Extreme Danger (57 page)

Josh. What a beautiful name. It felt exotic. So nice, the way he was petting Carrie’s hair. She was so thirsty to see any expression of kindness, even if it wasn’t directed at herself. Her eyes just drank it in.

The rattle at the door made her belly sink. The door opened.

Yuri marched in, followed by Marina. He saw Josh sitting up, then turned his evil glare on Sveti. She put Rachel down hastily. Stumbled back, putting a safe distance between herself and the toddler.

“You stupid brat. I told you not to touch them.” His hand flashed out with blinding quickness, a backhand slap that spun Sveti around in midair before the floor swooped up to deal her another huge smack.

Voices, yelling. Yuri, and another voice. Marina, too. Stephan and Mikhail joined the chorus, and Rachel shrieked.

She rolled over, her nose streaming blood. Josh was shouting at Yuri, words she didn’t understand. His fist flashed up, a swift uppercut. Yuri stumbled backwards with a grunt. Josh dove for him again.

Ka-chunk. Marina leveled a black, squared-off gun at him.

“Back, pig,” she spat out in English.

Josh stopped himself in mid-lunge, reeling for balance. He held up his hands, eyes wide. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “I’ll stop.”

Yuri yanked his own gun out of his pants, and pointed it at Josh with a shaking hand as he came on, swearing viciously.

“Don’t,” Marina snapped. “The boss wants to play with this one. Do not touch him. We’ve already had trouble for your stupid stunts.”

Yuri spat a big, yellow glob on the floor, and smashed the big pistol into Josh’s face. It made a bone-breaking sound.

Josh toppled like a tree falling, and lay horribly still. She could see wet, bright red blood on his face, from where she lay. A sound came out of her, the despairing cry of a tormented animal.

Yuri heard it and spun around, the bloodshot whites of his eyes showing clear around the muddy dots of his irises. He seized her by the upper arm, and wrenched her to her feet. “You little bitch,” he raged. “You come here. Your time has come.”

He dragged her towards the door. She kicked and scrabbled, bruising her feet against the concrete floor. Sobbing helplessly over what Josh had just done for her, that sweet, kind, brave, stupid thing—

“Careful with her, dickhead.” Marina’s voice was flat as a robot’s. “They won’t be happy with us if you damage her. How many times do I have to tell you?”

The little ones were all crying. Rachel wailed the loudest. Even after the door slammed shut and was triple locked and bolted, the baby’s piercing screeches followed her down the corridor.

Sveti didn’t stop fighting. A desperate jabber of thoughts buzzed through her mind; what would Rachel do without her? Would she sleep, or would she just cry? Would Sasha remember not to give her that nasty fruit slop with canned apricots that gave her hives? Had Yuri’s blow split Josh’s skull? What were they going to do to her? And was it going to hurt?

And oh, God, oh Mother. Mother. Please.

They shoved her into a big room she’d never seen before. A shower, surprisingly clean and antiseptic-smelling. Marina turned the water on, and wrenched the shirt off Sveti’s head, shoving it against her bleeding nose. “Press that there until you stop leaking. And you,” she directed the words at Yuri. “Outside. I don’t trust you.”

“Don’t be a cunt.” Yuri leered at Sveti’s chest, which she covered with shaking, crisscrossed arms. “I want to see her clean and pretty, at least once. Before…you know.” He smirked.

“Out.” Marina’s voice was adamant. “You bloodied her nose, asshole. They won’t like that. It doesn’t look good.”

“I never hit the parts they care about,” Yuri said, his voice sulky. “Just arms and legs.”

“And faces? Jerkoff. Out.” Martina gestured with her big, protruding chin towards the door. Yuri stomped out, muttering.

The shower was ice cold. The liquid disinfectant soap stank, burned her eyes, stung in all her scrapes and sores. She was shaking too hard when it was done to towel herself off. Marina had to dry her, while Sveti shuddered, teeth chattering, struggling to stay on her feet.

The older woman ripped a lightweight cotton thing out of a plastic package. Baggy green pants, the creases from the fold still sharp. A matching shirt, huge and floppy, that reached halfway to her knees. Her hair dripped down her back. Marina wrung it out, and wrenched a comb through it, dragging it straight back off her face.

Sveti found herself, barefoot and naked beneath the green thing, still shivering, her raked scalp stinging, the cold cotton fabric clinging to her wet back. She shuffled down the corridor, through the locked door at the end, out into another corridor. One she’d never seen.

It was wider, brighter. Much cleaner than the one she knew.

Marina dragged her down the cold gray concrete floor, and elbowed her into a metal elevator. She was horrified at her own reflection. She was so white, so skinny, so small. Those big eyes, that tiny face. She barely existed, next to Marina’s imposing blond bulk. They ground slowly up. The moving chamber shuddered to a stop.

The doors sighed open into a new world. The walls were soft green. Everything glittered. It dazzled her. Lights flashed and twinkled on walls full of gleaming equipment.

Marina shoved her between the shoulder blades, sending her stumbling into the room. It was filled with people dressed in green, like herself. Their heads were capped, their mouths masked. Only eyes showed. So many eyes, looking at her. She shrank from their regard, retreating towards the elevator. Marina pushed her forward again.

A very tall masked ghost stepped forward, his cold gaze boring into her face. “Get her prepped,” he said. “Fast. We’re already late.”

Becca counted her breaths. Tried to keep them slow, deep and steady. One. Two. Three. Four. All the way up to ten.

Then she slowly counted back down again. If she kept doing this, the night would end. It was finite. The world was turning, hurtling her through space into an unknown future. Day would come. Someone would come. And they would tell her what had happened out there.

She was not going nuts. She would not break down. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, or of whatever creatures were rustling and skittering over the concrete floor around her. Rats, bats, roaches, no big deal. She was a grown-up. She could handle it. Not afraid. No, and no, and no.

She wondered if three hours had passed yet. Could have been six hours, it could have been ten minutes. Maybe Nick had already gone to meet Zhoglo. Maybe it was all over. Maybe Carrie and Josh…no.

Stop. She couldn’t think about it. She’d start screaming.

One. Two. Three. Four…

The sound of a vehicle outside made her heart practically stop in her chest. Nick? It had to be Nick. He was the only one on earth who knew where she was, at least until tomorrow when the FedEx package was delivered. Maybe he’d had a change of heart. Maybe he’d realized that she couldn’t have done what he thought she’d done.

Yeah. Hah. The cynical, grown-up realist deep inside her laughed.

She had to toughen up. She knew life was dangerous. Caring about people was the most dangerous thing of all. She’d known that brutal fact since she was twelve and nothing she’d learned since then had convinced her any different. But she’d never let herself think about how bottomless that dark pit truly was. She kept herself too busy.

The only real bottom was death. Death would stop the suffering. Death would break her fall.

She’d never understood the reasoning her mother must have gone through, as she sat on her bed staring at that pill bottle. Falling, constantly, endlessly through inner space, into the dark.

Becca understood it now. And for the first time, she could almost forgive Mom for leaving them alone. Almost.

There was a rattling groan as the heavy door slid open on the rusty runners. Light flooded in, from the headlights of the vehicle rumbling outside. Fresh air moved her hair, chilled the sheen of cold sweat on her face.

Footsteps. Thud, thud, thud. She strained to see who it was, but the complex bulk of scaffolding was in the way, blocking her line of vision. She couldn’t see the whole silhouette. Just disconnected slices, and a halo of blinding, blurring headlights behind it.

Thud, thud. Closer.

She sucked in air, forced herself to call out, in a thin, quavering voice. “Nick? Is that you?”

A flashlight flicked on, moved over her body, and settled directly in her face. Blinding her even more than the headlights had done.

Thud, thud. Not Nick. Nick would never do something like that. Even angry, he would not deliberately terrify her.

The holder of the flashlight shone it up under his own chin, grotesquely illuminating his fat, wild-eyed, grinning mask of horror.

“Charming,” came that oily, complacent voice that froze her heart. “Tethered like a goat, ey? So convenient.”

Becca hung onto consciousness. She was falling, through inner space. And all she dared to hope for now was that the death that broke her fall was a quick one.

Chapter
31

D avy flinched as Tam whipped off her microfiber tank. The woman’s tits were just too much to take in the cramped back of the surveillance van. “Jesus, Tam,” he snapped. “Could you warn us when you’re going to pull a stunt like that?”

“Grow up. You’re a married man. Haven’t you seen tits before?”

“You use your tits the way a ninja assassin uses nunchuks,” Davy complained. “I don’t like to take a direct hit with no warning.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “Typical, projecting your lust onto an objectified woman.”

“Not any objectified woman,” Davy growled. “Just you, Tam.”

“Could we skip the feminist crap?” Nick asked tersely.

“Could you gentlemen give me some space?” Tam fussed. “I have to make myself look good, and your combined bulk is getting in my way.”

The five men crowded back against the walls as Tam rummaged through her bag of tricks. They were packed into the van, what with Tam, Davy, Connor, Seth, Nick and Alex Aaro. Once Aaro had heard the words “kids” and “organ pirates” mentioned in the same sentence, he’d insisted on coming along for the ride. They had a plan. Full of holes, risky by its very improvised nature, but it was a plan.

Mathes’s car was blipping away in a parking lot outside a large, nondescript complex of new brick buildings surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire and with God knew what kind of alarm system. Covert recon in Seth and Davy’s thermal camo cloaks had revealed a prefab hut twenty meters from the big automatic gate, manned by four guys, according to Davy and Seth’s thermal imaging goggles. There had to be more in the main building complex, and probably still more on patrol.

Tam yanked out a tangle of silvery latex straps, and proceeded to stuff her breasts into them. She rummaged again, pulled out two crescents that looked like bags of silicon gel, and wadded them into the base of the tit-web-slings, transforming her perfect C-cup tits into larger but equally perfect D-cups.

“So that’s how girls do it,” Seth said. “I’ve always wondered.”

Tam yanked a silver latex skirt out of the bag, and a thong. “Gentlemen, fair warning,” she said. “Anyone who does not want to see my cunt,”—she shot a glance at Davy—“close your eyes now. Anyone who does want to see my cunt, be aware that you will pay dearly for the privilege at some later date. When you least expect it.”

“With what?” Alex Aaro sounded fascinated.

“I like to leave it a mystery,” she said. “Your life? Your firstborn? Your immortal soul? It depends on my mood.”

“Your balls for a necklace,” Nick told Aaro.

“I am always looking for new materials for my wearable weaponry lines,” Tam said. “But shriveled testicles aren’t that pretty.” She punctuated her statement by yanking off her black briefs.

The men turned their heads so fast they risked whiplash.

They waited. “Is it safe?” Nick asked. “Can we open our eyes?”

“Safety is an illusion,” Tam said. “Is any man ever safe with me?”

Nick opened one slitted eye. She was more or less decent, if you could call a skirt that short decent. It stretched over her perfect ass like plastic wrap as she bent over, adjusting a blond wig. She flung the hair back, slicked crimson paint over her lips, yanked on silver boots with four-inch heels. She grabbed an aerosol tube and sprayed herself with a choking cloud of glitter that made them all cough. When the sparkling fog cleared, she gave them a dazzling smile. “How do I look?”

No one dared to answer. She looked like a Vegas showgirl about to take the stage. She looked like a million bucks. She looked like trouble incarnate. Nick shook his head. “I don’t like this,” he muttered.

“Too fucking bad,” Tam replied. “It’s the best chance we have. The one weapon no man is ever completely defended against is femininity.” She slanted a peek at Nick. “As our friend Nikolai can attest, hmm?”

The other guys winced. Nick clenched his jaw and let it pass.

Tam pulled out gem-studded clip-on earrings with a tiny receiver attached to one, which she tucked into her ear. A matching wrist unit was incorporated in a bracelet made of white gold and semi-precious stones. But she didn’t stop there. Nick watched her don a chain with a mother of pearl egg-shaped thing studded with jewels and swirls of gold. A small, pearl-tipped round pin stuck out of the top of it, that looked like a—