Reckless (Wrecked) (35 page)

“Where’s the other girl?” came the voice of the second man.

Sarah said nothing.

“I got your friend out there in the woods who’s dead asleep with a big lump on his head.  I got no problem going back out there and finishing him off with this,” he said, placing a huge and very lethal-looking hunting knife on the tabletop.  “So tell us … where’s the other girl?”

“Shouldn’t you have a Russian accent?” Sarah asked.

The guy gave her a half smile.  Maybe it was meant to be something nice, but all it did was make Sarah’s stomach contents curdle.

“So you wanna play, huh?  That’s fine.”  He stood.  “I’ll be right back.  I’m gonna go cut that guy’s ear off and bring it in here for her.”

Sarah stood up and screamed, “No!  Don’t do that!  I’ll tell you where she is!” 
What’s the harm?  She’s far away, and Kevin will never forgive me if I let them cut off his body parts.  Hell,
I’ll
never forgive me if I let that happen.

He walked back, slowly, as if he’d much rather be out dismembering her brother.  When he got to the table, he faced her, standing much too closely for her comfort.  “You don’t wanna play anymore?”  He lifted his knife up and brought it slowly to her chin, stopping when the point was just barely touching it.  “That’s too bad.  I was looking forward to playing a little game with you.”

She tipped her head back as far as she could to avoid being cut, but she felt the sting of his blade as it dug into her skin anyway.  A warm trickle of blood came to the surface and bled down her neck in a slow stream.

“Leave her alone,” said the guy on the other side of the room.  “We need her alive, at least for now.”

The knife left Sarah’s face and she tipped her head back down, resisting the urge to punch the guy  in the nose and kick him in the balls.

He turned his head and scowled at his partner.  “You don’t give me orders, Jack.”

“No, you’re right.  I’m just repeating the orders of the guy who does.  So leave her alone and get the information from her so we can get the hell out of here.  If we found them, so can the others; and I don’t want to be anywhere near here if that happens.”

Sarah could hear her pulse in her ears. 
Who are the others?  More assholes with knives and guns or the police?
  She had a feeling asking would be fruitless, but she tried anyway.  “Who are the others?  The FBI?”

“Shut up, bitch.  And tell me where that other little whore is, before I go remove parts of your sleeping friend out there.”

Sarah swallowed the insult that was on the tip of her tongue.  “She’s in town.  She left hours ago.  We don’t expect her back until … tomorrow.”

“Bullshit.  She wouldn’t leave you guys for a whole day.”  He looked over at the guy with the gun.  “She probably went in for supplies.  Their fridge is empty.  She’ll be back probably any minute.”

“Good.  We’ll just wait for her then.  Once we have them all together, we’ll figure out what they know and then take care of the problem.”

“Take care of the problem?” asked Sarah, unable to keep the fear from running her mouth.  “Does that mean what I think it means?”

The guy sat down again next to her and laughed quietly, using the tip of his knife to carve some letters into the top of the table.  “It means, pretty girl, that you are going to take a little nap.  A dirt nap.”

“Shut up, asshole.  You’re not going to help the situation by getting them all wired up.”

The man in front of Sarah shrugged.  “I don’t give a fuck about helping the situation.  I came here to do a job, and I’m going to do it.  Simple as that.  Like it or not.  That’s life.”  He smiled at her, revealing uneven, grungy, yellow teeth.

Sarah cringed at his disgusting face and horrific promises.  She could almost hear Jonathan’s words in her head, telling her their odds of survival had just gone down, knowing that the man in front of her was insane.  He didn’t just kill for money; he enjoyed it.  He probably had a collection of body parts at his house.  The blood drained from her face again as she realized she was probably staring into the eyes of the man who would take her life from her.  And the life of her unborn child.

“Where the fuck is Jimmy?” asked the guy with the gun, distracting Sarah from her mother’s instinct that had started to bloom across her chest, making her heart beat double-time.  “That asshole should have been back by now.”

“Want me to go look for him?” asked the guy with the knife, abandoning his carving job and standing.

“Yeah.  Go find him and bring him back here.  And tell him if he’s fucking with that kid, he’s going to answer to me.”

“I doubt that’s gonna do anything to scare him,” said the guy as he walked out the door.

“Well, it better!” yelled the gunman at his partner’s retreating form.  “I speak for Baskov, you know!”

“Yeah, yeah!” came the faint response.

Sarah heard nothing for a few seconds and then just the gunman acting frustrated.

“Fuck!  Goddamn asshole
idiots
.  Why do I always get stuck with the degenerates?”

“I find it highly amusing that you don’t include yourself in that group,” said Sarah, feeling just a tiny measure of safety over the fact that he’d kept the other guy from hurting her brother.  And he had chosen a gun for his weapon, which told her that he preferred to kill from a distance and move on.  It struck her as slightly less psychotic than the hunting knife that was big and sharp enough to kill a grizzly bear.  She glanced down at the table and read the name carved into it with the lunatic’s blade: 
Zed
.

“Shut up, you stupid bitch.  You have no idea what you’re talking about.”  His cultured tone disappeared.  Maybe it was the stress doing it, but now he sounded like a guy faking being a man with a nice haircut and clothing.

“Are you going to let Zed kill us?” Sarah asked, wondering if he’d bite.

“How’d you know his name?  I didn’t use it once.”  He walked over to stand next to her on her right side, the opposite one from where Zed had been sitting.

Sarah slid her arm over on the table, covering up the carving as casually as possible.  “Oh, we know about all of you.  Jimmy, Zed, you … Jack.  The FBI told us to expect you and to set off the silent alarm as soon as you showed up.”  Sarah was busy pulling false information out of some secret dark recess of her brain that may have existed as a result of watching too many action films with Kevin at the helm of the remote.

“You don’t have a silent alarm to the FBI.  Do you think I’m a complete idiot?  They’d have agents here if they knew where you were or that you were being followed.”

Sarah shook her head.  “Nope.  This is how they decided to let it play out.  They knew you’d be watching us and would see them if they were here.  Plus, they’re not far, so like I said … they’ll be here any minute.”

As if on cue, footsteps came running up the porch stairs and the front door burst open.

***

Candi was flush with the success she’d had at the library and grocery store, and in a huge hurry to get back and share the news with the others.  Jason and Stephen had both answered her emails, and the information they’d given her had lit a fire under her butt.  Things were happening, and they needed to make some decisions.

She pulled off the main road and onto the dirt road, but she hadn’t gone far before she came upon a car parked over on the shoulder.  She pulled up next to it and peered in the windows.  It was a nondescript sedan, reminding her of a typical rental car.  There was nothing inside it but a single manila folder lying on the front seat.  Something that looked like a photograph was sticking partway out of the top.

Candi’s blood pressure zoomed up.  Something felt very wrong about a car being out here at all. 
Why would someone stop so far from the house and the main road? 
All of the answers that came to her were bad.  She shut off the motorcycle and put the kickstand down, making sure it was going to stay up before she let go of the handles and walked around to the other side of the car.

She tried the front passenger door and found it unlocked.  Reaching in with a shaking hand, she took the folder off the front seat and opened it up.  She stopped breathing for a few seconds when she saw the first item.

It was her driver license picture.  Her heartbeat roared in her ears as she paged through the other papers inside.  Each of their DMV photos was there, printed in color.  A couple other papers were with them, one of them a copy of a receipt from a cell phone store, another a printout of a map of the area with several Xs in outlying areas.  One of those markings was directly over the spot where their cabin was located.

Candi shut the folder quickly and threw it back down on the seat.  Pushing the door almost closed, she focused on not making a sound.  She didn’t want to make any more noise than necessary, now that she knew someone was here specifically to find them - someone who’d been searching lots of other cabins in the area, probably for the last week.

She rushed back to the motorcycle, standing it straight and pushing it with all her strength over to the other side of the road.  She got it as far back into the trees as she could before abandoning it there, putting the keys in her pocket while hoping like hell she wouldn’t have to get it out of there in a hurry later.

As she walked down the edge of the road, she thought about all the time and effort they’d put into setting up their warning systems and training the dogs for security, wondering if had been well-spent or wasted.

When she came upon the still form of James lying in the middle of the road, she thought she had her answer.  Tears welled up in her eyes as she rushed to his side.

***

Kevin moaned.  Someone had hardcore tackled him on the rugby field.  It was even possible he’d been slammed into an un-padded football field goal pole in the in-goal endzone area, the way his head felt.  He tried to sit up, but the earth was spinning too much.

“Holy shit,” he moaned again.  “What the hell?”  He looked down at his hands, realizing for the first time that there were leaves under him and not turf.  “Where am I?”  He lifted his head, blinking his eyes several times to get his vision cleared up.  When things finally came into focus, he realized he wasn’t on the rugby field; he was in the woods somewhere.

And then the memories came flooding back: prom, the tophat, gunshots, Barry in the ER, the FBI, an assassin, running away, getting this cabin, setting up security for … He sighed and then punched the ground with a tight fist.  “Fuck!”  The bad guys had gotten through somehow, and he’d been lying on the ground passed out for who knew how long.  He had to get up and find the others.  Maybe it wouldn’t be too late.

He struggled to his feet, battling nausea and intense dizziness.  He held onto a nearby tree as his thoughts cleared and left him with the most amazingly awful headache he’d ever experienced.  He took a few tentative steps forward, knowing that he probably looked like a drunkard, but not caring at all.  His family was at risk, and he had to get to them, no matter what.

Ten feet into his trek he had to stop and vomit.  The pain in his head was overwhelming, and the spinning was making him feel sea sick.  He hadn’t felt this bad since he’d been on that lifeboat in the middle of the ocean.

He continued on, trying like hell to stay quiet; but no matter how high he tried to lift his feet, they still made too much noise shuffling in the leaves and grasses.  He fell twice before he reached the road.

“Left or right?” he asked out into the air around him.  He couldn’t tell were the cabin was in relation to where he was standing, and the dizziness that wouldn’t go away wasn’t making it any easier.

“Kevin?”

He rubbed his ears, not sure if he had imagined the sound of Candi’s voice or not.  There was a ringing there that accompanied the dizziness, making it difficult to get things straight in his mind.  “Candi?”

“Kevin!” came her yelled whisper.  “Where are you?!”

“Here,” he said weakly, the idea of shouting making him want to throw up again.

Candi appeared around the corner to his right, her face way too pale and her hair sticking out in all directions.  Sarah was going to be really upset when she saw it.  Heck, so was Candi.  He was wondering if he should say anything or just keep quiet about it.  It probably wasn’t important.  Something was important, but he couldn’t remember what it was.  His head was hurting too much to concentrate.

Candi reached his side and hugged him hard.  Kevin swallowed with effort, trying to keep from barfing on her head.

“Oh my god, I thought you were dead!” she cried.

“Dead?” he asked, wondering what she was talking about.  “Why would I be dead?”

“Because!  Someone’s here to kill us!”  She stared up at him and frowned.  “I think.  What’s wrong with you?”

Kevin rubbed his head, wincing at the big bump his hand ran over in the back of his scalp.  “Someone hit the shit out of me.  I have a huge lump back here.”  He touched it again, more gingerly this time.  It hurt like hell.

Candi reached up and touched the back of his head, her eyes going wide.  “Holy crap, Kevin!  It’s as big as an egg!”

“Yeah.  Hurts as big as an egg too.”

“Lean down so I can see it,” she commanded.

Kevin tried, but it made him fall a little to the side.  He barely caught himself before going down again.

“You have a concussion, don’t you?” she asked.

“Not sure.  Maybe.  Hold on a sec.”  He held up a finger for a couple seconds, then leaned over to the side and threw up again.  He stood up straight and wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand.  “Yeah.  Maybe I do.  Sorry about that.”

Candi took him by the upper arms and pushed him back into the woods.

“Where are we going?” he asked, not really caring at this point.  He was just glad to have her at his side again and safe.  All he needed to do now was take a little nap and he’d feel all better.

“You’re going to stay here where no one will see you while I go find out what’s happening at the cabin.”  She pushed on his shoulder, forcing him to bend his knees.  “Sit!  And don’t get up.”