Campbell (12 page)

“…so we just finish it and leave them wherever,” a male voice said outside the car. “I guess we have to bury them?”

A female voice piped in, “The boss said he wanted pictures of them in a hole. Burying them is part of the deal.”

“How will they ever know? We’re in the middle of buttfuck nowhere.”

“Pictures, jackass. Don’t you listen? He doesn’t want anyone finding the bodies. He said he wants them to just disappear.”

“You opposed to me having a little fun first?” the male voice said. “It’s not every day you have Lucy Campbell tied up.”

“I don’t give a shit, as long as you dig the hole first. No half-assing this or we won’t get paid.”

Tal chewed faster, and Lucy, her desperation taking over at the thought of whatever this stranger’s idea of a little fun was, managed to wiggle a foot free.

“Shh...” she whispered desperately, as the voices trailed off, presumably to dig the hole. “If we can get free, we’ve got a chance.”

Tal nodded into her wrist as she finally pulled it free and immediately reached for his hands. Her wrists were extremely cramped and it took a minute for her fingers to work properly, but she eventually found the edge of the tape in the dark and moved it enough to release his hands. They both awkwardly fumbled with the tape at his feet, and she exhaled with relief as her hands finally remembered how to properly function and she ripped the tape in one sharp burst.

“Go for the eyes,” Tal whispered, desperately moving his hands to try and regain motor function. “That’s the only chance we got, because there’s no way in hell our legs are going to work when we get out of here.”

“I’m going to bite whatever I can get my mouth on,” Lucy muttered. “I suggest you do the same.”

They both wriggled their hands and feet like fish on a dock, their adrenaline levels building as they contemplated what was bound to come, in either minutes or hours.

“I’m sorry,” Tal whispered, after a few minutes of squirming.

“Why?” Lucy asked, wondering if part of his mental process in dealing with what to come was some sort of fucked up confession.

“I just pissed. In my pants,” he replied sheepishly. “I figured it would help me focus.”

The smell of urine was suddenly overpowering. “So gross,” she muttered.

“You should go too. I don’t mind. I’m sure you’d feel better.”

She thought about it for a minute before giving in. It felt incredible, and he was right; it did give her renewed focus towards whatever it was she was going to have to do.

“We’re never speaking of this,” she whispered. “Never, ever.”

“Believe me, I’m pretty happy to forget this day ever happened.”

They lay there in wait for what could have been seconds or hours, both of them breathing steadily as they did their best to ignore the smell, which was a pungent mix of bodily fluids, and Lucy felt might actually distract their captors when they opened the trunk.

Waiting was torturous. She’d always been impatient.
 

Finally, the voices started moving closer, and Lucy poked him in the ribs, hard, to make sure he was paying attention since they weren’t saying anything.
 

He responded by poking her in the breast.
 

“Fuck off,” she whispered. “And once we’re out of here, keep your fucking hands to yourself.”

“Until you want some more of my spit?” he joked. “I didn’t mean to poke your breast. What happens in the trunk stays in the trunk.”

Lucy decided she was going to torch the car, simply for the satisfaction of it, if they lived.
 

“…you want to cut him up a bit before?” the male voice asked, “Since that’s your thing?”

“I don’t know. How long you going to be with her?” the female voice said.

“I could be a while,” he said nonchalantly. “See how much of a fight she’s got left in her.”

Lucy glared into the darkness and resigned herself to the realization that she had no idea what she was going to have to do to survive, but she’d do anything to come out the other end alive. She thought of all the things she’d never do if she didn’t make it; she’d never see her brothers again, never have the chance to see a calf born that next spring. She thought about all the books she’d planned to read, and wondered if the words would have made any difference in her current situation.

“He’s big, but not tall,” Tal whispered under his breath. “Probably two-fifty, maybe my height. I don’t know about her.”

“Just survive,” she replied as the jingle of keys signaled the beginning of what could be the end. “Whatever you need to do.”

“You too,” he muttered. As the lock turned, the tiniest sliver of light hit his eyes and sheer adrenaline flooded his veins.

This just wasn’t the kind of situation you could plan for, she regretfully decided.
 

Chapter 8

October 2001

Fort Macleod, Alberta

“I’m going to go out for some things,” Andrew said, kissing Lucy on the forehead. “You’re all right here?”

“Of course I’m all right here,” she said, rolling her eyes. “And don’t think just because you’re back, you’re the boss of us.”

“I don’t think that,” he said with a shrug, more aware than ever how dangerously intelligent his sister was, especially now that she’d figured out that murder was a good means of control. In the months he’d been gone, she’d morphed from a kid, to an adult in a kid’s body. “I just…don’t let anyone in.”

“No one’ll come near the house anyway. Not with him out there.” She sat back against the couch. They’d torched his chair the week before, and now it sat in the front yard. Lucy had announced as it went up in flames, that it signaled of the end of his reign of terror, as she told her brothers about the French Revolution. She read books by people whose names Andrew couldn’t pronounce. Lucy felt a little guilty about making her older brother feel stupid from time to time, but it didn’t stop her. “No one’s going to mess with us.”

“Hopefully not, anyway,” Cole said, throwing himself on the couch beside his sister. “I don’t think there’s anyone left to mess with us.”

“We don’t know what’s going on out there,” Andrew reminded him. “Since there hasn’t been TV or radio for two weeks.”

“The adults are all dead or otherwise occupied. No one gives a shit about what we did. He was as good as dead anyway. It was just a matter of time.” Lucy stroked Cole’s hair as he curled up on her lap. “And now we’re all together.”

Andrew nodded, a smile on his face. “Just like Mom wanted.”

Her older brother had been gone about an hour when a small knock on the back door got Lucy’s attention. She eased Cole’s head off her lap and peered through the dusty lace curtain at a girl, probably a couple of years younger than her. She looked familiar, Lucy thought to herself as she turned the deadbolt and opened it a crack.
 

“What?” she said bluntly as she attempted to position herself as a grown-up the way she’d been practicing. “What do you want?”

The girl’s dirty blonde hair was messy, and she wrung her hands in the doorway, obviously terrified. “My…my name’s Angela, and I’m hungry, and…I live down the road and we used to take the bus together, and I was wondering if you had any food?”

Cole leaned in from the living room, still half asleep. “Who’s there?”

“Some kid from the bus,” Lucy said, glaring at the tiny disheveled girl in the doorway. “Wants our food.”

“Your parents are dead?” Cole asked, pushing the door open a little more when she nodded. “Come in.”

“No,” Lucy said, shaking her head. “No one comes in.”

“She’s hungry, Ce,” Cole said, frowning at his sister. “And she’s just a little kid, and she’s desperate or she wouldn’t have come here. Would you come here unless you had to, with him out there?”

Lucy closed the door and shook her head at her brother. “So she goes and tells someone we’re here on our own, and then where are we?”

“She’s got no one. We can help her.” Cole ignored the disapproving expression on his sister’s face and opened the door. “Come on in. We don’t have much, but we can share a little.”

Angela Duncan came in, and ate as much as they offered her. She fell asleep on the couch that night, much to the chagrin of Lucy and Andrew. Cole though, couldn’t have been happier, because he remembered the little girl from the school bus and saw something incredible the others had missed.
 

The potential in Angela Duncan.
 

September 2012

Somewhere south of Campbell

Since Lucy was nearest the trunk lock, she made her move first. Unfortunately, it just put her in who Tal assumed was Ski-mask’s arms. He tossed her on the ground with ease, before reaching for Tal. Tal was right; he wasn’t tall. He was an ugly kid, with greasy hair, pocked skin and a bulbous nose, and a large body—not fat, but stocky. It was a dark night, the sky littered with stars, and they were on the edge of a scantly wooded area, just off a road.
 

“I knew we should have checked on them! They’re all untaped,” the girl, tall, also with terrible skin, short red hair and a mass of shitty tattoos on her bare arms, shouted at Ski-mask. “Idiot!”

“Fuck off,” he mumbled back, as he tossed Tal, disabled by his stiff limbs, onto the ground. “What the fuck is the smell in there?”

“Those assholes pissed themselves,” she grumbled. “Great. Now we’re going to have to smell that all the way home.”

Tal glanced at Lucy, seeing her entirely for the first time since this had started. She wasn’t just bruised on her head. Her arms were scratched and bloody, but she looked oddly contemplative as their two captors bickered back and forth in the darkest part of the night. She inched towards him and put her back to the trunk. He did the same.
 

From their banter, it was obvious that their captors were amateurs. Strong, a little intimidating, but amateurs.
 

Tal hadn’t noticed Lucy pull the tire iron out of the trunk in all their squirming, but she seemed to have it on her now. The scream as she hit Ski-mask in the knees with it at full force was monumental. He dropped to the ground, but the girl grabbed Lucy roughly pulling her to her feet and threw the tire iron on the ground before cuffing her across the face.

“Fuck, you two. Could you be any more of a pain in the ass?” she said calmly, before smacking Lucy again. “Chup, get up.”

Ski-mask groaned, and as he collected himself, Tal realized that he’d been given an out; an opportunity to run, with the girl wailing on Lucy while she primitively fought back. Instinct took over, and he did something he regretted instantly.

He scrambled to his feet and took off over the edge of a small bank and into the woods.
 

“Go and get him!” the girl screamed, with what he assumed was Lucy-induced pain. “He’s getting away!”

It was too dark for Tal to see much, and as he ran, he found his socks wet and his face scratched constantly by brambles and thorns. He ran until it was quiet, and then he collapsed behind what he hoped was a tree. It was incredibly dark out there, and every creak and crack put Tal on edge. He’d never been one for nature.

He couldn’t leave her there. He knew that. It wasn’t that they were close, or that he was greatly invested in her survival; it was common human decency that pushed him back. As he crept silently through the trees, Tal could almost imagine the conversation he’d have with Connor about how great it would be if she wasn’t around, but out here, he and Lucy weren’t on separate sides, and there was a good chance that they would have been allied if they’d had a few more days to talk things out. Saving her now, if he could pull it off, would go a long way in building their relationship. If he ran off and left her, and she managed to survive, he’d be forever viewed as a coward; not only by others, but also by himself. He didn’t even have to think about it. The bottom line was that despite their differing political ideologies, Lucy didn’t deserve whatever was happening to her.
 

Running back was excruciating in every way. He was hungry, tired, in pain in so many places he’d lost count, and spent those long minutes contemplating how cruel it really was to grab someone when they were in bed without proper footwear on. The only thing that helped him find his way was the brush he’d cut on the way there, which seemed to lead him in a relatively straight line. Crows squawked overhead. Things rustled in the bushes. He hoped they hadn’t deemed him scavenge-worthy.
 

The evening was slowly turning to dawn when he approached the edge of the woods and could see the scene he’d fled from. He was grateful for the light, because he hoped it would allow him to better understand the landscape and how to work it to his advantage.
 

“Just finish her,” the female voice said, exasperated and cruel from the far side of the car, out of Tal’s vision. “I want to get out of here.”

“Fuck you,” Ski-mask groaned, in a tone that made the bile in Tal’s stomach rise up his throat. “I’ll finish when I finish. Bitch is going to pay.”

He didn’t hear so much as a squeak from Lucy.
 

Tal stopped moving, and surveyed the scene from his position in the ditch. He mentally bemoaned the shortage of suitable pain-inducing sticks amongst the shrubs, but then caught the gleam of something so perfect it almost felt too good to be true.

The tire iron.
 

He didn’t question how it had arrived at his feet, but he picked it up, felt the weight of it in his hands, and when he heard a ragged sob that he knew wasn’t coming from either of his captors, something he’d never experienced before took over.

Blind rage.
 

He ran and swung, and eventually the swings started making contact. At that point, he started directing them a little more, and with the element of surprise on his side, he was quite successful in beating down their female captor into a crumpled heap on the ground with very little damage on his end, besides a few cuts to his arms that he hadn’t felt as they were happening from whatever she’d had in hand.
 

What was surprising was how disconnected he felt from the blood, and the obvious feeling of his reach attached to the tire iron hitting her skull. He’d never killed anyone before. It felt too easy. He found it curious that he was unaffected in a real way by what he’d done, but he wasn’t, plain and simple. He was more concerned about what was next.