A set of headlights cut on at the road nearby and a Humvee crawled up to them.
"Get in," one of the soldiers said.
And considering the circumstances, she had absolutely no choice.
12
Beat Down
Her back ached sitting against the cold hard metal of the chair fastened to the cement floor. Her hand was tied to a chair leg behind her back, and she raised her chin to gaze at the grungy bulb hanging over her head. It cast a bright pool of light that quickly diffused into the shadows around the edge of the storage shed. She could tell there were at least one or two soldiers moving around in the darkness, but she couldn't see them and she couldn't tell how many exactly.
Her mind immediately went to the two soldiers from Glass's forces that she and Carly had kidnapped and held in a storage shed much like this. The irony certainly wasn't lost on her.
The skin all over her body was clammy and she felt a chill run up her spine. She began to tremble, not from the fear of imminent pain or death, but more from fear of the unknown; she didn't know what was going to happen, and she didn't just mean for herself; she didn't know what would happen with the project, what would happen to the others. She didn't know if she would even be able to leave this grungy building and see the light of day again. That was the scariest part of all and it made her teeth chatter.
Footsteps echoed in the small shed from somewhere behind her. A soldier came into view at the edge of the light and stopped in front of her. He stood in his armor with his helmet off and looked at her, spitting on the ground and shaking his head.
"I have some orders to get some info out of you," he said. He spoke with a southern twang, a man somewhere in his forties with short, spiked brown hair. "It's nothing personal, but orders are orders. Anything you want to tell me before we get started?"
Sarah looked into his eyes. They were steely blue and there was something about them that was so captivating. As strange as it sounded, she took solace in them in that moment, imagining that there was something gentle in them, even if his coming demeanor wasn't. But then her gaze faltered and sank down to the dusty floor. She didn't say anything.
"All right, then," the man said. "Let me just put these on first." He picked up a pair of the standard-issue gloves for the soldiers and put them on to protect his knuckles. "The name's Dan, by the way. Your name's Sarah." He leaned around her and shook her hand tied up to the back of the chair. "Pleasure to meet you, Sarah.
"Now, being a lady and all," he continued, "I'll try and keep it light." He took a wide stance in front of her and looked at her as if to ask if she was ready.
Sarah looked away from him and braced for impact. He picked up his fist and hit her in the cheek, hard, but not too hard. Her jaw already ached and the pain stung, but she'd had worse.
"That wasn't too bad, was it?" he asked. "Just let me know if you need it a bit softer."
He wound up and hit her again. Her head rolled back and her shoulder blades dug into the top edge of the hard chair. Her teeth clenched together as the pain rippled through her body.
Her interrogator's demeanor was very odd and unlike anything she'd ever seen before, but she couldn't help but feel a warped sense of comfort in him, admiring him for how easy he was taking it on her, like he genuinely cared. She knew he didn't, but the psychological effect was strong. He even cooed to her between hits, telling her that she would be okay and putting a hand on her shoulder, giving her plenty of rest to make sure she could withstand the next blow.
"I'm gonna start hitting you in the stomach," he said. "Most folks don't like getting hit in the stomach; really knocks the wind out of them, and it's a pain like no other if you do it right. I really don't want to do it to you... never felt right about doing that to a lady... so it'd probably be all right if you wanted to tell me something now."
Her eyes drew from the dusty floor and looked in those piercing blues. They narrowed and squinted at her, almost as if they were pleading for her to relent and give up some information.
"If I'm going to be interrogated," Sarah said, "you may as well stop wasting my time and bring me someone with some real muscle."
Dan backed away from her with his hands up, knowing he had a genuine badass on his hands. He stepped to the edge of the light and stared at his boots before regarding her again. "Are you sure?" he asked. "Shit, if you wanted it, you should've just said so." He pulled off a glove and stuck his fingers in his mouth, whistling to someone behind her in the darkness. "Just remember, you wanted this."
The door slammed open behind her and the loud noise cut into her eardrums in the cramped and echoing space. Heavy footfalls clapped down on the cement, seeming to shake the ground a little bit with each one. They were definitely heavier than most anyone's would be, and as they got closer, her heart sank, knowing exactly what she just asked for and regretting every part of it.
Dan looked at her one last time before he backed away into the darkness and let her next interrogator take over.
At first all she saw was a huge, looming shadow stretch across her. But then she realized it wasn't a shadow at all, but Kenny's hulking mass. He turned and stopped in front of her. The top of his head almost touched the light bulb hanging above him, and as he stood there, his milky eyes glaring at her poor and helpless body, he looked like the previous interrogator had just grown by a factor of four. The armor he wore gleamed in the artificial light, and the cracked, ashy skin on his face gave him a particularly grotesque look.
Sarah opened her mouth. "Kenny—"
A fist with the force of a freight train pummeled her square in the face and her whole body rocked back on the chair so violently that her feet momentarily lifted off the ground. The feeling was akin to getting clocked in the face with a baseball bat, and for a long moment she didn't speak, couldn't speak. Her face scrunched up, trying to work through the incredible pain as the blood poured out of her nose and over her lips.
"This guy's a real mother," Dan said, stepping back into the light, but still letting Kenny be front and center. "You don't have to experience that again, but only if you tell us where the lab is and what Ron is up to."
The pain finally began to subside, enough for her to look up, anyway. As her eyes opened to the light it seemed especially harsh and caused her head to pound even more. Her eyes timidly crawled up Kenny's body to his face. She still had a hard time reconciling the man that she used to know with the thing standing in front of her.
"K-Kenny?" she said. "Kenny, is that really you?"
He stared down at her, a small smile stretching across his lips. "Sarah..." he rasped. His voice was gravelly and strained, like speaking didn't come very easily to him. His eyes widened and then smoothed out into something that looked like reverie. But then tension strained his features and he shifted his gaze over her head as his eyes glazed over. He turned completely cold again and he threw a left hook into her opposite cheek.
Her little body bobbed around in the chair, and she could feel it warp and pull against its restraints. Pain exploded in her again, and her muscles started to seize up as she shook uncontrollably. Her body was going into shock, and she tried to fight it off. She opened her mouth, moving her jaw around in a circle and trying to tell if it was broken or not. She could already feel that her cheek was cut open, and she didn't want to admit it, but she suspected her orbital bone might have been cracked, too.
Sarah looked up at Kenny. She knew her only chance was to appeal to him, to try to make him remember the experiences they shared together.
But he didn't even look at her, still staring at the wall just past her head. It seemed like the real Kenny that she remembered was trapped in there somewhere, but it was floating just beneath the surface, thrashing and struggling to get up for air. She didn't know if it was some kind of mind control or the effects of being a zombie, but she couldn't let herself just sit there and be pummeled into a puddle. The only problem with appealing to the real Kenny was that the last time they had met, the real K
enny had intended to kill her. She remembered his face when she and Wayne drove him out of Noah's Ark with the rest of his degenerate ilk. He told them he'd be back, and so he was, but she never would have guessed he would take a form like this.
As he stood in front of her now, her blood on his fists, haunting memories came back to her of being with him, Noah and Wayne in the building across the field, timidly standing at the edge of the room and watching Kenny beat the living hell out of two of Zed's men for trying to blow up their camp. Kenny had been fearsome enough to her then, but now that she was on the receiving end of it, it was far worse.
"Listen sweetie, just tell us what we want to know and he will never have to lay a single finger on you again," Dan said. He was a smooth talker and a smooth persuader; his eyes now held a very obvious look like he really was pleading with her to accept his offer. But she knew it was also a tongue-in-cheek taunt at the same time.
Sarah tilted her head forward and spit blood on the cement.
Dan stepped back out of the light, shaking his head.
Like a hulking mass of machinery, Kenny's head lowered in a very robotic fashion until his eyes were upon her again. Sarah's entire body tensed up as he took a step toward her, then he drilled his huge fist into her stomach.
She screamed and gasped and puked all at the same time. The feelings bottlenecked inside of her and it doubled the pain, feeling like her insides were tearing themselves apart. The pain was deep and it lingered for a long time. She struggled to catch her breath, thinking she wouldn't be able to withstand another blow like that.
"Okay, okay..." she said. She gave a bogus location for the lab, but Dan just laughed.
"Try again, sweetheart."
Kenny stepped toward her again, and the most dreadful foreboding swirled up in her. Her eyes flitted to him and she pleaded. "Kenny, please. You remember me, Kenny, don't you? It's Sarah!"
As he looked at her, she was sure she saw a flash of recognition, like the real Kenny came through for a moment, but then he was gone again.
"Don't do this," she said.
But he didn't listen as he walked around behind her chair. She couldn't see him anymore, and somehow that made it far worse. Then his massive hand grabbed hers, and she felt his fingers prying her tight fist apart.
Her pinky finger suddenly jerked the wrong way and broke.
Sarah screamed. The joint was destroyed at her second knuckle, and it felt like the whole thing was mangled and torn, though she knew it was still attached.
"This is only going to get worse," Dan warned her.
The breathing in her chest became like short and rapid machine gun fire. She could barely breathe anymore and she couldn't fight. But she also couldn't give them any information and jeopardize the project. She resigned herself and kept her head down, waiting for the rest of the onslaught.
She felt Kenny's huge fingers worm their way over hers again, this time wrapping around her ring finger. Without any hesitation, he snapped that one too and she screamed again.
"Are you sure you don't need any of your fingers?" Dan asked. "Hell, you've only got a couple of them left, anyway. If you wanna die, at least do it with some dignity. Don't die as the bitch with the twisted claw."
Kenny stepped back in front of her and looked down at her as she writhed around on the chair in pain.
"Well, I'm going to let you think about it," Dan said. "Come on, big guy."
Another soldier stepped out from the shadows and escorted Kenny out of the storage shed.
Dan watched them go and waited until the door was closed before he turned his attention back on Sarah.
He bent over and leaned his face right into hers. He looked carefully at her features and decided she was really quite beautiful, even underneath the blood which was now starting to subside and dry. "You know what you're planning isn't going to work, right?" he asked. "Everything you try is going to fail, and then you're going to die. Come over to the winning team."
He brushed his hand through her hair, letting his fingertips run down her cheek as she winced from the touch. Then he stuffed his hand down her shirt and fondled her, taking his time and getting a good handful. He stuck his hand down her pants and felt her up and down her bare crotch. "Mmm, that's a nice one." He cupped his hand under her chin and squeezed her cheeks together, pulling her head up to look into his eyes. "I'll give you a few minutes to think about it. But you won't survive the next one."
And with that, Dan walked out of the shed and closed the door behind him.
When she was sure there was no one around, she began to sob quietly. Her salty tears rolled down her cheeks and stung as they landed in her open wounds. She didn't want to break down in front of any of them, and she kept her ears open in case one of them came back. The times of her being weak were long gone, but the gravity of her situation weighed heavily on her and it was a sobering reality.
Her body softly shivered as she came down from all the pain that was inflicted on her. How long she was there, tied to that god-awful chair, she didn't know.
And then her skin crawled when she heard the door open again. But there were no footsteps, and instead there was an odd high-pitched whining sound. It was soft and barely audible, but it was very peculiar. Eventually, she realized that it wasn't the door that had opened, but something else.
She couldn't see it at first, as the dingy bulb that hung above her lit up only the area around her, but when the panel had been removed completely, a little bit of moonlight came in from high up on the wall in front of her, and someone stuck his face through the hole.
It was Trevor. "Psst, Sarah!" he whispered.
After searching the darkness in vain for the source of the sound, her eyes trained on the open panel in the wall and realized it was him. A joy that she could never put into words came over her, and she looked up at him, ready for him to give her something, anything, to get her the hell out of there.
The vent panel that he'd removed led directly outside the shed, but it seemed like quite the narrow gap. At first he tried to wedge himself through it, but he was slightly too large.
"There's a guard watching the front door," he whispered. "You're going to have to crawl through here. I think you can fit."
Indeed, she was a little smaller than he was, and it would be a tight fit, but she could probably do it. But first things first; she was still stuck to this chair with no means of escape.
But as if sent down from God Himself, Trevor pulled out his knife and stuck it through the open vent. "Here! Use it to get yourself out of there!"
But her hand was tied behind her back and she couldn't exactly catch it, nor did she want it to land on the floor and cause a ruckus. But Trevor was on the same page as her, mentally reading her thoughts. He held his arm out into the shed and made a motion with the knife as if he was going to throw it to her.
She knew exactly what he meant, and she prepared herself and nodded at him.
He slowly sliced the knife through the air back and forth, getting the feel for how hard he would have to throw. And when he was ready, he released and the knife sailed through the air in a rotating arc for her.
She caught it perfectly between her legs with the blade pointed down to her feet.
"Hurry!" Trevor urged her. "I think I see someone coming for you!"
13
Vantage Point
"I'll meet you on the outside," Trevor said, and then he disappeared.
Sarah stared up at the open vent, and then she heard commotion from outside the door behind her: footsteps; people talking.
She looked down at the knife with a laser-focused intensity. She only had one chance at this, and if she screwed it up, she would probably be dead or worse. She lifted her feet off the floor and carefully rubbed her thighs against each other, slowly moving the knife toward her knees without cutting herself.
When her knees pressed together on either side of the blade, she lifted her legs off the ground and brought her knees as close to her face as pos
sible. She stretched and strained against the chair and the rope tying her midsection and wrist to it.
The rope scratched and burned her wrist as she pulled away from it, trying to lean forward and bring her face to the knife. She opened her mouth and just barely managed to wrap her teeth around the handle, being careful to have a secure grip before she released the blade with her knees.
She lowered her feet back to the ground and twisted her body, turning her head over her shoulder and aiming the knife behind her back. She couldn't see if she was lined up, and she would have to rely on reflex and her instincts. But she had enough experience and training with a knife and really knew the feel and timing of it. Her heart hammered in her chest as she heard the footsteps get closer. Whatever conversation was happening between the two soldiers outside the shed was wrapping up.
She took a deep breath and held it. Then she opened her mouth and the knife dropped toward the floor. She curled her wrist up and squeezed her fingers together just in time to catch the knife by the blade. It gave her a couple of minor slices on her fingers, but the important part was that she had it. Very carefully, she worked the knife around through her three good fingers, wincing in pain every time the knife bumped into one of her broken fingers. When she had the knife turned around, holding it just below the tip with tight fingers, she tried to dig at the rope wherever she could.
A hand fell on the door knob outside, and Sarah tensed up, trying to hurry.
"All right, give me about twenty minutes," Dan said to the soldier standing guard outside the shed. "We'll see how I do."
The other soldier nodded and Dan twisted the handle and opened the door, stepping into the dark interior. He took a moment to admire Sarah's slumped figure from behind, and he couldn't help but let out a chuckle. As he walked past her into the light, he brushed a finger along the side of her neck and grazed it against her collarbone.
The Eden Project (Zombie Apocalypse Series Book 6) Page 13
