Collision Course, CH15 (Patreon)

The boxes fight me. The one I rebuilt wants me to continue despite his objection. I don’t need the release, but that box resonates in unison and I want it. He does too. Something else is causing him to attempt to stop this. He will not stop me if I force the issue.

“We can continue this afterward,” he says.

I close my eyes so he won’t be a distraction and retake control of the boxes, silencing all of them. I open them, and I am myself again. I take my hand out of his pants. He resists as I pull one of his legs out from around my waist.

“Let go,” I order. His reaction tells me he knows the pain I will cause him if he doesn’t obey, but it isn’t the incentive it would be for others. It is something else that finally gets him to move his legs. He leans against the bars of a cage and the young woman in it cowers away as far as she can.

I don’t look at him buttoning his jeans. That box shudders under my mental hand. It wants me to look, to touch, to take him. He is amused at the crushed belt buckle that is the result of my near loss of control. I turn and step away.

He isn’t why I am here, no matter what that box wants me to feel.

I replace my K-Bar with one of the many planted in dead men. I try to understand what I watched as I wipe the blood off it. The way Bart moved through the crowd trying to kill him, avoiding the attacks, and killing felt surreal. I have seen people go berserk, lose all sense and fight with blind rage. I have caused that to happen because they are easy to manipulate in that state, turn against their allies.

That was not the state Bart was in.

He was not mindless. He was quite aware of his surrounding. His movements were precise, calculated, surgical. There was no waste in any of his attacks.

He fought well in the hotel room. Showed skill and training, but nothing resembling this. Nothing his opponents did surprised him until I caught his thrown knife.

Of the entire fight, that was the one clumsy move he did. The one time when he didn’t seem aware of what was going on. As the knife flew, he believed I’d fall, like the others, it was clear on his face. He didn’t realize how clumsy it had been. It wasn’t easy to catch, but even I hadn’t, it wouldn’t have been a deadly throw.

I push Bart and what he did out of my mind and look into the cage. Boy, low teens. The next one had a woman in her early twenties, another woman after that, late teens. Boys are in the next two, seven, and early teens.

The next one stops me as I recognize the face, if not the eyes, looking back at me.

I crouch. Denita is curled up in a corner at the back, looking in my direction, but nothing is indicating that she sees me. Her gaze is flat.

A box rattles and my spirits sink. I had warned her father that after months, the odds of getting his daughter back were nearly none. This would be better if she’d been dead. Another box echoes it, and I don’t silence it either.

What kind of monster not only contemplates putting an eight-year-old through what is needed to break them completely in only a few months but then go through with it? Hate is an emotion I rarely allow myself to feel. It is too unpredictable, but I let myself hate these faceless monsters for destroying this child.

I slam the K-Bar in the mechanical lock, twist until the tumblers break, and pull the door open. Her only reaction was a shudder when the knife impacted, but as I open the door, her lifeless eyes are on me.

“Are you a monster?” In contrast to her bruised body, her voice is beautiful, soft, and lyrical. A distant box glows and I wonder if she used to enjoy singing. It feeds the rage, but I can no longer allow myself this luxury. I silence them all. If she notices the change in my expression, it doesn’t show on hers.

“I am. Your father asked me to come find you.” I offer her my hand.

She only looks at it. Lies are possibly all she knows now. They would be the main tool used to break a child, who is still conditioned to trust all that is around them. What did they get her to do with a word of it being the last time? Of being able to leave if she did this one thing? How long did it take for her to stop believing the words and violence to be needed to get her to comply?

I don’t know.

It is one of the rare pieces of knowledge I am happy to never have obtained.

That she moves to place her hand in mine tells me there is someone still there, buried deep. Someone who can still hope, despite all that has been done to her, but that person is no longer a child. Her expression is calculating as she moves. She watches for any sign I will betray her. Maybe for a sign she can turn the tables on me.

I don’t close my hand on hers, nor do I pull. I let her use me to get to her feet, then exit her cage. Only then do I take her in my arms and head for the exit.

“Ben?” Bart calls. He calls again when I don’t stop or acknowledge him.

The box I have started identifying as his rattles and I stop. I still it before turning. He has freed six prisoners, and he is working on another door.

“I could use some… help.” The quiver in his voice says he wants more, and his box reacts to it. I still it. Nothing good will come of me wanting him.

I am in the process of turning away when Denita touches my cheek. “They could use a monster’s help, too.”

A box rattles and more take it up. I close my eyes and try to still all of them.

Children.

“I’ll take Denita to my car and return.” I open my eyes and lock gaze with Bart over my shoulder. “I promise.”

He nods and goes back to breaking the lock on the door. No searching of my gaze, or asking for a form of safety. I said it, and he believed me. Who is the idiot here? Him for believing I’ll return, or me, for intending to return?

Denita presses against me once we are outside, shivering, and it registers that she is naked. I deposit her on the back seat, then cover up with the thick blanket I brought to hide her corpse from view.

“I need you to stay here and remain still. Can you do that?”

She pulls the blanket to his chin, then nods.

“Once I’m done helping Bart, I will be back. I promise.”

She doesn’t believe me. Unlike Bart, she had months here teaching her better. But she has nowhere else to go.

Back inside, I search the dead thugs, collecting keys, then me and Bart use them in the cages until everyone is released.

Fifty-three people. The oldest is twenty-five. They are all broken to varying degrees. The kindest thing for them would be to put them out of their coming misery. That isn’t why I’m here, and from how Bart is agonizing over them, he isn’t that kind.

“You can’t fit them all in your car,” I tell him.

They huddle together, wearing jackets Bart pulled off the bodies, staying as close to us as they can, hoping, needing us to keep them safe, but also terrified of the violence we have demonstrated. Will we unleash it on them?

“They can’t just wander down the road to a police station,” he replies. “Look at them. In this part of the city, they’re going to be picked apart before they make it two blocks.”

“We can’t call the police to pick them up,” I tell him. “Our blood is all over the floor in the building.”

He pulls his phone out and stares at the cracked screen. “I don’t guess you still have your phone?” he asks, not hiding the hope. “That you just turned it off?”

I don’t answer. He is too smart not to know I destroyed it as soon as he left the hotel room. He would do the same once he discovered someone had used his phone to locate him.

No nods his understanding. “I’m pretty sure I saw a tourist thing around here when I drove around, at the back. I’ll go and bring back a bus for them.”

“Non.”

“Ben, it’s the best way to—”

“I will go. You stay here, with them.” I curse my reasoning, not letting him go. His box. Him for not questioning me, for not asking what will keep me from just walking away.

I want to call him an idiot. But I’m the one who stopped him from giving me the perfect opportunity to drive off with Denita.

Denita is awake in the car when I stop by it. She looks at me warily.

“Are you hungry?”

She shakes her head. She must be famished, but how often was that used against her? Using any admission she wanted, needed, something to get her to do one more unmentionable thing? I don’t give her food.

Indebtment is something else that will have been used to break her.

The tour agency Bart thought was behind the storage building is on the east side, on the other side of the street. Unlike him, I paid attention to more than the target building. The gate blocking my way is chain-link, kept close by a padlock that I unlock in under ten seconds. The door to the office takes me thirty. The alarm twelve to circumvent. The lockbox that contains the key to the busses parked on the side of the building takes me twenty-three seconds. Each key is tagged with the license place of the corresponding bus. I take the one for the bus closest to the gate.

In the next room, I find a fridge containing a quarter of a strawberry pie, half a bottle of chocolate milk, two bottles of water, and a container of stale dumplings nothing healthy, but something is better than nothing for Denita at the moment. I can not offer her food without her growing suspicious, but I can arrange it so that she can steal some from me. I put everything in a cardboard box and add a fork and napkins.

I don’t bother locking anything back up once I have driven away with the bus. No one is scheduled to arrive for an hour and a half, according to the schedule posted in the lunchroom, and if the police aren’t here already by then, the missing bus will be too much of an indication something is wrong to bother with locking the place again.

I park it on the side of the road by the entrance to the storage lot so they won’t have to bother maneuvering it out. I put the box on the floors of the back seat. Denita pretends to be asleep, and I grumble under my breath about not needing the extra work of being a goffer on top of rescuer. Then I join Bart.

He hasn’t moved from where I left him, and there is no relief on seeing me. He trusted I’d return.

He is an idiot.

He smiles at the bus. “Alright, everyone! Your ride’s here.” They startle and back away from us, toward the building. Bart motions toward the exit and bus. They look at it but don’t move.

“Get out!” I snarl loudly, threateningly, and step toward them. The panic is silent, but they run for the bus. When I look at Bart, he has a smirk and quizzical expression. The cracks in his box glow and I almost reach for his cheek before I have it under my control again.

“You need to go with them and make sure they get in the bus, instead of running down the street.” He doesn’t move. He no longer cares about them. It’s a situation he considers resolved, and he wants to go back to the situation I represent. His box rattles despite my hold on it, and I puff out my chest. The power I have over him is… dangerous.

It feels so good.

“Go,” I order, and he remembers Benjamin is married and has already told him they wouldn’t happen. There is resignation in his eyes as he turns away, but not defeat. Bart is someone who loves a challenge, even an impossible one.

Possibly especially, an impossible one. As he is rounding up the herd, his box quiets and I can go back to what is left of my task. Out of the trunk, I take two duffel bags—Bart is now in the bus talking to the oldest of the women—and head inside the building. I drop the bags by the door and take one of the containers from it. I sprinkle the contents over the blood on the floor and the bodies, making sure each of the pools are connected. I’m on the third container when someone enters the building.

I turn, hand on my Desert Eagle, ready to shoot the intruder, but stop when I see Bart. His box tries to vibrate out of my hold and I force myself to want him to have left. Cracks in the box glow, and they make a form that suspiciously looks like him. I can’t stop the smile.

“I told them to make it to McDowell, and head West. It’ll take them to the other side of the city before they run out of road.” He nods to the container. “What’s that?”

“Magnesium.”

He whistles. “That’s going to make quite the hole in the concrete when you light it up.”

“And destroy all blood evidence.”

“What’s your plan for the building? I don’t want to leave it standing. They’re just going to clean it up and get things going again.”

“Look in the other duffel.”

He looks up from the bag. “Is that C-4?”

“Semtex.” Since he is here, I will make use of him. “Place a brick every ten feet by the cage’s door. Don’t worry about the wires and caps for now.”

I cover the blood and use what is left of the magnesium to make a line to the exit. Then I take the caps and wires and connect the explosives. Once we are done, the central cells are wired, and the receiver is away from the magnesium.

I ignite it before closing the door and I can already feel the heat through it.

“You need to leave,” I tell Bart, heading for my car. The bus is gone.

“I don’t have anywhere to be, or anything pressing to do,” he replies with a casual smile.

I am not a challenge he can conquer.

But I could conquer him.

I slam a hand on his box, then fix my gaze on his wonderfully blue eyes. I make mine hard, cold. “There is nothing for you here, Bart. You don’t need to stay and watch the destruction of this building. You will know there is nothing left when the news reports on it. You need to leave. The sun is coming up.”

Instead of protesting, he hands me a piece of paper. “My address. Drop by.”

I can take it, have him believe I’ll do so. It would be easy. “No.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Are you telling me you don’t want to finish what we started in there? You’re the one who looked like he had trouble stopping.”

More boxes glow in spite of my will, and I want to agree to what he is offering so badly. “No. I got carried away. I am returning Denita home, then going home myself.”

“To your wife.”

“Oui.” His box begs me to stop lying.

“And your kid.”

“Kids. What we did was amazing, but it can’t happen again.”

“You mean I’m not good enough for you to continue cheating on her with?” there is anger in his voice, understated, but more dangerous for that. Bart is deadly, and he had all of the Ben ID’s information. I can either placate him or destroy it.

Destroying is always the simpler option.

“This has nothing to do with how good you were. I have rules that ensure I survive to continue doing this. I do not get attached. You stole my information. Look through it. See if you find anything showing I have been with the same person twice. I will not risk my life for a dalliance.”

“I can destroy you.”

I am wrong. It is not anger I hear, it is pain.

“It won’t make me come back.” I give into the box’s rattling and speak the truth. “I wish things were different, Bart. I wish I could stay and see what happens between us. I don’t think either one will like what it is, in the end, but I wish I could find out, know for sure. But it can’t happen. If this is enough that you need to destroy my life, my family, that is your decision. But I cannot stay.”

He searches my eyes, my face. He even glances down at my crotch for any sign a part of me is willing to sacrifice everything for him. He doesn’t find it and turns to his car, never looks back, and drives away.

I fight the urge to go to him, soothe the pain I have just caused him, until he is out of sight. Now I can put him out of my mind.

The magnesium has burned all DNA by now. I open the door to the back seat. Denita still pretends to be asleep, but the box has been opened. I pretend not to notice the clumsy attempt at closing it. “Cover your ears. This is going to be loud.”

I put the car between me and the building and flick the detonator. The explosion pushes the car against me, and all I hear for the next minute is ringing. I should have done this as I drove away, but there is a satisfaction in feeling the heat of the blast around you.

Of knowing, without a doubt, that you have won.

My ears still ring when I get back in the car and drive off. A glance in the back seat shows Denita is sleeping for real now, and I am careful as I drive not to wake her.

* * * * *

The house Denita’s father lives in is small, but in a nice neighborhood. The kind of places where children should feel safe, but see none as I drive onto the driveway. I look at the houses as I exit the car. A few curtains quickly close as I look in their direction. Maybe it is due to Denita’s kidnapping, possibly there is something else going on here, but fear is the sense I get.

Denita wakes with a touch, but she doesn’t tense. She has learned it’s best to let whatever is coming happen. Her body now belongs to the men who took her, not her. She relaxes in my arms, more than when I carried her to the car.

Her father is out the door before I have stepped off the driveway. I hand her to him and he holds her tightly. She doesn’t react to his cries, but he’s too busy being happy to notice. That will come later. And it will then make things worse.

It won’t be my problem, I tell myself, but instead of leaving, her dead eyes pull me to follow them inside. I close to the door and stand in the small living room and don’t go further as he disappears with her through another door.

The room had pictures of a little girl everywhere, not recently put on display as a reminder that she exists. They are old, the frames they are in are faded. This is what happens when a father loves his child.

If I let him destroy her, he will never forgive himself.

He returns and hugs me. “I can’t thank you enough.”

I don’t react. I don’t offer the comfort he still seeks.

“I was so scared you’d bring me her body; that she was already dead.”

My lack of reactions makes him pull back in discomfort.

“Your daughter is dead.”

“I don’t understand.” He glances toward Denita’s room, confused.

“Your daughter, the little girl in those pictures. The one that was taken from you. She died.”

“But—” He points to the room.

“That isn’t her.” I could put compassion in my voice, understanding. I could let the appropriate boxes resonate and be gentle, but I am not interested in empathy. This is about explaining to him how things are so will have a chance at not destroying the person who was returned to him.

“You’re not making sense. Who did you bring back if she isn’t my Denita? Why does she look like her? Why bring her here?”

“The body is that of your daughter, but they destroyed who she was. Her spirit. Her soul, if you believe in those things.”

He falls into a chair. “Is she going to get better?”

He still doesn’t understand this new reality.

“There is nothing for her to get better from. There is nothing left. Denita is gone. If you forget that, all you’ll do is make yourself, and her, miserable.”

“How about doctors?” he asks, hopeful.

“They can treat her body, but they aren’t needed. The men who took her didn’t want her appearance to be damaged, so it is all superficial. You don’t want to know what they did to her,” I say as he opens his mouth. “I don’t know the details of what they did, but I know how to go about breaking someone this thoroughly. Learning that will not help you sleep any better.”

“Shrinks? If it’s in her head, they can help, right?” again, the question is filled with hope. I should not be looked at for hope.

“The good ones will tell you to be gentle with her. Not to bring any expectations when interacting with her so you can get to know who this new person is. Be supportive so she can regain her confidence. To be patient. You will never get the girl in those pictures back. It was too late for that by the time you came to me, but you may get someone you can learn to love as your daughter again.”

“How long will that take?”

I shrug. “No one can tell you that. It might never happen. It could be next year. It won’t be within six months. Some never heal.”

He hesitates, but he is now in the trap of believing the more he knows, the better placed he will be to help her. “What happens to those who don’t heal?”

I shrug again. “Some take the broken pieces and make-believe they can fit together. Others end up in hospitals for the rest of their lives. Some shamble around, hiding the cracks from the rest of the world, which doesn’t even want to acknowledge they exist.”

He swallows. “Which kind are you?”

I smile, and he shirks back. “I am none of those. I never tried to fix what was done to me. I embraced how broken I am. I took those shards and sharpened them. I made them claws and used them to rip apart anyone who gets in my way.”

He is afraid now.

Good.

“I wasn’t born a monster; I was made. And I like what I am.”

I turn, leave. My work isn’t done. I didn’t only promise him I’d return his daughter. I promised him I’d make them pay if she was dead. And pay they will.

I look at the time.

And they will within the next sixteen hours.

I trust Asir to have found what I need well before withdrawal kicks in.