Hostage (Big Time Rush fanfic thriller)

Part 3

                “Innocent people,” the man from the concert repeated. He stopped, chuckled, and turned around. “Let me show you the true definition of innocence.” With that, he kicked a door so hard that it crashed into the wall with a reverberating clang.  

                The group was forced to gather around the open doorway, which hid a soft light in the corner. Stephanie found herself looking at a room with machines that hummed and whirred in the background. There was a table of flowers, greeting cards, and a large teddy bear.  And in the middle of the room was a lone stretcher bed. Between the sheets, Stephanie could barely tell if the shape was human.

                Wait – that’s a little kid, Stephanie realized.

                “There isn’t a lot of time. Get James in that chair.” The leader cocked his gun to the visitor’s seat against one wall. “The rest of you – Kendall, Logan, Carlos, not you.” He grabbed Christopher’s shoulder and pulled him back. “Get next to James. Do it quickly.” Nobody moved. “Do it or you die where you stand.”

                Then his entire personality changed. “Hailey, wake up – Daddy’s here,” the man murmured, and everybody looked at him in shock. “Hailey? Can you hear me? It’s Daddy. I’m here, honey. I’m back.”

                His hands curled to hold the child’s hand. He patted her hand over and over, like a baby’s. The girl in the bed looked like a baby. She was so tiny and frail, with a bandage wrapped around the top of her head, and her skin was so pale that it was practically transparent. Tubes hid much of her nose and mouth, and without the blankets Stephanie worried that Hailey only weighed 10 pounds.

                “Look who I brought for you, Hailey. Open your eyes and look,” the man said. “It’s Kendall Schmidt. There’s Logan Henderson, and Carlos Pena. James Maslow is in the chair right over there. See, honey – it’s Big Time Rush. I brought you your dying wish.”

                Logan’s sniff sounded almost like a gasp. Even James managed to look up in his daze.

                “I know how much you wanted to go to the concert tonight, but the doctors couldn’t release you. But you know something? The Big Time Rush boys remembered their promise. Remember last year’s concert, honey? Remember when you told Logan that you wanted him to sing you a special song on their next tour?” The man smiled. “The boys remembered, honey. Everybody’s here. They’re going to sing for you, just like they promised. They left tonight’s concert just to come to the cancer treatment center and sing for you. That’s how special you are.”

                The whole crazy night suddenly made sense. The room was so quiet that only the medical machines could be heard.

                The man fixed his icy blue eyes on the group. “You wouldn’t know anything about it – but this is what real love for a fan looks like,” he snarled. “Some of your fans love you so much that they make it their dying wish to see you. My little girl Hailey is only 6 years old. She’s dying of leukemia, boys. Last year when she was going through chemotherapy, I brought her to your concert right here in Toronto. You looked my little girl in the eye and said that you’d be back to sing for her on your next tour. And then you forgot about her.”

                “That’s not true!” Kendall’s eyes looked glassy with tears. “We have so many fans – we would never—”

                “You forgot about my little Hailey,” the man interrupted, undoing the safety on his gun. “She spent a year wasting away in this special treatment clinic, hoping for another chance to see you. But you were too busy being worshipped by all your fans across the world to care about one little girl in Canada.”

                “Dude, you’re out of control!” Logan shouted. “We visit sick children all the time! We don’t ignore our fans – we do everything we can to come through for them! We get millions of letters and tweets, and it’s not fair that your daughter slipped through the cracks, but you can’t accuse us of being insensitive! That’s not who we are!”

                “Oh, really?” Suddenly the man was on his feet, furious. “Prove it! Convince that little girl who only has days to live—”

                “When the lights go down in the city...”

                Everyone turned to see James weakly singing from his seat. Sweat shined his pallid face, and his eyelids were closed and rimmed in black, indicating significant blood loss. But Stephanie thought that he had never looked more handsome.

                “You’ll be right there shining bright,” Carlos joined in. “You’re a star and the sky’s the limit—”

                “And I’ll be right by your side,” the four boys sang together. “Oh! You know ... you’re not invisible to me ... oh-h, you know-w, you’re not gonna be invisible.”

                Their mini-concert was unexpected ... but everything about that night was unexpected. Some of the people in the room began their day expecting to put on a live show in a foreign country – some of the people in the room woke up expecting to meet their idols. Only a few knew they were going to wake up and kill that day. But one person in the room didn’t know anything – how long she would live, or how long it would take for her to die. She wasn’t conscious to know that her father, though undeniably insane, loved and had given up everything for her. She didn’t know that for one night, the world had stopped to make a small fan girl the star.

                Kendall held Hailey’s hand as he knelt by her side, sang, and cried. Logan and Carlos stood together, and Stephanie watched James belt his strongest notes on the last verse of “Invisible”. When the Big Time Rush boys finished, even the gun men were in silent tears.

                The man raised his head to show tear-filled blue eyes. “Thank you,” he said quietly.

                And at that moment, there was a glorious crash.

                “Toronto Police! Drop your weapons now!”