Threat Warning (12 page)

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Authors: John Gilstrap

Tags: #Fiction, #General

BOOK: Threat Warning
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“Roll with me,” Jonathan said. “If some homegrown terror group was trying to frame Islamists for all this killing, what better way is there to seal the deal than having one of them detonate a bomb? At a school, no less.”
Venice held up her hand to command the floor. “There’s more,” she said. “This is just coming in from the wire services. The school where the bomb went off—Gerald Ford Middle School—has the smallest per capita enrollment of Islamic students of any in the area.”
Boxers held out his hands, as if to say,
ta-da.
Venice wasn’t finished. “And the four major television networks are reporting that not a single known terrorist organization is stepping forward to claim responsibility for any of the events of the past three days. Not only that, five of the most active groups, including al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, have announced that they had nothing to do with them.”
Boxers scoffed, “If al-Qaeda says it, then it must be true.”
“Close,” Jonathan said. “They have a long history of claiming responsibility when they own it, and they rarely lie about it.”
“Honor among murderers?” Venice asked.
“More like good public relations,” Jonathan said. “I guess if you kill and own up to it, people are more afraid of you.”
“Plus, you don’t want to piss off your competition by claiming credit for murders that don’t belong to you,” Gail said.
That this kind of political calculus—all of it built around the murders of innocent people—actually made sense, made Jonathan despair for the future.
“So let’s just make this logical leap,” Jonathan said. “Let’s say that this Army of Allah group is not what it wants us to believe. How does that bring us any closer to finding out where they are?”
Blank faces all around.
“Well, that’s the mission,” Jonathan said.
“No kidding,” Gail replied. “Just how do we do that?” He turned to Venice. “What spigots do we have running for intelligence?”
“We’re monitoring ICIS obsessively,” she replied. “And we’re monitoring all the news services. I’ve designed bots to seek out the key words that might mean something, but there’s not much more I can do. If they broadcast again, we’ll have another shot, but until then, or until we catch a break, we’re dead in the water.”
Jonathan thought about that, and then turned to Boxers, whose shoulders sagged.
“You’re gonna call Roleplay Rollins, aren’t you?” the Big Guy guessed.
C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN
 
With the furnace extinguished, the night brought the return of frigid temperatures. As Christyne wrapped herself in her coat and pulled the blankets over her head, she tried to settle herself by listening to Ryan’s even breaths. At what age, she wondered, did sleep stop coming so easily? As a teenager—as with all teenagers—she’d been able to sleep for fifteen, twenty hours at a time, sometimes sleeping entire weekends away when she was in college. Now, rest felt like a commodity more valuable than gold.
She wished she understood why their captors were being so hard on Ryan. He was only a boy. A frightened, angry boy. Mistreating him would only make him angrier and more frightened. It was the way he was wired. Just like his father.
Christyne told herself that the attitude that made Ryan so difficult as a teenager would also make him a success in life. You never lose if you never give up, right?
These people needed to understand that Ryan was
incapable
of controlling his smart mouth and his occasionally disrespectful glares. He wasn’t being difficult; he was being . . .
Ryan
.
It was so dark in here.
How does one measure darkness? she wondered. There were many words for the varying degrees of brightness, why not for darkness? Because “dark” didn’t touch the lack of light in their tiny room.
A black velvet cave
, she thought. The kind of darkness that gave birth to the scariest childhood fairy tales. In this blackness, every terrible thing seemed possible. No one could protect you because no one could see you. You couldn’t even protect yourself.
What was that?
There was a gentle clicking sound, so soft that she never would have heard it if she hadn’t been listening so intently to the night. Ryan’s breathing continued undisturbed.
Could have been a rat, she supposed, which brought precious little comfort.
No, nighttime creatures didn’t stop after a single clicking sound. They’d have made a series of clicking sounds—whatever the clicking sounds might have been.
She sensed movement. This wasn’t a noise so much as a feeling, the kind of near-awareness you feel as an airplane slowly changes altitude. In fact, that was it exactly. She felt a pressure change in the room.
“Ryan, is that you?” she whispered. She knew of course that it couldn’t be. He hadn’t moved.
Another sound. A pop this time, as if wooden furniture were expanding in humidity.
It’s nothing
, Christyne told herself. It was just her imagination leveraging the most drama out of the thick darkness.
Her eyes strained in their sockets, desperate to see something out there. Anything. Over in the corner by the door, the darkness seemed to have lightened, a vertical shaft of dark gray against pitch black. The door had been opened.
A shadow moved. The shadow of a man.
Realization hit her in a rush and she sat upright in her bed, turning to her left and slapping at the shelf where she knew she’d left the matches for the lamp.
Oh God, oh God, oh God . . .
“Don’t do it, woman,” a voice said from the darkness. Christyne recognized the voice as Brother Stephen, the one who had been so terrible to Ryan. “Be silent,” he whispered. “Don’t make me hurt you.”
The shadow moved closer.
Christyne scooted away from the intruder, closer to the head of the bed. “Please stay away,” she begged. Her voice came out as a barely audible squeak.
“Shh,” Brother Stephen said. “This doesn’t need to be difficult.” In two more steps, he towered over her, his silhouette a black stain.
“Please don’t,” she rasped. A new kind of terror enveloped her. She’d seen this man—this boy, really—abuse her son. Now he was—
He sat on the edge of her bed, and the shadow of his hand reached out to her. Settled on her breast. He squeezed too hard, but she sensed it was less an act of torture than inexperience. “All you have to do is be quiet,” he said. His other hand fumbled with the front of his trousers.
Christyne started to tremble. Blinding, disabling fear enveloped her like a straitjacket. She knew what was coming, but in her terror, she was unable to do anything to stop it—to do anything to protect herself. “My son,” she whispered.
Brother Stephen slid his hand down her stomach. It groped her lap. “Maybe he’ll get his turn.” His chuckle was even more terrifying than his touch. “A woman like you needs a man like me. I’m going to kiss you now.”
His shadow swelled as he came closer and planted his mouth on hers. His tongue pried her lips apart.
“Don’t fight me,” he whispered.
Christyne shifted in the bed and her hand brushed his exposed, engorged penis. It was wet and slick and her hand jumped as if it had touched a hot stove.
“Big, isn’t it?” he hissed. “Go ahead. Feel it. Rub it. Think about all we can—”
A guttural roar filled the room as something massive slammed into her attacker and knocked him to the floor.
 
Lying on his left side with all his clothes on—including his coat—Ryan kept his covers up high, all the way to his chin, just to keep warm.
He’d been slipping in and out all night. The bruises on his ribs and his cheek were killing—
He could have sworn he heard the door to their little prison open.
Someone stepped inside. He moved as a shadow, but he kept the door open behind him, and somewhere in the house someone must have left a lamp on, because he cut a silhouette in the darkness.
It was a man, one of the terrorists, but there was no way to tell which one. Until he spoke.
“Don’t do it, woman,” Brother Stephen said.
Ryan heard clothing rustle, and he heard his mother make a whining sound. She pleaded.
“This doesn’t need to be difficult,” Brother Stephen said.
With those words, Ryan knew what the intruder was going to do. He knew what rape was. He heard springs squeak as he watched the invading shadow sit on his mother’s bed.
She made more frightening sounds, and there was more whispering. Ryan couldn’t make out all of it, but he could feel his mother’s terror from all the way over here.
She said, “My son,” and something about that made Brother Stephen laugh.
Ryan felt his face flush with anger. His heart rate doubled. Tripled. This was the asshole who had beaten the crap out of him when his hands were tied. The man who had promised to kill him if he stepped out of line even one more time.
“I’m going to kiss you now.”
That’s when something inside him snapped. He tore off his covers and he launched himself at the beefy silhouette, charging full tilt, and aiming high. He had no plan, and no fighting skills, but there was no way he was going to let this asshole get away with what he was trying to do.
As he closed to within the last foot, Ryan tucked his chin in a little and smashed the top part of his forehead into what appeared to be the attacker’s temple. Something flashed behind Ryan’s eyes on impact and a jolt of pain lit him up from forehead to tailbone. He smelled blood, and then he tasted it. A second later, he felt it streaming down his face, but by then, he was airborne, and as he tumbled, he felt what he somehow knew to be Brother Stephen’s jaw nestled in the crook of his elbow. He clamped down on it, turning as they fell. When they hit the floor, Brother Stephen’s head hit first, and then Ryan landed on his shoulder and rolled. Something snapped, the sound making him think that he’d broken his shoulder. Except the pain never came.
Everything happened so quickly. Behind him, his mom screamed, but at a whisper level.
He couldn’t care about that. He needed to prepare for the counterassault. When Brother Stephen got the opportunity to throw a punch—if he really put all of his strength behind it—he’d separate Ryan’s head from his shoulders. He’d already caught a glimpse of the attacker’s power while he was holding back. This time, one of them was going to die.
Ryan scrabbled to his feet and found Brother Stephen where he lay on the floor and he fired a savage kick into what he thought was his head, but he really had no idea. The kick landed firmly, though. And Brother Stephen didn’t even grunt. He must have been knocked unconscious.
Fire flared to Ryan’s right. He whirled to see his mom holding a wooden match high to illuminate the scene. Her face looked pale in the yellow light and tears streaked her face. Her hand shook.
“Are you okay?” Ryan asked.
She just stared at the form on the floor. “He was going . . .” Her voice trailed away.
“I know,” Ryan said. He pivoted on his heel and looked around the boxes and crap that surrounded him to find a lamp. He lifted it off the box closest to his mother’s bed—the one she used as a nightstand—but by the time he got the globe lifted to expose the wick, the match had burned to a nub and Christyne had to light another one.
The wick ignited easily, and the light got even brighter as Ryan lowered the globe, the brightness creating sharply defined, dancing shadows. He swung the lamp to assess the damage done to Brother Stephen.
“Son of a bitch,” Ryan breathed. The attacker lay still on the floor, his dick and his balls hanging out the front of his unbuttoned pants. He shot a look back at his mom, working hard to swallow the anger that welled inside of him. When she looked away, so did he, sorry for the thoughts that had entered his mind.
Holding the lantern out in front, Ryan moved closer to Brother Stephen, and stooped to get closer still. Exposed junk aside, something wasn’t right about the way he was lying on the floor. He seemed too flat—like a balloon version of himself from which maybe an eighth of the air had been released. And his head. It was at an odd angle, an inch or two farther to the side than it should be.
Finally, Ryan saw Brother Stephen’s eyes. They both were open, but the left one just a little more so than the right one.
“Holy shit, Mom,” Ryan breathed. “I think he’s dead.” He turned to look at her. “I think I killed him.”
Christyne brought her hands to her mouth. “Oh, no. Oh no, oh no, oh no . . .”
Ryan hurried across the room, pushed the door shut, and hurried back. “Mom, what are we going to do?” His mind raced. If those assholes came trooping in here again in the morning and they found their buddy—their
brother
—dead, God only knew what would follow. He decided to answer his own question. “We need to get out of here.”
Christyne dismissed it out of hand. “They’ll shoot us.”
“Mom, they’re going to shoot us anyway. They said they were going to do it before, and now they almost
have
to.”
“We need to hide the body,” Christyne said.
“But he’ll start stinking,” Ryan countered. “Especially when they crank that furnace up again in the morning.”
“Maybe he’s just unconscious,” Christyne said.
Ryan rolled his eyes. “Look at his face. Have you ever seen a live person look like that?”
She nodded. “Okay,” she conceded. “Okay, he’s dead. We need to do something with him.”
“We can’t put him outside, or people will find him.” Ryan looked around. “Maybe we can hide him under all these boxes and crap.”
“But what if they come looking for him and find that we hid him?” Christyne thought aloud. “Won’t that just make us look that much worse? Anger them that much more?”
“We killed one of their brothers, Mom,” Ryan argued. “I think they’ll pretty much go off-the-charts pissed when they realize that.” He gave her a hard look. “We need to get out of here. We don’t have a choice anymore.”
She looked across the room. “The door’s unlocked,” she said. “Could it be as easy as that?”
He shook his head. “If we get that far and get caught, it’ll all be over.”
Ryan looked up at the ventilation widow, raising the lantern to get a better look.

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