by M. E. Betts
In Daphne's mind, she was back in Kentucky, in the mental health facility at which she had spent her later teenage years. She wasn't dreaming, as she hadn't had any dreams since early childhood, or at least she couldn't remember having any. Rather, she fantasized, daydreaming of a somewhat generic scenario, the likes of which had happened with regularity starting in her second year at the facility.
It was a scene in which she was able to slip out, unnoticed, at night. During her time at the home of her former adoptive family, the Andersons, she had developed, honed and perfected her sneaking ability. While committed to the mental hospital, she invoked this skill as frequently as she could, seizing any opportunity to slink silently through the halls, shrouded by whatever shadow was available.
In her dream-like state, she waited patiently in a corridor that ended in a large set of security doors equipped with an alarm. Outside of the double doors, freedom awaited Daphne. She trained her hawk-like gaze on Nina, an overnight orderly. From her hiding place down the hall, on her hands and knees beneath a large supply cabinet, Daphne could easily make out the conversation between Nina and Victoria, the overnight supervisor.
"I'm goin' out for a smoke," Nina muttered, pausing for a moment in the doorway of the office near the security doors. Daphne could hear the abrupt rustling of papers from inside the office as Victoria feigned productivity.
"Leave the door cracked," the supervisor replied, her tone barely audible from down the hall, even to Daphne's particularly keen ears.
Daphne grinned, grateful for Victoria's laziness.
"Will do," Nina said quietly on her way out the double doors leading into the reception area. A soft biiinng sounded as she stepped through the threshold. She reached down to retrieve a doorstop from the other side, the side where captivity ended. She glanced back over her shoulder and down the corridor, her expression a mixture of vague apprehension and guilt. Propping one of the doors slightly ajar with the doorstop, she made her way to the foyer and out into the mild July night.
As the front door latched closed, Daphne heard Victoria let out a deep, labored sigh as she settled back into her office chair. She heard a series of tones in varying pitches as the supervisor dialed her cell phone.
"Hey Tammy, what's up?" Victoria said to the party on the other end of the line.
Daphne quickly filtered out the content of the conversation, which was easy to identify as a garden-variety session of shooting the breeze. She crawled out from beneath the cabinet, her movement fluid and silent, and rose slowly to avoid any cracking or popping which may draw unwanted attention. Her feet were bare, and their dry and weathered soles slipped soundlessly over the smooth, checkered linoleum. As she approached the open door of the office, she paused, trying to estimate the woman's whereabouts within the room.
"Bullshit!" Victoria cried suddenly, cackling over the sound of her office chair gliding across the room. Daphne heard the mini fridge being opened as the conversation continued. "It's none of her business. What a woman does behind closed doors is no one else's concern." She paused, and Daphne heard the voice coming from the receiver before the supervisor continued. "Well, what his wife doesn't know won't hurt her."
Daphne slithered past the doorway, reaching the steel security doors. She risked a quick glance through the window in the upper half. She wanted to ensure that Nina was outside with her cigarette. On one occasion, Daphne had come close to being discovered when Nina had come back in after only a moment, having forgotten her lighter. In her haste to find a hiding place, Daphne had run into an end table in the reception room, knocking a stack of magazines to the floor. Although she had managed to avoid detection, making it back to her room undiscovered, the incident had left a permanent impression on Nina. Ever since, she had insisted that the building was haunted.
"So if you hear me scream bloody murder," Daphne and her roommate, Tanya, had overheard Nina tell her co-worker the following day, "then it's probably just our resident ghost scaring the bejeezus out of me."
Tanya turned to Daphne, a smirk lighting up her face. "Is the resident ghost you?" she asked. She and a few of the other girls were aware of Daphne's ninja-like tendencies, and the fact that she occasionally took advantage of those capabilities by sneaking out at night.
"Yeah," Daphne admitted, "it's me."
Peering through the window of the door, Daphne could detect a swirling cloud of cigarette smoke outside the front entrance, illuminated by the exterior light fixture. Confident that Nina would be outdoors for at least a few minutes longer, Daphne began the careful process of slipping out the security doors. Since the left one was still propped open, she knew that she would avoid the biiinng which had sounded earlier. She pushed the door agape with a meticulous, practiced patience. When the gap was big enough for her narrow body to fit through the space, she stuck her right foot first into the reception area. She then spun her body in one smooth motion until her left foot met the right, and she found herself on the free side of the threshold, facing the door. She let it slowly close in until it touched the door stop, then turned to make her way toward the reception area where she would hide, waiting for Nina to finish her cigarette.
She ducked behind the front desk, crouching low. As she waited, her night vision began to develop, and the objects in the office popped out from dark obscurity little by little. She heard Nina cough from outside, which usually signified that the woman had finished her smoke break. A moment later, Daphne heard a slight metallic jingling as the front door was pulled open. Nina brushed past the desk, preceded by the odor of tobacco smoke, then disappeared into the rear, captive part of the building, kicking the door stop out into the front area just before the security door swung closed.
Daphne resisted the urge to bolt immediately into the warm night and fresh air, preferring to wait a couple of minutes to ensure that Nina wouldn't come back through for any reason. When she was satisfied that the woman had returned to work, she crept to the front doors, edging one of them open with painstaking, deliberate caution. She slipped her body through, and found herself enveloped by the balmy, intoxicating summer night. She let the door close just as carefully as she had opened it, then turned to head toward the woods, beaming with joy and self-satisfaction.
Once she was safely concealed within the treeline, she let loose, bounding through the woods with the exhilaration of her temporary reprieve from captivity. She felt the warm air rush over her face, her dark red hair trailing behind her like long, crimson streamers. She felt her toughened soles making contact with the ground as she sprinted, and her hands reached out here and there to let her fingertips graze rough brush, branches and tree trunks. She inhaled deeply through her nose, enjoying the rich, clean scent of earth, foliage and the sweet perfume of wild summer shade blooms that proliferated on the forest floor. She indulged in a low, content laugh. She felt alive, liberated. Smiling broadly, she tilted her face back to bask in the silver glow of the full moon from above the treetops.
As she twirled and skipped, she became aware of a most unpleasant sensation coming from a distant place. She remembered, painfully and instantly, that she was daydreaming as the cruel sting of the chain bit into the pale flesh of her well-muscled back with its old, silvery scars, and she tumbled against her will into the present.
It had been around twelve hours since Daphne had been taken captive, at least by her own best estimate. She had a vague sense of her whereabouts. Shortly before she was kidnapped, Daphne and her group had passed through the small town of Bixby, Missouri, which was situated in the heart of the Mark Twain National Forest. That had been a few hours after sunrise. She had slipped away from the rest of the group in order to scout out a water treatment facility north of town. Although
most survivors wouldn't feel at all safe wandering the post-apocalyptic wastes on their own, Daphne was hardly the average survivor.
Her own personal apocalypse had occurred nearly a decade and a half earlier with the violent deaths of her entire immediate family. Having lost her parents and her older brother, she found herself swept into the foster system. As it turned out, her brief time as a foster child would prove to be quite preferable to the adoptive family into which the torrent of the system had ultimately deposited her. It spit her out into rural Kentucky with the abusive family and left her to suffer, like a fish who had slipped through the cracks of bureaucracy and washed ashore at high tide.
After an agonizing decade with the Andersons on their hobby farm, Daphne had snapped. It was due to the mixture of malnourishment and all forms of abuse, including physical, sexual and psychological. Although she had eventually slaughtered the Andersons in cold blood, many residents of the nearby village had vouched for her, volunteering to clue in the authorities as to the young lady's mistreatment, an open secret locally. Many refused to speak up, fearful of being punished for letting the abuse continue in the first place, but others decided that they could no longer bear the guilt. Daphne's suffering had influenced her eventual sentencing, which was the reason she landed in an in-patient mental treatment center, rather than a juvenile detention facility.
After her release at the age of eighteen, she had spent her time mostly living outdoors, as she had during most of her time as a captive on the hobby farm. She would sneak into yards, sheds, garages and occasionally houses to steal the few provisions that she needed to survive. She had been free for little more than a year when the dead began to rise and the world as everyone knew it came to an abrupt end.
She had wandered the dead world on her own for a few months before meeting up with Shari, who would prove to be not only a trusted friend, but like the big sister she never had. From the interior of the sheet metal and concrete building where Daphne was being held captive, as she anticipated the next lash of the chain, she wondered briefly what her friends down the road were doing, if Shari was beside herself with worry.
The thought was ripped from her mind as the chain bit in again. Her eyes squeezed closed, her toes curled, and her pelvic floor tightened along with every rippling muscle in her lean body as the tension of breathtaking pain overcame her. Another heavy-gauge chain wrapped around her rib cage and secured her to a concrete support pillar that ran from the floor to the ceiling. It was a similar gauge to the one being used to lash her, about a quarter of an inch thick. Her arms encircled the concrete pillar, bound at the hands by a pair of heavy, bulky handcuffs, and her ankles were held tightly together with a thick leather belt. She sat on her rear end with her cuffed hands off to her right side, hugging the pillar, and her knees bent with her bound feet in front of her.
"Stop," one of the two men present told Daphne's tormenter, a tall, wiry young woman with short, blonde hair that was the color of lightly toasted coconut. "Red's gonna be mad. You know that, right?"
The blonde shrugged, tossing the chain casually to the cement floor and panting lightly. "Guess I'll just have to make it up to him later, if that's the case."
"Must be nice," the other man said. "Being able to stay on his good side just by wetting his dick."
The woman with the coconut bob threw her head back and laughed. "Hey, don't hate. You have a mouth, don't you?"
"Let Red hear you say that," the first man said. "See if he doesn't pop you in the face."
"Homophobe, huh?" the young woman asked.
"Big fuckin' time," the male replied.
The female crouched, picking up the length of chain from the floor, allowing it to rattle sensually along the floor as she rose and circled around to Daphne's front, eyeing her with a looming gaze.
"I have a rather personal beef with her," she said, flicking the chain out so that its end came within inches of the tip of Daphne's nose, her head turned to the side so that the blonde had a profile view of her face.
"What?" Daphne asked, her teeth gritted through the pain of the welts on her back. "'Cause of one of those guys that got killed between here and Farmington?"
She regretted the words upon uttering them, steeling herself for the next lash. The young woman, however, spared her the chain in favor of a fist, her bony knuckles making contact with Daphne's lower left jaw. The momentum jarred Daphne's body to the right, knocking her into the pillar.
"Shut up," the blonde said, rubbing her slightly traumatized knuckles. She grabbed Daphne by the hair, yanking her head sideways by the scalp into the concrete pillar beside her. "But while I'm at it, this one's for Dylan." She reared back before striking Daphne full-force across the right cheek with an open palm.
As Daphne's cheek throbbed in the shape of the woman's hand, she thought back to the encounter three days prior, which had occurred roughly thirty miles up the road. Dylan, if Daphne's memory served correctly, had been the first in the group of sadists to die.
Daphne's group of around fifty had consisted of herself, Shari, and several other high-profile figures at McCormick Place, in addition to dozens of others for support. After a substantial group from the National Guard had shown up at the convention center in February, the settlement on Lake Michigan in Chicago had finally gotten enough extra man power, equipment and weaponry to be able to send a large group out into the world. Due to the communications skills of Phoebe and her department, who had enabled satellite communication, they would also have the ability to keep in touch with the group back in Illinois as they attempted to journey across the country. The rest of the team was comprised of security personnel, mechanics and medics. Every member of the group had trained in defensive and offensive strategies prior to leaving the convention center, as well as being schooled in the basics of survival. They trained both as individuals, and also as a group, practicising working together as a common entity.
They had left Chicago about three weeks prior to arriving in Missouri, with their destination being the Very Large Array, or VLA, in New Mexico. It consisted of 27 large radio antennae laid out in a Y-shaped array. Phoebe and Professor Hewitt, the former of whom had studied astronomy at the University of Illinois in Champaign and the latter of whom had taught it, both speculated that the explanation for the undead plague could lie in space.
"Just a guess," Professor Hewitt had said. "But it's one that's worth at least ruling out."
Although the Professor had clearly wanted to see the facility for himself, he had conceded to let Phoebe, the younger astronomer, make the journey in his stead. Though he was far more versed in astronomy and astrophysics, Phoebe's knack for electronics and communications, combined with her youth, made her the most logical candidate.
In the seven months since Daphne and her group had arrived at McCormick Place, Phoebe had made short work of establishing communications networks. As a result, the more than 1,000 inhabitants of the convention center now enjoyed the convenience and added group safety of functional cell phones and instant messaging.
When the group departed Chicago in early April, bound for the southwestern desert, the trip through Illinois had turned out to be largely uneventful once they had passed the deathtraps of the suburbs, a sprawling yet congested residential halo surrounding the city. As they approached St. Louis at the Missouri border, they found that they encountered increasing levels of sadist activity. After the third such encounter, they had decided to avoid St. Louis by an even wider margin than they had originally planned. They circumvented the entire region, crossing the Mississippi River dividing Illinois from Missouri via the bridge in the small town of Chester. From there, they had taken state route 32 toward Bixby, passing through Farmington. It was after leaving the modest city that Daphne's group was confronted with evidence that they were being followed, even though they had suspected it since before they had crossed the border.
Daphne had been keeping watch overnight along with two members of security while the rest of the group
slept inside several abandoned campers in a small, fenced-in RV park.
Daphne was sneaking barefoot through the woods when she noticed the noxious smell of burning tobacco. She froze, scanning the area with her eyes and ears. Her gaze seized upon a human form about twenty feet to her left, which appeared to be that of a large, stocky male looming in the shadowy, moonless night. Daphne stayed motionless, unsure whether or not her presence had been detected by the silent figure. After a few moments, the unknown man headed north, to Daphne's left, in the direction of the RV park. Daphne crept after him, noting the smoldering cigarette butt the man had flicked into the dampened compost of the forest floor before continuing on his way.
As Daphne prowled behind him, she produced one of dozens of hard, sharpened sticks she kept in a quiver on her back. Over the winter at McCormick Place, she had grown to miss the pointed sticks, her preferred weapon after her trusted titanium knife. Chicago had been generally devoid of the type of wood Daphne needed to make the throwing sticks, as she rarely used anything but ironwood if she could help it. As she and her group had progressed southward, she had begun to see increasing numbers of rose chestnut trees, a common ironwood in the American south. It provided a sturdy wood with which to fashion throwing sticks, springs traps and the like.
She trailed the large, shadowy figure, ready to launch the sharpened stick from her fingers at a moment's notice, at which time the implement would burrow into the lower skull of the lurking stranger. His hand reached into his jacket pocket, taking out a walkie-talkie and raising it to his lips.
"This is Dylan," the figure said. "We were right, the fuckers are h--"
Dylan never got to finish his sentence before the pointed length of wood spun through the air, lodging itself into the lower skull near the brain stem. When she was sure that the sadist was both down and out, Daphne raised her own walkie-talkie to her face.
"Shari," she whispered, "we've got to go. Now. Wake everyone up."
