Ransom X

by I.B. Holder

Chapter 60 Retribution Run

  Blade heard the crack of wood. He stood, half painted, dribbling excess royal blue down a puce mesh drain. He dropped the metal paint sprayer, and his feet were in motion with a speed that had him at the doorframe by the time the nozzle hit the tile.

  He ran toward the sound, metal flashed as long thin knives appeared effortlessly, drawn from two hidden hip straps that his hands brushed past as an extension of his running motion. The deep twilight lent a mixture of rich red and burnt orange to the sky. Instead of concern, a sudden euphoria filled his body. He tuned out everything in the world and concentrated on his favorite thing: punishment.

  Blade, or Blue, or half Blue in this case, the diagonal stripe that went across his torso also cut his face into uneven quadrants ranging from fully painted to thickly splattered, had a long loping gait that along with the flapping pieces of blue skin, made him look like a zombie.

  He burst into the room where the sound emanated and took in the situation in an instant. There was a hole in the trailer floor and Laura’s bed was propped up against the wall. Blade moved to bend over the hole drawn by a speckle of blood on one of the sharp splinters wickedly sticking up along the edge. His neck snapped towards the bed that towered over him. She must have used it as a ladder, then come down with all of her force on – something was wrong – the smell of blood, it wasn’t the stain he smelled, there was more. The warning alarms sounded in his head as he backpedaled slightly from the hole.

  The bed leaned away from the wall. He scrambled backward staring up as the frame traced an arc that he could tell he could not escape in time. Crash, the metal bar slammed into his shoulder. The leverage had come from the floor, if he’d remained at the hole it would have been a broken neck, but he only had a dislocated shoulder to thank Laura for. How could he ever repay her for this intense pain? Blade gritted out a smile through the agony of pushing his shoulder back into place. He’d think of something.

  He looked up and saw her bloodied arm poised to strike him again. He pointed the tip of a knife up through the spring frame, daring her to bring her flesh anywhere near his freakish dexterity. There was nowhere for her to go, the exit was within reach of her deadly captor.

  Blade relished her indecision. “What a bad girl you’ve been.” He said in a saccharin rich tone. His wounded arm began to shake uncontrollably; it was a betrayal.

  “Poor thing.” Laura spat back. Blade turned furious in an instant. “I’ve known who you are from the start.”

  In a slow animal growl, “Yet there’s part of you that wants to apologize, and throw yourself on my mercy even now.”

  “You have no mercy.” She said, walking slowly toward him.

  “Making your response perplexing. You stupid whore.” He said returning to his natural voice, demeaning and decisive.

  Laura’s eyes were in a trance as she stepped forward, uncertainly, almost within Blade’s grasp. She reached down and picked up his lighter and flipped it over in her hand. She held it out as if she were returning it, then Laura changed direction suddenly by vaulting backward off of the spring frame. She disappeared through the hole in the floor.

  The force of her lunge spread through the frame and reminded Blade of his wound. A white flash of pain filled his eyes. It was the kind of pain that should have been followed by a blackout, but Blade resisted the darkness regardless of the consequences. He wanted to feel the pain, mixed into her pain. The thought of the sadistic cocktail was enough to keep his eyes from rolling back into his head.

  Blade wedged his good arm beneath the frame and it slid off his body. A few deep breaths and he struggled to his feet. He checked his watch with a grunt as his shoulder socket turned outward at an angle he’d never seen his shoulder hang before. It was bent backwards at a thirty-degree angle, and, glancing down, it was now pushed to the periphery. Ten minutes until broadcast, he might be late – that was unacceptable, but he was beginning to entertain the grotesque possibility. That bitch would pay for this. He would cut tears of blood into her beautiful rosy cheeks.

  Laura landed softly on the pile of blankets she’d thrown down the hole under the trailer right after breaking through the wooden floor, just before setting her trap. She knew that she’d need them in case everything did not go well, and she took careful precaution to wrap her hands in the spandex roller-girl waitress costume that had been freshly supplied for her next appearance before picking up the stack.

  RIGGA, RIGGA. Noises above her, the rattle of metal shifting. The injury she’d inflicted upon Blade would keep a normal man incapacitated for at least ten minutes, CREEEAK, she knew that she had only seconds.

  Laura broke from the sanctuary of the undercarriage of the trailer; there were four equally ominous directions of the compass dial that could be followed. In the gloom of an ever-deepening darkness, she was sure of only one thing. The high ground was to her left.

  A slow motion escape had been her plan from the very beginning. “Get out of the madhouse, then sit tight until the element of luck was out of the equation.” A couple days of watching, planning would cement her escape. She’d learn their habits, the ins and outs of the operation and she wouldn’t stop until the odds of her escape were all stacked in her favor, not theirs. She’d be in control this time, she needed that so much that it hit the override button on her inner need for a straight downhill plunge that might lead to a road or outcropping of houses in the valley below. Her salvation certainly didn’t lie on the trail upwards, but it was the safest play.

  She raced past the flagpole, crouching low, giving less of a profile for the outside porch lights of the buildings to catch and magnify. She could hear the dogs yapping far away, someone was approaching their kennel she thought, and she knew exactly who it was.

  At the edge of the clearing she plunged into the brush, twigs caught at her carefully styled hair; branches ignited the fire that was the large open wound on her arm. She’d gotten it plunging through the trailer floor, and the bleeding would be her first priority when she found a place to stop. She’d have to choose the location carefully…

  Suddenly with a tremendous clap, the spot was chosen. She would stop, right here. Pain crashed over her body in asymmetrical waves. A shrill abbreviated scream escaped her lips before she could remind herself that any noise above a whisper was suicide. Laura looked down at the instrument that had abruptly stopped her progress. It was grizzly steel toothed trap, grinning up at her like a ravenous mechanical beast. The teeth were grinding into the bone just above her knee. She pulled at the jaws, forcing them beyond the puncture wound only to have a fresh wave of pain flood into her arms causing them to shake and lose their grip.

  SNAP, it bit again, razor teeth lining up along the same marks as before. Laura had never felt pain like that before in her life. Not when she’d broken her collar bone skiing, not when her brother pushed her back through the shower door and she landed on a thousand pins of broken glass, not even more recently.

  There was nothing to compare the sensitivity of raw nerves re-engaged. In fact, Laura thought she was going crazy because the very act of breathing seemed to make the white hot sensation burst into flame. She had medical training, only in field dressing and first aid. It would have taken a trained specialist to notice that the offset of the steel jaws had caused the most painful kind of break. The concussion on two different sides of the thick femur bone near the socket had caused competing fractures which traveled to the middle of the bone then traveled down the marrow to meet.

  Every articulation of the knee joint was a fresh stab into the wound, every vibration traveled through the marrow stimulating the most sensitive pain centers in the body.

  A noise, a voice below, Blade was urging the dogs to find her. The percussive commands: “Go – Get her, find her, girls.”

  Her hands grabbed at the steel in a panicked search for leverage, and she pried the trap open enough for her to twist her bloody knee out and draw it close to her body. There was a sic
kly smell that mixed with the blood, an oily musk smell. Was she being drugged, too? She should have known that Blade would have trapped the woods surrounding the compound. If there were something on the jaws of the trap, it would be deadly.

  Waiting for the grip of death would have been almost a luxury at that point for Laura. She thought about the soft fingers that would message her into a semi-conscious daze before turning out the lights. There might be moments of peace mixed in there somewhere – and that kicked her into motion. Death could be enjoyed from any position on this shrinking world of freedom that she’d thrust herself into by kicking out that panel in the floor. She’d like to at least have a view.

  She had to move, her position had been given away. The details of her climb away from the trap, up through the brush, would never come back to her. She was lucky, she thought much later, because it must have been pure fear that dragged her two, three hundred yards up the slope. Fear of what was behind her, moving relentlessly, coming through the darkness, with a predator’s sense of mercy. The jingle of collars and the yapping of dogs were approaching the trail behind her, but what she feared was human, or at least human in form.

  Laura took the lighter out, turning it upside down to bathe the cap in the flame. She pressed it to the flesh on her arm, the wound closed without sensation. Her body barely noticed the pinprick inconvenience.

  She heard the loud yapping below, they’d stopped for some reason at the traps. They were waiting for their master. That gave her precious moments. Would she have time?

  She set out the blankets covering her within the hollow recess of a long needled evergreen. The crunching steps of Blade approached below, his anger seethed in a grumbling indistinct gnash of vowels and consonants which she was sure was some brutal old world incantation that would have frozen her heart if she could have made them out over the night’s sounds. She repeated the process with the lighter. She pressed the metal cap against her bloody knee grinding it into the interior of the burbling wound. That’s where she’d find the lighter when she woke up. Her heart thundered. It was too much, and Laura’s consciousness punched a clock that the toughest men in her class would have already have filled. She felt like she could see the darkness gather in the deep shadows then bleed along the ground until it entered her pupils. Barking, voices, rattling chains became a background static to the inner chatter of her mind. She was a brave girl, that’s what they’d say when they found her. A brave, dead girl.

  Blade stumbled into the main cabin, the place that used to be the administration building, nearly a half hour later. He picked up the phone and dialed. The time that it took for the call to connect was unacceptable; he was already off his schedule.

  “FBI”

  The call that rang from the rotting rafters of the old A-frame building. The high ceilings plunged quickly along sharp diagonal lines to meet gaping bay windows; they were entering what used to be the lobby. Many cabin resorts were built like this in the seventies – and it was the model for all of the old IHOP restaurants. The sturdy frame of this building had withstood a lot of neglect, and in a climate such as this, neglect works almost as quickly as a coordinated wrecking crew. Legacy was through the sturdy door first.

  Legacy tumbled through the door, turning his deflected momentum into a graceful roll. He felt the texture of the thin gummy carpet as he pushed himself to a crouched position.

  He knew it was the wrong place immediately. The lobby was filled with people, and the people all had magnificent coiffs with some combination of dirt or braid, dreadlocks or rainbow-colored hair. The grungy couches met equally decrepit clothing and formed a mesh of upholstery and human - it was difficult to say where one stopped and the other began.

  Legacy put away his gun. He felt almost as surprised as the faces that greeted him. The fact that he was in the field again, drawing his weapon and shouting orders was as incredible as the shock that, unfortunately, did not wash faces of the trespassers clean.

  Brent charged around questioning people, confirming their error. He wanted to believe that this might be some kind of cover for a complicated operation – but nothing about this place smacked of Blade’s obsessive style. Blade wouldn’t even walk through this lobby.

  The dirty hippies, or “dippies”, (and considering the amount of smells that Legacy had been confronted with since entering, he wouldn’t mind if the name stuck), had formed a cluster around Legacy. The broad shoulders must have given him away as a representative of authority. They looked at him in the strange kind of combination of fear and anger that teenage protesters have confronting the man.

  Was Legacy the man? It certainly looked like they felt he was. It was time to blow their minds.

  “Sorry folks, we had a tip that Jimi Hendrix was hiding out up here.”

  He turned to Brent and shouted, “No Jimi?”

  Brent shrugged; his face registered a confusion that told Legacy that he was too young to even know who Hendrix was, or why he was a hero to ninety percent of the people in this room.

  “Move out.”

  Behind him, a sudden wave of energy passed through the slack jaws and dilated eyes, questions hurled at Legacy as he marched toward the exit. “I knew they faked his death.” Was the common thread, Legacy produced a sharp military turn at the door and said; “I can’t comment.” then left the building. He was the man.

  Brent peppered him with nearly as many questions as they double-timed it back to the car. “We didn’t check the rooms, that could have been a front, couldn’t it?”

  The free spirited crowd did not mix with Blade’s bikers, not even as a fence around the operation. “It smelled wrong.”

  That was all of the explanation Legacy gave to Brent, who jogged alongside him for the next quarter mile. They sped away from the resort, neither man spoke of the fact that Blade was getting closer to killing his next victim with every tick of the clock.

  Time was not on their side. It was already past five, Laura would be on camera now, her body exposed and her mind toyed with until her heart stopped beating. The deathblow would come at six.

  They sped down the road, Legacy pushed the accelerator down and hit fifty, bumping through wheel trenches on uneven dirt roads winding back to the highway. Brent stared forward, jaw locked in frustration, but his feelings didn’t matter much to the silent wheelman skipping the bottom of his car across the uneven terrain like a flat rock across the smooth surface of a pond.

  A glance over at his passenger opened up a window into his mind. It was the kind of instant appraisal that Legacy was legendary for, and it gave him his answer. He didn’t want innocents to pay for his anger. He wanted one very specific person to suffer for his feeling of helplessness. He wanted to take Blade down. Brent himself had become a loaded weapon, and Legacy could tell that he’d better be very careful with whom or at what he directed Brent at. He looked like he could go off at any minute.

  Legacy skidded onto the main road clipping a gleaming silver pole of a chain link fence. A bright spark flashed across the passenger side. Brent gave him a look, and said with a deadpan tone, “Good luck getting back your deposit.”

  Humor was the last thing that Legacy expected from his companion. The look on Brent’s face was rigid, his jaw was set like he’d just said something like “Let’s kill them all,” but behind his eyes there was a measure of awareness, and that’s what made the comment funny. Legacy was quietly reassured.

  He didn’t have the same feeling about their next destination, it either was the place and they’d be tight up against the clock or they’d have missed their chance entirely following this very lead. There’d be no one to blame if they didn’t get to Laura, and that was ok for Legacy. He didn’t want anyone to blame.