Cold Hell - 29. Chapter 28

I was tied to a chair in a dark room. The only light came from the flashlight held in my face. Juan stood just feet away, his face dark with rage. Cookie and Tinkerbell stood in the background. My head ached. Blood covered the side of my face from where Juan had hit me, already crusted over.

"How did you know they were coming? Who did you tell?" Juan's voice was low and dangerous.

Why? Why was he doing this to me? I had given him the data at my own expense. Was that not proof enough he could trust me? It hurt the way he looked at me. It was like looking into the eyes of a completely different person. "I didn't call the cops."

"Then how did they know where to find us? You ran after me and told me not to run towards the door."

"I don't know how they found us." My voice trembled. My eyes stone with tears. His anger washed through me like fire, but worse was the sting of betrayal and hurt he felt. I tried to shift in my seat. The rope had been knotted around my wrists so tight it bit into my flesh.

I glared at him, suddenly furious with myself. "I saved your life you stupid fuck…"

His fist crashed against my face, followed by the sound of crunching bone. My face bounced off the back of the chair. For a moment everything was black; my ears rang. I could feel blood flooding into my open mouth, warm and tasting like copper.

"Come on, don't do this, man." Tinkerbell's voice, pleading. "Why did he give us the data we need if he was going to call the cops?"

I shook my head, trying to clear the disorientation. "Because he's fucking paranoid, Tink. He's got to find someone to blame for everything else going to shit. I knew because I had a premonition. I get these feelings sometimes, when something bad is getting ready to happen." I continued to glare at him. I was getting a perfect view of the person he truly was. He was not the person he had led me to believe.

"What are you saying, that you're psychic?" Juan's face was scrunched in disbelief.

"Something like that. "

He laughed darkly. "If you believe that then you're crazy."

"Don't believe me? All you have to do is take my hand. I'll show you." Maybe it was the tone of my voice or the look in my eye, but for a moment he looks doubtful.

He scowled, coming around the back of the chair. He pulled out his handgun and pressed the muzzle against the back of my head. "You better not try to do anything funny or I swear to God, I'll blow your fucking brains out."

I felt his fingers touch mine, warm and slightly calloused. I wrapped my fingers around his, remembering the night of my eighteenth birthday, the transference that had transpired between my mother and I. How she had shown me the fear and the pain and the madness she felt; how small and insubstantial she’d felt in a small universe. You want proof, I thought, teeth gritted. Here’s your proof.

I gathered all my thoughts, ordered them the best way I could, like a movie, and pushed them into Juan as hard as I could. I felt Juan hiss, felt him try to pull away, but I dug my fingers into his flesh as hard as I could. I want you to see, I told him, speaking through my thoughts. You think my life is so privileged - you think it’s so great to be me. Let me show you.

No, he begged me. I could hear the fear in his voice. Please -

I showed him the loneliness I’d felt my entire life, the love I’d yearned from my father and never received, the weight of his expectations. I showed him what it had felt to watch my mother slowly wither away as the madness ate at her, the fear that one day I could very well go through the same thing.

I’m sorry, he said, trying to pull himself free again. I could hear him sobbing. I’m sorry I hit you -

Tinkerbell and Cookie were looking at me with wide eyes, their bodies tense. Juan was sputtering. Saliva drained from his trembling lips.

“What are you doing to him?” Cookie said. She took a step towards me.

“Step back,” I warned her. ”You touch me and I swear to God, I’ll turn him into a vegetable.”

Cookie must have believed me because she stepped back until she was resting up against the wall.

Speaking through our connection, I said to Juan, You’re not sorry. You’re just afraid. You should be. I can make you feel things you never imagined feeling. I can drive you insane. You ever fucking hit me again and I’ll make you wish you were dead. Do you understand?

Yes, yes, just make it stop -

I released his hand. He stepped back, sobbing.

“Do you believe me now?” I spat. My nose burned.

He nodded. “Yes.”

“Cut me loose.”

He pulled a knife out from his jacket pocket. The rope tightened against my flesh as he sawed up and down. A second later the rope fell away. I rose to my feet. Tremors passed through my body as I looked around the dark room. It appeared we were in some sort of basement. A flight of wooden steps led up to a door. Without waiting to see what the others would do, I climbed up the steps. If they wanted to kill me, then let them kill me. Either way I’d had enough of the situation.

The door opened easily enough. I stepped through into a darkened hallway. The headlights of a passing car illuminated my surroundings. The house I stood in looked like it had been empty for quite some time; the air smelled of dust, the floorboards beneath my feet covered in dust. The front door was right there, just feet away. All I had to do was walk through it, then I was free, I would catch a cab and go home…

My hand was on the knob when the basement door flew open. “Stop!” Tink shouted, running towards me. “You can’t go out there!”

“The fuck I can’t,” I snapped. “I’m done with this.”

He slammed the door shut. “You don’t understand. The authorities are looking for us. They’ll have seen you at the warehouse.” Movement shifted behind him as Juan and Cookie closed the basement door behind them. Juan glanced at me morosely, then looked away. Somehow he seemed to have shrunk, as if I’d stolen something vital from him. Maybe I had. Maybe I’d shown him too much. I wondered what would have happened if the transference had gone on longer - would there have been consequences? It occurred to me for the first time I could use it as a weapon.

“What are you going to do if I were to leave?” I demanded. “Are you going to break something else? Are you going to shoot me?”

Tinkerbell gulped uncomfortably, and looked to Juan. Juan had knelt down on the wooden floor, staring down at his knees. “Tink,” he said without looking up, “get on your computer and see if you can find us a way out of here. Cookie, check Danni’s nose.”

Cookie obediently crossed the room to me. She reached out to touch my forehead. I stepped around her. ”Stay the fuck away from me. I want to go home.”

“You can’t,” she said gently. “You’re stuck with us now.”

Barbed threads of panic began to wind their way through me. “What do you mean I’m stuck with you?”

The softening of her face and the look of pity and fear in Cookie’s eyes were all somehow worse than what she’d just told me. “You’re a fugitive.”

You’re a fugitive - you’re a fugitive - you’re a fugitive. Her words brought the reality of my predicament to full focus. I was an enemy of the law. I’d traded in the only life I’d ever known for this little ragtag group. I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor. I felt completely numb. My mind started and stopped like the overwhelmed processor of a computer, unable to compute and break down the information it was receiving.

In the end I only had myself to blame; but there was only one person I wanted to take my rage and terror out on so I looked at him, lips trembling. “Do you know what this has cost me? Do you know what I’ve given up just now? And all you can do is sit there looking like a stupid little boy. Fuck you...Fuck you.” I gritted my teeth. My fists were curled so tight the nails bit into my skin. It was everything I could do to keep from launching myself at him in blind rage. “I fucking hate you...”

I could feel his shame building for getting his team into this mess, for bringing me into it, and for hurting me. I wanted him to feel it - I wanted it to haunt him.

Tinkerbell looked up from the small portable laptop in his lab; his face was lit by the blue-green glow emanating from the screen. “I messaged Ryker. He just answered back. He’s transferring us to Mexico.”

For the third time Juan’s face shifted, from resignation to shock. “Why Mexico?”

Tink shrugged his shoulders. “He’s not sure. He probably wants us to focus on another mission until things calm down again. Like I said, he’s not giving us information.” He glanced at me. “But he wants us to take Danni with us.”

“Why?” Cookie asked.

“Says at this point he could be a valuable asset. After all he was able to get the data we needed from Aamodt Corp.”

They were talking about me as if I wasn’t here. Great. Thanks to my being psychic I’d totally isolated myself. And now I had to go to Mexico with them. There was no telling what would happen when we got there.

The idea of going to Mexico terrified me. It wasn’t a place most people wanted to go to. The country had been degrading steadily for the last two centuries. Its people lived in terror, never knowing what was going to happen from one moment to the next. In the twenty-first century a wall had been erected between the United States and Mexico to keep the criminal activity in Mexico from bleeding into the United States. For the most part it kept everything contained but immigrants and criminals were still finding ways to get through.

Not only was I a fugitive, but I would be a prisoner and a terrorist as well. I would have no choice but to comply with Juan’s group and this Ryker. My moral compass had slimmed down to only one goal: My own personal survival.

“When do we leave?” Juan asked.

“We’re to meet a contact here at the pier in Roc City. He’ll be here in three days. Until then we lay low and hope the authorities don’t find us.”

“Fuck.” Cookie laughed, not in humor but in fear I think. “This is going to be fun.”

…

I can barely describe what the next few days were like or how I felt. To say stuck in a dream doesn’t quite cut it. In another reality might be closer; a reality that was completely separate from my own, a reality in which things had gone terribly wrong.

For three days we stayed inside, not speaking. A dank, oppressive silence had stretched throughout the house. I had to sink deep into my mind to keep from going insane. I would tell myself maybe going to Mexico wouldn’t be so bad. While I was well traveled, I hadn’t yet been outside the United States. I had nothing but time to feel guilty and hate myself for the choices I’d made. No one but Juan ventured out, and he only did it to get food. Most of the food we ate was canned, heated up by a small portable stove. At night I slept on the floor. Tink and Cookie would offer me blankets to try and make it more comfortable but I refused - I wanted to show them I wasn’t going to give in, that I was more than capable of enduring the situation. And I wanted to make them feel guilty for distrusting me.

Juan continued not speaking to me - as if pretending I wasn’t there. I was grateful for the distance, because if he had spoken to me I would have said some very unkind things in response. My nose hurt, sometimes more sometimes not at all. Mostly it would just ache. Every time it did I would use it as an excuse to keep being angry at Juan. To keep hating him. It was my hate and rage that kept me going, and it would be my source of energy for the next two years.

We left on the third night, taking a bus to the pier. We had to wear our face scramblers - that’s what I had begun to think of them as; I know it’s a ridiculous name but I simply couldn’t think of another - and stick to the back, where it was the most packed. We got off a few blocks away from the pier, another rundown area of the city. Most of the buildings had been abandoned for decades, rotting from the inside out. This side of town belonged to the homeless and the forgotten, the souls the world had forgotten about - they were almost as undesirable as the criminals exiled to the penal colony on Planet Redemption.

Those lost souls could be seen wandering the trash-filled streets now, their faces streaked with dirt, their clothes darkened by dust and filth. None of them gave our group a second glance. With my oily hair and crooked nose and sweaty body, I passed for one of them. The only relief came from the salty gusts of wind coming in from the Atlantic.

We reached the docks. The ships anchored to the port looked as if they had been there for ages, listing lazily in the frothing water. Algae grew up the sides. Only one ship looked newer, like it hadn’t been aged. An Asian-looking man dressed in dark nondescript clothing stood over by the docks, marked by the burning ember of the cigarette he held in his fingers. He watched us approach without expression.

Juan addressed him by name. “Cypher.”

“Juan.”

They clasped hands in greeting. Cypher made the same gesture with Cookie and Tink. He just skimmed over me before looking back at Juan. “This place looks like a shithole.”

“Not as bad as the shithole we’re heading to.” Juan said this casually and his face revealed nothing but I could feel the fear as if it seeped from his pores.

“Well I got the boat. It’s going to take a couple of days and I don’t want to get held up by patrols on the water.” He looked at me again. “Now I recognize him. That’s Danni Aamodt V. How did you get him involved…?”

“Just something we picked up along the way,” said Juan.