few more spooks, everyone now gathered in the school gymnasium to accommodate the swelling numbers. So far, we’d learned that the creepy post-modern bar in the woods was listed as being owned by something called J. Enterprises, out of San Francisco. J. Enterprises, sadly, was a dummy corporation, and everyone was having a hell of a time figuring out how to connect a name with that dummy corporation.

  Once we’d gotten that disheartening news, Blaze pulled Juarez and me aside.

  “A package was left on the front steps at the police station,” she said, her eyes steady on me. “Deputy Holloway just discovered it. It’s a tape.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “What kind of tape?”

  “It’s from Barnel,” she said. “In it, he makes very vague references to whatever he has in store at midnight. He also has messages from those he’s holding hostage.”

  “Diggs is on the tape?” I asked.

  “He is,” Blaze confirmed. “I need you to take a look—we think he may have put some coded information in there for you.”

  I nodded blindly. She led me to the little A/V cubicle I’d been at before, and set me up with the digital tape. This time I wasn’t alone, though: Blaze, Juarez, Agent Keith, the Technology Nazi, and another handful of agents stood by, watching alongside me.

  The tape started with Barnel, talking about everything he was planning: the end of the world at midnight; holding everyone accountable for their sins; taking his family out with him. Your garden-variety psychotic ramblings, in other words.

  “This is not suicide,” he said, looking into the camera with sweat running down his face and an odd, glazed look to his eye. “This is a revolutionary act. We won’t be held hostage by the devil and his minions no more.”

  He signed off. A whole parade of others were next: Casey, Danny, Wyatt Durham, along with a slew of faces I didn’t recognize. Each read from a prepared statement held off camera, detailing their past indiscretions. Most everyone looked like they’d been through hell already—bruised, bloodied, out-and-out terrified. George Durham came on and I cursed softly, realizing I’d been right: he never made it to his mountain hideaway.

  And then, Diggs appeared.

  I pulled my legs up into the chair, all but curling into myself when he looked at the camera. He read the words with dead eyes and no inflection in his voice, using a steady monotone that sounded beyond wrong coming from him. He looked exhausted. The tape switched off; half a second later, it came back on. Diggs was still there. The dead eyes were gone suddenly, replaced with something raw and sad and so deeply personal that I wanted to shut it off until I was alone. I fou
ght the urge and remained there, my attention riveted to the screen.

  “Since this is apparently my last will and testament...” he began. I steeled myself against an onslaught of emotion, managing to hold it together until the end, when he looked into the camera with those sparkling blue eyes and smiled at me.

  “You’re an amazing woman... even if your best record is Original Soul, you’ve made my life better in a thousand ways. I’ve always loved you, Sol. Even when it wasn’t smart. Even when I had no right. I think I always will.”

  No one said anything for a respectful few seconds after the tape ended, while I sat there trying to get a grip, fighting a losing battle against the tears tracking down my cheeks and a pain in my chest I knew wouldn’t go away until I had Diggs back.

  Finally, I cleared my throat. “Original Soul,” I said. “That’s not my favorite record—I don’t even know who recorded it. That’s his clue.”

  It took us sixty seconds on Google to track down what he was trying to tell me:

  Original Soul: the 2004 debut album by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals.

  “Jenny Burkett,” I said, as soon as I saw the band’s name. I turned around in my seat, pulse racing, heart jumping, ready to lead the charge.

  Juarez looked at me blankly. “How do you get there?”

  “Grace Potter—Grace is the Burkett’s dog,” I said impatiently. “Roger’s dead… Jenny disappeared. J. Enterprises is out of San Francisco; Mae told us early on that Roger brought Jenny out here from San Francisco. She’s in on it. I’m sure of it.”

  Blaze gave the word and a dozen agents sprang into action.

  I turned off the TV, still frozen on Diggs’ face.

  “You okay?” Juarez asked. We sat together, alone in the darkened room now.

  I nodded. He waited for me to give him something—I could all but see him doing it. Waiting for me to break down, share my thoughts, give him something to hold onto to make it seem like we were even remotely in this together. I took a deep breath, and forced it out slowly.