Redemption (Enigma Black Trilogy Book #3) (4 page)

“Do what you want,” Roger managed to say through a series of coughs. “I can’t give you what I don’t have.”

“I’m growing tired of this,” the solider sighed. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you until the count of three to show us where Mrs. Norland is hiding. If you produce her, we’ll forget this little incident ever transpired, and your charges will remain as they are now. If you don’t, well, perhaps we’ll carry out your sentence right here, right now.”

“Roger,” Elizabeth whimpered, louder but still not loud enough to be heard outside the garage. She began to squirm out from underneath the tarp, only stopping when she heard her husband’s voice.

“No, Elizabeth,” he said. “There is no Elizabeth here.”

“One. Mr. Norland, seriously. You’re making this harder than it needs to be. Two.”

“Go to hell.”

“Have it your way. I guess I’ll be seeing you there, though I’ll be arriving much later than you, I’m afraid.” A sudden blast shook the house, startling Elizabeth.

“No. No. No,” she moaned, biting her bottom lip to suppress the scream that tried valiantly to escape from her throat.

“Find her,” the leader of the group of soldiers commanded. “Search every square inch of this house. Leave no stone unturned; no object intact.”

Given their commands, the other soldiers marched through the home—an army, it seemed, by the sheer number of footsteps that came from inside the house. Underneath the tarp, Elizabeth Norland curled up into the fetal position to make herself as small as possible. Just feet away, she heard the door that led from the garage to the inside of her house open with such force that it bounced off the wall on the inside. Footsteps from the house into the garage followed seconds later. By the sound of it, there were three soldiers making their way into the garage.

Elizabeth remained still while their footsteps walked past her, searching the garage. Tools from the workbench fell down onto the concrete floor.

“Search the vehicle,” a new, almost robotic, voice ordered the others. Unable to open the locked vehicle the traditional way, Elizabeth soon heard the sound of glass shattering as one of the soldiers broke through the window to unlock their SUV. Sounds of the soldiers rummaging through the contents of the vehicle soon followed. “It’s clear,” the voice proclaimed after a minute of searching. “Keep looking. Leave no stone unturned,” he said, mimicking the instructions of their commander.

Footsteps soon resounded across the garage again, with each of the three soldiers searching different sections of the structure. “There’s a laptop in this toter,” one of them proclaimed.

“Take it out of there. We’ll bring it back with us,” the one who’d spoken earlier answered.

Elizabeth closed her eyes and took a deep breath, hoping the tarp would remain still. Minutes passed when she heard the sound of boots walking back up the stairs and into her home.
Maybe they won’t find me after all
, she thought, hopeful.

“Sir,” the more vocal of the three soldiers spoke. “I’ve located the female subject in the garage.”

What?
Elizabeth felt a pair of hands forcefully grip one of her feet and pull her out from underneath the tarp, where she came face-to-face with the soldier who had found her.

“Very good,” their commander said, stepping out of the house. “Mrs. Norland, I suspect you won’t make nearly the scene that poor Mr. Norland did, will you?”

Elizabeth looked past the commanding solider into the house, where she saw Roger lying in a pool of blood on the floor. “No!” she screamed, tears falling down her face.

“I didn’t think so,” he said, smiling at her. He motioned for a pair of men behind him to step forward. “Please handcuff Mrs. Norland and take her to the van.”

As she was dragged down her driveway, her hands firmly secured at her back, Elizabeth looked over her shoulder to see a few of the soldiers removing all of the electronics from the home, as others poured gasoline in and around it before setting it on fire.

My eyes opened, revealing the same sight I’d grown accustomed to since regaining consciousness two days prior: the recovery room. The same drab, white, sickeningly sterile room that smelled of latex, hand sanitizer, and other substances I recognized by scent, but couldn’t put a name to. I wanted out. Despite the fact that the left side of my body still throbbed with pain, I just couldn’t take being cooped up in bed for a single second longer. I turned my head to face the chair situated in the corner of the room near the foot of the bed, expecting to see either Kara or Ian sitting on its green padded seat, but I was surprised, instead, to see Drew. He was sleeping, his feet propped up on the corner of the hospital bed, gone to the world. If ever I had a chance to escape, it was now.

Stealing one last look at Drew, I began to sit up, doing my best to ignore the searing, stabbing pain in my left shoulder. It made its way down my arm to the side of my rib cage, which forced me to collapse back down on the bed. After taking a moment to recover, I took a deep breath and willed myself up to a sitting position. An IV was still attached to my arm.
This is going to be interesting.
Carefully, I pulled the medical tape away from the catheter and the IV tube, inspecting the insertion site in my left arm. A sickness crept over me. I could handle the sight of blood, if it wasn’t my own. But if I had to choose between a little nausea and freedom, I would grit my teeth and bear it.

I gripped the catheter between my fingers, closed my eyes, mentally counted to three, and pulled it out of my arm, suppressing a squeal in the process. Within seconds after the removal of the IV, a warm wetness trickled down my arm. Even knowing what it was, I still couldn’t help but look down to see the blood trickling from the hole in my vein. With the bile rising from the pit of my stomach, I quickly wrapped a portion of my blanket around my arm. Next to Drew stood a cabinet containing a sink and a set of drawers. One of the drawers, in theory, had to contain a dressing of sorts—I hoped. In even more pain, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and allowed my feet to touch the cold linoleum as though its touch against my skin would somehow energize me, replenishing what had been drained from my body.

Slowly, I stood up, quickly discovering how weakened my legs had become. My body crumpled over, and it took all the energy I could muster to grab onto the bed to prevent myself from collapsing to the floor. I peeked back up at Drew, fully expecting to see him awake and gaping at me, only to be pleasantly surprised again by the snore that escaped his lips.

Okay, let’s try this again
. Tightening my grip on the bed, I pulled myself up, inch by inch, to a standing position, and allowed my body time to adjust to my new stance. My legs were stiff, painful, but bearable in relation to the rest of my body. And it struck me then that I could now truly say that I know what people mean when they say they feel as though they’ve been run over by a truck. Not only did I feel like I’d been run over, but also backed over repeatedly, spat on, lit on fire, and beaten with a baseball bat. How I was still alive, I would never fully understand.

Painful step after increasingly painful step, I walked over to the drawers, finding bandages and strips of cotton in the first one I opened.
It must be my lucky day
. I unwrapped the blanket from around my arm, grabbed a strip of cotton out of the drawer, placed it over the still-bleeding puncture wound, and then secured it with a bandage. After one last glance at the still-sleeping Drew, I climbed over the hospital bed so as not to risk falling on him by tripping over his outstretched legs and walked to the door of the recovery room, first peering down the hall.

With no one in sight, I made my way through The Epicenter’s surgical room and opened the door to one of the many hallways. My energy seemed to make its way back ever so slightly with each step I took, as though my movements were charging some kind of internal battery. Hanging loosely from each one of my shoulders, the cloth gown I wore closely resembled one from an actual hospital, except without the opening in the back, for which I was thankful. However, it was still short, and even though I was the only one in the hallway, my self-consciousness kicked in, and I found myself tugging the hem down every so often. With no socks or slippers, my feet felt as though they were turning to ice on the floor.

I needed to change. I needed a shower. I needed to do something that would make me feel human again.

As I drew closer to the vacant sitting room, I began to realize that I might have lucked out on running into anyone.
It must be nighttime
, I thought as I rounded the corner to the final hallway that would take me to my plain, but somewhat strangely inviting, living quarters. When I reached Ian’s room, I paused at his door, wondering whether he was asleep or whether he was even in there at all. It was strange not being next to him, almost like a part of me was missing with his absence.

My room was exactly as I’d left it, nondescript, with the only signs of my existence being a balled-up pair of socks on the floor and my photo album on the nightstand. “Home, sweet home,” I muttered, making my way to the bathroom. The room lit up as I flicked on the light switch, and I saw my own reflection for the first time since the day of the address. Pale and arguably emaciated, I looked like the very definition of death warmed over. I freed my right arm by tugging the sleeve of my gown down, leaving the garment clinging to my left shoulder. Then I took a deep breath, braced myself for the inevitable pain, and gingerly allowed the gown to slide down my left arm.

The wound had been dressed and sewn together, a sight I didn’t particularly want to see. Still, I couldn’t keep myself from undoing the gauze bandaging that hid it to see exactly what damage had been inflicted upon me. As I lifted away the gauze, I saw the entry wound for the first time. Although it still had a long way to go, it had healed at a miraculous rate, and wasn’t nearly as unsightly as I’d imagined it would be.

My shoulder throbbed as though reminding me of the actual severity of the damage, and the fact the bullet had deflected off my scapula before coming to rest in the tissue of my shoulder, somehow missing a major artery by mere centimeters. Centimeters. The difference between life and death, between an inconvenient injury and a life-ending bodily catastrophe, had been less than an inch away.

I allowed the rest of the gown to fall to the floor, revealing the flesh of my naked body. Bruised, scarred, beaten, and broken, my body resembled a human punching bag. Absentmindedly, I traced one of the darker scars that ran crookedly across my chest. Where this marking came from, I didn’t know. My body had been marred so many times since coming to The Epicenter, it was hard to keep track of where they all had originated. And as I stared at my beaten, naked form in the mirror, my mind couldn’t help but wander to thoughts of Blake. I remember seeing him shirtless, troubled by the remnants of puncture wounds, lacerations, surgeries, and other wounds that had healed, forming lines and discolored patches of flesh across an otherwise perfectly toned exterior. Cameron had nicknamed him Frank after Frankenstein, a monster. Now I was becoming the monster.

I shook my head, erasing the disturbing thoughts. Blake’s spirit had been defeated at the time of his death. He’d lost his fight, his will to live. My body may be scarred like his, but I wouldn’t lose my will. The Epicenter wouldn’t claim me as its victim the way it had Blake. Anger, red hot fury, swelled inside me. “You don’t have me. I am not yours,” I yelled at my own reflection, at the stranger in the mirror. Enraged and without thought, I punched the glass, shattering the mirror where my fist struck it, while a crack spread outward across the rest of it like a spider web.

I sunk down to the floor, cradling my throbbing knuckles, the tears falling freely down my face. Blood ran down my arm and dripped onto the floor and the broken glass that had fallen down from the sink. Through my tears, I eyed the jagged shards thoughtfully and picked one of them up. Ironically, the one I had chosen was shaped like a sword with a narrower portion that jutted out like a blade, and a thicker, handle-like section at the bottom that didn’t appear as ominous as the thinner portion.

With my glass sword in one hand, I turned over my other hand to reveal my wrist. Bright blue veins ran down the length of my forearm before jutting off in different directions, creating a virtual fork in the road right where my wrist turned into my hand. I touched the glass to my arm, lightly brushing it along the path of the larger, more pronounced vein. All it would take was one long, deep cut to make the pain I felt go away. Just one cut to leave The Epicenter behind and reunite with my family again. Just one.

I screamed, throwing the glass against the wall, which shattered my sword into several less dangerous pieces. Death was not an option right now, not yet. The easy way out was not up for consideration. More determined now than ever, I stood up, ripped the leads away from my body, causing myself further pain and discomfort, and threw them in the trash can next to the toilet. With my bleeding hand, I then turned the knob on the bathtub and started the shower, determined to wash away all my dark thoughts.

A revolution was on the horizon, and I would be its catalyst or I would die trying.

I stepped out of the shower, dripping wet and shivering because I hadn’t thought to grab a towel. On the floor where I’d last left it, my robe lay unfolded. With my foot, I threw it up in the air and caught it with my hand, quickly donning it to warm up. In one of the bathroom drawers, I found some bandages packaged in plastic. I ripped the package open with my throbbing hand and unraveled the bandage, wrapping the material around my knuckles and securing it with adhesive. Cautiously tiptoeing around the glass on the floor, I then made my way out of the bathroom.

“Are you seriously trying to give me a heart attack?” Kara’s unexpected voice startled me, causing me to jump. She sat on my bed, her eyes stern and fixated on me in a cold stare.