ＮＯＡＨ
TIME IS a monster. It holds you and eats you up from inside out. Biting and stinging, like a thousand bees on your body, their buzz replaced with a set of questions, nagging and screaming in your head.
It started after I ended the call with a group of bikers.
A woman like the one on the TV, they said.
‟Her name is Amelia. Amelia Wilfred.” That’s what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t. My mouth wouldn’t form any words and my head went blank. I had got many calls claiming they had found her many times before, from people who were mistaken, to people who were looking for the prize. However, I almost know these ones have her. The location they’ve given us isn’t too far from the one we tracked from her call.
It really can be her.
I may be on my way to see her right now. After all this time, all this worry, it can finally end.
‟Can’t you go faster?”
‟My God, Noah, if you ask me one more time I will kick you out of the car so you can feel how fast I really am going,” David mumbles.
‟Maybe if you’d just let me drive I’d-”
‟We’re here,” David interrupts and my heart drops. Swallowing my words, I look through the window at the two bikers with their hands folded. They look heavy with sand all over their faces and clothes. Where is she? I scramble off the car and stride to them.
‟Where is she?”
‟The prize?” one of them says, but the other pushes him out of my way, revealing a woman who stops drinking water the moment she notices me.
For a second I do not recognize her. Her face is covered with bruises and dried blood, clothes torn and muddied, but it is her. Leah is alive and only a step away from me. I take her into my arms, willing her to be reality and not just my mind again. And she is. Real. Tears welding up, I stroke her hair, pulling her further into my body, because she will disappear if I ever let go.
‟Let go of me!” She cries pushing me away, her hands weak and shaky. She is not looking at me, holding herself and stepping back.
‟What’s wrong?” I remove the hair off her face getting closer again, trying to hide her from the bikers, trying to provide a sense of a safety that has been long gone for her.
‟Don’t touch me!”
Dumbfounded I step back, as if I burnt my hands, feeling the stinging fire of it. My heart is beating out of my chest, screaming her name, mind fogged with a thousand questions.
‟Don’t touch me.” She shrinks back, now crying.
‟What? Leah, it’s me,” I say. Something might be in her eye, or in the haste she did not get to notice my face, too paranoid to distinguish my voice. Right?
She looks up at me frowning. ‟I don’t know who you are,” she growls. ‟Back off.”
Everything around me fades. The woman in front of me is not Leah. She is not my Amelia. She has her face, her hair, her eyes, but those very eyes are sending daggers my way, in a manner Leah has never done to me before. Amelia, for some reason, does not know me. I will not believe it, it must not be true.
‟Ma’am, I’m Detective Andrews. I’m in charge of your case,” David steps forward raising his badge.
I almost reach out for him, but my body won't move. Why is he talking to her like a stranger? He can not be believing this.
‟Do you not recognize this man?”
‟No.”
Everything around me spins round and I can not catch up. My chest stings and the tips of my fingers are tingling, I need to wake up from this long long nightmare.
‟Can you try?”
‟Am I supposed to?” She wipes away tears that have been building up. ‟I don’t know who he is,” her voice breaks and she cries. ‟I don’t know who I am,”
It’s silent. She keeps repeating how she does not know anything, but I can hardly hear her anymore. The impossibility yet the possibility of this is choking me. How? The burning heat of the desert is shooting through my face, burning my skin, eating away all the oxygen. Does she not remember? Anything?
David, being so professional at maintaining his shock that I want to punch him, steps forward and asks; ‟Do you know where you were kept?”
‟A wooden hut. I heard the police this morning, I screamed, but I-” She sobs. ‟They didn’t hear me. I was so scared! I thought- I thought that was it.” She shivers in the burning heat of the sun.
David looks back at me, I give him my angriest expression feeling my blood boil. I told you. We could have saved her earlier.
My hands ball into fists, jaw clenched. ‟Get in the car,” I mumble assisting Leah into the car, then, giving the bikers their cheque and thanking them, I get into the driver seat.
David gets in. ‟We need to get her to the hospital,” he says calling back up.
I look back at Leah. ‟It won’t take too long, I promise,” I say and drive back through the desert.
‟What are you doing?” David snaps.
‟Don’t ask if you already know the answer.”
David sighs. ‟We're not supposed to do this, but I want this as much as you do, we better be quick with it, though, I called backup.”
‟By the time your little friends arrive, we'll be gone,” I mumble speeding up.
We are soon in front of the hut. ‟Stay with Leah,” Getting off, I slam the door. The sound of my boiling blood overrides David’s pleas to slow down and think first when I spot the bald man getting out of the hut, looking as pale as a ghost as if only finding out now that she is gone. I pull his shoulder and flash my fist into his face. He stumbles back and puts a hand on his face before realizing what happened.
‟What the fuck?” he shouts.
‟You had her!” I charge at him, landing another punch on his face, receiving a vibrating pain through my knuckles.
‟You again? Didn’t your friend shut you up already?” He wipes blood off his lips.
I pull him from his shirt. ‟She’s in the car,” I taunt kicking him in the stomach.
The heavy man flounders and approaches me, yielding his fist back and shooting it forward. I dodge it, grabbing him again by the shoulder and throwing multiple punches on his side.
I stand and ready another hit when I feel knuckles crashing onto my face. I founder and before I balance myself, I am pushed till my back slams against the hut’s wall, only to send a high kick making him miss his footing.
‟Freeze!” David shouts, gun aimed at the man. ‟Hands over your head!”
The man does. “Where were you the past five minutes?” he shouts.
But I dive in and pound my fist on his face. Over and over, the man having no time to collect his senses making him trip and fall with a heavy thud.
“Silently cheering for him,” David says pointing at me.
I sit on the man and pound my knuckles on the his face. Fighting David as he tries to pull me off.
“Noah, I know you want to kill him, I want that too, but we need him alive,” he says.
The man's face shapes around my knuckles like mold, blood painting them and scattering onto my shirt. For every hour she was held captive, for every bruise evident on her body, for all the emotional and physical scars that are going to linger, for all the pain she has to go through to heal.
For her forgetting.
‟Get off!” David finally manages to pull me off and into my senses making me stand away from the bloodied unconscious man. ‟Jesus, you’re heavy,” David mumbles squatting by the man and handcuffing him. “I almost feel sorry for stopping you, I know he deserves more, but, oh well, protocol,” he says sending a glance at me before standing up. “Protocol won't notice this, though,” he says shooting a kick at the man's side.
I wipe my lips with the back of my hand and walk to him before he stops me raising his hand. “No. You got your share,” he says and sighs. “Okay. Now we only need to move him into the car.”
I look at the large man and sigh. David grabs his feet and I his head and he drags him till we reach the car where I accidentally drop his head making David send me a death glare. “I can't investigate a retard, he already looks like one, he doesn't need anymore hits on his head.”
‟It just slipped.” I raise my hands in surrender.
David looks at me then back at the man, “Well you did bloody him enough to be slippery.” He opens the backseat door and grabs the man’s legs again.
‟No! Not beside her!” I pretend not to notice her trembling figure and scowl at David. ‟Put him in the front, I’ll be in the back instead.”
‟Sorry, out of habit- Wait so he’ll be beside me then?” he asks, betrayed.
‟Yes.” I get in beside Leah as she watches both of us.
“What if he wakes up? I won’t be able to do anything with the wheel in hand.” David rests his hands on his hips. “Let’s just get Leah in front and you two in the ba-” He stops when I shoot him a glare.
I want to talk to her, the only way I can do that right now is to be close to her.
I avert my eyes from Leah back onto David. “You don’t have anything to tie him with?”
“There’s rope. Downstairs,” Leah mumbles more to herself than to us.
I look at her, relishing every vibration of her voice. Real and close by. Her eyes, one of them bruised, telling painful stories the days that passed. Before all this, I never had a greater fear of the unknown. The one even though of which her eyes are telling so much, I still know nothing.
“I’ll go get it.” I mumble leaving the car.
“At least help me put him in.” David says in disbelief as he stuffs the man into the car.
‟Wait!” Leah cries and I freeze. ‟The other guy is down there too.”
“Other one?” David asks, she nods. “There were two?” He stops in place.
“Yes. Another one, slim and-”
“The kid?” I turn at her.
“What kid? There was no kid! He was old, maybe in his forties.”
I watch her as she eagerly described the man. Her hair messy and flying around her face. Swollen and purple eye barely able to see through. Her lip is cut and dry with blood and her face has hints of purples and greens. Dark dried layer of blood trails down her head, just as dry tears pass through the dirt on her face and her eye bags prove that she hasn’t slept for years.
Nodding I step further towards the hut. ‟I can take him,” I say running in, he doesn’t sound like much of an opponent; barely skin on bones.