Age of Blood

41

She felt every bump, turn, and stop. With her wrists and ankles tied, she’d been unable to control herself as she rolled around in the back of what she’d come to call the pain box. She sensed it was probably a truck, but without the benefit of sight, her mind had begun playing tricks on her. Once she’d slammed into a side so hard she’d blacked out. Didn’t they know she was rolling around back there? Weren’t they smart enough to know that she wasn’t supposed to die? After all, how could they get the ransom from her father without proof of life?

She’d seen all the movies. She’d even been to a Secret Service class, preparing her on the possibility of being kidnapped. The instructor, an old agent who’d taken a bullet for President Reagan, had gone into great detail about what to do and what not to do. Antagonizing her captors was one of the things she wasn’t supposed to do.

But for the last God-knows-how-many miles she’d been doing her best to do just that. She realized that her gag kept them from actually hearing her through the metal of the damn box she was in, but that didn’t stop her one bit. She began with an evolutionary postulate regarding their mothers and specific animals from the order of primates, and the probability of offspring occurring as a result of the unlikely mingling. Then she moved on to the idea that being able to fornicate oneself was possibly a good thing, encouraging them over and over to do this, and to enjoy it, and to do it some more. Finally, she succumbed to the tried and true measure of anger, which was to combine both ideas into one, encouraging and hypothesizing what a creature might look like if it was the result of man on beast copulation, with said procreation coming out their collective asses.

And then finally the pain stopped.

The truck slowed, then pulled over to the side of the road.

And for several heavenly minutes, she was still, unmoving, unrolling, basking in her full body bruises, breathing heavily through her gag.

She felt the truck shift as someone got out of the cab. The scrabble of a key in a lock, then the rattle of a handle, then light so blinding that it felt like her eyes were pierced by spikes full of sun. She fought to see past the pain. First there were two figures, then one seemed to remove the head of the other; she heard it bounce wetly past her and rebound off the far wall. The body was placed inside, next to her. She willed herself not to scream behind her gag as the man’s neck, still gushing blood, rested inches from the edge of her peripheral vision.

Then the remaining man pulled her to the door.

“I am here to rescue you,” he said, his English well-spoken but with a Mexican accent. He removed the ties about her ankles and untied her wrists. Then he put his hands on her shoulders. “Tell them thank you for their help.”

She tried to speak, but her voice was dry and cracked. Finally, she managed, “What?”

“You heard me, girl. Tell them the man in the white suit thanks them.”

“Who… who are you?”

“Adios.”

He turned and walked away into the painful light. He was speaking into a cell phone.

“Wait!” she cried. “Where are you going?”

“I have a meeting with your father.”

“Stop—help me. At least tell me where I am.”

He turned back and said, “Do not worry, little burra. Help will soon be here. Rest. Stay. Your heroes will come for you.”

There was a certain finality to his words. But as he started to leave once more, she couldn’t help herself. “What about my father? Will you tell him where I am?”

The man stopped once more. “I most certainly will,” he said with a smile. “Now rest. Help will come soon.”

He took three steps and merged with the light. She tried to see where he was going, but the light was too bright. Still she stared and eventually the brightness dimmed and her vision started to adjust. She was on the side of a road somewhere. Cars and trucks were roaring by. Occasionally a large truck would pass so close that her smaller truck would rock back and forth.

She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting or how many times the truck had rocked, but eventually she felt something roll into her lower back. It stayed there. She knew what it was without looking. She couldn’t move. If the head resting against her back moved, she might just scream.

Then came another truck.

Then came the rocking from side to side.

The head rolled to her left and touched the hand she’d put out to steady herself. She stared at the face of the dead man and it stared back at her. And finally she did scream.