“You didn’t tell us you were restocking so soon,” one of them said.
He was a skinny man. Anxiousness erased his limited good looks. Dark haired and sallow, not a second went by that he didn’t check the eye contact of his comrades, two of whom seemed intent on ignoring it. One was a big dangerous hulk, heavily bearded and with a watchful look that made Lilianna want to look elsewhere. The other was a nondescript character actor born to play the role of a convicted felon. His lustful gaze caused Lilianna’s hackles to rise. The fourth of Greerson’s men wore Kevlar like he lived in it, thick orange hair and darker beard merged long ago.
“You’ve only just come back in and you’re wantin’ to go out again?” the last one said to the speaker. “You’re greedy, Sandler.”
“Greedy?” the skinny man said and raised an eyebrow. “It’s only natural, Chesterton. Can you blame me?”
The dark-toned redhead looked to Yusuf and his big companion.
“Take them through.”
The scarfed man stood outside the kennels as back-up. Bleak and lethargic fear washed through Lila as Yusuf moved to obey. His damaged comrade watched as Yusuf stepped between the two women with a slaver’s grin. He already wore his beard like a Somali warlord and Lila’s eyes narrowed into fierce points taking in the thick gold ring she wanted to tear from his ear the moment she had a chance.
“Calm down, ladies,” Yusuf said. “You bruise too easy. Like ripe fruit.”
He made like he needed to pat them down. The other men chuckled, watching openly as he groped each of the two women in turn. Their hilarity spiked as the corrupted trooper clowned around. He turned Lilianna onto her back, squeezing her breasts as she hissed threats through the gag robbing her of anything but unladylike grunts, and Yusuf paused and raised an eyebrow at her thoughtfully, like a stage comedian unhappy with the front row.
“You serious, little girl?” he said. “Quit your squawking.”
“Little girl’s got a lot to say,” the biggest of Sandler’s trio said.
“Easy, Zardoz,” Sandler said.
“You don’t ‘easy’ me,” the brute replied. He motioned to Lilianna even though she’d immediately shut up. “Let her have her say.”
“No.”
The conversation stilled as all eyes turned to Chesterton now casually armed once again with his AR15 against one shoulder.
“Chester –”
“Shut up,” the burnished man said. “You guys came here for a taste, and you’ve had it. Go wash up or something. The Councilor’s orders are clear. Yusuf and Fuckface are your ride back to the Zone.”
He spoke with an aura of command. He turned his wrath on Yusuf.
“And you stop fucking around,” he said. “Get these gals inside so you can get gone.”
Yusuf’s dark face split into a playful, handsome grin. Lilianna thought of Vegas – just another person not coming to her rescue – and was glad to see the troopers’ squad leader had his men under control, if nothing else.
“OK, Angus, don’t go makin’ that face,” Yusuf smirked, then lifted a hand overhead to point down at Lilianna as his bigger comrade pulled Lila to her feet. “But I’m drawin’ straws for this one,” he said and grinned at her wickedly.
Lilianna recoiled. Yusuf blew a kiss like a death threat.
Chesterton glanced at Lilianna until he had her attention, and took a good long look as he did. Then, straight-faced, he returned to Yusuf with the same unblinking look.
“Think again,” he said. “This one’s Greerson’s.”
*
THEY’D ONLY raked out the animal enclosure to allow another kind of captive. Lilianna was thrown headlong into hers, and Aurora went into the kennel beside it. A sagging wire-mesh screen separated the two women in the wood-and-concrete structure, with more dingy cages across from them and continuing down the twin rheumy halls. The naked orange globe burnt just out in the walkway right outside as if to forbid sleep even for the exhausted.
And Lilianna was exhausted. But the light of day only cast her and Aurora’s captivity into clearer and clearer and ever more horrifying shades. Left alone for a moment, she grunted her way through the torture of getting her bound hands in front of her, and she loosened and finally pulled her gag down into a crusty dry neckerchief. Then Lila scrambled to the wire she clutched as she looked down on Aurora laid in the shadows, but the girl had just a moment to twist about and share Lilianna’s terror, and then the gate to Aurora’s stall opened again and two fresh guards pulled her out.
“Hey!” Lila yelled. “What are you doing? Where are you taking her?”
A third man hesitated near Lilianna’s cage and peered in, smiling like waiting for an invite. The trooper no longer wore his scarf – not needed now, apparently, revealing a disturbingly good-looking man with a horrible leer.
He started working the bolt on Lila’s cage door. A voice rang out nearby as Aurora was bundled away down the narrow hall by the other newcomers.
“Leave it, Slinky,” Chesterton called. “How many times I gotta tell you clowns? You can have a shot at her friend with Apache and Warlock.”
Slinky let his eyes linger on Lilianna, giving up on the gate. Lilianna detested her own stricken terror that left her blinking back mutely as the handsome man winked unhandsomely and withdrew. The horrid orange light threw the shadow puppetry of her friend’s dire struggle across the gloomy walls.
“Leave her alone!” Lila yelled.
“You’re not meant to have your gag off,” someone said.
“Yeah,” one of the other would-be rapists said. “Shut up, little darlin’.”
Slinky only got to watch, delighted, as his comrades did the dirty work of hauling Aurora to her feet and then propelling her away, deeper into the darkness at the end of the stalls. Lila’s friend kept dropping her dead weight, weakly trying to fight them, but the two new guards were well-fed men of solid build. The first was a man in his fifties looking every part the veteran mercenary with neck tattoos flowing all the way to the sides of his shaven scalp. His offsider was a khaki-clad Native American. The weak light rendered his dark features uncertainly.
Lilianna didn’t know what else to do and so she started to yell, shrilly, more panicked than she liked to hear. But Chesterton appeared at the door to her cubicle hovel.
“Miss,” he said quietly. “Shut up. Now.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“You don’t hear me or something?”
Lila tested the burly man’s tone for leeway. Slowly, carefully, she asked, “What have I ever done to you?”
“You’re a fucking slow learner, girl.”
Chesterton grabbed the wire cage and Lilianna shot back against the far wall, but the squad commander made no further move. He slid his gaze over her in a way far too much like appraising livestock, and Lilianna almost felt worse that there was no lust in it.
“Please,” she said.
“‘Please’ what? Let you go?” Chesterton sniggered, his ginger complexion burnished by the raw electric light. “He must have a real hard-on for you, Miss. And I’ve only got bad news . . . and I don’t like being the bearer of bad news. So why don’t you get some rest? You’ll need it.”
“Stop your friends, please.”
Chesterton looked away then, snorted like he was bemused when he was clearly troubled and didn’t want to face it. Aurora started screaming from close by and Lilianna shook with violent sympathy.
The senior trooper was so quiet at first she almost didn’t hear him.
“They’re going to hunt you, you and your friend, just like the others,” Chesterton said. “You really do need to rest. Sleep. There’s a slight chance for you. You might be the one to get free. To get clear, before they track you down. The way they talk about you, about your old man, maybe Greerson’s even scared. But he wants you. Oh yeah. And Wilhelm’s given license. Hell, we never knew Ernie had all this in him. You’re here, where they sent all the others. So get your rest, Miss. No one’s co
ming to save you.”
“Not even you?” Lilianna asked.
She tried to force the eye contact, dismayed when Chesterton’s only hardened.
“Nope. Not your dad, either,” he said. “No one’s told you yet, but your old man’s dead already and that brother of yours probably too.”
He let go the wire and left Lila to her shock.
By the time the torrent of questions came, Chesterton was gone, and Lila’s yells were lost beneath the sound of Aurora shrieking.
*
AURORA COULDN’T SCREAM forever and the men wouldn’t let her. The horrible meaty sounds gave way to sobs and then Aurora’s groans as the men took their turns. The day was well and truly up by then, the sunlight angling in through the high mesh-covered concrete slit windows. The tortured girl was thrown like garbage back into the cell next to Lilianna.
Lila tried to speak, to offer some kind of help despite their captivity, but the pale-limbed girl lay unconscious. Perhaps it was a mercy. For all of Chesterton’s dire warnings, the idea of sleep was a terrifying fantasy for Lilianna, who crouched in the stinking straw listening to her friend whimper like a beaten animal in semi-consciousness The harshening light revealed everything, and Lilianna was still crouched there, stricken and immobile, when the daylight started fading once more with the sun’s passage overhead.
The troopers didn’t patrol the aisle nor bring anything to drink or eat. She wouldn’t eat what they offered anyway. And she refused to accept Chesterton’s story. Tom Vanicek had proven himself a hard man to kill, and there was a quiet furious joy still alive in his daughter knowing Tom would extract biblical vengeance on anyone who moved again her – or her brother.
But she couldn’t throw off Chesterton’s words in full. The truth was, Tom and Lucas might be dead. And Lilianna would quickly join them if she broke now.
“Hey!” she called out – using her “girl” voice. It wasn’t hard to inflect it with the right amount of fear, though the innocence was lacking. She clutched the cage mesh instead and at the last moment yanked down the front of her polo top so the neckline tore.
There was nothing in the straw for a weapon. Not even a pot to shit. Nothing about the cubicle showed recent use – but then Lila saw the scratch marks around the timber mechanism of the gate carved by human nails. No dog could be so precise.
A figure cleared its throat and the shadows stirred as the trooper advanced towards her down the orange-lit corridor.
Lilianna wasn’t prepared to see a female trooper regarding her impassively, and the innocent, flirtatious, zesty smile she’d somehow fashioned on her mud- and blood-encrusted features turned instantly ridiculous under the hard-faced blonde’s disapproving look.
“You want something?” the woman asked. “You s’posed to keep quiet.”
Lilianna’s face fell into tatters just like her half-baked plan.
“I’m just . . . I just need to pee. . . .”
“Been holdin’ on?”
“Yes.”
Lilianna tried to say it brightly. It didn’t work. The woman’s look was like a blowtorch.
“Stupid of you,” the woman replied stony-voiced. “You ain’t gettin’ out till tonight, when Greerson comes.”
Lila’s mouth moved yet no words came. The tendons stood out on the guard’s bared forearms, the rest of her packed into Kevlar and khaki. She even wore a name tag: McGill.
“Bunker down,” the woman told her. “Storm comin’ in.”
“Wait!”
McGill growled, but pitched her voice low like worried about getting caught.
“Keep your damned fuckin’ voice down, I said.”
Lila had no idea what to say and McGill started her retreat.
“Wait, please.”
The blonde woman looked at her with a hard expression broken too many times in the past to break again now. Utter hopelessness overwhelmed Lilianna and she sagged against the cage door.
“How can you do this?” she asked. “I’m a woman. You’re a –”
“You’re an enemy of the people,” the trooper said. “That’s enough for me. They take it out on you and leave the rest of us the fuck alone.”
Lilianna gasped a reply, but the woman turned and marched away.
*
LILIANNA DIDN’T KNOW whether the light faded or her eyes grew tired. She blinked awake at a harsh scraping metal noise, surprised to see Aurora moving in the cell next door. With straw caught in her hair, the girl knelt in torn clothes working at the door to her kennel.
“Aurora,” Lila said.
The other woman turned to shoosh her, and in so doing revealed the full extent of her tragedy. One of her eyes was swollen shut and her hair and face were streaked with mucus, grime, and blood. Mostly blood. Her lone open eye glared with urgency as she put a finger to her lips and pointed meaningfully to indicate their captors. The rest of their shared disaster plunged in on Lila’s sleep-befuddled thoughts, and she leapt into one corner to vomit, but nothing but a mouthful of soapy bile came out, just like in the movies.
At some point in her panic, Lilianna started praying. Then she caught herself doing it.
“I’ve got a piece of wire,” Aurora whispered. “See?”
Lila forced herself back to her friend. The wire was little more than a nail. Aurora’d etched more of those telltale marks around the wooden latch on her cage door, doing little more than damaging old paint. A bright, almost hostile fever-look burnt in Aurora’s eyes, daring Lila to shatter her completely with any truth more horrible than what she’d already endured. Lilianna nodded slowly, mute, navigating her own terror as well as the mood. Then she turned to her own kennel gate, unable to glimpse if any guards were on watch nearby.
“We have to get out of here,” Aurora whispered again.
“I know.”
Lila kept herself breathing rather than talking. She threw off the irrational desire to shake the living bejeesus out of the cage door. Then she resisted the urge to slump in defeat again.
“I’m sorry, Aurora.”
“Sorry?”
“You’re only here . . . because you tried to help me.”
“You helped me,” Aurora said. “Before. The Incident.”
Lila nodded, monastic and overwrought.
“Do you see a way out of this, Lila?”
“Not yet,” Lilianna said sadly. “Not yet.”
And her sigh was replaced by the sound of engines in the gathering dark.
*
CAR DOORS SLAMMED, but their tormentors took their time gossiping in the yard outside. Men’s voices snickering and trading barbs carried on the wild wind, lost in translation as if the breeze stole the very words from the air as it scoured through the network of stale and foul kennels.
Lilianna fought off the shakes by focusing her breath. Aurora watched intently, as if desperate for cues. That meant it didn’t make sense when Lilianna started standing and squatting in rapid order – limbering up for what she imagined as their one chance at freedom.
The men’s chatter reached a crescendo when someone whooped and rattled the fence outside, which transmitted into the kennels like the buzzing of telegraph wires. Scuffling booted footfalls and then the clustered intrusion of more living shadows into the light presaged the company’s approach.
Denny Greerson came first.
“Well there she is,” the goat-faced, sickly-haired Safety Chief said.
A malevolent twinkle in his eye sent a knife of fear deep into Lilianna’s chest as it occurred to her Greerson wouldn’t dare such harsh treatment if her father still lived. Yet again, Lilianna fell into a blinking, gulping mess as all fortitude abandoned her, which only emboldened Greerson’s slithering laugh.
“Lila,” Aurora called across to her and shook the wire mesh. “Lila, get up.”
“Oh now now,” Greerson chuckled. “I think this little bitch knows what’s coming – what’s always been coming. You liked that black boy? We’re gonna get him too, if we haven’t al
ready. But Vegas is going straight into the grinder. Nothin’ like you . . . Lilianna. Even that pretentious fuckin’ name . . . Play your cards right honey, and maybe I’ll give you to Yusuf when I’m finished, since you like ‘em so dark.”
“Fuck you, Greerson,” Lila said deliberately. “My father’s going to slit your –”
“Tom Vanicek’s as good as dead.”
Greerson punctuated the remark with a snotty snort. He stood dressed for the promised hunt. Night vision goggles hung against his armored vest.
“What, no one told you yet?” he asked her.
Lilianna stood carefully and moved to the back of the cell.
“You said ‘As good as dead’,” she replied.
Greerson scanned her like a hard-to-read book, then grin-grimaced.
“Let’s just say there’s a plan underway even as we speak,” the Chief said quietly. “Your father’s got a rendezvous with destiny . . . and an old friend.”
“I thought you were his friend,” Lila said.
“He’s a good man,” Greerson agreed. “Staunch. Not like me. Sorry. I go weak in the presence of beauty.” And he winked at her. “Sorry, Lilianna. I’ll do whatever I have to, if there’s something I want.”
“You want me?”
“Got you already, babe,” he told her. “Just takin’ my time with it.”
“Yeah?” Lila tried to focus as if the whole conversation wasn’t leading to her rape and murder. “What’s the plan, then?”
“Well, first, we’ve got to get you out of there,” Greerson told her. He said it friendly-like, despite the intent. He motioned into the kennel as if the ball were in her court. “You play nice, I’m going to let you out for a run.”
“A ‘run’,” she mimicked him.
“It’s a little sport we have around here,” Greerson said. “Could become the new national pastime. I don’t think I understood when Ernie first showed me, but I do now. A beauty like you, it’s not enough just to take you. I could do that anytime. Anyone could.”
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 55
