“Don’t, Brad. It’s okay.”
If anything, Logan blamed himself. What had he been doing while his wife, while the love of his life, was taken God knew where? He’d been sleeping, unconscious.
Worthless, he told himself. You’re worthless.
He took a deep breath. No. No. He wasn’t worthless. He would get out of this…somehow. He wouldn’t give up. Giving up meant being underground and waiting for the worms to eat you…or in the belly of some unholy beast.
“We’re gonna get out of this,” he said. “We’re gonna be all right.”
Laughter came from somewhere else. Logan recognized it as easily as he had recognized the voice from the next cell over.
“Grease, you son of a bitch!” he shouted.
“Yeah, that’s what I feel like,” Grease said. He chuckled, but there was hardly any humor in it at all. He cleared his throat; the effort sounded like it was damn near killing him. Then he spoke again. “I think they’re coming for you next, Logan. Then me. Then Brad.”
“How do you know?” Brad asked.
“I don’t for sure, but I have a hunch.”
“What are they doing? Where did they take Jane?” Logan said.
He didn’t like how desperate his voice sounded, but he was desperate, wasn’t he? The fact that he might be next, that he might be this close to death, didn’t even cross his mind. All he cared about was Jane.
A sinister voice in the back of his head, one that had always been there in the past but grew louder as the world turned more and more chaotic, spoke up now.
You’re too late, Logan. She’s gone. You weren’t there for her, and now she’s gone.
“I don’t know what they’re doing,” Grease said, “but it ain’t good, I can assure you.”
Logan was looking around the cell, hardly listening. The voice that told him Jane was gone was a slap in the face, more so than waking tied up in a jail cell. Scanning his surroundings, he saw nothing. The place was empty, not even a bed of rock to lie down on. He looked up, and was barely able to make out the metal rings his rope was tied to, then looked down and saw the ones near his feet. They were smooth metal, sparkling. Brand new.
It was like these assholes had installed the hardware themselves after the world had ended. But why? Why take humans prisoner? Were they going to eat them? Meat was scarce, of course. The monsters from the voids didn’t just feast on humans; they feasted on anything that moved. Raising cattle and chickens was not an easy task in a world where one can hardly go outside or make noise.
Or were these crazy, robed people going to turn them into their slaves? Logan didn’t know. None of it made sense. The only thing that made sense to him now was that he had to get out of this cell and he had to get out fast.
Something to the left caught his eye. One of the stones that comprised the wall jutted out at an angle, moderately sharp. This rock was about three feet from where he was tethered against the back wall. His heart hammered with hope and possibility. This was his way out; this was his saving grace.
But you aren’t strong enough to knock down the bars keeping you in this little room, buddy.
He’d worry about that when it was time to worry about it. For now, he had to get out of these ropes, because he saw only one scenario where the men and women would come to take him out of the cell, like Grease thought they would. That scenario involved knocking him out cold, like they’d had to do to get him in here in the first place. He certainly wasn’t going to go anywhere on his own free will, and if they knocked him out again, there was no telling if he’d ever wake up.
So Logan leaned to the right, throwing all of his weight against the ropes and the rings holding these ropes against the wall. He strained, his face growing hot, his eyes bulging.
“Logan, you okay?” Brad asked.
Logan didn’t answer. He was so close now. His hands, tied at the wrist, were mere inches away from making contact with the sharp brick. All he needed was a little more—
The ring above his head gave slightly, dust puffing down onto his shoulders. He coughed, felt the particles go up his nose, and then sneezed violently. When he opened his eyes, he thanked God for the solid two hundred and fifty pounds of bulk that made up his body. The force of the sneeze spurred him to the right spot, and now his left hand was right against the jagged brick. It wasn’t as sharp as he needed it to be, but he figured it would do the trick.
“Logan?” Brad called again.
“I’m fine,” he answered, his voice strained. The rope bit into his wrists, turned his hands purple. He felt blood running down one ankle; it felt like the world’s biggest bee sting, but he kept going.
He rubbed his wrist against the raised piece of stone, back and forth, back and forth. Not much happened…not much except more pain and strain against his flesh. It was like trying to cut rope with a butter knife.
Breathing hard, muscles aching, brow damp with sweat, Logan stopped. He knew what needed to be done. Life had never been easy before, and it wouldn’t be now.
He leaned forward again. This time, he didn’t press the rope against the jagged edge of the stone; no, he pressed the strangled flesh of his wrist against it instead. The pain wasn’t all that bad—at least not until he moved his hand back and forth, and the sharpness opened his skin. A glut of blood burbled out from the wound, so much so that he was, for the moment, completely taken aback, unmoving for a solid thirty seconds. A thirty seconds that he didn’t have to waste.
“Logan, dude?” Brad said. “What’s going on? Why are you wincing?”
He hadn’t even known he was wincing. The rock had cut him deeper than he expected. He didn’t like that, but it was what it was.
“I-I’m okay,” he said. “I’m finding a way out of here.”
“Good luck,” Grease said. “Only way out of here is with one of them robed bastards. Either that, or you kill yourself, go out on your own terms.”
Logan didn’t reply; neither did Brad. But Logan was way ahead of Grease.
The blood currently running down his left arm was quite a lot. The red coated the rope, and the threads grew heavy. Logan shimmied and wiggled his wrist until he felt his flesh peel back. There was a strong burning sensation and a bout of pain, but he swallowed it down and kept at the movement.
Fifteen seconds later, his left hand was free of the rope. He immediately began loosening the other side, blood wetly slapping the concrete floor.
He was able to widen the rope around his right wrist enough to slide his hand through without using his own blood as lubricant. He would’ve begun working on the restraints around his ankles had he not heard a squeak from a door somewhere down the dark corridor. Footsteps followed this squeak, heavy footsteps, confident footsteps.
Moving so quickly he was mostly a blur, Logan thrust his bloody hand back through the loop that had only a few moments ago been boa constrictor tight. A look of fear crossed his face, but he forced himself to change it before whomever came through the corridor showed themselves. He rearranged his face into a look of sullen contempt, but in the back of his mind, he was worrying about the blood everywhere. If they saw it, they might think he was up to no good. Which was exactly what he was up to.
“Andre the Giant, you’re up next!” a foreign voice shouted.
Logan closed his eyes, made himself look dazed.
The foreign voice broke into a fit of laughter. “Aw, look at all that blood! Good try, buddy! Too bad I was in the Scouts! I know how to tie the tightest knots in the fucking world!”
Logan fluttered his eyes open then closed them again. He really had to sell this dazed expression. Hopefully, if all went according to—
The door to his cell swung open.
“Yessiree,” this foreign voice said. “After them monsters eat all of you, especially you, big guy, they won’t be back for a couple weeks, maybe a month. That’ll be a load off of Annette’s chest, and a load off of Annette’s chest is a load off of mine, buddy.”
Logan’
s eyes opened again, still fake-dazed. He saw the man in front of him, recognized him as one of the few robed figures that had jumped them in the arena. He was balding, maybe just under six feet and two hundred pounds. Pudgy in the middle. His forearms showed in the big sleeves of the robe, and they were thick, knotted with muscle, like this was a guy who’d done hard work for a living, made tire molds or stocked shelves during the third shift at Walmart. Still, the guy could’ve been fifteen years younger and half a foot taller, and Logan still would’ve been able to take him.
At least, that’s what Logan thought.
That cold confidence of what Uncle Tommy called the ‘Gunslinger’ mentality took hold of him. Put him up against one of those monsters right then, and he would’ve tried to wrestle it to the ground, like Steve Irwin versus an alligator. Only for Jane, though. She was his driving force, the reason his adrenaline levels had spiked, and he no longer felt any pain—just calm. Beautiful calm.
“Sorry, pal,” the robed guy said. “You look like you’ve been dozing already, but I gotta drug you. Can’t say for sure if you’ll ever wake up again.” He shook his head. “Eh, maybe you will. I hope you do. The big ones always scream when the monsters start in on ‘em. It ain’t pretty, but it sure as hell is entertaining.”
“Leave him alone, you bastard!” Brad shouted. “Take me instead!”
The robed guy leaned sideways to look at Brad. “You’ll get your turn, pal. Hold your horses. Might even get to see your big friend here get his guts ripped out. Them damn monsters are never on time, I tell ya.”
“Fuck you!” Brad shouted.
Grease was laughing, but it still didn’t sound like pleasant laughter; to Logan, Grease sounded like a man who’d officially lost his marbles, who’d been driven to insanity. With all the shit going on in the world—the voids, the monsters, and now this—Logan was surprised a lot of people hadn’t lost their minds a lot quicker.
“All right, buddy. You’ll probably feel a bit of a pinch,” the robed guy said. He pulled a syringe out from beneath his robes. In the harsh light, Logan saw a clear liquid drip from the needle, which was easily four inches in length. “I mean, it’s nothing personal. We gotta do what we gotta do to survive, and Annette discovered something great.” The guy shook his head and raised his hand, aiming for Logan’s neck. “Ah, what do you care? You’ll be dead in an hour, maybe sooner.”
The guy was so busy talking, he didn’t see Logan’s arm slipping from the loop, or his fingers clenching in a fist, until it was too late.
Boom!
The man shouted out in manic surprise, the sound seeming to be made more in shock than pain. Blood flew every which way. It slapped the stone walls and dripped in streaks, like a macabre Jackson Pollock painting. Logan felt the man’s nose give beneath his fist, felt it crumble into a mess of flesh and cartilage. He had come a long way since his freshman year, had put on at least fifty to seventy pounds, most of that muscle, and this robed man took the brunt of that weight, despite half of Logan’s body being held back by the ropes.
The syringe pinwheeled in the air, the needle gleaming in the muted dungeon light. It hit the ground and bounced into the corner near one of the old stains.
The man, now swaying like a fighter ready to go down for the count, managed to stay up for a few more seconds. Logan’s adrenaline pumped buckets into his bloodstream, so when he swung again, his teeth gritted and his eyes narrowed in pure focus, he meant to go further than a knockout punch; he meant to kill the man.
This punch caught the man in the jaw. The teeth under his cheek gave in to Logan’s knuckles, and he felt them crumble much like he’d felt the guy’s nose crumble. A fountain of blood sprayed from the man’s mouth. He went sideways, hands slapping the stone and leaving streaking finger-trails as he slumped to the floor. Then his eyes fluttered, showed the whites, and closed.
Logan, breathing hard, heart and head pounding, saw for the first time ever in his adult life the extremity of his strength. A feeling of guilt washed over him. He had never killed a man, had hardly ever hurt one (aside from shooting at another robed man back in the arena, but that hadn’t killed him, he knew). Now, though? That punch might’ve killed this guy.
Somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind, he remembered thinking that was exactly what he intended to do, but now, looking at the unconscious middle-aged man, he just felt bad.
Things had changed.
“Logan? What happened?” Brad’s voice. “Are you all right?”
No. No, he wasn’t all right, but he grumbled a “Yeah,” and began working on the other rope loop. Now that the adrenaline was starting to wear off, he felt the pain in his left hand. The knuckles were swelling, already turning a purplish color. It was very possible that he’d broken one or more of his fingers. He moved sluggishly, but by the time he got his right hand free, he was moving a little faster. Pretty soon, those other freaks would wonder where their friend was at with ‘Andre the Giant,’ and then they’d come looking for him. Logan would fight, but he was sure they wouldn’t come in armed with just syringes this time; they’d come in with assault rifles and shotguns.
“You kill him?” Grease called.
Logan glanced at the unmoving man. His chest expanded raggedly with inhales and exhales. He hadn’t, but near enough; Logan knew that all too well.
“No,” he answered.
“You should’ve.”
Brad said, “What? Logan, are you free?”
“Getting there.”
He stepped one foot out from the binds and worked on the knot around the other ankle. The skin was chafed and beet red, like a sunburn, but he hardly noticed.
When he was free, the first thing he did was go over to the syringe and stomp on it, grinding the plastic into little pieces. A puddle formed around the broken instrument like its own pool of blood, like the same puddle forming around the robed man. Picking up the syringe and driving it into the man’s neck had crossed Logan’s mind, but ultimately he’d decided against it. There was no telling what that drug would do to someone. Could kill him, cause a heart attack, something like that, and Logan wasn’t a killer.
Not yet.
He took the keys off the man’s belt, his own hands still bleeding heavily, and stepped into the dungeon-like corridor. It wasn’t a dungeon—not really. Just a holding area in an all but defunct and neglected police station. He saw a score of desks through the door’s small window, all of them empty, but with scattered papers and bits of ceiling tile strewn across them. One light in that main area flickered spastically. Logan peered out of the small, metal-crisscrossed window for a better look. He saw no other robed figures, he saw no monsters, and he saw neither Jane or Devin Johnson, which brought on a sinking feeling in his gut that he was all too familiar with.
Turning around and shaking his left hand, which had begun to tingle, he approached Brad’s cell, unlocked it on the first try, then unlocked Grease’s.
“Keys?” Grease said, raising an eyebrow. “Figured you just ripped the bars right out the wall, you know, like the fuckin’ Incredible Hulk.”
Logan said, “I wish it was that easy.”
A moment of silence followed this, each man regarding the others, waiting for someone to step up and take the lead.
So Logan did.
Before Tony Layton came upon Annette Palmer—the old woman in charge of this sacrificial operation—and her band of survivors, before the voids came, and before the end of the world happened in what seemed like a blink of an eye, he had been in and out of prison for a variety of offenses, the most serious of which was rape. He’d served nine years for that one, and had just gotten out a year before the void came to Stone Park.
Tony Layton was a bad seed, as simple as that. He didn’t regret anything he’d done in the past; in fact, he’d done worse stuff and gotten away with it. When he was only nineteen, he stabbed a man outside of a little dive bar in Barberton because the man was gay and kept giving Tony the eye. He stabbed him in the left side
of his stomach and then twisted the blade, and left the gay man on the sidewalk as a steadily growing pool of blood nearly drowned him. The music in the dive bar was so loud that no one heard the man screaming in pain. Tony walked away, wiped the knife on the thigh of his jeans, and then caught the bus about a block from the bar. The gay man bled out and died on the pavement.
Tony didn’t know this, but had he known, he wouldn’t have given two shits. Though he was twenty years older than his nineteen-year-old self, Tony would’ve stabbed the guy again with no problem, and he would’ve stuck around to watch him bleed out. Would’ve enjoyed it, too.
Stabbing that man was what was on his mind as he mounted the steps to ‘the dungeons,’ as those in Annette Palmer’s merry band of budding cultists sometimes called it, because he was thinking about stabbing George. He still had his knife from twenty years ago; he’d hid it under the floorboards of his mom’s house right before he was carted off to Mansfield for nine years. When he got out, the first thing he did was find a prostitute, fuck her, then go back to his ma’s house and made sure the knife was still under the floorboards. It had been, and now it was in his pocket, feeling heavier and heavier with each step he took, fingers tingling, wanting to reach downward and pull it free, snap it open, use it.
He had never really liked George, the balding bastard who thought he ran the place, but since an hour ago, he’d hated him. An hour ago, George had brought the black soldier-guy and the broad into the preparation room. Both of them were knocked out, drugged up with that shit that George kept in the syringes. Fucking doctors and their drugs.
The ritual wasn’t going to happen for at least an hour or two, so Tony had asked if he could have a go with the broad. Jane was her name, and she had a sweet rack and legs that went on for miles. Her face wasn’t much to look at, but who gave a fuck? He’d just turn her around and get on with his business—he wouldn’t need a couple of hours, either. He’d be quick.
And Annette didn’t care; she’d watched him do it to a sweet redhead a couple weeks ago. Fucking weirdo. He didn’t like the idea of being watched while he got it on with an unconscious broad, and Annette certainly wasn’t anything to look at—the chick was old enough to be his mother, all gray-haired and wrinkled—but he had to admit, it was kind of…neat, and it kind of turned him on more.
Taken World (Book 2): Darkness Page 12
