Crisis Event: Jagged White Line

by Shows, Greg

  Crisis Event: Jagged White Line

  by

  Greg Shows and Zachary Womack

  Crisis Event: Jagged White Line is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Greg Shows and Zachary Womack

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Published in the United States.

  Cover art by Anna Fritzel and Zach Womack

  Cover model: Michelle Church

  Acknowledgements

  We would like to thank the following people for their assistance, encouragement, advice, technical input, proofreading, and all around awesomeness: George Proctor, Michelle Church, Kimberly Yee, Kathryn Ehlers, and Anna Fritzel.

  Contact Sadie at:

  website: www.sadiehalloman.com

  email: sadie.halloman@gmail.com

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/SadieHalloman

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008419547703

  A Note from the Authors:

  We hope you enjoy the third episode of the Crisis Event series. If you have questions about the upcoming release of new episodes, feel free to email us. If you enjoyed the book and would like to join our mailing list, feel free to click the link below and send us a message. We would be honored to hear from you.

  Please click this link so that we can personally thank you for reading this book:

  sadie.halloman@gmail.com

  Crisis Event: Part 3

  Jagged White Line

  Chapter 1

  “Where’s the goddamned package?” General Titman yelled. He loomed over Sadie, his bloodshot eyes stretched wide, his breath a noxious horror. Spit dribbled from his mouth and splattered over Sadie’s forehead and wet hair.

  She hardly noticed.

  She was too busy trying to breathe.

  Water had saturated the white cloth covering her nose and mouth, and now with every sucking breath, more water leaked into her sinuses and throat.

  “Naaaahh!” she screamed.

  But screaming made it worse. Every scream brought another breath that drew in more water and seemed to threaten her with drowning.

  She wasn’t really drowning. There wasn’t enough water leaking into her sinuses or lungs to drown her.

  She knew this. But her body didn’t, and every time one of Titman’s men dribbled more water over the cloth, she jerked her shoulders and tried to pull against the ropes that were immobilizing her wrists and ankles. When the water was flowing and her autonomic nervous system was in full panic mode, she couldn’t even think. All she could do was let her body react—her gag reflex triggering a vomit attack, her arms and legs jerking involuntarily as she tried to escape the sensation of drowning.

  One of the men lifted the cloth from her face.

  Sadie coughed and gasped. She tried to shake her head but they’d screwed eye bolts into the pool table rails so they could completely immobilize her head with ropes and a leather strap. Then they had stacked bricks beneath one end of the pool table so that blood would pour into her skull and make her temples throb with every heartbeat.

  Thunder boomed, penetrating deep inside the mansion they’d appropriated for their interrogation.

  “Why’d you become a terrorist?” Titman yelled. “Was it your grandmother? Were you involved in the D.C. attack?”

  Sadie said nothing. She stared up at the ceiling, which looked yellow from the glow of the lamp light.A pool table light had hung over the surface she now occupied, but Titman’s torturers had ripped it out. Now two jagged holes like knife wounds remained in the plaster where the support anchors had been. Bare wires hung down, as if the house’s entrails had been revealed.

  Titman reached out and grabbed Sadie’s right breast, pinching the nipple so hard it turned purple.

  Sadie screamed and screamed, her arms jerking at the ropes that held her fast. HEr breaths came in choking gasps, and she couldn’t help but look at Titman’s bloated face—despite her hope that dissociation would soon take her outside her body and away from this nightmare.

  Maybe things haven’t gotten bad enough yet.

  “Tell me where the goddamned package is!” Titman shouted suddenly, the same command he’d been shouting since the one they called “Blakely” had tossed her into the general’s Humvee an hour before. Now Blakely was nowhere to be seen, apparently too squeamish to watch the torture.

  That was okay, Sadie decided. He’d be present for his own torture and death if she had her way.

  Not that she really expected to have her way.

  Titman had already betrayed more information than any she could give him. Whatever the “package” was, it meant the difference between the continuance of the United States government post-Crisis, or the complete dissolution of that institution for all eternity. Since she had nothing to offer in that regard, it seemed unlikely she would get off the pool table alive.

  The one called “Mallick” lifted the cloth and waited for Sadie to stop coughing.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe if you told me what you’re looking for I can help.”

  General Titman glanced at Mallick. He grinned and draped the cloth over Sadie’s face again.

  “Please, no!” Sadie wailed. “I don’t know anything.”

  Sadie sensed movement to her right and glanced over, straining to see through the gap between the cloth and her face. A feeble spark of hope that someone was stepping in to stop things faded when she caught a glimpse of Getter.

  Getter was Mallick’s buddy. He’d left a short time ago—after inserting his latex-gloved fingers inside her to “search her.” He’d done this eight or nine times before she lost count and he wandered off, giggling about how he would have to keep checking up there to see if anything had “shaken loose.”

  Now he was back.

  “I put a little tabasco in it,” he said, and handed a ceramic coffee cup to Mallick. “That was real fortunate, let me tell you. When I give you another cavity search you’ll find out just how fortunate.”

  Sadie’s groan was involuntary, and was followed immediately by a few drops of water that hit the cloth over her face.

  “Noooo!” Sadie screamed. “Pleeeaaase!”

  Getter giggled and Mallick asked him to light a cigarette for him. Somehow Sadie was able to focus on the sound of the lighter even as the water saturated the cloth and began to drip into her nostrils again.

  She gasped as the burning water ran into her mouth and sinuses poured down her throat.

  Ten minutes later the cloth had been removed. Sadie was shrieking, crying, and choking, convinced she would go insane if the three of them kept up the torture much longer. She’d been probed again—sexually assaulted by Getter and his Tabasco sauce-covered gloves—and Mallick had put his cigarette out on the bottom of her right big toe. Now General Titman was threatening to slice off her eyelids with a combat knife. Already he’d cut a two-inch gash along the inner part of her upper right thigh. Blood was dripping down into a puddle beneath her.

  On top of it all she needed to pee.

  “Or maybe I’ll cut your nose off next,” Titman said. “And pour salt in.”

  “No, wait,” Mallick said. He had a big smile on his face.

  “For what?” Titman asked.

  Sadie’s eyes darted
to her right, where Mallick stood. He had pulled a small plastic canister out of her backpack and was holding it up.

  “A little lye for the liar,” he said.

  “No!” Sadie begged.

  “It’ll be just like Fight Club,” he said.

  “Oh my God, I so love that movie,” Getter said, his voice sounding a lot like a teenage girl talking about her favorite boy band. He jumped up and down and clapped his hands together three times. “Soooo love it.”

  “Except,” Mallick continued, “It’ll be worse than Fight Club.”

  Suddenly Getter turned to Sadie and leaned in close.

  “And we’re gonna make sure you don’t talk about it!” he giggled, his head nodding up and down with glee. “It’s the first rule, you know?”

  “And the second!” Mallick said.

  “Oh my God,” Sadie whimpered, and her bladder let go. Urine flowed over the soggy cardboard box beneath her.

  Sadie’s face burned and her entire body flushed red.

  “She’s a gusher!” Mallick yelped with a thick Texas accent.

  “It’s not my fault,” Sadie told herself again and again. “They did this. Not me.”

  She kept repeating the thought like a mantra, even as Getter and Mallick cackled and made jokes. She felt something tight and hot swelling in her chest, a rage cycling up so high she could hear it buzzing inside her head.

  “See,” Titman said, turning back to Sadie and leaning down close. “Right now you got something to sell. This body’ll keep you fed and fucking in some trading town. But what’re you going to sell if you make us carve out all your good parts?”

  The general’s hand traced a circle around her navel.

  “You’re not going to be a hot piece of ass for long at this rate.”

  Sadie shuddered, and she felt like her whole body was convulsing. She needed to make something up. To convince the three maniacs to stop torturing her—even if it meant they killed her afterward.

  They weren’t going to believe she didn’t know anything. They’d already convinced themselves she did. And once someone was a hundred percent convinced of something—true or not—you could almost never get them to believe anything else. As one of her neuroscience professors had once said: “This is the most ironic tragedy of human existence...the cause of war and terrorism and murder and genocide.”

  “Owwwww!” Sadie shrieked suddenly. Her back arched and she pulled at the ropes securing her to the pool table. While she’d let her mind wander off to a long-past cog sci lecture, Titman had poured salt into his hand and clamped it down on her right thigh. Now he was was grinding the granules into the incision, his nose barely six inches above her own, half his body up on the table with her. “Nooooooo!”

  Mallick was cackling again, but Getter was there beside the general.

  “Who gets to fuck her first, General,” Getter asked. “Me or Mallick? Or you?”

  Sadie snarled, and decided that if her hands were ever cut loose, she’d go for the nearest weapon and try to kill at least one of them.

  “Sir!” someone shouted.

  Titman looked up and glared.

  Sadie couldn’t see the shouter. But she could see Mallick and Getter—both of whom had turned toward the voice. Both stepped away from the table, moving in opposite directions from each other as if they’d been trained to make tactical decisions automatically, in any situation they found themselves.

  CIA? Private contractors? What the hell for?

  Sadie heard feet clomping on the room’s tiled floor.

  “Something wrong?” Titman asked, his voice straining to remain level.

  “It’s time for the good cop, sir,” the new arrival said, and Sadie recognized Blakely’s voice. Despite hating him for turning her over to the three torturers, she felt relief. Maybe even gratitude.

  Maybe he’d stop the torture for a while.

  Maybe he’d tell her what was going on.

  Or maybe he’ll be worse.

  Titman’s eyes narrowed. The sergeant was standing just inside the doorway, and the three men Titman considered to be Blakely’s loyal lackeys—Duck, Hider, and Meadowlark—spread themselves out along the wall. Their rifles were slung over their shoulders—horizontal and not pointing anywhere in particular, but ready to fire.

  Titman let go of Sadie’s thigh.

  “You sure got pretty labia,” he said, turning toward Blakely. “Be a shame if we had to slice ‘em off and feed ‘em to you. Wouldn’t it, sergeant?”

  Titman reached into the inside pocket of his gray camo jacket, watching as Duck’s rifle barrel moved a couple of inches toward him. He smiled. Now he knew for sure who he couldn’t trust in this mutinous crew of reservists.

  Titman pulled out a cigar, bit the end off, and stuck it into his mouth.

  “Come on, boys,” Titman said. “We’ll give our little terrorist some time to talk.”

  Chapter 2

  “If you know anything, now would be the time to tell me,” Blakely said, and though he wanted to look down at the girl strapped to the table, he found he couldn’t. He was sitting on the edge of the rail, his back to the girl, talking over his shoulder.

  He was having feelings.

  Feelings he hadn’t had in a long time—not since he’d seen the photographs and videos of his fellow soldiers beating, torturing, and murdering innocent civilians in Mexico.

  One of the feelings was shock. Another was shame.

  The result of those feelings—back when he’d first seen that video—was that he’d been forced to grow up. To realize that life wasn’t all about good guys and bad guys, or whatever childhood crap he’d believed before the videos were leaked.

  “Know anything about what?” Sadie cried, her voice cracking and tears flowing. “Please make them stop.”

  Blakely ground his teeth and took a deep breath.

  “They’re looking for something you should’ve found in the backpack you went through in Youngstown. Or something that was in the motorcycle you took.”

  Sadie, whose fear had subsided a little, was terrified all over again.

  “I knew it,” she said. “I knew I shouldn’t have stuck my nose in it. He tried to warn me.”

  “Who tried to warn you?” Blakely asked. “And stuck your nose in what?”

  Sadie told him about the Tall Man, and the Long Haired Man, and the murder. Then she told him about the kids and the dogs. Duck, Hider, and Meadowlark stood listening, glancing at Blakely’s and waiting for him to tell them what to do.

  “Jesus Christ,” Blakely said when the girl fell silent. “You are fucked.”

  Sadie, whose mouth, throat, and sinuses were burning, and whose entire body was overloaded with agonies of all variety, managed to snort out a laugh.

  “I thought you were the good cop,” she said.

  “In an interrogation scenario,” Blakely said, “There are no good cops. Only cops pretending to be good. Or nice. Occasionally they’ll be honest. Not very often, though. Interrogators are either liars or brutes or both. But you already know that.”

  Sadie remained silent, listening to Blakely.

  “Anyway, a real good cop—or at least a civilized human being—would have put those three down yesterday when he saw—.”

  Blakely cut himself off, not wanting to think about the little girl and her bloody pink toes scattered on the floor in front of her.

  “Instead I keep following orders I ought to refuse. I’m fucked too, you see?”

  “Please,” Sadie said. “Can’t you help me?”

  “Sure,” Blakely said. “If you’ve got what they’re looking for.”

  “What are they looking for?” she asked.

  “Something inside a Geiger counter,” he said. “Small but really important. That’s all I know.”

  Sadie swallowed several times, trying to ignore the burning in her throat and mouth and her nakedness as the soldiers stood around her.

  Images of Callie flashed through her mind—one after another
—of what would happen if these people got their hands on her.

  She saw Callie being sexually assaulted and tortured with Tabasco sauce, and being raped and carved up slowly with a combat knife as the crazy general and his evil accomplices cackled with glee.

  “I know where it is,” she said. “I can get it for you.”

  “I knew you’d say that,” Blakely said, and stood up from the edge of the pool table. He looked at Duck. “Cut her loose.”

  The three reservists moved quickly to saw through the ropes holding Sadie’s head, shoulders, arms, and feet immobile. She sat up, rubbing at her bloody ankles, which were ringed with raw pink flesh. She swung her legs over the side of the table, hopping down quickly and looking for a weapon.

  “Thank you,” she said to the three soldiers, though she immediately hated herself for saying it.

  She knew the psychology of torturers and their victims. And she knew better than to fall into the trap of gratitude. These bastards all deserved to die for what they’d done to her—or allowed to be done to her.

  Sadie could see the three soldiers were embarrassed and ashamed. They couldn’t look her in the eyes.

  While Sadie was busy psychoanalyzing the soldiers, Blakely dug into the pile of her personal belongings. He pulled out her freshly laundered MIT t-shirt and a pair of black warm-up bottoms.

  “Here,” he said, and tossed the clothes to her.

  She caught them, then stared at him. He held her gaze for all of a second before his eyes slid away. He glanced back at her naked body for a fraction of a second, then turned around slowly, as if it was a difficult task, and not something he wanted to do.

  Pig. Another rapist. At least at heart.

  Sadie turned away and put on her pants, careful not to pull them up too quickly. Her crotch was on fire and cloth pressing against her flesh made it worse.

  She slid the shirt over her head and shoved her arms through the sleeves, wincing as the cotton cloth settled against her inflamed nipple.