My ankle exploded in agony. The small twinges of discomfort that I’d felt earlier and ignored were gone. Now it was full-on excruciating pain. I glanced down and my foot was in a weird angle. Shit. The pins in my ankle that helped to stabilize the joint might have torn loose.
Part of the ceiling fell in only a few feet from us.
I bent over and gripped one of Plummer’s arms. Without the ability to squat, I’d have to basically deadlift him up onto my shoulders to carry him out.
It wasn’t pretty. My trainer would have chastised me for wanting a back injury from the positions that I contorted my body into to get the big man up onto my shoulders, but I did it. Somehow, I got all six feet eight inches and two hundred eighty pounds of Chris Plummer onto my shoulder and I staggered toward the stairwell.
My ankle was shot. Every step with the massive amount of additional weight ground the bones further into disrepair. I’d be lucky if a surgeon would be able to repair the damage that I put my body through during that trip across the Resistance headquarters and down the stairs to the outside—if any doctor would even touch rebel scum like me at this point.
The cool November air was a welcome relief to my burned skin and I made it a full two feet beyond the doorway before I collapsed. I couldn’t breathe. The mask’s filters were clogged with ash and grit. I tore it away from my face and gulped greedily at the morning air. Faces appeared in my blurred vision and I felt hands slip under my armpits. They dragged me and Plummer away from the building.
I waved off the so-called street medics with their bottles of water and Band Aids. They needed to do what they could for Chris. I pulled the burner cell from my pocket and saw that I had fourteen missed calls from Cassandra’s burner and several more from Beth.
I dialed my wife’s number and Beth answered. “Hello? Bodhi? Are you alright?”
“Where’s Cassandra,” I croaked. My voice was harsh and sounded as if I’d inhaled flaming ash. On second thought, I should have taken the water they offered me. I flagged down one of the people sitting on her knees watching the others bandage Plummer’s head and pantomimed drinking water.
“She’s resting,” Beth said. “You’re a father!” I accepted the bottled water and drank it greedily. “Bodhi? Are you still there?”
I finished the water and replied, “Yeah, sorry. So, Cassandra and the baby are okay?”
“Yeah. Doing well. Do you wanna know if you have a boy or a girl?”
I smiled. “No. Please don’t tell me. I want to be surprised.”
“Huh? Oh, hold on.” There was a muffled sound as Beth shifted the phone around.
“Baby?” It was Cassandra.
“Yeah. I’m here.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m still downtown. There was… There was an issue that came up. I’ll be headed your way pretty quickly, though.”
A commotion in the crowd caused me stop talking. The bystanders parted and I saw black fatigues, black helmets, and rifles. The NAR was here to finish the job.
“Baby, I gotta go. Remember where we went for our first date? Don’t say it. When this is all over, I’ll meet you there for dinner. Goodbye. I love you.”
“Bodhi? Bodhi!” I could still hear her screams as the black bag descended over my head.
“We got you, you traitorous son of a bitch,” I heard someone say.
“Hey, that’s Every American. We got ’em both!”
“Bag him too. Director Stansbury will be pleased. We might get a performance bonus for this one, boys.”
My hands were pulled behind my back and a pair of handcuffs were slapped on my wrists before my captors half dragged, half carried me to the waiting vehicle. I cried out, trying to tell them that my ankle was shattered, but all that got me was a fist or club to the back of the head. Clearly, they weren’t interested in what I had to say.
As I was thrown into the back seat, a woman’s voice filled my ears. I’d never heard the voice before. “Where are the members of the Inner Council?”
I shook my head. I had no clue what the fuck she was talking about. There was a slight pressure on my thigh and then everything exploded with pain. My entire body spasmed and then went rigid. I bit my tongue. I felt my heart skip several beats.
“Let’s try this again, Bodhi Haskins.”
Well, shit. They knew who I was for sure. That didn’t bode well for me.
“I don’t know who—”
She hit me with the Taser again. I thought that I hit my head on the window, but everything hurt, so it could have just as easily have been the floor.
“The Inner Council, Haskins. Twelve founding members of the NAR. Ring a bell?”
I gasped for air. Between my ordeal in the collapsed building and this, I felt like shit. “My ankle,” I managed. “Shattered. Please.”
I heard her shift in her seat and then a tapping sound on glass. The vehicle lurched underneath me as we sped away from the drone strike site.
“Your ankle is injured?” the woman asked.
“Yes.”
Pain exploded in my ankle as she stomped down upon it and twisted her heel into the bones. I could feel everything grinding together inside and I knew that I would never walk properly again.
Finally, the pressure relented. “Where are the members of the Inner Council?” she repeated as if saying it over and over would make me understand her more.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I promise you.”
Another Tazer jolt to the leg and for added effect, she pressed down on my ankle. I pissed myself.
“You’re going to tell me where they are, Haskins.”
My mind raced. Chris had said that Rogan was out east on a mission, but didn’t give me any details. It was part of the Resistance’s standard operating procedure that each person only knew as much about operations as they needed to. If they weren’t directly involved in an operation, then there was almost no reason to know anything about it. The idea was that you couldn’t snitch on your friends when you got captured if you didn’t know what they were doing.
As it turned out, it was a damned good idea to keep information secret from one another. Once she got me to her facility and tortured the fuck out of me, I told her everything I knew and more. I made up stuff that I thought she wanted to hear. I gave her the truth. I confessed to everything she accused me of. I did anything I could to try to stop the pain and suffering.
The only secret I kept was where Cassandra and the baby were. There are some things worth dying for. They were my final line and I would never betray them.
Never.
TWENTY-FOUR
Time in captivity passes differently. I’m not talking about prison, those guys have set schedules of day and night, patterns that can be learned and adjusted to, regular meals, et cetera. That wasn’t the case in whatever dungeon they had me in.
Hell, I didn’t even know who “they” were. I knew that the arresting agents had mentioned the name Stansbury. He was the deputy director of the Austin CEA, so I was reasonably confident that the feds who’d taken me were CEA. But I’d never seen Psycho Barbie—my nickname for the tall, busty brunette who had a penchant for torture—before all of this. I didn’t know if she was CEA, CIA, DOD, or some other alphabet soup three-letter organization. The only thing I knew was that when I heard the clicking of her low heels in the hallway outside, there would be pain.
Sometimes she didn’t even ask questions. Sometimes, she just tortured me and left without even saying a word. I’d always been taught that waterboarding was the worst thing our government did to prisoners. Boy, was I mistaken. It sucks, don’t get me wrong, and you really do feel like you’re going to drown, but have any of those bleeding heart news anchors who reported about the evils of enhanced interrogation techniques ever had their testicles squeezed in a clamp for hours on end? Had they ever been sodomized by angry guards? Have they ever had fingernails and toenails torn away by pliers? I wondered if they’d ever had toes lopped off with gard
en shears before.
Believe me, there are much worse things than waterboarding.
Like I said, I have no idea how long I was in captivity. It could have been days or weeks, I couldn’t rely on food or sleeping as a measure since both were routinely withheld from me until I revealed what I knew about the missing members of the Inner Council, which, as it turns out, was nothing. I knew nothing about the Inner Council and learned more from Psycho Barbie about them than she realized.
The Inner Council was made up of twelve members. The president and vice-president sat on it in an advisory role, but the real power was with the twelve senators who’d rewritten the US Constitution and forced the nation into Democratic Socialism. They were the ones who were missing. Well, apparently, eleven of them were as one of them was found a few miles from his home, discarded on the side of the road. He’d died of a heart attack during the kidnapping and was tossed out.
As far as I could tell, they’d gone missing about the same time Jason Rogan went east, so I was reasonably convinced that he’d had a hand in the action. Psycho Barbie was very interested in Rogan and you can only resist so long when someone is cutting the soft skin between your toes with a scalpel. I told her everything I knew about the man.
What was once the bane of my existence when trying to find my car in a mall parking lot was probably the only thing keeping me alive, and Psycho Barbie hated me for my terrible sense of direction. After they realized that I legitimately didn’t know anything about the Inner Council, I figured the only reason I was still alive was because of Goodman. I didn’t give up her location because I didn’t exactly know it. I’d always referred to the barn’s location as “beyond Round Rock,” but that could have been anywhere in the eastern half of the state of Texas. The only way I knew to get there was by sight. I had no idea what the name of the roads were or really what any of the major landmarks in the area were except for low hills, cedar trees, and overgrown weeds.
I lay on the concrete one morning—or was it night? Who the fuck cared anymore?—when an alarm started going off somewhere. I’d like to say that I was interested in what was happening, or even that I was concerned with my own safety, but I’d be lying. I was beyond ambivalence. What was that called? My mind didn’t always work the best these days, what with the lack of nutrients, loss of blood and body parts, and the intestinal parasites that I was sure inhabited my lower GI tract from not performing any type of hygiene that wasn’t a part of a torture event. I wanted to die. There was simply no way I could help the process along in the cell they had me locked in.
Psycho Barbie hadn’t visited me in a long while. Hell, it might have only been hours or days, I didn’t know. Regardless, it seemed like a long time. My cuts didn’t really heal anymore, but the blood on my skin was long-dry, so I estimated it was at least a day or two since anyone had been there. I’d resorted to drinking my own piss a long time ago, so my swollen, dehydrated tongue wasn’t even a good estimate of the passage of time anymore.
Whatever was happening outside, I didn’t give two fucks about why an alarm was sounding. For all I knew, it was another one of Psycho Barbie’s tricks to get me to turn over more information, regardless of the fact that I’d told her everything I knew about the Resistance and our plan for overthrowing the NAR.
I did sit up and take notice when I heard far-off gunfire. That was different. I didn’t know if it was different in a good way or a bad way, but anything different was worth taking note of. Were there other prisoners in the facility where they kept me and they were being put to an end, or was it something else?
The sounds of struggle got closer and I decided that it was not the systematic murdering of prisoners. Instead, it was the proverbial something else that kept me in suspense. I’d thought that I wanted to die, but now that the moment was at hand, I learned that I wanted to live. I wanted to see my baby and my wife. I wanted to taste the fresh air and feel the wind on my skin. I wanted the freedom that I’d fought so hard for. I wanted to live.
My life depended on the next few minutes and I thought about where I should go in my little closet. Was directly in front of the door where whoever was doing the shooting would see me the moment they opened it the best place to be or was it the corner? Maybe behind the door so I could call out that I was a friendly. A hundred scenarios ran through my mind and I tried to think about them all.
I decided to go into the left corner across from the door. That way my appearance wouldn’t startle an operator into fingering his trigger prematurely. I dragged my body across the floor, fingers digging into my own excrement as I clawed my way toward the spot where I figured I had the highest likelihood of staying alive for a few more seconds until I could identify myself.
I waited…and waited, huddled naked in the corner. I heard a door clang open and a male voice say, “Clear.” It sounded like it was directly across the hall from me. I didn’t know there were doors there.
The locking bar outside my cell grated metal against metal as it was pulled open. This was it. This was the moment I’d fantasized about for so long. I was going to be freed one way or the other, either in spirit when they shot me or physically when they rescued me.
Light flooded my chamber and I sank away from it. She was here. I just knew it. Psycho Barbie was back to inflict more pain and ask impossible questions about things I had no answers for. Shapes blocked the lights and I felt rough hands upon my wrists, pulling my arms apart. This was when they’d tell me to quit resisting. It was the same every time.
“Quit resisting, man,” one of them said.
See, I told you. Next would come the dragging me across the floor to the interrogation room. The one with all the fun toys.
“Hey! Hey, you’re safe. They can’t hurt you anymore.”
Huh? That’s new. Stop it! I screamed mutely. Psycho Barbie is playing tricks on you.
“Are you Bodhi Haskins?” the man asked.
I nodded. I needed to save every bit of saliva in my mouth because Psycho Barbie didn’t like it when I refused to talk when she asked a question. She got very angry and went to work with the toys right away. Sometimes I did it just to get the pain started and the session over with as soon as possible. Sometimes I resisted. Most of the time, I passed out and woke to find myself in the cell.
“Are you Bodhi Haskins?” the shadow repeated.
“Yes,” I croaked.
The pressure on my wrists eased and the man backed away from me. He spoke into a radio, but I wasn’t sure of what he said. After a moment, he knelt beside me and a bottle of water appeared in front of me. Was this how they were going to finally kill me? Was I just supposed to drink the solution and pass into oblivion? Seemed kind of anti-climactic.
“It’s okay. It’s water. You can have it. You’re safe now.”
I risked a glance at the man’s face. He wasn’t one of my normal guards. Was he telling the truth? Was I safe?
My hand shook as I grasped the bottle and he helped me press it to my lips. After a tentative sip, I decided that it wasn’t poison. It seemed like regular old water. Glorious, liquid, life-giving water.
I tried to gulp the whole thing down, but he pulled it away from me, spilling some of it to the concrete beneath me. “Hey, take it easy, Bodhi. You gotta drink slowly or you’ll shock your system and go into cardiac arrest.”
I nodded and accepted the bottle from him. Then I dashed it against my lips in my rush to guzzle more. The man wrestled the bottle away from my weak grasp. “I’ll let you have some more in a minute, man. There’s plenty of water for you. You won’t ever be without water ever again. You’re okay. We have a medic who’s coming with Rogan.”
Rogan? As in Jason Rogan, that Rogan?
“Jason Rogan?” I asked, my voice rasping like wind through dried corn stalks.
“Yeah. Master Sergeant Rogan will be here soon. He was on the other side of the compound. You’re safe, okay, Bodhi? You’re safe.”
I eyed the water bottle greedily and considered jumpi
ng the man. I could probably overpower him, I thought. I had the strength of a crazy person. Was I crazy? Probably. I could—
“Here, drink some more,” my rescuer said, averting my need to attack him. “Drink slowly.”
I willed my body to listen to reason. I should drink the water slowly to allow it to properly flush my system. By drinking it slowly, my body could absorb it instead of pissing most of it away when my bladder became over full. It was the smart, logical thing to do. It was what every sports nutritionist had ever told me.
I drank every drop of water in that bottle in less than five seconds. I had to act quickly or else the Nancy-boy in front of me would have stopped me from doing it again.
Ha! Loser! Dammit, I was crazy.
After the water was gone, I leaned back against the wall. I was dimly aware that my junk was pointed directly at the guy, but I didn’t really care. I couldn’t cover myself up with anything. If he was offended, then he’d give me something for my nakedness.
“Haskins!” a new voice shouted. I looked up to see Rogan silhouetted in the doorway. He had a shit-eating grin on his face. I was pretty sure that my appearance mirrored his, except that I’d actually eaten my shit.
“Rogan,” I croaked.
“Boy, you look terrible,” he said. “Let’s get you cleaned off and give you some food.”
They helped me to my feet and brought me down the hallway to the interrogation room. I tried to escape their helping hands, but they held firm. They were going to torture me for information now. They wanted to know about Psycho Barbie. Wait! I thought. Does that mean Psycho Barbie is really my friend and these are the bad guys?
My mind raced, trying to piece together the broken threads. Rogan wasn’t a bad guy—or hadn’t been. I had no idea which side of the aisle his allegiances lay now.
“Get all that shit out of here,” Rogan barked, pointing at the table and chairs. “Haskins! Haskins, calm down. I know this is where… This is where they hurt you. We’re not going to hurt you. This room is a shower room. See,” he pointed at the floor as men came from behind me and began moving Psycho Barbie’s favorite toys. “Those are floor drains.”
American Dreams | Book 2 | The Ascent Page 17
