by Addison Cain
Skinner.
She rolled her eyes, but he’d come up on the other side of her at the railing, so he didn’t see. There was a tug on the glass in her left hand, and Buckeye turned her head to see him lifting it, taking a long draw before setting it on the top of the porch rail on his other side.
Her mouth went into a line. “What do you want, Skinner?”
He leaned an elbow on the railing and gave her a smile so confident she wanted to pistol whip him unconscious. “I’m just tryin’ to figure out why you’re all alone on the porch when there’s comp’ny to be had inside.”
“Think I’ve had about enough ‘company’ for one evening,” she said. Nerves in her fingers were getting twitchy. “Shouldn’t you be more worried about what Maggie’s doin’ than some letter hauler you don’t hardly know?”
The man slid closer and his voice was smooth as glass. “Mags has her own business to conduct.” Fingertips traced over the bones in her wrist. “But you’re done workin’ for the day. Ain’t you.”
This guy had a set of brass ones, she’d give him that.
“I’m not interested, Skinner.”
She moved to take her hand back, to shove off and just head for her truck, but a spider’s touch became a grip. A yank. He snapped her to him, her shoulders colliding with his chest. Then the railing was in her ribs and his hands were pinning hers down to the top of it, stretched out on either side.
“Yes you are.” His voice was a rasp at her ear and set all her fine hairs standing on end. “I can smell it on you. I know exactly what you’re interested in.” He pressed in at her back, and there was most certainly an erect cock wedging against her tailbone. “And it ain’t pretty smiles and blue eyes back there.”
“I said, fuck off!”
Buckeye bent a knee and stomped her boot sole onto his right shin. The enforcer swore and made a grab for her hair, but the elbow of her freed right arm arced up and back, connecting with flesh and bone. It didn’t crunch how she’d hoped, but it did cause a satisfying grunt of pain, and now the rest of her was loose to spin around.
The screen door creaked open and a second imposing figure stepped out of the house, only feet away. Skinner had a hand to his nose and murder in dark eyes, but the other man stepped toward them.
“The woman told you to fuck off,” said August. “Or you wanna fight both of us? Looks like she’s doin’ a damn fine job already.”
Skinner looked from August to Buckeye and back again. Ends of his hair had fallen in disarray over his forehead. He straightened and glared poison at both of them.
“Y’all two better not come back here alone,” he said. “Neither one of you.” He strode off around the side of the porch, perhaps to enter the house again from the back.
Buckeye let out a long breath. The remaining man approached, cautious.
“You all right?”
She eyed the house as though the spurned Skinner would come storming back out of it, vengeful. It was paranoia, though. The man was a sleaze and a coward, but he wasn’t an idiot. Any sort of incident at The Rose, and the Lustful would be demanding his enforcer bands. He wasn’t going to jeopardize a hard-won job like that.
“I’ll live,” she answered at last, leaning her backside up against the rail and folding her arms over her chest.
As August came near, he chuckled. “I, uh … I came out here to tell you … you ain’t as bad a dancer as you think. But it sounds like to me you’ve had about enough compliments from men for one night.”
She could tell he was trying to diffuse the riotous tension in the air under the porch, but Buckeye just didn’t have it in her to be polite anymore. Compliments? Hell, men altogether. Should have never accepted the invitation to go inside in the first place.
“You been real nice, August,” she said, beginning her excuses as he joined her at the rail, “and I did have a good time dancing. Haven’t done that in a long time.” Buckeye gave him a tired smile. “I just … don’t think I know how to handle people. Even if they’re polite and fun.” She hoped it was a graceful and civil enough way to make her excuses and get to the truck.
The smile he gave her back was its own kind of sad. The blond man shook his head. “I’m real sorry, Bucks.”
She looked over at him in the dim light. Squinted.
“For what?”
A flash of motion.
Pain, needle sharp, in the side of her neck.
“This.”
Something was inside her. Thin. Precise. Spreading.
She wanted to screech, to bolt, but her eyes rolled back.
Arms caught her as she slid to the ground, which melted before she got there.
The stars she saw were not in the Milky Way.
Deliver Me From Evil
Buckeye’s feet were on the ground, but something dull was cutting under her arms. Her body slumped forward, and the inside of her mouth tasted like dusty upholstery. Moonlight showed her earth and rocks instead of wood or carpet under her shoes.
Metal clanked somewhere close in front of her and she groaned, a thick sound, her tongue filling the back of her throat. The tightness across her chest was her shirt: something held her upright with it.
Someone.
Her head lolled in Buckeye’s best effort to look up and see. It hadn’t been this dark outside The Rose. One of her knees buckled and fabric yanked up into her pits. A fist hoisted her again, and she tried to make words. They came out a sludge of malformed syllables.
“… think it’s wearing off.”
Spiderwebs laid over her hearing, the voice just on some sticky opposite side of clarity. She blinked and flexed her fingers as though she’d just regrown them. Wrong? Yes. This was wrong.
“Then I guess you need to get the fucking door open already.”
Here, this second voice vibrated in a familiar way. It belonged to the person with a grip on the back of her shirt. Deep and male. Handsome.
Buckeye’s heart thudded and more of the fog burned out of her skull.
August.
The dance. The porch.
The sonofa—
She dragged her head up on an uncooperative neck to see wheels. A heavy rear bumper. A rolling cargo door clattering up its track.
Buckeye swayed but got her knees to lock for support. From the maw of the armored hauler, at least a dozen pairs of eyes stared back, glassy from darkened sockets. Every one of them told her the same thing.
Run.
Adrenaline redlined. The purge was violent, systolic.
She dropped. Twisted. Ran.
Clear night air seared her nostrils. Dry earth pounded under her boots. There were lights in the distance and she surged in that direction, the glow from each starring uniformly from the grit watering her eyes.
Male voices swore behind her and the thud of rapid pursuit matched the sound of blood in her ears.
Enforcers? After all this time?
Buckeye lurched forward, remnants of whatever drug keeping her stride sloppy. The footfalls closing the distance behind her were sober and driven. Greed would catch up with her. It always did.
Her breath sawed in and out of her throat. She dodged around small, thorny shrubs in the moonlight. Tore through the barrens, no idea how far she was from The Rose. The lights she ran toward could be anything.
A second set of lungs worked in the night. Her pursuer was close enough for her to hear his breathing.
Fuck!
She pushed harder, muscles on fire to keep up speed. Something batted at her right elbow as it swung back. A hand. Buckeye ripped away with a shout, but it was enough. She wasn’t watching her feet.
Rocks and earth rushed at her face. Drunken reflexes did no more to help than force an awkward yell out of her throat when palms and knees skidded over the ground. She scrabbled to stand, to keep going.
And then a boot kicked the inside of her knee. The sole of another planted squarely on her ass and shoved her forward, off-balance. Her hands weren’t fast enough to break this
fall, and Buckeye collapsed face-first onto hard dirt.
“Enough!”
August shifted his boot to the small of her back, pinning her like a bug. She screamed pure rage, abraded palms still trying to pull her body from under his weight.
“Goddamn it, I said enough.”
The boot became a knee and he grappled her arms. Buckeye flailed, but the man wrenched her wrists around to her back. The high of adrenaline bled out from the stalled chase, and her prior state flooded in to fill its place. Her world spun, and she groaned into the dirt, grit sticking to the spittle on one side of her mouth.
More tugging at her right arm, and then the sound of cloth ripping. August yanked the sleeve away while she humped at the ground, straining without effect to right herself up and out of his hold. When Buckeye felt the fabric threading beneath her forearms, she went feral.
“Fuck you! No!” She bucked like he’d struck her with lightning. “They ain’t ever getting’ their money! I ain’t ever gonna have it! Fucking pig!”
“Ain’t nobody wants money from you, woman.” He ignored her writhing, voice resolute while he finished the binding. What was left of her shirtsleeve cinched down tight, and she felt him tie off a knot.
“So what?” Buckeye seethed. “They just gonna have me killed then? One of their little shows? Make a fucking example?”
A fist was in her hair. She jerked useless arms against the ties. “Listen,” he said, giving a sharp tug for punctuation, “you ain’t getting’ out of this. Y’hear? You’re still drugged up and I can run faster’n you. Now I’m gonna pull you up. Are you gonna fuckin’ walk back to the truck with me? Or are you gonna be difficult?”
Breath came with effort, the severe angle of her neck crimping her windpipe. Silver lined the side of the bastard’s face, the rest of it silhouetted by the moon where he leaned over her. Buckeye tried to swallow and shake her head.
“No,” she said. “I’ll walk.”
“Good.”
The knee came off her back and the fist moved to her shirt again, gripping as it had when she’d come to, a calf led to slaughter. August hauled her to her feet. She bolted.
Or tried.
“For fuck’s sake!” He spun her into a stumble, a firm hold still on her shirt. “Fine, we’ll do it the hard way.”
For an eyeblink, she was free. Then a shoulder was in her gut and she was rising, feet coming off the ground. Her new view was cracked earth passing under the tall man’s striding boots.
Buckeye tried to rock onto her outer hip, even if it meant falling the long way, getting the wind knocked out of her. There was no way she’d just let this asshole carry her off without a fight.
His arm tightened around her hip.
“Buckeye, I will hurt you.”
She kicked a foot back and connected, probably with his jaw—she couldn’t see. All it earned her was a grunt. Then pain shot up her left leg. Buckeye shrieked.
Something clamped down on her ankle. Through leather and sock and everything. Clamped and held, tighter, tighter. Blue-yellow shock lanced the nerve and her spine arced backward, a mindless response to a blade-sharp stimulus.
He kept hold of her that way, leg pulled diagonal across his chest, for the rest of the walk back to the truck. She squealed and swore the entire time, calling him everything but a fried egg, but the man was unrelenting.
“I warned you,” he said, when he dumped her onto the floor of the cargo box.
“Fuck you!” She spat the words at him, her injured ankle tucking up on instinct, but with bound arms there was no sitting upright. Instead she tried to roll, furious.
Another hand grabbed her under the arm, this one from inside the truck. The male voice she’d heard earlier said to August, “This isn’t going to work.”
No. Nothing was going to work. This is what happened when people had debt with a house of Greed and ran. The enforcers caught up with them.
“Well we’re out of the T-40,” said the blond jackal who’d chased her through the desert, “so you’re gonna have to do it the old-fashioned way.”
She had just enough time for her eyes to open wide before a heavy thing struck behind her ear. The face of the traitor glittered to blackness, and Buckeye Wheeler was gone.
Everything was wrong. This wasn’t her mail truck. This wasn’t The Rose. This wasn’t any sort of way to wake up from a nap.
The bumping had started it. The jostling, again and again; the snarl of an engine working hard. Some background process in Buckeye’s head decided at last these were not dream noises and stirred her back toward consciousness.
She was lying on her right side, warmth at her front and back. Her body wedged between two others like a single card slid into a deck.
Breathing came first, by instinct, and she swallowed to wet her throat.
There was something between her teeth. Pulling back at the corners of her mouth. It didn’t budge when her tongue went to push it out, and her eyes snapped wide awake with the rest of her.
There was nothing to see but black. Her head whipped to the side, pupils dilating to suck down light, but there was none. Fabric grazed her nose and, with the jerk of her face, she could feel it covering her ears, her hair, tucking down around her neck and into her shirt collar. Something held it in place around her throat and Buckeye decided it was time to panic.
She yelled and launched herself upright, ready to run and fight anyone who stood in her way.
Or at least that’s what her brain told her she was doing.
Her yell dampened into the cloth gag and Buckeye flopped like a fish. The body behind her let out a grunt, deep and male, when her head thudded back and knocked against what might have been a chin.
Her arms and legs did nothing to help her get up. They couldn’t. Something held her ankles together; her boots had no play in any direction. When she made to fling her arms from where they curled under her ribs, all she managed was a banged elbow on the cargo floor beneath her and a sharp tug between her legs.
Straps. The painful coming-up-short was straps. Yanking on both sides of her crotch, circling around her back. Heavy canvas bagged her like an angry cat. This was a straight jacket.
She was bouncing in the back of a truck like a rag doll. In a hood. And a gag. Wearing a straight jacket.
Buckeye began to throw what her grandmother would have referred to as a ‘wall-eyed fit’.
The gag ate her screams as she thrashed. The floor bruised joints, and the fabric of the hood abraded the tip of her nose. More noises came from the person behind her now, and in front, as well. Their sounds were damp and muffled like hers. The firm line of pressure under her shoulder blades Buckeye now recognized as another set of forearms, restrained the same as she was.
The wheels jolted over some rock or crevice and her knees bashed into the legs in front of her. A feminine yelp came through another gag, and some grumble came from the man at her back. His sound told a brief story of irritation, of wishing Buckeye would just settle and shut up already. Her fellow debtors had given up hope.
After a few more futile grunts and tugs at her bonds, she did settle, however. If from exhaustion over anything else. The air inside whatever crude hood they’d placed on her was humid. Rough fabric sucked against her nose and puffed back out with her breath. It smelled like they’d found it in an abandoned building somewhere, untouched since before the Delineation.
This was what happened to people who owed money to houses of Greed. At least people like Buckeye, who ran. The odds were with a person until they weren’t, but oh god, when Luck smiled … The trouble came when Luck was the only shovel available to dig oneself out of a hole. And the Lady was fickle. Woo her all you want, there was no telling who she’d be in love with the next day. The next hand or roll.
Luck had fallen out of love with Buckeye Wheeler, and the desperate mail carrier had tried to win her back hard. Tried and failed in spectacular fashion. It had come to a point where getting half a continent away had been the only
avenue left. Not even to reconciliation, but to mere survival.
All her maneuvering had amounted to stalling, though, and Buckeye was fooling herself to say she hadn’t known this from the day she ran. No one would heed the rules of The Vice if the enforcers just let things go. They never did, and now here she was. Stacked together like cordwood with so many other unlucky sons o’ bitches who’d thought they could outrun Greed.
She let the truck’s sloppy suspension jounce her limp body about in time with the others’. Struggle was pointless. Even the scalding tears she didn’t bother to fight anymore. They just came, making tracks through the dirt on her face, without any squinching of eyes or hiccoughing in her chest. Buckeye let the darkness be a nest of safety, if only for a time, that hid from her whatever unpleasant fate lay at the end of this ride.
It was hard for her to say how much time had passed when the truck bumped to a stop. Nothing like real sleep had come, but the contrast of rough motion versus stillness was enough to bring her out of something akin to a trance. The arm she was lying on was asleep, so it had been at least long enough to accomplish that.
She made an attempt to stretch her calves by pointing her toes, and found her boots making contact with something shifting and rounded. A surprised grunt from somewhere past her feet had her suspecting it was the top of someone’s head, and Buckeye swallowed down another wave of fear and disgust at the enforcers’ methods.
Voices came from outside the cargo box, but nothing her straining would let her hear. A body to her right coughed through its gag, and she thought some other sounds elsewhere in the container might be sobbing. She shifted, the very beginnings of a full bladder another problem when she was already full up.
Heavy metallic clanking came just before the clatter of a roll-up door. Where there had been black nothing, now there was light-colored fabric, blurry, right in front of her eyes. Buckeye was not the only one to holler and wriggle against restraints. Daylight was close at hand. Freedom, right there. But then that was the joke, wasn’t it?
