At least I could stop pretending to be scared.
“No way. Fuck that,” I said.
Rat-Face smiled. “Y’know, I was hoping you’d say that.” He took a couple of running steps, and his arm blurred toward me, swinging the baton.
There is a right way, and a wrong way, to block a strike from a bludgeon. You never want to cross your arms over your face in the classic defensive posture. This will only result in a broken ulna, in most cases. The proper way is to extend your arm straight outward, and let the offending object skirt down the outside of your arm until it deflects off the muscle of your shoulder. It’s best to do this with one arm, while guiding the object away from you and moving forward to immobilize your opponent. Fortunately for Rat-Face, the cuffs on my wrists limited my mobility; otherwise, I would have taken that baton from him and rammed it down his scrawny throat.
Instead, I settled for stretching both arms forward, palms together as if in prayer, and circling them into the arc of the swing to disperse as much kinetic energy as possible. It still hurt like hell, but not bad enough to paralyze my left arm. More importantly, nothing broke.
The maneuver left Rat-Face off balance, so I stepped in and bumped him with my hip. I outweighed him by a good thirty pounds, and the impact sent him sprawling over onto his side. The other thug, the one still pointing his gun at me, laughed loudly.
“You are being pathetic,” he said, in a heavily accented voice. Eastern European, maybe Russian. “Even he is being chained, and he beat you.”
Rat-Face got to his feet. When he turned to face me, his skin had turned a dark shade of red and his knuckles were white around the grip of his baton. His thin lips stretched into a greasy smile. “You’re gonna pay for that, sweetheart.”
Next, he tried staying at the edge of where I could walk, bound as I was by the leg irons. He circled back and forth, trying to make me trip over my own feet, while sweeping the baton in short, flicking strikes. I countered by keeping my base planted and moving around from the waist to dodge the little ball of iron at the baton’s tip. His arms weren’t very long, and after seven or eight misses, he stepped back out of reach to ponder what to do next. All the while, the Russian laughed.
“He is being fast, this one,” he said. “How do you say … lusaf?”
“I think you mean ‘elusive,’ you inbred Cossack fuck.”
The Russian nodded, ignoring the insult. “Da, that is it. He is being elusive.”
“Fine, here you go.” Rat-Face flipped the baton around and offered the handle to the Russian. “Why don’t you give it a try?”
The Russian shrugged, handed his rifle to Rat-Face, and took the baton. As he approached, I could tell just by the way he moved that he knew how to handle himself, unlike his uncoordinated friend.
His first swipe was a lateral, aimed at my waist. I bent forward and thrust my hips backward to avoid it. The Russian reversed the baton and brought it around toward my head in a deft, backhanded swing. I had to duck to get out of the way, which was exactly what my tormentor wanted. He let his momentum spin him around, and then sent a hammer-fist crashing into the back of my neck. My vision swam, my legs turned to rubber, and I fell forward onto my knees.
Yep. This one knew his business. That was exactly what I would have done.
The Russian chuckled, and from the corner of my eye, I saw him toss the baton in the air, let it spin a few times, and catch it. He held the handle toward Rat-Face.
“That is how you are to be doing it.”
While I was still too dazed to move, Rat-Face took the baton and swung it with everything he had. It hit me on the small of my back, directly over the sensitive kidney area. The kidneys are a bad place to get hit; the two organs are not only filled with blood and big arteries, they are also filled with thousands upon thousands of nerve endings. A hard strike to the kidney hurts so bad that you literally cannot scream. Your muscles lock up, you can’t breathe, and you suffer temporary paralysis of the torso and limbs. I was off balance when Rat-Face hit me, and the blow sent me toppling over onto my side.
I saw him making ready to strike again, and managed to go flat so that the only target he had available was my back. The baton bounced off my shoulder blade hard enough to make me wonder if it was broken. There was a whistling sound, and then the baton struck me again in the thick muscle at the middle of my back. Just as I was anticipating a fourth strike, I heard a single, fleshy clap.
“Not in the head, you fool. How are we to be having women and drink if we are having no slave?” the Russian said.
“LET GO OF MY HAND, YOU PINKO FUCK!”
I turned my head and saw the blurry outline of the Russian holding Rat-Face by the wrist, with the smaller man struggling to pull his hand away. Casually, with the same unworried ease as if he were swatting a fly, the Russian planted a knee in Rat-Face’s gut. The little bastard gasped as his breath left him, eyes bulging, and went down to his knees. The Russian twisted the baton out his grasp like taking a lollipop from a petulant toddler, and shoved the other man over onto his back.
“Maybe you are not caring about pussy,” he said, planting a boot on Rat-Face’s chest, “but I am. We get nothing if this man is dead, da?”
He took a step back, tapped the baton against the sole of his boot to loosen the segments, collapsed it, and tossed it onto Rat-Face’s chest.
“Get up,” he said. “We are to be going back on duty now. I will to be coming back later and taking him to the mines.”
He strolled casually back toward the entrance while Rat-Face struggled to his feet. He shot me a hateful glare as he got up, his eyes promising murder. He shoved the baton back into its holster, stared angrily for another moment, and then turned to follow the Russian out the door. When he had shut the door behind him, I rolled over onto my side, groaning.
“You shouldn’t have done that.” I heard a voice say from behind me. It was soft and whispering. Definitely feminine. I sat up slowly and craned my head to look.
“What?”
“You shouldn’t have fought them like that. They’ll come back, and there will be more of them. They’ll make a game of it.”
My vision cleared enough to see the person talking to me. She was young, maybe early twenties. She had long, blond hair that hung in filthy clumps down her dirt-encrusted face. Tear streaks marred the mud on her cheeks, leaving twin clean spots in their wake. She had a blanket wrapped around her but still shivered in the cold. I could see enough of her skin to know that she wasn’t wearing any clothes, and that if she were cleaned up and fed, she would be quite pretty.
“Why are they doing this?” I asked. Of course, I already knew why, but I wanted to maintain my cover.
“They need workers,” she said. “People to dig their tunnels.”
Her eyes darted around, and she craned her head to see if anyone was listening. Then she leaned forward and whispered, “You’re strong, and you can fight. If you stay alive, they’ll try to recruit you. Try to make you one of them. But you have to keep fighting. Don’t let them break you, no matter what. If you get through it, they’ll let you live.”
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Miranda,” she replied. “But don’t tell anybody that. If they ask you for your name, say ‘maggot’. Otherwise, they’ll beat you again.”
“Hey, shut the fuck up over there!” A voice called out from the table where the off-duty raiders were eating. We both sat quietly until the shouter went back to his meal.
“There’ll be trouble for you now,” the girl said. “You’ve caused a stir.”
I chuckled, and lay back on my mattress. “Story of my life, Miranda. Story of my life.”
*****
A few hours later, the Legion proved Grayson Morrow, as well as Miranda, wrong. They skipped the part where they sent a bunch of burly men to drag me off somewhere and beat the hell out of me. Maybe they figured they had done enough of that already. Instead, they went straight to phase two—isolation.
/> Not that I knew this right away. When I saw three raiders coming for me, one of them the big Russian, I thought my day was about to get a lot worse. I was right on that note, just not in the way that I thought I would be. They cuffed my hands behind my back, disconnected me from the iron ring in the floor, and fettered my ankles with another set of leg irons.
As they escorted me across the warehouse floor, the dank, earthy smell that pervaded the place grew stronger. Eventually, a lantern that one of the raiders carried illuminated the edges of a pile of dirt to our left. Craning my neck, I tried to see the top of it, but it disappeared into the murky black beyond the lantern’s light. We passed more piles of dirt along the way, until finally we came to a stop.
Looking down, I saw a square had been cut into the thick concrete under my feet. The edges were fairly straight, and from the look of it, it had not been done recently. My guess was that whoever cut this hole had done so with heavy equipment, back when gasoline was still available. Which meant it could have been there for as long as two years.
There was a wooden platform built over the hole, with a smaller, square hatch in the middle of it. One of the raiders produced a key, opened a padlock on the hatch, and then disappeared down the ladder beneath. The Russian nudged me in my sore kidney with the barrel of his AK.
“Go on, maggot. Down the ladder.”
I did as he said, and followed the fading light of the lantern down into the darkness. The ladder ended abruptly after only about twenty feet, and my feet hit bare dirt as I stepped away.
“Don’t move,” a voice said from the other side of the lantern. I squinted and turned my head away from it. “Stay right where you are. Try anything, and I’ll kill you where you stand.”
I waited, blinking and standing in place. The other two men climbed down behind me, grabbed me by the arms, and urged me forward.
“Let’s go,” one of them said.
I followed them down the tunnel and tried to glean as much information as I could along the way. So far, what Morrow had told me was holding up. Just as he had said, the tunnels were low and narrow, barely wide enough for two men to walk abreast while standing up straight. If I had been a few inches taller, I would have had to duck my head to avoid hitting the arched roof.
Every few feet along the walls, wooden supports ran from floor to ceiling and connected to thick, reinforced joists overhead. I’m no architect, but it looked to me that whoever had designed this tunnel system knew what the hell he or she was doing. It didn’t look like one of those crumbling death traps that drug smugglers had used along the U.S.-Mexico border back during the drug wars. This tunnel smacked of careful planning, and the expertise of a structural engineer.
After walking for what felt like miles, but was probably only a couple of hundred yards, the tunnel branched off in three directions. The lantern-bearer turned right, and the other two dragged me after him. The tunnel widened into a chamber that was maybe a hundred feet long, with six doors lining the walls on either side of a central walkway. The door frames were made of bricks and mortar that had been anchored into the surrounding hard-packed dirt, and the doors themselves had been fabricated from rebar and sections of angle-iron. Each one connected to its frame on heavy-duty steel hinges and had a large padlock holding it shut. The man with the lantern produced another key and unlocked one of the doors.
“In you go,” he said, grabbing me by the arm and shoving me through the door. I tripped over my leg irons and fell headlong onto the floor, just managing to turn sideways on the way down to avoid smacking my face into the dirt. The impact jarred my shoulder, and set my kidney to aching all over again.
“Enjoy your stay, maggot,” Lantern-Man said, laughing as he shut the door and locked it. The light faded with the sound of footsteps walking away, leaving me in complete darkness.
When I was sure that they were gone, I stood up and began walking the perimeter of the cell. It was square, and I measured it by walking heel to toe along all four sides. The walls were ten feet long, giving me a total of a hundred square feet of floor space. Not exactly the Waldorf-Astoria.
The floor was bare dirt, but it was hard-packed and dry. In one corner, I stumbled upon a five-gallon plastic bucket and wondered if my captors really wanted me to use it, or if it was some kind of psychological ploy. It wasn’t as if I could unbutton my pants with my hands cuffed behind my back.
“Speaking of …” I muttered, and sat down against the wall.
I had been hoping against hope that they would leave my hands bound in front of me, but evidently, my little display with Rat-Face and the Russian had made them cautious. If I wanted to avoid pissing my pants or shitting myself, I would have to get my handcuffs past my hips.
Leaning my back against the wall, I began experimenting. At first, it seemed impossible. My arms just weren’t long enough. But then I realized that I was holding my back too straight, and began working on relaxing it. After about an hour of stretching, pushing myself a little further each time, I managed to get my wrists halfway down my buttocks. Finally, by stepping away from the wall, blowing out all the air from my lungs, and hunching over as quickly as I could while keeping my elbows bowed outward, I finally got the cuffs over my hips and down to my thighs. From there, it was a simple matter of lying down on my side and working my feet through. Now that I could use my hands again, I relieved myself in the bucket, and then sat down in a corner to ponder my next move.
My options were pretty limited. Without my lock-pick, there was no way I was getting out of my cell, not that it would have done me any good. There was still the tunnel entrance to deal with, and even if I did somehow manage to sneak my way through, the Legion would be all over me before I made it halfway to the warehouse exit.
No, my best option for the moment was to simply play along. Grayson Morrow had told me what to expect from this part of the recruiting process, and although I wasn’t looking forward to it, knowing what lay ahead of me made it easier to deal with. It was going to suck, there was no doubt about that, but the Legion needed troops. If I could stay strong and gut it out, I could soon find myself in a position to deal some serious damage to these assholes.
“All right then, motherfuckers,” I whispered into the darkness. “Do your worst.”
Chapter 19
Sun Doesn’t Rise
The first couple of days went by quietly. At least I think it was two days, my only way of gauging the passage of time was to fall asleep and wake up again.
When I was awake, I stretched, did some light exercises, and practiced shifting my cuffs under my feet, back to front. Moving them back was easy enough, but getting them in front of me was still a pain. I kept practicing and got a little better at it each time, slowly building up flexibility. Other than that, pacing my cell and singing to myself were my only distractions.
No one brought me any food or water during that time. The hunger didn’t bother me too much; I had gone hungry plenty of times. The thirst, however, quickly became a problem. My throat went dry, my lips felt like sandpaper, and the simple acts of blinking and swallowing became painful endeavors. By the end of the second day, I had stopped exercising and my throat was too parched to talk, much less sing. A throbbing started in the back of my head, low and faint at first, then growing and spreading until it felt like someone had opened up my skull and was pounding directly on my brain with a ball-peen hammer.
Occasionally, I heard voices drifting to me through the darkness and the pain, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Some of them had the brash, arrogant tone of Legion troops, while others were more subdued, whispering, and hesitant, as though afraid someone would hear them. I could hear their chains clinking as they were marched back and forth, and the frequent clap of something striking bare flesh. I tried to count how many of them there were, but the rattling of chains and stir of voices was too indistinct.
Finally, right about the time I was beginning to think my captors had forgotten about me, I heard footsteps approa
ching in the corridor. I shifted my handcuffs to my back, and waited. A lantern shone through the bars to my cell, revealing the shapes of three men standing beyond, one of them rattling a key in the lock.
“Rise and shine, maggot,” the one with the lantern said. I recognized him; he was one of the men who had dragged me down here in the first place.
I worked what little moisture into my mouth that I could manage, and tried to talk. On the first attempt, it came out as a croak.
The Russian stepped in behind him and leaned over, a hand poised behind his ear. “Sorry, what you are saying?”
The two troops behind him laughed. Whether at his comment, or his broken English, I wasn’t sure. Dimly, I noticed that all three men were carrying something. The objects were long and slender, kind of like Grabovsky’s. …
Shit. Not good.
“Don’t suppose any of you fellas could spare some water, could you?” I said, my voice as rough as broken glass.
“Sure, here you go.” The Russian pulled a bottle from his pocket, and tossed it down in front of me. “Go ahead, drink up.”
More laughter. Evidently, they didn’t know that I could move my cuffs around to the front. Just as I thought that, one of them pointed at the waste bucket in the corner.
“Hey, guys, look at that.”
The Russian stepped over and looked at it. His smile vanished, and he turned a scowl at me. In the tepid light, I noticed that he had pale gray eyes, and his nose looked to have been broken at least twice. “How is it that you are to be doing this?”
“Wanna see?” I asked, and stood up. The three of them eased back a step.
Surviving the Dead 03: Warrior Within Page 23
