Hailey
I was beside myself—very literally, beside myself.
I don’t know exactly how it happened; but there I was, “Hailey the see-through doppelganger”, standing next to my pale, unconscious, body which was sprawled out on the slaughterhouse floor. I’d never believed in spirits, and I’d never believed in ghosts, at least, that’s what I thought was the case until the shock of Rusty’s death turned me transparent.
The closest thing I’d ever felt to an out of body experience was falling asleep in biology. My sudden, unexpected transformation into “Hailey the friendly semi-ghost”, was shocking to say the least, so naturally, I was a little freaked out. Had I been in my actual body, I would have had a large-scale panic attack; but, I wasn’t, so physically blowing a gasket was on hold for the time being.
“Spirit” me was strangely calm, eerily calm—one of the few fantastic side effects of being “ethereally detached”. I looked over at my actual body with the kind of tragic pessimism that police officers do when they file through pictures of deceased kidnapping victims.
I wondered if I would die before the day was out—if Liam would put eighteen years to rest with a stolen gun or dip me in a vat of battery acid so my parents would have to bury me in a beaker.
Maybe he’d stab me, strangle me, or leave me in a field where the German Shepherds would have to sniff me out. Either way, my odds of getting back home in one piece were slimming by the hour.
I didn’t know if God could hear me where I was, or if the prayers of missing people went missing along with them; but if He could, there were miles between my mouth and His ear. Still, I hoped he was listening. What I needed was a loophole, but I wasn’t sure where I’d find it.
Rusty’s death was doing a Broadway musical number on my sanity, not to mention shredding my nerves into frayed confetti. The day’s circumstances had turned me into a bleeding, sweating, half-crazed mess, who was stuck in a madhouse with The Brothers Grim.
While “spirit” me was flipping through morbid outcomes like movie rentals on Netflix, “actual” me was starting to look pretty terrible—my armpits were practically peeing themselves and leaving lukewarm sweat stains on my t-shirt. Sexy.
My feet started tingling, and as far as I knew, spirits weren’t supposed to feel much of anything, so I’d either crossed over, or was seconds away from coming to. I kept my fingers crossed for the former. Heaven seemed a nicer alternative to waking up sprawled out on a rotting wooden floor.
The electrical fireworks in my feet suddenly spread to my ankles, politely telling the rest of my body that it was time to come back inside from spiritual recess and deal with reality—as awful as it was.
Pins and needles crept up the back of my calves, washed over my thighs, and spurted out at the top of my spinal chord. My nervous system fired a few warning shots across my body, unpleasantly reminding me of how much pain I was in before I’d gone into shock.
As my ears tuned the world back in, I heard Caleb shouting at someone loud enough to steal my attention. When I opened my eyes to see who it was, everything within twenty feet of me looked like shapeless smudges on a windshield; but I knew there was someone else in the room—someone who didn’t want me immediately aware of their presence.
I heard heavy, hurried footsteps headed towards the slaughterhouse door, and a final muffled exchange between the unnamed stranger and Caleb before the room settled back into silence. I blinked until the world blurred into focus and found Caleb sitting directly across from me. We were alone and the sudden solitude was unnerving.
“Get up.”
His voice sounded harsher than any other time I’d recalled hearing it. His eyes were wild—rabidly darting back and forth between the slaughterhouse door and the place where I was sitting in front of him.
Before I could respond to what he’d asked, a car bomb of an explosion went off in the back of my head. I reached back to touch the place where the pain was radiating from and felt the beginnings of a large bump and a nasty migraine on their merry way.
I must have hit the ground outright when I’d passed out earlier—and from the looks of it, Caleb hadn’t done much to stop me from falling. I don’t know why I’d expected him to act any differently, but some portion of me had hoped he would’ve at least tried to keep me from accidentally maiming myself.
At the station, he seemed relatively concerned about my well-being, but now that he was back in his own world, he was becoming progressively indifferent. His sudden distance was disturbing.
I glanced over at him as I tried to sit up, feeling about as self-conscious as an elephant walking on eggshells, and hoped to catch some light in his eyes. He wasn’t looking at me. His attention was fixed on the front door where Rusty’s blood was seeping into the slaughterhouse from the outside.
I thought of saying something, but there was nothing for me to say. Caleb had been dead quiet since I’d heard him shouting at the stranger earlier. I couldn’t make out which of his brothers was in the room, nor was I able to catch a word of their conversation; but Caleb sounded exasperated, and hadn’t quite seemed himself since.
He was sitting on his heels just a few feet away from me, balancing all of his weight on the balls of his feet like he was waiting for something. For what—I didn’t know, and didn’t want to. From where I was standing, I caught sight of a ray of sunlight refracting through a single tear skimming the surface of his face.
Caleb was crying silently to himself, like he was possessed with an unspoken grief, too weighty to voice. I inched towards him, letting pity and ignorance get the best of me, paying no mind to the slow changes in his demeanor as I approached.
I promised myself from the moment he’d forced me on the bus to Manassas that I’d never let him scare me, that I wouldn’t let him have an inch of control when it came to keeping my cool. But at that moment, in the middle of an otherwise beautiful summer afternoon, he terrified me— and no self-made promise could make a difference in that fear.
“Caleb-”
My voice broke against my vocal chords and spattered out of my mouth in raspy fragments.
He didn’t answer me.
I stepped closer to him again and gingerly reached out to place my hand on his shoulder, closing the distance between us. I didn’t know if it was appropriate for me to try to comfort him, but commonsense aside, I wanted to—regardless of the risk.
The second my fingers grazed his collarbones, he shot up and whipped around to face me, grabbing my wrist so tightly I thought he’d break it from the pressure alone.
Caleb’s eyes were wilder than I’d ever seen them, burning cobalt with a kind of rage I didn’t think he was capable of. Frantic, I tore my wrist out of his grasp and pushed him as hard as I could, trying to keep him at an arms length; but, he charged forward, backing me into the bunks lining the walls behind me.
My calves struck the bottom beam of the lower bunk and my knees buckled, threatening to give out entirely. Caleb latched on to my shoulders and locked his elbows, trying to stiff-arm me down onto his bed. Desperate to break away from him, I reached up and tore at his face with my nails, leaving three raw and bleeding scratches along the length of his cheek.
He stumbled backwards, grabbing his face and mumbling curse words I couldn’t understand, giving me a few seconds to sprint towards the door. As I ran, I heard him dragging the legs of what sounded like a footstool across the floor behind me, but before I could turn back to see what he was doing, he hurled it straight into my ankles, sending me reeling.
I hit the ground so hard that the impact reverberated through my teeth. Sliding against the wood floor, the splintered beams ripped right through the skin on both of my knees, leaving gashes as big as quarters just below the caps.
The slaughterhouse door was within a few feet of me, and I’d be dammed if I didn’t make it outside. Cillian and Marcus were nowhere in sight, and I figured if I could get out the door I could make a break for it. I had no idea what I’d done to set Caleb on the warpath to attack me, but I had to escape before he had a chance to stop me again.
Just as I tried getting to my feet, Caleb bore his knees right into the center of my back and slammed me straight down onto the floor a second time. I rolled over onto my back underneath him and tried to stop him from pushing all of his weight down on top of me.
He slapped both of my hands aside and slid his fingers around my neck, choking off what little breath I had left. I pushed frantically against his arms, attempting to relieve the pressure he was pressing down on my airways.
I pleaded him to stop, searching his eyes for any sign of civility left in them, but he refused to look at me. I knew I didn’t have enough strength left to keep resisting him; and the harder he pushed, the less fight I had to keep myself breathing.
“That’s enough Caleb!”
Cillian was standing in the doorway with a sizable amount of wire cable hanging over his shoulders. Caleb unlatched his hands from around my neck, and I gasped in a lungful of air, struggling to get my wind back between tears.
“Did you see what you wanted?”
Caleb gazed up at his brother, breathless and imploring, like he was seeking approval for what he’d done. Cillian tossed him the bundle of cable and a roll of duct tape; and Caleb sat me up, wound them around me, and slapped a length of tape over my mouth to keep me from screaming.
“I saw what I needed to. You had me worried earlier. Back in front of Rusty you seemed a little too serious about that tramp. We can’t have that ya’ know.”
Caleb’s eyes flickered back to normal just in time for me to catch what looked like embarrassment scamper across his face.
“I didn’t know what else to do. The girlfriend act was the most believable thing I could think of.”
Caleb’s eyes quickly found their way to the floor. Cillian knew he was lying.
“I hope for your sake, Caleb, that that’s all it was.”
“Come on, Cillian-”
“Do you know why I asked you to rough her up earlier, Cal? Because she needs to understand that you’re the boss in this house—not her boyfriend. That mouth of hers nearly landed the lot of us in prison, and all you did was stand there and watch while she yapped Rusty into an early grave!”
Caleb shot his arms out, snatched Cillian by the collar and dug his fingers hard into his brother’s t-shirt.
“Not another word, Cillian. I don’t want to hear anything else out of your mouth about that.”
Cillian brushed his brother’s hands away.
“Suit yourself, kiddo. Just try not to make anymore mistakes at our family’s expense, alright?”
Caleb’s hands fell to his sides.
“I won’t. I’ll swear on whatever you want just to prove it.”
“Swear on your life, then. If you break your word, I’ll kill ye’ for it. Deal?”
Cillian latched on to Caleb’s hand, tight enough to drain the blood from it. Cillian couldn’t have been older than Caleb by more than a year or two, but he seemed to take extreme pleasure in what little power that provided him.
Caleb snatched his hand away, ignoring his brother’s attempts at intimidation, and picked me up off of the ground, pulling the wires tight enough to cut off my circulation.
“Forget it. We’ve got other things to worry about. What should I do with her for the time being?“ Caleb asked, piquing his brother’s interest.
“Whatever you want I suppose, just tell me when you want me to leave the room!” Cillian broke out into a fit of laughter that frightened me badly enough to make the hair on my neck stand on end. His laugh was closer to a raspy cackle than anything else.
Cillian was impish, far less physically terrifying than Liam, but equally as sinister. Between laughs he’d occasionally glance down at me, his eyes gleaming pallid blue in the day light..
Caleb fell silent, suddenly seeming a victim to his own reservations. Cillian’s jeering was stirring up a storm beneath his surface. Earlier, I would have pitied him, but there was nothing in the way of pity left in me—there was nothing left in me at all, save anger and fear.
“You’re a Judas after your own heart Caleb. Don’t worry yourself to pieces. As long as she’s kept in her place, you’re alright by me. Toss her in the cold store for the time being. We need Marcus back before we can do anything else.”
Caleb pulled me off of the ground by the cables, urging me towards a locked metal room in the back of the slaughterhouse.
As the wires around me tightened, my adrenaline began spilling into my bloodstream. I didn’t want to be thrown into a place where I'd be alone with the ghosts of animal corpses. I let all my weight hang dead in his grip.
I would make him drag me—keep my heels firm against the floor until he’d be forced to carry me, cursing and spitting, into the meat-hooked room. I’d be no different than the livestock who fought and lost their lives here. I’d scratch, and curse, and defy, the men who’d trapped me.
Death pervaded this room—it lurked in old dried bloodstains on the floor and danced around the rusted killing machines lying unused in the darker corners of the house. I’d given my blood to this poisoned place, just as the cows and chickens and pigs had before me. But unlike the animals, I would survive. I’d find my way out, and run when given the chance.
"She won't move Cillian."
Caleb struggled to get me to step an inch further from where I was standing. I wasn’t going to be hauled away so easily. Cillian lost himself in another fit of laughter, and Caleb's face flushed red.
"You've gotta learn how to handle a woman Caleb or you'll disappoint down the road."
Cillian moved Caleb aside, picked me clear up off the floor, and slung me over his shoulder. I kicked as hard as I could manage, thrashing my knees around like a madwoman, hoping to inhibit him as best I could.
“Here’s a lesson Caleb. For jumpy girls like this one, lift her up so her diaphragm rests right on top of the rounded part of yer' shoulder and-"
A hard jab from Cillian’s shoulder blade spilled the air right out of my lungs. I stared out at Caleb while he watched as I choked, sputtered, and blued in the face. His expression was nearly unintelligible, but I was getting sharper at reading the subtext beneath his furrows.
He was stuck somewhere between concern, and forced indifference. As my vision dimmed, I locked my bloodshot, bulging eyes with Caleb's and watched his conscience betray him. Guilt was lingering just below the surface of the chipping veneer he'd put on to appease Cillian. I cracked a smile under the duct tape.
I’d found my loophole.