Reunion (4 page)

“I’m so sorry, Amy.”

“And they took it!” she hisses.

“Took what?”

“My arm!” she wails. “I didn’t even get to keep it. You’d think they’d let me keep my own arm. It was mine, after all. I just woke up and it was gone. Didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.” She weeps softly.

Panic grows like a human-sized moth inside my chest.

She’s really losing it. Or is that the infection talking?

Either way makes sense.

I reach for the vodka and she tracks my movements with her eyes.

“You want to get drunk?” she says with a choking laugh. “
This isn’t exactly happy hour.”
 

I reach for the table cloth and start biting the edge. The polyester is hard to separate but eventually, my canines do the trick. I rip a long, thin strip from the tablecloth.

“What are you doing?”

“Soaking this cloth in some vodka and putting it on your wound.”

She doesn’t argue.

And that’s when I get even more scared.

“How long do you think it’s been since Mikey trapped me in here?” I ask her, trying to keep her talking and alive.

“
Dunno,” she mumbles, then passes out.
 

“Shit,” I mutter under my breath. She’s inhaling and exhaling at a regular rate. I sit in the glow of the candles and watch her.

And then I carefully soak the tablecloth strip in vodka and begin gently blotting her wound. She flinches in her unconscious state, but doesn’t wake up.

Oh, it’s bad. Really, really
bad
.

After I finish what I can, I leave her to rest, propping the alcohol-soaked cloth against her wound. Fashioning a pillow of sorts from some tablecloths, I find myself fading out to sleep. In the back of my mind I think I should
n
’t leave live flames running, so I blow out two of them.

But I leave one. It gives me a sense of security.

And then I basically pass out from sheer terror.

The mind is your worst enemy.
You think you are what you think. That you are the sum total of your experiences and the memories that make up those experiences. That we’re just consciousness being transported around by these bodies.
 

And that the fusion of the mind, soul and body is who and what you are.

But your mind is a tri
cks
ter. It has a flip side. Your mind is both angel and devil. It is yin and yang. Phallus and hole.

Life and death.

Heaven and hell.

And right now, it’s
pure
hell.

I keep imagining rats coming at us. I dozed off for some amount of time and now I am sitting here in the near-dark, staring straight ahead, trying to convince myself I do not hear more mice down at the other end of the storage room.

No.

No.

SNAP!

That’s the third mousetrap I’ve heard now.

I start to cry. I can’t stop.

I fade out again.

Mark.

I wake up with my lips stuck together. Amy is making a weird sound when she sleeps. It’s like she has a bad chest cold. I feel her moving against me, like she’s tapping her foot.

It’s her. She’s shivering that hard.

If I don’t find a way out of this, she’s going to die right in front of me.

I look up at the door. My hand still aches from banging on it after Mikey trapped me. That’s useless. How long have I been in here? Surely Mikey told whoever he’s working with that he trapped me. Why hasn’t anyone come?

Mark.

I stand and stretch, my fingers brushing against cobwebs. I don’t even flinch.

My mouth is so dry I start to cough. The candle is down to the final inch. The glow of light is low. I find my water bottle.
M
aybe two inches of water left. I need to save it for Amy. She needs it more than me. I let myself take a tiny sip just to wet the inside of my mouth.

I feel so guilty.

I can feel myself getting tired. So tired. It
must
have been many hours since Mikey put me in here. I’m dehydrated and my head starts to ache. I’m not hungry. Not yet. But it begins to occur to me that I will lose my strength soon. If I’m going to find a way out of here, it’s now or never.

I light another candle and go to the hatch door I opened. I ignore it, because I know what’s there. A pipe no bigger than me with a dead rat in it, and dangers unknown. I could try to escape—

The main door starts to open.

I open my mouth to cry out for help, but then I stop. The main door is open only an inch. It’s shining light on Amy.

Mikey knows what he did to me. They’re coming for us. They’re coming to kill us.

Or worse. I look at my hands. This may be the last time I get to use
both
.

Wrenching the hatch open, I blow out my candle, toss it into the corner, and wriggle into the pipe backwards, feet first. It’s like crawling into a tunnel filled with dirty jello. I start gagging. The thick muck slides along my cheek and a little bit gets in my mouth.

I gag some more.

I almost shut the hatch door but stop at the very last second. What if I can’t open it from in here? Instead, I almost close it and hope it doesn’t click.

Because I don’t close the door, I have about a millimeter of light that comes in.

And sound.

A man’s heavy boots
click-clack
down the stairs. The main door stays open. Whoever is here has someone else with him. I hear a woman’s voice.

Then I hear crying. Women crying and babbling in a language I don’t understand. It sounds like Spanish, though. Maybe Portuguese or French? I’m not sure.

Something moves against my foot.
I pull my leg up and crack my knee so hard against the pipe I almost scream.
 

I can’t scream.

I can’t move or leave or
anything
.

Whatever’s behind me in this pipe gets to do whatever it wants to me.

I feel teeth nibbling at my ankles.

“
Looks like the new girl gone and fixed the place up,” says a man’s voice.
 

Frenchie.

“It’s a regular Martha Stewart magazine spread in here,” says a very,
very
familiar woman’s voice.

Claudia, of course.

They had Amy all along.
Oh, my God.
 

“
Where are the rest?” he asks her. I feel a whoosh of air come in the tiny sliver of space where I’m holding the door open. Something sharp presses against my ankle bone. I try to push the image of a rat’s teeth out of my head.
 

“The rest?” Claudia asks, puzzled.

“The shipment?” His words are so venomous I inhale sharply.

“Oh. Oh,” she says in a small voice, like she’s a misbehaving child. “I don’t know. Papa said there’s been a complication.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Frenchie says. “I know he was busy getting that DEA agent arrested, but what the fuck? He couldn’t bother to let me know we weren’t meeting the new load now?”

Getting a DEA agent
arrested
? Mark.

Oh, Mark.

I start to gag again.
My shoulder screams with pain from the position I’m in. I remind myself that at least I have two shoulders, unlike poor Amy.
 

“I got buyers who are screaming for that new shipment,” he growls at Claudia. “What the hell’
s
he want me to do?”
The sound of freaked out women talking in languages I don’t understand fades. Someone screams in the distance, then I hear a thud.
 

N
o more screaming.

“I don’t know, Frenchie,”
Claudia
says in a defiant voice. “I’m not part of any of this.”

“You are now, Smart Mouth Bitch. You fucked up and your daddy’s gonna pay for what you did if you don’t make it right now.” He makes a nasty sound with his throat. “And look at her down there. What a waste.”

What did
Claudia
do
?

“Huh,” he says. “This one’s gonna be dead before the next van load. Who the fuck cut her like that? You?” He cackles with laughter as I hear Claudia saying somet
h
ing in a defensive tone.

And then:

“Look, I don’t give a shit what your daddy says. We got a network and buyers. Money don’t grow on trees. You screwed up with your little doggy incident and—” His voice goes lower.

So Claudia was the one who hurt Wizard and set me up?

And Dean Landau has set up
Mark
?

“I just want to know where Eric is,” she says to Frenchie in a pleading tone.

“Because you wanna fuck him? You need a pole to ride, I got one,” he snaps at her.

Her voice sounds muffled, then pleading, and then angry.

“I’d fuck your brains out right here on the storage room floor but I got a place I need to be. Doesn’t mean I can’t get me a little sugar now—” he makes a lewd sound.

“Get your hands off me!” she shouts, and then the door slams shut, closing with a hiss that sounds like a dying person’s last breath.

A sharp pain pierces my calf. I scream. Something crawls up my leg and stops at my ass.

I shove the door open and fall out of the pipe in a slick mess that is like being reborn.

The rat that’s turned me into a snack tries to bite my foot as I crawl out. I’m in utter darkness again, too far from the candles to grab one fast. The rat makes an aggressive noise, then scampers back into the pipe.

And that’s the last thing I remember before I pass out
again
.

I wake up to the sound of weeping.
In the pitch black tomb we’re in, I can’t tell if it’s me or Amy.
 

Or both.

I reach up to feel my face. My eyes are wet.

I hear Amy sobbing.

“It’s okay,” I try to say, but my mouth feels like someone has put sawdust and cotton in it. My bladder aches again. I take a deep breath and smell that odor I detected when I first came in here.

Amy’s infection is worsening.

I crawl over to where I last remember a candle. My fingers find it. I need to keep a flame going at all times. I am down to six matches.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault you’re going to die, Carrie,” Amy says.

You’re going to die, Carrie.

That wakes me up.

“We are
not
going to die,” I say in a low voice. There is rage in my tone. Her words anger me. How dare she say we’re going to die?

No.

Frenchie’s words flood my brain.

Arrested
. Dean Landau worked to get a DEA agent arrested. It must be Mark. And that must be why he hasn’t found me, yet. He’s been arrested.

For what? For Eric’s disappearance? Has something more happened? I hate not knowing.

Mark was right. We were both set up by the dean.

I need to stop thinking of him as the dean.

He’s
El Brujo
.

Mark will find a way out, though. Once he explains who he really is, Chief Cummings will have to let him go.

“Sure,” Amy mutters.

I jump a little. Huh. I guess I’ve been talking aloud and didn’t realize it.

“Sure. Mark’s coming. He’s coming, Carrie. But who’s coming before him? The butcher is. He said so. He’s coming back for me and the new girls.”

I start to pant so hard I almost blow out the candle.

“And you’re the newest girl, Carrie,” she says in a choked voice. “You. He’ll cut off your arm and take it away and leave you here.”

“No.” I stand and walk back to the hatch. As I put pressure on my leg, the calf begins to throb. That damn rat bite. I wonder if the creature has some disease. Funny how in any other circumstance I’d be freaking out about the rat bite. Today, though, it’s an afterthought.

I need Mark.

I need to be rescued.

Amy needs medical treatment.

A rodent’s bite is the last thing I need to worry about. Can’t treat a bite when you’re dead.

As much as I hate Amy’s words, she’s right.

Tap tap tap.

I whip around. That tapping didn’t come from the main door.

I stare into the abyss of the pipe. Nope.

The rat that bit me comes into view. It’s sniffing around the stained bag of coffee like a hungry child hovering around a birthday cake.

Thump thump thump.

This time it’s a solid sound, like someone
is
banging on metal with the heel of their hand.
The rat didn’t do
that
.
 

I look around the room, but don’t see where the sound could be coming from.

Thump thump thump.

It’s steady enough and coming from the wall.

And then I hear it. The voice is so faint, but it’s clear:

“Carrie.”

It’s a woman’s voice, and it’s coming from behind the shelving.

I pull one of the heavy boxes filled with papers off the shelf. Nothing behind it. With as much effort as I can, I shove box after box off the shelf, not caring about the mess.
Papers fly everywhere. One box tips over in an avalanche of paper. After each box, I pick up the candle to look at the shelf. Time after time
there’s nothing there.

And then, suddenly, there’s a hole. In the wall. It’s square, and no more than three feet wide, if that.

Allie’s face is staring at me,
bright, round brown eyes like headlights in a dirty face
.
Her body looks like she rolled in sewage on one of those reality television shows where you jump through an obstacle course.
 

E
x
c
ept this is anything but entertaining.

“
Help me,” she says. She looks like toothpaste coming out of a brown tube. Her shoulders are squished and she’s having a hard time breathing. “The opening narrows here,” she gasps.
 

“Where do I grab you?” I ask. She’s squeezed in there so tight.

“Armpits,” she blurts out. I do as she asks and reach under, my fingers digging into the soft flesh of her ribs, armpits and breasts. My singular goal is to get her out of there, so I grab as hard as I can and pull.