Porter (7 page)

             
Allie
realized that Raspy thought her family
had an accomplice.
She didn’t want to make him spasm
with
coughing;
h
e might pull the trigger when she did.
While she dithered
Allie saw his finger tighten on the trigger. Desperately she tried to twist her leg out of the way.  He used his left hand to hold her leg down and
then
pulled the trigger!

Agony scythed through Allie’s calf. She tried to reach out and sense Raspy’s neck but found that she couldn’t
feel anything
with her leg hurting so
badly
! She curled up and grasped
at
her leg with her hands
,
though she had difficulty
doing it
with her wrists bound together.
It seemed like
the bullet had
missed the bone as her
leg wasn’t flopping around. T
he hole was in the fleshy part of her calf, but it still hurt terribly. She had to do something about their guns!

Raspy continued waving his gun about but seemed less frantic as nothing had happened after he shot Allie. Roger’s coughing had died down though he still bent over and held his knees. Dean came back into the room from the bathroom wearing new shorts but no shoes. He waved his gun about too but both he and Raspy continued to calm down
when nothing
happened.

Allie’s pain diminished to a dull throb and she had a sudden idea. She reached out with her sense and found the water pipe in the kitchen wall
right
behind her. She focused on Raspy’s gun, feeling the bullet in the chamber with powder in
the shell behind the bullet
. She opened a
tiny
port and
was rewarded by
the sensation of water spraying into the powder. Was it enough?
She
worried
that if she opened the port too far
,
the water pressure might push the bullet out of the end of the
cartridge
and she surely didn’t want water dripping out of the gun to warn them that something was wrong.
With a mental shrug, she turned to the gun that Dean had stopped waving and put back in his
waistband
holster, then to the one in Roger’s holster. She considered wetting the powder in the second cartridge in each gun
,
in case they just jacked the slide if the first
bullet
didn’t fire. Her leg was throbbing and she
was finding
it hard
er
to concentrate and sense the water pipe so she closed her eyes for a moment’s rest.
There must be something better she could do!

Allie’s dad croaked, “If you’ll just let my family go, I’ll show you how I made the first device.”

Raspy chuckled, “Oh sure, that’s a good one! You betcha Albert, you just promise, cross your heart, hope to die and we’ll let the family go to the police while you’re ‘splainin’ how to make the port machine. Sho’ ‘nuff Albert, tha’ be fine!” He laughed some more. There was a grunt and scraping of chair legs as he set the chair Dr. Dans was tied to back up right. “Oopsie, no, that wouldn’t work! Instead why don’t you start explaining and drawing pictures of the device right now, just so’s I won’t put any more bullets in
to
your daughter?”

“OK, but first put a bandage on her leg and take the gag off my wife.”

“We’ll bandage her leg but your wife makes too much noise. I ain’t takin’ that gag off.”

“OK, but you’ve got to let one of us check on Stephen.”

Allie was surprised that her dad seemed to negotiating in such a level headed manner. He
’d
always seemed
brilliant
,
but
far too
fuzzy headed
for this type of discussion
.

Someone started cutting her pants leg open
.
She opened her eyes
and saw Dean cutting them with a knife. She
looked at
her dad
. He gave her a little half wink!
Did he realize what had caused the storm of coughing? There were two small wounds on her calf, entrance and exit
,
she presumed. They weren’t bleeding much. She wiggled her
foot, it hurt but the muscles
worked.

Dean said, “Hell, she ain’t hurt.” But he cut her pants leg into strips and wrapped them around her calf anyway.

“Let me check my brother,” Allie said.

Raspy said, “Soon as your dad starts drawing.”

Allie looked and saw that Roger had lifted her dad’s chair and put it next to the table. They cut her dad’s hands loose and shoved paper and pencil in front of him. Her dad stared at
Allie
with a look of concentration as if he
was
trying to tell her something, but she had no idea what. Then he pulled the paper to himself and started drawing. Dean cut her hands, then her feet loose, then stepped back and pointed his gun at her.
Allie swung her legs off the table and stood gingerly.
Her leg
hurt, but not horribly.
Best not to let on though.

Playing her injury up, s
he limped and stumbled over to Stephen and crouched down. He was still breathing and had a strong pulse but didn’t respond when she said his name. She pulled back an eyelid because she knew that’s what medical people did
,
but she didn’t know what to look for. So she reached out with her strange sense to feel the inside of his head, though she had no idea what it was supposed to feel like, never having done this before. The left side was different than the right!
Crap, was it supposed to be that way?
There was an area between the skull and what Allie assumed must be his brain on the left side that seemed different, and she realized the pressure was high
er
there! She’d heard of people bleeding into their heads and knew that
such bleeding
was bad! Her first impulse was to demand that they take Stephen to a hospital, but she immediately realized that that would never happen. Could she let out the pressure? What if she did some harm? Her thoughts raced desperately,
but
she
decided she
was pretty sure he was going to die if she didn’t do anything!

Allie gritted her teeth and formed a port from the area of high pressure
inside his skull,
to the outside of his head
. She was immediately relieved to see blood staining his hair
,
indicating she wasn’t just letting
grey matter
leak out.
She didn’t think.
She ran her fingers through it to be sure there wasn’t any brain in the stuff leaking out and was relieved to find only blood. She looked up and saw her mother’s wide eyes; her dad just looked grim at the sight of the blood on her fingers. She looked back down at Stephen and let more blood out until the pressure was so low that it
didn’t
flow
any more
. By the time she’d finished doing that she
had a headache and
knew she wouldn’t be able to make
more than a tiny
port for a
little
while. She hoped that the bleeding in his head had stopped.

Raspy said, “Keep drawing!”

Allie looked back over at her dad and saw him look down from her and back to whatever he was drawing.

Allie sat down next t
o Stephen and tried to look non-
threatening so that they wouldn’t tie her
back
up. For a moment she wondered what her dad was
actually
drawing and what they would do when they found out it wasn’t really
a
port producing machine.
She put her head back and closed her eyes as if exhausted, which she actually was. If she were to cause these guys to bleed into their skulls like Stephen had, how long would it take them to become unconscious? Her leg was hurting in this position, she reached down and grasped her thigh to move it and her hand struck a lump in the pocket of her baggy cargo jeans. Her little tube of Mace
pepper spray
! She restrained the impulse to whoo
p and
instead
considered how to use it? She needed to wait a while because right now she would be limited in her ability to make ports. She just rested her head back on the wall with one hand on Stephen’s neck and closed her eyes.
She needed some way to deal with these guys one at a time. But how…?

Stephen moved under Allie’s hand and she was startled to realize that
was so tired that
she had dozed off! She looked down at her brother. His eyes were open! He still looked
muzzy headed
and unfocused but he was awake! “Stephen,” she bent over him, “you got hit on the head and you’re just waking up.” Allie sensed that a little blood had reaccumulated but it wasn’t much. She drained it out anyway. She looked
over
at her parents. “
Stephen
’s awake! Still looks pretty stunned though.”
She turned to Raspy, “We need to get him to a hospital.”

“Sure, Honey. Soon’s your dad finishes his drawings and explanations, we’ll be on our way.”

From the smirk on Rasty’s face she could tell that
that
would never
actually
happen. She thought for a few more moments and decided that things probably wouldn’t get better. She was untied and at least her dad’s hands were free. “I’ve gotta pee,” she said as plaintively as she could.

Rasty looked up from where he was watching Dr. Dans draw. He caught Dean’s eye and jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

Dean waved her to her feet with his gun and she limped across the living room area to the hallway where she presumed the bathroom was
. Just down the hall an open
door revealed a dirty bathroom. S
he stepped inside and started to close the door but to her startlement Dean blocked the door with his foot. “Nah, I gotta be with you,” he said with a nasty grin.

At first Allie was dismayed to have this man in the bathroom with her but then realized that this played right into her intention
s
. She said, “OK, but you gotta turn your back.”

“Sure,” he snickered and faced into the corner. Allie thought he probably planned to peek in
to
the mirror
on the back of the door
or something so she
did pull
down
her pants and sat on the toilet. T
hen
she
reached out with her
odd
sense for the cold water pipe under the sink and
also for
Dean’s skull.
She aligned the port to face toward his skull so that the spray of water wouldn’t cut into the soft matter of his brain, then opened
a
port as big as she could. She’d heard that the brain didn’t have any sensory nerves in it but Dean must have felt the
vibration of the
spray right through his skull because he reached tentative
ly up to the side of his head. But t
hen
he
made a little grunting sound
,
swayed and
started to fall
over backward. Allie scrambled up from the toilet and caught him before he crashed to the floor. She laid him down gently, then sat back down and peed because she really did have to go. She flushed the toilet, washed her hands and went back out to the living room, glancing at the closed bedroom doors on her way. She wondered if there was someone else in one of the bedrooms, then she saw a tiny TV camera up in the corner
of the hall
. Probably, she decided. Monitoring things on the camera.

Raspy grunted and said, “Where’s Dean?”

Allie shrugged, “He had to
pee
too.” She noticed that Stephen had rolled over and thought that must be a good sign. Allie’s mother was watching her intently, and as Allie looked at her, her eyes flicked over at Roger where he sat on the couch
, picking his nose.

Allie’s dad cleared his throat, “Do you want me to explain the drawings
I’ve made so far
to you? Or should I wait to explain them to Randy?”

Raspy said, “
To
Mr. Forst?” He glanced up at the
light fixture
over the table where Allie
recognized
the lens of another
camera. Raspy looked back down at the drawing, “Naw,
you can explain it to me.”

Her dad started
talking and
pointing to things on the drawing but Allie tuned him out and focused on the pipe in the kitchen wall and
on
the inside of Roger’s skull. Once she was sure of her locations
,
she again opened as big a port as she could. Roger looked puzzled and also reached up to the side of his head. Allie was finding that it was difficult to hold this port open but she strained to do so for a few moments longer
until she
saw Roger slumping and making funny swallowing movements. Then his head flopped back and he started to snore. Loudly! Allie gasped as she let the port shut.