Indigo: The Saving Bailey Trilogy #2 (38 page)

Holden and I walk back to our couch, but someone has already drunkenly thrown themselves upon it. I am about to push the heavily sedated man off, when a scream rings out from the upstairs.

Every muscle in my body freezes; the chilling scream is a replica of one that erupted from Alana’s mouth as child when she fell from a tree and broke her arm.

Holden doesn’t recognize the high-pitched screech, he looks at me confused. There is no time to explain; I propel myself up the stairs, stepping over Solo cups lined up in an innovative game of beer pong. Holden stumbles far behind.

I hop around people blocking the hallway.

How long had she been left alone? Not long enough for something terrible to happen.
But that scream
, it could argue with me that she was hurt or in danger.

I go to a room at the end of the hall, Cairen stands in the doorway.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

He doesn’t acknowledge me. I push past him.

Alana is on the ground, holding a sheet over her head like Mother Mary, huddled in the dark shadows of an empty closet.

There’s a mattress stripped bare on the floor and a naked black man sitting on it. He grabs a blanket off the ground and makes a run for the door. Cairen raises his arm up, letting him run underneath it like they’re playing limbo. I step out of the room and watch his black rear-end fly down the stairs. I catch a glimpse of the panic stricken face belonging to Allegiance, the Apocy leader.

Holden has finally made it upstairs; he makes it through the obstacle of people in the hallway and comes toward me.

I look back in the room. “Are you okay, Alana?”

She looks fine enough, naked and scared but unharmed.

“She won’t be,” Cairen cuts in. “Allegiance, really? The rival’s
leader!
That’s ironic, think he could have taught you a thing or two about being allegiant. Allegiant to your own gang!”

Alana whimpers something.

“I’ll kill ya!” Cairen screams, his hands seizing into claws.

He’s on her fast but I’m on top of him just as quick, my hands fitted around his ripped arms, pulling him off of her. She cries out as his fists make contact with her skin. I keep tugging, my hands slipping over his sweaty biceps.

Where’s Holden?
I can’t see anything past my hair and the frenzy of Alana’s screams, Cairen’s jackhammer hands breaking her in.

Taking a step back from them, I search the room for a weapon. Holden tosses me a lamp. I knock Cairen over the head with the base of it, not hard enough to knock him out, but enough to turn his attention off Alana.

His focus is on me now.

Grabbing a fistful of my hair, Cairen walks forward and I walk backward, until I am pushed into a corner of the room with nowhere to run. “
Ah!
” I grimace.

“I tried to be nice to you, Indigo, but maybe I made a mistake by letting you think that we were friends, that you were equal to me. It happens sometimes,” he says. “I cross over into nice guy territory. Rarely, but occasionally, and forget that I’m a monster, a snake, and you’re my rat.
My dinner
.”

Yanking me out of the corner, my hair wrapped up in his claws, he forces my head into the corner of a wooden dresser as easily as if he were pulling down a lever on a casino slot machine.

Pain grips me and I am momentarily blinded by red. I blink furiously to gain back my vision. Cairen’s ugly face multiplies it waves back and forth like a finger ‘tsking’ at me. I lash out at one of his many faces, nails barred.

My vision straightens. Red, puffy lines streak Cairen’s cheeks but the pain doesn’t touch him. Below the surface he is a beast of snarling fangs and bulging muscles, struggling against shackles. I have only managed to further agitate the beast within.

“Stop fighting back!” the beast bellows. “I could kill you with my bare hands! Do you hear me?”

Do I hear you?
Above the party, above Alana’s cries and Holden’s loud, loud breathing?
I don’t hear you. I don’t hear any of it.

But Indigo does.

I push Cairen back with all my might—
with all Indigo’s might
—and he falls against the dresser. “I hear you loud and clear, BASTARD!”

“Stupid bitch!” he limps away from the dresser, holding his back, and then shuffles out of the room in a Quasimodo fashion. How I managed to hurt him, I’ll never know.

I barge down the hall after him, punching walls as I go along, the obstacle of the crowd parting for me.

I turn into the bathroom and lock the door. My hand inches along the wall, fumbling for a light switch. I find one and flip it on; a single bulb hardly lights the tiny room.

I walk backward from the bathroom mirror and hit my back against the wall; my reflection startling me. Blood from a tiny gash on my forehead courses over my eyebrow and the bridge of my nose. I wonder how bad off Alana is if
I
look this scary.

Someone knocks on the door.

“It’s occupied!” I yell.

They knock again. I punch the door to scare them away.

“We have to go!” Holden says his voice muffled.

“Then go!”

“No, not without you. We have to get back to the Allie. Cairen’s really pissed!”

“I know he’s pissed!” I shriek, frustrated. “I figured that out after the first punch. Holden, you did nothing to stop him. You didn’t even blink an eye!”

“Well, it’s not like Alana was any help either…”

“Oh, that’s so mature, taking Alana down with you. What could she have done? She’s half the size of
me!
But you, you definitely could have made him stop.”

“It’s not like that, Bailey. That’s not how the Allie works.”

“You and Cairen keep saying that,” I say, “but I get the inner workings of the Allie as well as the both of you. I
fully
understand how it works. I just fail to accept it. And I never will, because it’s wrong, unjust, and sick!”

“Look, I don’t give a shit what you think about the Allie, I’m trying to save your ass and if you don’t come out of that bathroom this very second, you may not have an ass left to save!”

I unlock the door. Holden pushes it open and grabs my arm, he drags me down the stairs, and out of the house so quick that all the graffiti on the walls blur into one distinctive, grungy grey.

“
Calm down!
”
I say. He throws me in the van and I bounce against the mattress.

“This is not a calm situation!” he says, pushing the door shut.

“What about Alana? We can’t just leave her!”

He swings open the driver’s side door and gets behind the wheel. “Cairen’s got her. Press something against your head to stop the bleeding. You’re going to bleed to death
.
”

I ball up the end of a sheet and press it against my gash. Blood soaks through the thin material quickly, and I have to layer a shirt on top of it too.

“Cairen’s going to kill her!” I cry. “What will we do?”

“Nothing, we are going to do
nothing
. And you’re going to be quiet, so I can think.”

“But what if he makes us jump her?”

“That won’t happen,” he says, sure of himself.

I take the pressure off my head and move to the front of the van. In the rearview mirror I can make out my eyes-and that’s it. The rest of my features are covered in a thick mask of congealing blood.

“You’re scary looking,” Holden says, pushing my head back. “Go lie down. He beat you good this time.”

“He raped her?” I say in both a statement and a question.

“He didn’t rape her,” he says. The van swerves, his hands too tense on the steering wheel. I can see the veins that go from his palm to his wrist.

“But she
screamed
,” I say.

“Because Cairen caught her in the act.”

“Holden, what act?”

“The act of consensual sex with the rival’s leader!”

“She wouldn’t! She isn’t that way!”

“Maybe she was drunk or drugged, I don’t know. Bailey, she’s in trouble. Sit back now and let me think. Be quiet.”

I fall back on the mattress. We drive a little way, but eventually the silence gets to Holden and he starts to talk again. “You’re pumping with adrenaline right now and that’s why you don’t feel any pain. But when that stops, you’re going to be a wreck.”

“The adrenaline’s gone,” I say in a hollow voice.

“We’ll be at the Allie soon. I have medicine for you.”

I think about Alana, naked and tiny under her sheet. Think about how much she reminded me of a little kid dressed as a ghost, trick or treating on Halloween. Cut out black holes for eyes…but I had never seen them so green, so bright, and sparked with terror. I try to remember if she’s a virgin, or had been before tonight. But I can’t recall a time that we ever spoke of it. Sex was the one subject we never touched upon in our late-night, sleepover conversations. What
had
we talked about?

“I’m sorry I didn’t help you,” Holden says, “but you shouldn’t have gotten involved.”

“I didn’t think you would step in… but I
hoped
you would. You’re just as emotionless as Cairen.”

“I’m not emotionless!” he says. “I wanted to stop him, but I couldn’t.”

“You were fully capable.”

“Of what? You’re so quick to pass judgment. I was scared, why can’t anyone but you be scared?”

There’s not enough fear to go around the Allie.

“Holden, do you know what he’s going to do with her?”

He twists his lips up and shakes his head no.

“What can we do?” I ask.

“Nothing.”

I scrape dry blood of my cheeks; it falls in red flakes on my chest and shoulders. Holden keeps driving, grows used to the silence and the sound of my labored breathing. I try to untie the corset but the knot would take a fork or a bobby pin to undo. I lie on my back and expel oxygen like a tree, unmoving, yet living.

Before long, we are at the Allie. It’s around four in the morning, but Holden is happy we’re the first ones back. I know it only means that Alana is alone with Cairen longer.

Holden tells me to stay by the fence as he goes inside the warehouse to get medicine for my head. I try to stay awake, even though my head is laughing at me. The mounting pain in my chest is laughing at me. And pretty soon, it seems like even the empty refrigerator, dumpster, and the tires are laughing at me. If I hadn’t hit my head, I’d be alarmed by the hallucinations.

What feels like hours later, Holden drops back over the fence with his hands empty. He is shaking in the moonlight, tears shining on his cheeks. He pulls his right arm back and balls his hand into a fist. “I’m sorry,” he says, his voice tremoring, “but its best you not see what’s about to happen.” He slams his fist into my temple, grunting from exertion.

A sharp pain rips through my skull. Psychedelic fractals spin before my eyes. Something is expanding in my chest, something heavy with sharp edges, it cuts my lungs and takes away my breath. I am lifted from the ground; I cry out but don’t hear it. There’s a rushing in my ears like the sound of rapids.

I am laid down on something firm but soft—a mattress.

Go to sleep now go to sleep now go to sleep now
- I have heard this sentence before, from someone else—Trenton, when he was drowning me in the retention pond outside school
.

I drown now, in a black ocean of pain. Bobbing at first, flapping my arms above my head, the universal sign for ‘help I’m drowning!’ And then, I sink to bottom.

I wonder,
am I really at the bottom, or am I on top? Am I really drowning, or am I floating?
Floating on my back, hands treading water, a silky curtain caressing the outline of my body.

And, I drift… to nowhere.

Fireworks go off all around me. It’s the fourth of July and I’m standing in the middle of a field of wet grass, watching the fireworks soar into the sky with a whistle and explode in a series of loud pops. Suddenly, everything goes black and I can no longer see. The firework show is over. The sky is dark again, everything silent. Then, the sky lights up like it is morning. Fireworks rain down on me, burning my clothes away and setting my skin on fire.

I fight Holden with all my strength. It must look like a cat fighting a pit-bull, but at least I try.
“
Bailey, stop!
”

I’m going to head-butt him like I did to Spencer in the hospital, when he presses my temple with his fingertips and a stabbing pain brings me to my senses.
“
It’s almost over
,”
he cries.

What’s almost over?
And then an echoing
bang
splits the air. It drowns out Holden’s sobbing and the sound of my racing heart. It’s as if we have also been struck with the bullets and not just the sound they reverberate.

“No! Alana!” I howl. In a burst of adrenaline I push Holden off of me.

“Bailey, it’s over! Stay in the van please!” he begs, his words stumbling over a succession of sobs.

I rush to the backdoors, throw them open, and almost fall out; I thought they would be locked. Holden tosses something to me.
A leather Jacket
. I look at him in confusion, hysteria rising in my chest.

“Don’t wear it, just hold onto it,” he says. “And Bailey,
be quick!
”

Bailey be quick, Bailey be nimble. And Bailey jump over the Allie fence.

The echoes of gunshots fade as I make it to the fence. I burn my feet on the hot chain-link metal, pulling myself up. I fall to my knees on the other side.

Cairen, Ashtray, and Don are at the end of the alley, gathered around the refrigerator that now lies on its back – a gun extending from Cairen’s fist. I stand and move in their direction; staggering like I’ve got drunk goggles on.

“Looks like someone had a little too much fun at the party,” Ashtray sneers.

I must look pathetic to them.

I lose all sense of balance and give up walking for crawling. I push along to the refrigerator. Red hair pokes out from the airtight door. Don, Ashten and Cairen are unearthly silent as a sob, uncontrollable as a hiccup, jumps from my throat; it shakes my body and takes my breath away.

I touch the tips of Alana’s hair. Gripping the plastic handle, I open the fridge door. Alana’s small body is curled up and turned sideways; crimson staining her blouse like a flattened red rose. “’Lana,” I croak.