Chapter Seven: A Dead End Trail
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ll right Rick, where do we start?” Eric scratched his head while he and Rick were standing down in the lobby of the Drake Hotel, looking for Zaniya’s mysterious attacker. “We don’t even know what this creep looks like.”
“Just give me a minute, brother. I’m thinking.” All of a sudden, out of the corner of his eye, Eric spotted a man dressed in black, holding Autumn in his arms.
“Ricky, help me,” she moaned.
“Rick! Look! Over there!” The man started to disappear through a doorway.
“Get him!” Rick cried. The two started running after the figure, who was walking down what looked like a set of service stairwells.
“Hey! You can’t come in here!” Eric almost knocked over a custodian.
“Sorry man, but we’re trying to catch someone!” Rick called over his shoulder. The man was yards ahead of them, with Autumn lying limply in his arms. When they got to the bottom of the steps, Autumn and the man were nowhere to be found.
“Shit!” Rick punched the wall, “we lost ‘em!”
“Rick, do you smell that?” Eric sniffed the air.
“Yeah. Did you fart or something?”
“Very funny,” Eric replied. He held his nostrils shut. “God, what is that? It’s really foul, whatever the hell it is.”
“Probably garbage,” Rick said, holding his nose as well.
“No way man. I have smelled plenty of garbage, and this is much, much worse. It smells like a dead body!”
“A dead body? When did you ever smell…”
“Don’t ask!” Eric retorted. Rick walked forward, and heard a squishing sound.
“Oh yuck! What the hell is this?” He looked down and saw some kind of steaming green slime on the floor that was giving off the extremely foul odor.
“Look, it goes through that door. Maybe that creep that has Autumn left this behind.” Eric pulled open the door, and sure enough, the trail of slime went down some more steps.
“Come on, because when I catch that mother fucker, I’m going to drive on his face!” Rick ran ahead of Eric, careful not to step in the slippery, foul slime. Eric raced to catch up with him. The trail ran down the steps, through another door, which then led to a large boiler room.
“Autumn! Where are you baby?” Rick called.
“Ricky!”
“Where are you?”
“Look at this.” Eric knelt down and picked up a garnet red high-heeled shoe.
“Is this hers?”
“It’s a size six. It’s hers,” Rick confirmed. “It’s probably the same asshole that attacked Zaniya Perkins. Show yourself, you punk mother fucker!”
“Tee, he, he, he, he! Boo, ha, ha!” A loud cackling echoed off the walls. And then something slammed shut.
“What was that?” Rick said, with the color draining from his face.
“It sounds like the door where we came in.”
“Come on!” Rick ran ahead to the door and yanked on it, but it wouldn’t budge.
“The door’s stuck!”
“What? Let me try!” Eric yanked on the heavy doorknob, but again, nothing happened.
“Oh great! Just fucking great!”
“Wait brother, let’s try together. I’ll pull your arm, and you pull the door. On three, okay? One, two, three!” Both young men pulled with all of their force, but all they managed to do was knock each other over.
“Tee, he, he, he, he, he…boo, ha, ha, ha, ha!”
“Rick, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Yeah! That stupid motherfucker locked us in here! Come out and show yourself, you bastard! Where is my lady? Show yourself, punk ass motherfucker!”
“TEE, HE, HE, HE, HE, HE, HE, HE!”
“Okay, this is too much like a scene from the original Nightmare on Elm Street,” Eric said, feeling his blood run cold.
“Come on man, give me a hand with this door! We’ve got to get the hell out of here! Just wait until I get my hands on that mother fucker!”
* * * * * * *
“That should hold them,” a heavily accented voice was saying. I heard moaning beside me, and then I heard somebody crying. I recognized it as the voice of one of my very best friends. Someone nudged me. I didn’t want to open my eyes. Deep in my heart, I wanted to just close my eyes very tightly, and the nightmare would disappear, right? Wrong! Dead wrong!
I heard the clanking of metal and smelled mildew. I gagged, but thankfully, I didn’t start retching. That’s all I needed was to start choking on my own goddamn vomit in a situation like this! My mouth was filled with something rubbery, something that my teeth were clamping down on, and it was making a huge amount of saliva build up in my mouth, but there was really no where for it to go. I couldn’t spit it out, since a leather strap was buckled behind my head and holding the rubber device in my mouth. I moved, and felt not rope, not duct tape, but metal handcuffs holding my wrists captive. They were connected to another metal belt around my waist, and then there were more around my ankles, I could see. There were no knots to pick at, no tape to try and saw through. I was completely captive and helpless!
Mom! Where was my mother? Mommy! Mommy, where are you? I felt the nudge again. I turned my head. It was my mother! In the dim moonlight, my mother was chained up and gagged with the leather strap across her mouth just like I was. She was sitting with her back against the damp wall. I scooted over to her as best I could and laid my head in her lap. I wasn’t feeling lightheaded or woozy anymore, but my head felt like somebody was using my skull for a base drum.
Mom…you’re here. At least we’re together, I thought. I had tears in my eyes. I never intended to rope my poor mother into this mess. She looked down at me with a look that said,
I should’ve been able to protect you, baby. This is all my fault. I should’ve been able to break that window.
“Well, well, well, ladies, I see that you’re finally awake. I’m sorry that our accommodations are a bit, ah, shall we say, on the meager side. But, considering what is going to happen to you, I’d say that we are being more than fair.” Fair! Is this what they called fair? Stacey Van Dyke came up to what I could see now looked like a barred door, holding a lantern in his hand. He called this fair? Lying on my mother’s lap, chained up like some goddamn criminal, in this mildew smelling, cold, damp dungeon of a place? If I wasn’t gagged so tightly, I’d assault his ear with curses that would make God cover His ears.
What are you going to do with us? What are you going to do with my daughter? Stacey understood Mom’s frightened, muffled pleas.
“Well, Mrs. Ryan, your lovely daughter will bring a very pretty penny on the slave market. She is part of a package deal as requested by one of my clients. As for you and Mrs. DuVall, well, we cannot leave any witnesses to our little escapade, so you will both be disposed of properly.
Disposed of? I wailed and screamed into my gag. I yanked angrily on my chains. No! You can’t do this to me! You can’t kill my mother! I’ll be an orphan! You can’t do this to me!
“Oh, but I can, Miss Ryan, and I will. And by the way…I know all about you. Those flu-like feelings you were having in the limo? Your attack of insulin shock was a stroke of luck for me. You see, the bar really wasn’t out of orange juice. It’s just that the drug I slipped to you dissolves so much better in cranberry juice. Something about the acidity of the berries. My colleague, who is also a fine scientist, could explain it to you much better, since you and he are going to be getting to know each other quite well.” What the hell was he talking about? I had to ask.
A man stepped out of the shadows, or at least, what I hoped was a man. He was very tall, bigger than Joshua. He had on a black fedora, a black cape, black clothes, and leather black gloves. The weirdest thing was his face. Where his face should’ve been there was a white mask made of gauze. There were blank holes where his eyeballs should’ve been, and same thing for the nostrils, there were just two hollow black holes. Thick gray smoke was rising from those clothes. He looked like something out of one of my childhood nightmares. I huddled closer to my mother when he came up to our prison door.
“Hello there, Caitlin. I’ve heard so many wonderful things about you. I am going to have a wonderful time training you and your friends.” Train us to what? I’ve got news for you buddy! Slavery has been illegal in this country since 1863! You can’t do this to us!
“You are a very feisty young woman. I am going to enjoy breaking you down and rebuilding you to our clients’ specifications.” When Mom heard him say that, she mumbled a few choice words at him, even though the gag muffled them all. She shifted her weight so that I was closer to her.
You aren’t taking my child anywhere! You’re going to have to go through me first!
“Ah, Mrs. Ryan, I would certainly welcome the opportunity to train you, but ah…our clients like them fresh and young. No, I am going to enjoy watching the demise of you and Mary Margaret DuVall in the next cell here.” They turned away from our cell and I heard every word of their conversation.
“Where is the Knight woman? Why wasn’t she among the women you brought here?” That came from the creep in dark clothes.
“Slight complication. She’s at the hospital with the girl that you attacked.”
“Don’t worry. I will find a way to bring her here. She won’t suspect a thing. And then, we can make plans to move the young ladies to a much more secure location.”
“What about the mothers? And the real Mr. Van Dyke?”
“The original plan. Leave them in here with the bomb strapped to them, and let the demolition powder take its course.”
Oh God, no! They were planning to leave my mom in here with a stick of dynamite and let it blow her to Kingdom Come! I started wailing and crying into my gag. I couldn’t help it. I was hysterical. Joshua had no idea where I was, and by the time he found out, it would be too late. My mother would be nothing but a smoldering skeleton, and my friends and I would be on our way to God knows where do to God only knew what. Wait a minute! The attack on Zaniya was a setup! It was a deliberate distraction to get Joshua and the senator’s attention diverted so that this man could make his move! Ooooh! I wanted to kick my own ass for being so goddamn stupid! And then I let my mother nuzzle up to him! This was my fault. All of it.
I laid my head in my mother’s lap and just cried like a baby. She leaned over and nuzzled my neck as if to say,
“No Caitlin, don’t beat yourself up. We’re going to get out of this. I’m not going to let this man hurt you or me. We’re going to get out of here, sweetheart.” Oh Mommy, I wish I could believe you. We were really doomed this time. All I could do was wait as the minutes on the clock ticked down to doomsday.
Congratulations Caitlin. Now you’ve got your mother in a deathtrap. What are you going to do now, Miss Mildred Hubble?
This was my one chance to redeem my powers, and man, I really blew it!