After (44 page)

In the bathroom, he runs cold water over her hand. The cuts aren't deep. He finds his first aid kit, but his hands are shaking so much, he can hardly get her bandaged.

Back in the bedroom, Riggs stands there, trembling, looking from the gory corpses on the floor, to Hope, still blood-smeared, to Gareth in his crib. Again and again, Riggs's eyes go from one to the other, back and forth. Around and around.

Hope finds a ballpoint pen and a scrap of paper. Bent over the dresser, she writes, then finds a hammer and a nail in the toolbox sitting atop that same dresser, and nails her note outside the front door. Riggs is still standing there, shaking, staring at Gareth. The flecks of blood have dried and turned dark. Hope lifts Gareth from the crib, sets him on her hip, slings the diaper bag over her shoulder, and takes Riggs's hand.

Leads him up one flight of stairs to a room identical to his own, except there's no crib.

Hope lays the baby down, unsnaps a dozen snaps and slips him out of his blood-spattered onesie. In the metal cabinet that stands against the same wall in every bedroom in that building, Hope finds a stack of towels. She takes two and carries Gareth out the door, down the hall to the showers. Zombie-like, Riggs trails them down the hall, into the shower room. It's a lot like that room, in that other building, where the pack of them had tortured Diego and Evan. Riggs watches Hope turn on one of the showers, watches her get Gareth out of his diaper. Then he shuffles out of the shower room, closes the door, and then stops, right there in the frame of the door, and waits.

Hope strips off her bloodstained shirt, steps out of her underwear, and carries Gareth into the shower. Holding him to her, she watches the water dissolve the flecks of dark, dried blood from his face. Watches water bead red on his honeyed skin, and trickle and stream, faintest pink, down his length. This little baby, with his small, fragile body. This child with his curious gaze, so eager to smile and laugh. Once, those men were like him.

When she sets him down, Gareth stands, wobbly, hugging Hope's knee as she washes the blood from her hair and skin. Then she scoops him up, dries him off, rubs at her wet hair with a towel, then wraps it around herself and sets Gareth on her hip. When she opens the door, Riggs is still there, filling the frame with his massive body. Still trembling.

Together, the three of them wander back to the strange bedroom. It's hours past his bedtime, and Gareth's sleepy eyes barely peep open now and then as Hope diapers and dresses him and sets him in the center of one of the beds.

Now she stands there in her towel, staring at the floor. Maybe she is thinking of going back to Riggs's room to get her overnight bag. Riggs comes close, stands in front of her, pulls his t-shirt over his head. Still, panting, Hope clutches her towel to her, her gaze tracing up Riggs's heavily muscled torso to his bloodshot eyes.

“Here.”

He lowers the t-shirt over her head, draws the fabric down, over her towel.

“I don't know what to do,” he says a few minutes later. “I could take you to Karen.

Or to Evan and Diego. I wish I could take you to Eva,” he says, his voice breaking, tears rolling down his face, “but I can't.”

Without a word or a smile, Hope gets into the empty bed. She closes her eyes; she lies still, but doesn't sleep.

After a while, Riggs unlaces his boots, the right one still sticky, strips off his jeans, and gets into Gareth's bed, curling his massive body around his tiny son, who is gently snoring. Gareth sleeps through the shuddering of Riggs's body, through the stifled sobbing.

But Hope rises from her bed, and slips under the covers behind Riggs. Curls her arm over his waist. Presses herself close. Riggs's sobbing grows louder. More convulsive.

When he's calmed, he says to her, his voice still shuddery, “I've never deserved the love you've shown me. I should have known one day you'd find out what kind of man I am, and your love would hurt you. I was wrong, thinking I could be around someone like you, and never hurt you. Two things I wanted most in my whole life was to be good to you, and good to Gareth, and for the two of you to love me. Eva, too. I don't know how she could forgive me, but she did. And if things could be different, I'd give anything to keep her safe, I'd sacrifice anything before I'd hurt her, just like I would for you and Gareth. But it's different, with the two of you. 'Cause Eva knew what I was when she let herself...I don't know. Not love me, but show me love.

“But with you, if I'd made myself a good man, like I meant to, I wouldn't have let you love me. But I'm not good. I still let the things I want get in the way of looking after what's best for you and Gareth. I'm sorry.” He goes on whispering, almost chanting, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

When Hope wakes in the wan morning light, she runs. Runs from that room, out of that building. Runs, bare legs blurring, bare feet leaving their impressions in damp earth, muddy prints on gray-white cement. Runs up the steps, runs across the porch, runs up the stairs and flings open the door to the room Eva and John and Gareth share.

And then she stops.

For a few awful, silent seconds, Hope and John stare at each other.

At the mere sight of John sitting there by the window, his eyes red and swollen, his face twisted in pain and loss, a newborn baby cradled in his arms, Hope starts to cry.

Broken, wrenched sobs.

* * * *

Later, Karen will tell Hope what she'd told Riggs the night before. How long, how hard the labor was. How, finally, the baby had come. Surprisingly strong and lively, after such a rough birth. She'd even taken Eva's breast, and everyone—Eva, John, Smith—

had been relieved, knowing the infant girl was getting that vital first milk.

But Eva was bleeding so much. Minute by minute, going pale. Gray. Fading. The baby nursing was supposed to help, to stem the flow of blood, but the blood kept coming.

And Eva seemed to know. She kissed the tiny infant at her breast. And then she looked at the Major and whispered that she was sorry. He'd read her pallor, her limp hold on her newborn, and already his hazel eyes were red, fixed on her in desperate terror.

But John kissed Eva, so gentle, so sweet, and smiled his placid smile, and lulled by her ear that everything was all right, that Eva had been perfect, made a perfect baby girl. Whispered that he loved her. That she'd made him happy. And then he told her again that it was all right. All right.

Avery, though, was white as snow, and shaking, and he stared into her with his red eyes and begged her to stay with him. Please. Please. Please.

But she was gone.

* * * *

Hope stares at John, shakes her head, pleads, “No.”

Not seeming to notice that Hope has uttered something aloud, John's eyes hone on her bandaged hand. Her bruised arms. Rage and fear pull him from his chair.

Hope makes her words slow, clear. Tells him, “James is gone. He took Gareth.”

* * * *

A Humvee is missing, too. Four parties in four trucks comb the surrounding region for them, but find nothing.

After, Smith and John are left with their memories of Eva, and her infant daughter.

And the drawings Hope does, day after day. The drawings are unlike any of Hope's other art. These are done in pencil, and from a close distance, they deceive the viewer with an impression of black and white photographs.

Eva reclining against the trunk of the elm, a book propped on the swell of her pregnant belly; Eva asleep in Smith's arms; Eva nursing little Gareth; Eva and John, lying in bed, naked and laughing; Eva at her little table by the window, writing in her journal, head cocked to the side, her mouth firm and set, her eyes intent and determined.

PART II: NIX

~

YEAR TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

”Wait. Let's give her to Artel.”

“Yeah,” the younger one laughed, holstering his gun. His knuckles were stained with drying, rust-hued blood.

Cement. Cement floor, walls, ceiling. Stairs. Smooth, cold angles knocking her feet, tripping, so she kept almost falling. But the big hands dragging her hoisted her up, yanked her along.

A phlegmy laugh. “You didn't like your prospects back home? You didn't like us?

Let's see how you like having The Sadist for your husband, subvert bitch.”

Stupid pigs. After everything they'd done, laughing now at their dumb attempts at arousing her fear. She stopped trying to lift her feet, and sagged into their big, cruel hands and let them wrench her up. Six flights. Cement chaffed the tops of her feet as they dragged her thirty yards down a dim, sterile corridor, past twelve doors. At the thirteenth they stopped and she forced her limp, tortured body to straighten and stand.

“Cunt,” one hissed while the other worked a key, angry she had the strength to hold herself up.

The door swung in, and they shoved her through. Hard. Wanting her to fall. To arrive crumpled and low. She kept her feet. Shaking. Swaying. But standing.

A man turned from the window and looked at her. Then at them.

“We brought you a little treat,” the pig to her left wheezed.

When the pig to her right touched her face, pulling her hair behind her shoulders to display her nakedness more convincingly to the man by the window, she managed not to shudder.

With a final loose rattle in his lungs, the tubercular pig tossed a lacy garment onto the floor. Then the heavy door clanged shut. The man by the window moved toward her.

She straightened. Hardened. Body taut. Fists clenched. Why did he have to be so goddamned big? Didn't matter. She could hardly stand.

Closer. Closer. Her stomach clenched and she choked down the bile rising in her throat. No slobbering, giggling pig like them. Rigid and cold. A stoic face, unreadable eyes, hard and gray. Like the concrete all around them.

He swooped in. She flexed for the futile fight. But he blurred down to the ground and up and away without touching her, the white scrap of lace that was the only clothing they'd give her in his hand. His eyes scanned it, then her face before he stomped over to the fireplace and threw it on the flames.

The Sadist. That's what they'd named him. So now, instead of that humiliating scrap of lingerie she was supposed to wear to keep her in her place, she'd have nothing. Fine. She'd rather be naked than wear the uniform of a sex slave.

The Sadist blurred out of focus. Bad. She strained her eyes until he was one and his lines were sharp. Opening a drawer. Fear making her cold. Pushing her down, toward the floor. What did a person do to earn the name “Sadist” from men who'd hurt her the way they had?

He came at her. In his hands he had whatever he'd gotten out of the drawer, but she was watching his face. Angular. Scarred. Blank. Moving in. In his hands, something square. Dark. Soft.

Clothes. Clothes like his.

It was a trick. No spluttering giggling, but he was playing. So close the soft folded corner brushed against her ribs, right under her bare breast.

But then he pulled back. Took away the clothes she knew he'd never let her wear.

Held them back, behind, while he leaned in close and sniffed her air.

“You stink of them,” he said, his voice blank like his face, and low and rough. Like asphalt. “Clean up in there.”

With blank gray eyes he suggested the alcove behind her. She'd go. She'd do everything he said until the moment came to fight. The floor lurched under her but she pleaded and her body took her into the alcove.

A toilet. A sink. A shower. Alone. Four walls and steam and water needles stabbing her cuts and bruises. Hard to stand, hard to see, but alone—that was good.

But soon he'd come, and this was a bad place to fight, cornered and dizzy on slick tile. Better to face him out in the main room. There was a chair she could wield.

And a lamp.

She almost walked past without noticing. The square of folded clothes next to the sink. A trick. The Sadist. Maybe he played with you like that. But she wanted too badly to care. She started to black out when she bent over to step into the briefs. For this, she'd crumple to the floor. Briefs. Pants. Tank. Flannel. Dressed. Human.

She stood. Maybe. But then she was down, cold tile punching her cheek, something wringing her stomach like it would rip her in two. Puking. Maybe literally puking her guts out. Pain that teased with a promise of death. But then the pain backed down and she tasted bile mingled with what she'd been forced to swallow before.

When she opened her eyes, when she resolved the blurred blacks and whites, there were two big boots by the puddle of beige vomit. He bent down over her. She pleaded, but her body betrayed her and stayed crushed to the floor. But she wouldn't cringe like a cornered animal. She'd face him.

His hollow voice. “Don't waste that hate on me.”

He scraped her from the tile, carried her to a bed and laid her down. Her brain ordered a fight but her body deserted. Before she passed out for good she felt him wiping her mouth with a wet cloth.

* * * *

Probably he'd fucked her while she was out. No way to pick his bruises out from the others.

Maybe not, though. Where's the sadism in raping an unconscious, unfeeling body? A man like that would want to see her cry. Hear her beg. Scream. As if she'd give him the pleasure.

For three days, he left her wondering. He let her eat half his food. Let her sleep in his bed while he slept on the floor.

“When you're better, we'll take turns.”

He demanded nothing of her. Took nothing from her. Even her name.

“My name's Artel,” he told her that first morning as he thrust toward her a plate with a half-eaten roll, a half-eaten apple, and an unidentifiable hunk of charred meat, gnawed away at one side. When she didn't offer her own name or take the plate, he set the dish down on the bed and went back to his place by the window. From that window, she realized when she looked out and saw that it overlooked the center of the compound, he might have watched everything they'd done to her.

“There are two people in this cell, and they brought us one plate of food. What's there is yours, not mine,” he said when she'd left it all untouched for nearly an hour, unwilling to take anything from him, sure he'd use it against her later. So she ate. Not because she trusted his words, but because they made it possible for her to do the prudent thing—eat, regain her strength, so she could take care of herself.