“Shut up,” La-La commanded.
Sadie lifted a shoulder as if she didn’t care one way or another, however she did care. She needed to find out who these people were and what they planned on doing with her. “Why should I shut up? It doesn’t make sense. Don’t you want me to talk? Or is it all about torture with your men? Is that it? Ve haf vays of making you talk, right? You guys are a bunch of Nazis, I’m betting.”
“You think we are the Nazis?” La-La laughed, showing a huge gap in her smile where her front teeth used to be. “That’s rich. That’s fucking funny. And you can talk. Go right ahead. Tell us where you’re from and how many…” She was stopped as more steps shook the boards overhead.
Someone even bigger than Baloo was striding slowly through the house. “Baggy Pants?” Sadie asked. Mad Jenny, who had gone pale, nodded. Even La-La didn’t seem so self-righteous.
Baggy Pants was tall and lean as a straw. The jeans he wore weren’t baggy in the least; they were like a second skin. He seemed disappointed in Sadie. “This is it? This is what everyone’s losing their shit over? Phh.” He carried an old, pitted Louisville Slugger, which he tapped on the cracked floor as he walked around Sadie.
“Seems like a waste,” he said. He didn’t look all that sad, however. “I’m going to need better light than this. Mad, go get some candles.” Mad Jenny was happy to get out of there and scooted up the stairs without looking back.
Sadie was starting to wig. She could feel her pulse bounding in her temple and she grasped at a straw. “Baloo said to wait,” she said. “You don’t want to cross him, do you? He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who takes insubordination light…” Unexpectedly, Baggy Pants swung the bat, cracking her across the right shin. He didn’t swing for the fences and nor did he need to. He used just enough force to make Sadie scream. The sound ripped out from between her gritted teeth. The pain was electric and went on and on.
It took minutes, her breath rushing in and out, before she was able to gain some sort of control over herself. When she could, she begged: “Please, you don’t want to do this.”
“You’re right, it’s more of a need. Speaking of needs, La-La we’re gonna need a bucket. You see when I hit you again, girlie, you’re gonna puke and it ain’t gonna be pretty.”
Her unsatisfying meal of chewy rib meat was already threatening to come up. Sadie had to fight it back down her throat. La-La backed to the stairs, passing Mad Jenny who had stopped midway down. She held three red Christmas candles in her hands, but they were forgotten as she stared.
“What the fuck are you waiting for?” Baggy Pants demanded of Jenny. Quickly, she placed the candles on the floor in a triangle around Sadie who couldn’t help feeling like she was being sacrificed to some demon.
“Listen, Mister,” she said after taking a steadying breath. “Baloo told you to wait. Has it ever occurred to you that I’m not currently your enemy?”
“Currently? Were you my enemy before?” By the way he said this, slow and carefully as he studied her, Sadie got the idea that he’d had a checkered past and one that he probably didn’t want to have to face.
“No,” she told him. “But it doesn’t mean I won’t be your enemy going forward. And you don’t want that.”
He relaxed, letting out a short bark of laughter. “Ooh, am I supposed to be scared of you? Are you a ninja? Is that what all the black is about?” The bark of laughter now settled into a slow chortle. Sadie desperately needed to stretch the time and so she only smiled as he laughed at his own joke. When Mad Jenny failed to join in and the laughter became forced, his smile dipped into a dangerous looking frown.
She was over the pain in her shin enough that she managed to give him her usual one shouldered shrug. “It’s not me you should fear, not until I’m standing over your bleeding body. No, you should fear my family. If anything happens to me they’ll burn this bitch down, and trust me, they’ll find out who did what to me and there will be retribution.”
This was no lie. Sadie was sure that if she died, Jillybean wouldn’t be able to recover and God help anyone near her when she melted down.
The idea of revenge seemed to resonate with Baggy Pants. “And where is your family?” he asked, once more eyeing her closely, the baseball bat unmoving from his shoulder.
“I’ll tell Baloo whatever he needs to know. You have nothing to fear from us as long you keep cool.”
“Keep cool?” He cracked a smile and began walking around her, once more tapping the bat, hoping to freak her out. It didn’t work. With every minute that went by, she was that much closer to safety. Jillybean would come. She would come like a tornado destroying everything in her path. It had happened before. Baggy Pants should have been the one terrified.
“I’ll keep my cool,” he said, coming to stand before her, leaning jauntily on the bat as if it were a cane and he an English rake. “I’ll be all sorts of cool, but don’t expect ol’ Baloo to be a gentleman tonight. Oh no. We don’t take to strangers poking around where they’re not wanted.”
Sadie nodded but said nothing. Silently, she began to count to sixty over and over again. She had counted twelve times and was in the middle of the thirteenth when Baloo’s distinctive tread could be heard coming through the house. He paused somewhere on the main floor to talk to La-La, who hadn’t come back with the bucket.
“Keep yapping,” Sadie murmured. “Every minute counts, every minute.” The conversation was over all too quickly and Baloo made his way down the stairs. He seemed to think that a slow, heavy approach would set the fear of God in Sadie and she played along, dipping her head to appear afraid, or rather more afraid than she was.
The bat was a scary interrogation device and she didn’t want to get hit with it again. Once had been more than enough. At the same time, it was an odd tool to use. If they messed her up too much, they wouldn’t get a good price if they decided to sell her. Did that suggest that they weren’t going to sell her at all? Did that make them actual good guys?
Possibly, she thought. What was a greater possibility, she figured, was that they would beat her just enough to make her talk and then sell her once her bruises had healed. Clearly Baloo had used Baggy Pants and his bat before.
Baloo leaned against one of the support beams and stared at her. “Look at me,” he ordered. Not wanting things to escalate too quickly, she shook her hair back and stared at the man. In the candle light, he was not quite the monster he had seemed under the harsh beams of the flashlights. He had a heavy shock of black hair that hung over a pale, somewhat washed-out face.
“Why don’t we do this the easy way? You can tell me what you were doing sneaking around my forests.”
“Could you tell me what you are planning on doing with me first?” she countered. “Do you plan on selling me? I assume traders come through every once in a while.”
Baloo gave her a sad smile. “That’s not how this works. I ask the questions and you answer. It’s pretty simple really. Now, you were going to tell me what you were doing sneaking around my forests.”
Did she dare trust a man who was so quick to use fear and torture with the truth that there were only two others out there, and one, a child? She didn’t think so and yet she didn’t think she’d be able to come up with a lie that would keep her from being beaten. She would fumble around, making up terrible lie after terrible lie until Baggy Pants used the bat again.
The only question was if she could draw out the easy part of the questioning long enough. Her only hope was that Jimmy had to be freaking out. He had to be doing something, but she didn’t know what that something would be. Was he waking Jillybean? Or was he trudging out to the box canyon alone to check things out for himself?
He’d wake Jillybean, Sadie thought. Jimmy had never been a great thinker or a leader. He’d wake Jillybean and she would immediately jump to the worst case scenario and she would come with fire in her eyes and lightning on her fingertips—this wasn’t anything she could tell Baloo.
“I was scoutin
g,” she admitted without elaboration.
Baloo waited for a few seconds and then sighed. “Annnnd? Please don’t make me…you know.” He gestured to Baggy Pants who had picked up his bat, the barrel of it resting in the palm of his left hand. “Who exactly were you scouting for?”
“Our group coming out of Wyoming. There’s about six hundred of us looking for a new place to settle down in the west. There’s just too much crap going on out east with the Azael and the River King and all that. We…me and a platoon are scouting for a way through to the Pacific.”
“Okay, that wasn’t so tough. It seems logical and perfectly fine. It’s just too bad you’re lying. Baggy?”
Sadie’s eyes flicked to the enforcer just as he swung the bat aiming for her left shin this time. With her ankles tied to the chair there was no way she could move or dodge. The pain was once again outrageous. It roared, not just in her shin, but throughout every bone in her body.
She was still screaming when Baloo grabbed her hair and yanked her head back. “Does this valley look like the Pacific to you? Is there a beach out front I missed? No? Then you’re lying. Tell me the fucking truth!”
“You don’t want to do this,” Sadie answered, when she could catch her breath. Her glare was all hate.
Baggy Pants snorted and said: “She has friends that will…what did you say? ‘Burn this bitch down.’ Supposably, we should be afraid.”
“Oh, you have some tough friends?” Baloo asked, bending down to look into her face. When she nodded he nodded right along with her. “I believe you and that’s why we’re here. And that’s why I’m going to beat you bloody until you tell me who they are and where they are.”
“And how many there are,” Baggy Pants added. “Ain’t no six hundred out there or we woulda known and a platoon seems too small for a raiding mission.”
Sadie shook her head. “No, I said a scouting mission. I know this isn’t the Pacific, I was just hoping not to have to go that far, okay? We were ambushed and…and we lost people. That’s the truth. We saw you guys hunting the buff…” She stopped her tongue, afraid that she had already said too much.
“You saw the hunters,” Baloo said, sounding suddenly, not just reasonable but friendly. His eyes weren’t anywhere close to friendly, however. They were slitted and shrewd as he took in this bit of information. “What did you do then? Did you go down and snatch one for yourselves?”
She was slow to answer, feeling turned around by the pain and the terror of saying the wrong thing. “No. We, uh took some of the leftover meat. It was just going to be scavenged anyways, right. There’s no harm in that. We took it and went up into the hills.”
“Which hills?”
The question was innocent enough and yet Sadie couldn’t answer. Her mouth came open and for some reason she couldn’t just spit out a direction or a description or anything.
“Will you do the honors, Baggy?” Baloo asked.
“No!” Sadie cried, but too late. It was her right shin again and this time she vomited from the pain. The misery went on and on, and she wasn’t able to concentrate on the next question until Baggy Pants threatened her with the bat once more.
Baloo pulled him back. “I know you’re just trying to protect your friends,” he said, trying to sound reasonable again. It was comforting in a way and Sadie began nodding. “That’s what I’m trying to do as well. It’s not easy out here in the sticks. We got bandits everywhere. You understand…”
He was interrupted by a sudden crackle of sound. There was a radio clipped to his belt. From it, a hissing voice whispered: “Baloo! Baloo! We got something happening over here.”
“Who the fuck is this? Wrinkle?”
“Yeah. There’s something going on down the hill from us. It’s hard to see…is that smoke? Is that smoke? Hey Baloo, we got smoke all down the hill. I mean it’s a lot.”
Baloo glanced over at Sadie and once more his eyes went to squints; he had seen the hope in her face. She knew what the smoke meant: Jillybean. “I’d release me right this second if I were you,” she said. “It’s going to get bad for you.” Her self-assurance wasn’t an act and Baloo saw that too.
“Hey Wrinkle, tell the boys to keep cool. I’m going to switch some of Dingo Dan’s guys over to you.” Baloo changed the frequency and pulled half his men from the southern stretch of hill and sent them to the northern side. Sadie made sure to keep her face neutral. Jillybean had likely planned for this very outcome. She had probably been hoping for it.
A tense few minutes passed before Wrinkle came back on, whispering: “Someone triggered one of the flares. Shit, they’re coming!” A lone crack of gunfire was the catalyst for a hundred more. Through it, Wrinkle could be heard yelling: “Another flare! Another flare!”
Baloo was frozen by the sound of the gunfire. He stood staring up at the ceiling of the basement as the cracks and bangs went off all along the northern hill. When it petered out, he turned to Sadie and yelled into her face: “You are going to tell me how many guys you got right this second or so help me, I’ll break your knee caps.”
She was utterly unfazed. They had no idea what sort of terror they had unleashed on themselves. “Do you want to die?” she asked. “If you let me go right now, I might be able to save you.” The two locked eyes for a good thirty seconds before Baloo turned away. For a moment, Sadie thought she had won, however, without looking, he jerked a thumb at Baggy Pants, who slowly stepped forward, not nearly so full of swagger as he had been.
“She’ll know what happened here,” Sadie said through gritted teeth. What was about to happen would hurt terribly, but at least she knew there’d be revenge. “She’s going to torch this valley and everyone in it.”
The words were barely out before Baggy Pants swung the Louisville Slugger.
Chapter 9
Sadie Martin
Her breath sucked in as her face twisted into a grimace ready to scream in anticipation of the searing pain she knew was coming. The bat could shatter her knee cap with the same ease it could destroy a Christmas bulb. The pitted hunk of wood whistled through the air, but then…“Stop!” Baloo ordered.
Baggy Pants tried to check his swing, but too late and the barrel rapped against Sadie’s right knee with just enough force to have her cursing. “Son of a bitch! Motherfucker, that hurt!” The pain was similar to that of walking into an end table in the dark. It hurt enough to turn her face red, but at least it wasn’t debilitating and it wasn’t anything like what she had already experienced.
“What is it?” Baggy Pants asked.
“I…I, just hold on for a second,” Baloo said, once more his head cranked upwards as if he had heard something. There was only the confused stutter of gunfire and Wrinkle yelling through the radio trying to find out what everyone was shooting at. “We’ll never know what she’ll say is a lie or not. At least not in the time we have, and I have to see what the hell is happening.”
He clenched an impotent fist at Sadie and then hurried up the stairs, the pine boards creaking loudly under his feet. They stopped somewhere in the hallway. There was a pause and then they began heading back. Sadie was stuck midway between hope and fear.
Was it Jillybean? If so, she had worked amazingly fast. But what if Baloo had changed his mind? She was pretty sure that she would spill her guts after another swing of that dreadful bat.
When she saw Baloo’s hands up, Sadie let out a weak but happy laugh before saying: “Careful, there’s three of them down here.”
The three people in the basement looked confused at first and none of them reached for a gun until it was too late. Baggy Pants dropped his bat and had a hand on the pistol holstered at his hip when he saw Jillybean decked out in leaves and branches, dressed like a tiny shrub. Sticking out of what was arguably the best camouflage Sadie had ever seen was a small hand holding a .38.
Slowly Baggy Pants lifted his hand away from his gun. “Wh-what is this?” he asked.
“Shut up,” Jillybean said, pulling back her hood and sh
owing them a twisted, unsettling version of herself.
Next to Sadie, Mad Jenny swallowed loudly. If she was truly mad, it wasn’t obvious compared to Jillybean, who had never looked worse. The grin on her face was stretched so far back that all of her teeth showed in a maniac’s smile. Worse were her twitchy eyes.
As they watched, one blue orb slid to the right to stare balefully at Baggy Pants who took a step back, saying, “Whoa, that’s freaky. How did she do that?”
“Cut me loose,” Sadie said, speaking as evenly as she could. Jillybean was on a hair trigger ready to explode at the slightest provocation, real or imagined. “Baloo, cut me loose if you know what’s good for you.”
The leader of the valley ignored her. He slowly turned to face Jillybean. “Hey, slow down, okay? You got to see this isn’t the right way to do things. Okay? Listen to me, you’re on a path that has only one destination and it isn’t good.”
One of Jillybean’s eyes turned up to the man. “You’re wrong. There are many—perhaps an infinite number of possible endings here.” She spoke in a dreamy voice as if what was happening wasn’t real. “Do you know what permutations are? It’s a math word that kinda means possibilities. The ending of all of this depends on so many, what’s the grode-up word? Yes, thanks Ipes, factors is the word.”
“What factors?” Baloo asked, trying to sound calm despite the utter insanity in the little girl.
“To start, do you try to grab my gun or not? If so, I will shoot you in the heart and then I will shoot the tall guy in the guts so he’ll die slow. Then I’ll probably shoot the women because they’ll run. But what if you’re faster than you look and get the gun? That changes things. Then I’ll flick this switch.”
She held up a remote control detonator, her thumb already on a black button. “And what’s that do?” Baloo asked.
“It’ll blow up your fuel depot. No one was watching it. There wasn’t even a lock on the gate and now there’s a pipe bomb attached to the runoff valve. When it goes off, it’s gonna be big.”
The Undead World (Book 10): The Apocalypse Sacrifice Page 9
