A moment passed by, the footfalls making their way closer and closer.
NO! I thought. I won’t be a victim again!
I quickly made my way to the master bedroom and removed the book bag which was slung over my shoulders. I reached down into the top opening and withdrew my Hi-Point 9mm handgun and its spare magazine from a side pouch. Thumbing off the safety, I hid against the far wall behind the bed, lying down on my stomach so I could peer under the furniture and see the entrance to the room. If I were found, I was going to make them pay! I wasn’t going to any camp. I wasn’t going to let them control my life! I was a free woman fighting to take care of myself, and no one was going to tell me otherwise!
I was suddenly tired of the games, exhausted by the struggle. Who would have thought that my own government was against me? These men were the enemy now. I never thought I would think that way; but the near-death encounter with the other DHS agents at the bridge, and their use of murdering gang members to kill the civilians they were supposed to protect, engendered a rage inside my soul that cast away any lingering fear. I was death; They just didn’t know it yet!
As the seconds wore on, I began to hear some conversation coming from the two men. I was surprised to hear them laugh at one point as their words began to coalesce into a meaningful conversation.
“You see the new chick on 22?” One of them asked the other. “Dayum! She’s got me drooling every time she walks by!”
“The blonde?” The other replied. “How can you miss her!”
“I heard she worked at The Doll House men’s club before all this started.” The first one shot back.
“Wouldn’t doubt it!” the second one replied again. “Been a lot of women showing up at the building that the guys are claiming to know.”
“Yeah!” The first one retorted. “Those guys on patrol run across a nice piece, and all of a sudden, their long lost girlfriend is magically found!”
The second man snorted at his friend. Their voices stopped as each of them entered yet another apartment. A few moments later, she could hear them draw closer.
“You know who has it made though,” the first one snorted. “Travis!”
“Travis Nixon?” The second one asked. “What’s he done now?”
“He’s got two girls with him!”
“How the heck did he do that? He’s got one of those upper floor one-bedroom apartments too, doesn’t he?”
“Yep!”
“Then how the heck does he get two women?”
“I wish they were women,” The first one said. “One of ‘em can’t be more than 16.”
“What the heck! How did he get to do that? I mean, there are rules, right? Only one couple per bedroom! Just how did he pull that off?”
“You’ll never guess. It was so simple!”
“Well, tell me dipweed!”
The first agent didn’t say anything. From the sound of their voices, I knew that they were right next door. They must have gone into the room where we had slept the night before. The room where poor Brie had died. They must have found something! They must know we were in here!
“Found another one!” The second agent called out.
“What is it?” The first one yelled back.
“Missing a pillow case, room 317!”
That’s it! We’re done for! I thought.
I gripped the pistol tightly, preparing to spring up from behind the bed when they rushed the room. I was ready, thinking of the death and destruction on our trip downtown fueled my rage! I would avenge Brie’s mother and sister and all the others killed by the white supremacist gang the government goons unleashed on us! I would have my vengeance when they found me.
“I’ll mark it down!” The first agent sang. “That’s the first one in this building!”
“That’s way better than the others. I guess they started with this apartment and worked their way south to the others!”
“Makes sense. They probably got sloppy as the day wore on.”
What? They were taking inventory? I thought to myself. I felt my shoulders and arms relax as I realized we weren’t being searched for. Suddenly, I heard one of them move into the apartment where I had hidden. I could hear him make his way to the hallway, just outside the door. I could feel his presence as the stagnant air around me moved with the man’s presence. Dust swirled above me, glinting and gleaming from the beams of sun that penetrated the drawn cotton curtain. I realized that he was steps from Brie’s body; and the sudden feeling of hope drained from me, leaving a void quickly filled by fear. I was going to have to fight it out after all!
The man entered the guest bedroom. I tensed, waiting for him to call his partner. I just knew they would come storming into my bedroom, their automatic rifles blazing away. I resigned myself to my fate and waited to spring my trap.
A moment passed by, and I heard the agent enter the hallway once again. There were no cries of alarm. There were no sounds of a gun being drawn and a round racked into place.
Suddenly, the man’s boots appeared in front of me. He had quickly entered the room and stood facing the bed.
“Master Bedroom sheet is missing!” He said to the other man.
He lingered for a moment or two more, and disappeared back into the heart of the apartment. A few seconds after that, he was back in the hallway moving down to the next unit!
“Anyway,” he yelled to his partner. “What is Travis’ secret? How does he have two women in the one-bedroom apartment?”
“The young one,” he replied. “He told the manager that the young one is his sister!”
“NO!” Came the reply. And both me laughed as they finished their rounds and exited out into the stairwell.
I lay there, too stunned to move. How in the heck did they miss a body when they were meticulous enough to realize that the room was a sheet short?
I had to find out, and I pushed myself up from the side of the bed and crept out into the hallway. The apartment was silent once again and I moved to the open front door and listened intently for over a minute. Not a peep could be heard.
What happened? I thought. How did they miss Brie’s body?
I pushed myself to find out, and walked gingerly back to the hallway. I had to know, but didn’t want to see her body. As I stood frozen outside the door, the fear and shame eventually gave way to my curiosity. I stepped into the room, continuing to stare straight ahead, bracing myself for the sadness that would likely hit. I slowly turned my head and looked at the bed. It was as clean as the day we entered the building. The sheets and linens were stacked neatly on the foot-end of the bed, the sheer curtains drawn, allowing plenty of filtered light into the room. Where is her body? Where is little Brie?
I approached the bed and looked into the open bi-fold doors of the room’s closet. Clean and empty. As I turned back to leave, doubt and questions filling my mind, I glanced down on the floor to the same spot I had hidden in the other room. There, lying between the bed and the wall, was the little girl’s corpse wrapped neatly in a sheet. Jorge had put her on the floor, hidden from the bedroom door, and not on the bed as I had assumed!
I breathed a sigh of relief and left her body where it lay. I crept to the hallway and down to the stairwell, hearing nothing as I pressed my ear to the cold, off-white metal door. I waited for a bit, seconds dragging into minutes before I heard the sound of a door being opened from above. Both men rumbled down the steps and I sprinted to the first open apartment, dashing through the living room and into the bedroom hallway. A quick glance into the guest room revealed another bed I could hide behind if needed, but the men never entered my floor. I went to the west-facing window and looked down, watching as the two agents left the building and began their journey back to wherever they had come from.
The adrenaline crash that hit me was total and w
orse than anything I could remember. Even at the height of my swimming career, I couldn’t remember being so drained. My hands were quivering and soon my whole body shook. All the epinephrine from my adrenal grands had rushed into my blood stream, anticipating a fight or flight scenario. When the confrontation failed to occur, the “coming down” side of my body’s reaction to the danger was causing me uncontrollable seizure-like muscle shakes. I hate being out of control! I staggered to the couch, flopped onto the waiting cushions.
I don’t know how long I lay there; it could have been for a minute or two or it could have been for an hour. I was drained, and at some point, closed my eyes.
“She’s in here!” I heard a woman say. I opened my eyes to see Janice hovering over me, her face contorted with fear, then relief, as she gently shook my shoulders.
“Oh my God,” she exclaimed. “We thought they captured you!”
I sat up, my body aching like I had just run a marathon. I was drained and sore and wanted nothing more than to go to sleep and wake up from this horrific nightmare.
“What happened,” she continued. “How did you hide from them?”
I slowly related what had transpired, Garrett and Jorge having joined us in the room. When I had finished, they told me about hearing the agents enter the stairwell and how they hid amongst the clutter in the basement.
“We dodged a bullet!” Jorge said. “Obviously, this building is not secure. I think we need to find some place that is safe, and quickly!”
“I agree,” I said. “But we need to talk to John first. When I leave him a signal, the only thing he will know to do will be to make it to this building as soon as possible. Whatever we do or wherever we go, it has to be after we talk to him. It’s a simple symbol telling him to check in on us.”
“You know,” Garrett interjected, “John agreed to meet us here tonight at 8 p.m. We don’t have to go and risk the trip to leave the chalk sign on the pillar.”
“No,” I quickly said. “We have to make sure he sees a mark. He could forget, or think that we will be OK on our own for just one night. I don’t want to leave anything to chance. As long as we think we can do this safely, I vote yes.”
“Then we need to do this soon, like this afternoon.” Jorge replied.
“I will,” I replied. “I just need a moment or two. I am so sore and jittery!”
“I’ll be right back,” Jorge said. “I can help with that.”
He exited the apartment, leaving the three of us alone.
“Where’s he going?” I asked.
“Oh, probably to the basement. We found some cool stuff down there earlier. Jorge has a stack of things he wants to take.”
A few minutes later, Jorge appeared with a paper bag. I could hear glass clinking against glass and plastic as he set the grocery bag onto the coffee table. He reached in and pulled out several tiny bottles of liquor. They were the little bottles you get on an airplane, and he placed several on the table in front of me.
“Pick one,” he stated. “You have whiskey, rum and brandy.”
I hated whiskey, unless it was cut with Coke; and rum was on my personal no-fly list! Just the smell of it brought bile into my throat after having consumed nearly a bottle of Malibu Rum a few years back on a trip down to South Beach.
“Give me the E&J!” I said after a moment or two of decision making.
“Good choice!” Jorge said. “You can drink brandy neat!”
He twisted the top off the tiny bottle and held it out for me. My arms shook slightly and felt like they were tied to an anchor. I grasped the drink with both hands and brought the bottle to my lips. I tilted my head back and let the warm, brown liquid flow into my stomach.
When it hit my throat, the alcohol almost caused me to throw it back up. But I fought through it and drained the rest of the brandy. I drew in a quick and deep breath and blew it out with a big “Harrumph.”
The alcohol burned as it hit me, but I quickly began to feel a deep warmth spread through my body. I sat back and closed my eyes again, letting the drink infuse calm and peace through my veins.
I continued to lie back into the leather cushions, letting time pass by. In what seemed like a moment, I drifted off, only to be awakened a second time by a gentle shake on my arm.
“Wake up, sleepy head.” Janice chided me. “Time to go.”
“What?” I asked, my mind not yet catching up to the conversation. “What time is it?”
“No idea,” Janice replied. “But you’ve been out for over an hour.”
“WHAT?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “We went over our notes and watched a bit more out the windows. It doesn’t look like there are any patrols around here yet. Nothing regular anyway. Little traffic and only a few people walking the street. We think it’ll be alright for you to go to the parking lot to leave John the sign.”
“Sure,” I replied. “Do you have the chalk?”
“Yep,” she said. “It’s in the other apartment. Come on, let’s go. It’ll be dark in a few hours and we don’t want to stay here any longer than we have to. We have to make sure you reach him today.”
We left the room and joined the others, making our way down to the basement and through the outside door that Jorge had pried open the night before.
After all the stress and planning, the actual trip to the lot was remarkably quick and easy. Within 15 minutes, I had journeyed to the parking lot, marked the pillar with a “J” in chalk and returned without seeing a soul. The actual implementation of our plan was almost anti-climactic. While I was out, the three of them had designed our strategy, which involved Jorge acting as a lookout while trailing me from a distance, and also included a rally point and two different routes to get there if we were discovered. We planned the three-block trip like it was D-Day, and because of it, we avoided problems and now were safely back in the apartment.
As I sat there, waiting for John to contact us, I realized that you can’t plan for things you don’t know about, but you can prepare for those that you can envision. It sure is mentally exhausting, but it could keep us alive. Now, we have to just wait and see.
Come on John, I thought. We’re waiting for you!
Chapter 10
“I would ask myself, ‘What’s going to kill me first, and what’s going to kill me next?”
— Alan Kay: Survivalist
“Wow,” John groaned after sliding out of the Oshkosh M-ATV. “I forgot how uncomfortable these things are! My spine is jacked!”
“Come on old man,” Bru replied. “You can’t be that out of shape!”
John just smirked as he glimpsed the younger agent quietly stretch his legs on the other side of the massive machine. John shook out his arms from driving the large and totally uncomfortable vehicle.
“It wouldn’t be so bad,” John started, “if it had some darned armrests.”
“No kidding.” Bru replied. “Those mesh nets they stick on the door frame are worthless. The net’s gauge is so big, everything falls right through the openings.”
The only good thing about the M-ATV, John mused, was that a lot of the interior had not been loaded up with electronics and other large fixtures that took up most of the front seat room like the one he drove back in the sandbox. With a full military loadout strapped to his body and a military-issued sidearm on his hip, he could never really get comfortable on the dusty, hot Iraqi roads. At least now he could holster his sidearm on a chest-mounted holster. The military would never let them do that, afraid that an accidental discharge would injure or kill the soldier to his side. At least with a leg-mounted holster, an A.D. would put a bullet in the floor, or at the worse, in the idiot’s own leg. From a practical standpoint, the chest-mounted holster made the most sense. While sitting in the driver’s seat, he could draw and fire in half the time it took to try and access his
sidearm if it were strapped to his hip. Ammo magazines, along with map, handcuff and other utility pouches riding on his battle belt prevented him from twisting his body to get at his sidearm. It was also terribly uncomfortable on his hip, the gun’s grip constantly digging into the fleshy opening under his armored chest rig and over top of his battle belt holding the rest of his gear.
Unfortunately, the military-issued front seats were installed in the M-ATV. They resembled the old Air Force jump seats you could find bolted to the walls of the cargo hold in the transport jets like the C-17 Globemaster III. They were thin, straight-backed and had no cushion.
His gunnery sergeant used to joke that the military made any form of transportation painful so the grunts wouldn’t get used to it. “The Marines didn’t hire you to sit on your ass,” he used to yell. “You grunts were made to run to the enemy, just so you can look at them in the eyes when you slit their throats!”
John, for his part, thought they made the front seats uncomfortable so that the driver didn’t fall asleep.
“I’m going to look for a cushion tonight,” John quipped. “My ass feels like I’ve been bodyslammed.”
The two men met at the back of the truck where an open bed with metal bench seats were bracketed in by a metal mesh panel. A large spare tire was mounted in the center of the opening, but both could reach past it and into the rear flat bed to get at their ammo cans. These held anything combustible other than the ammunition magazines that were strapped to their bodies. Some spare ammo, a couple of flash bang and colored smoke grenades. The red smokers were to mark spots for either emergency retrieval or an enemy combatant’s location. Their gear bags had been stashed in the back seat and would stay there locked up in the vehicle for the night.
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