Coffee & Criminals

42. Until The Bitter End

I heard voices even before my eyes opened. Deep, baritone voices with the edge of coldness that I had learned to pick up from even the strangest of strangers. People like that spoke with a dull, dredged voice that curled under skin. Voices like that had no good intentions. Or maybe I was just overcompensating again, like always.

My head was aching. Wait. Correction: everything was aching. Every part of my body, from the roots of my hair to the tips of my toes, hurt. The pain was greatest in shoulder. Before I opened my eyes, I shifted slightly out of instinct to get more comfortable. I got the opposite. A bubble of pain tore through my shoulder like a hurricane and the ground I laid upon was hard but warm and wet. Was I lying in a pool of water?

No. I was lying on a pool of my own blood.

I saw the color when I finally opened my eyes. Blood had a very strange color up close, the dark crimson almost brown against the dreary grey of the cement. I saw the puddle of red against my face, felt the wetness drip down my cheek as I moved again, kicking out uselessly. My movements were languid and slow, like my feet were bound with rope and a thick metal taste lingered in my mouth.

When I glanced down, I saw that they were. Heavy tan nylon rope around my ankles and my wrists. Gaining my senses back, I sat up in a panicked daze. The binds were worse than handcuffs. They were thick and the coarse fibers itched and the pressure they exerted on my skin was enough to leave a rope burn. My movements were limited. I straightened my spine and rested my back against the cold wall, the shock of it all finally numbing me down to a silent and barely malfunctioning human.

I tried to clench my hands into fists but one hand protested heavily. I remembered how Elliot's boot had crushed down on them. The fingers of my left hand were broken. They were stiff and I couldn't bend them, but it didn't hurt. Yet. The shock was blocking the pain from registering inside my brain.

As expected, I tried to get myself free, although I saw little point in trying. One arm was shot with a bullet and the other had a hand with fingers that were cracked like glass and the ropes were tight to the point of it being unbearable, around my wrists and ankles. And I was too weak to try and use my teeth to untie them. 

The room I was in appeared to be some sort of dungeon, a basement-like area of a factory. It was cold and dark and empty, something out of the horror set of a movie. A soft buzzing insistently sounded from somewhere, along with the drip-drip like ticking clocks. 

I wasn't going to freak out. I was going to think this through like the rational human being that I was.

Yeah, right. Screw that. Cue the hysterical sobbing and screaming fits.

But hell if they thought I wasn't going to fight back. I would- even if it cost my life.

The ropes were strong, but they weren't unbreakable. Even fiber had a weakness and I was determined to find it. I didn't know when Ade or Elliot or some other vengeful idiot was going to come busting through that door with a gun but I had to at least try. Wolfe would have wanted me to try. He'd be disappointed if I sat quietly while they planned my execution. I'd picked up several survival skills from him as well. One of the things I learned was that you didn't always need muscle to overcome an obstacle- just intelligence.

My eyes swept around the room. It was large, with a door and a corner that rounded into a small hallway-like thing and then another area, this one filled with large ventilators and heaters and power lines. I was under some kind of warehouse maybe, or perhaps a public building. I looked upward. Giant tubing lines and insulation stared back at me. A single lightbulb was on the ceiling. There were several vents on the walls, about three or four feet off the ground. The small hatch doors were rusted brown. I glanced warily at the door and then forced myself to scoot towards the closest vent.