Captives (20 page)

"Nice day out," Walt said. "Is this my reward for good behavior?"

She didn't try to shield her eyes from the high sun. "When you're in the desert, it's hard to forget how little life owes you."

"Sounds spiritual. When do I get my apology?"

The woman snorted. "For what?"

"I'm not sure. You gave one to everyone else you took."

"I've asked around. She did some talking. They say you're the one who stopped the invasion."

"You wouldn't apologize unless you felt guilty," he said. "But why would you do it if it made you feel that bad?"

She walked between two shrubs, watching the ridges. "Do you think your name's going to draw water with me? That was years ago. The world's moved on."

"Because you
don't
want to."

Liss put her back to him. "Question is, are you still that same man? Or have you gone soft?"

"They've got something over you, don't they?" He ran a hand through his hair. It was greasy, longer than he liked. He had the feeling it would only get worse. "Who is it? Your husband? Feed them new people, or they'll cut his throat?"

"About time to shut up."

"Probably not. The kind of man a woman like you would marry would be the type to get himself killed in captivity. This is something worse. Your children?"

She turned, lifted her right hand above her head. "Do you see the men back at the bunkhouse?"

"The ones with all the guns? Staring at us like you're about to signal the start of a race?"

"As soon as I swing my arm down, it's over."

He went quiet, face buffeted by a breeze that couldn't decide if it was cool or warm. "Tell me you've got another signal for when your arm's just getting tired."

Liss didn't smile. "You spent time in L.A. Do you know the Dead Stars?"

"Never made their acquaintance."

She nodded vaguely, then lowered her hand. Walt's heart roared. No shot came. Two of the men detached from the building and strode through the grass fighting to make a spring comeback. They returned him to his room.

He was held there for days. There was no light except what peeped through the cracks beneath the door and around the mail slot. He was fed oatmeal that smelled suspiciously like the lake. Fortunately, his body resisted any illness it might have carried in its waters. He knew it had been a good idea to drink the water wherever he went.

Between the meals, the changing of his bucket, and the light from the hallway, he could have kept a fairly accurate calendar, if he'd been inclined. He didn't see the point. It could only cause him to dwell on the exact number of days it had been since Carrie had been driven away. When one was too many, the precise count didn't matter.

Other than eating, which he wasn't able to do much of, and sleeping, which he did tons of, he had basically nothing to occupy his time.

He kept himself sane with three tricks. The first was reminding himself that if they weren't killing him, they were probably intending to sell him. And if they were selling him, it would probably be to the same people they'd sold Carrie to. Unless Liss knew better than to risk her trading partners' health by sending Walt off to them. At worst, he'd be sent packing
somewhere
. A somewhere that would presumably be easier to escape from than his stone cell. And he had a name to go after. The Dead Stars. Who, from what Liss had implied, hailed from Los Angeles.

That fucking place. Try as he might, it kept pulling him back. This time, he ought to burn the whole city down. Guarantee it could never reel him in again.

The second trick was a series of increasingly elaborate fantasies about Carrie. Not all of them were sexy ones, either. In fact, after the first week, they tended to be embarrassingly innocent: hikes through the pines outside Monterey. Snorkeling the coasts of the Yucatan. Balloon rides over Los Angeles. Maybe that was what they ought to do once he got out of his internment and she got out of hers—
wander
. Wander like sons of bitches. See more of that sweeping world he'd visited snatches of in his earlier travels. Have fun.

Of course, roving around would mean exposing themselves to more of the provincial violence they were currently wrapped up in. But these days, something as quotidian as eating meat could be a death-defying adventure. Fact was, without medicine, police, dental care, fire departments, and so on, they weren't likely to reach sixty. Might as well get their money's worth before then.

The third trick was working on a way to get out of here in case they chose to hang on to him—or decided to quit feeding him grain and use him to feed the grain instead. A way to go all
Shawshank Redemption
on their ass. He wasn't sure how he was going to accomplish that with a bucket, a spork, a mattress, and four blank walls. Would have to be on watch for the opportunity to steal a tool. And then, once he had it… well, he was still noodling on that one. But if this place was a reservoir, that implied there was an outlet to the farms and towns below. He needed to find it and prepare his breakout. Once he was outside, all he'd have to do was find a log or an old cooler or something and float down the stream. See how the beagles dealt with
that
.

Mostly, though, he spent his incarceration doing nothing. There was nothing more he could do.

Roughly ten days after he'd last spoken to her, Liss summoned him back to the empty field.

"I have news," she said. "The Stars don't care about you."

"I've known that much for a while."

"The Dead Stars, idiot. Dropping your name turned out to be a negative." She raised an eyebrow. "They were afraid you'd cause too much trouble."

"Little do they know I can be defeated by the ancient secret of the lock," he said. "Why are you bothering to tell me this?"

She gazed down at the deep blue lake, then turned away to stare into the treeless ridges. "A few years back, we were part of a larger organization called the Empty Skulls. Very crude bunch. Effective, but their idea of 'strategy' doesn't get more nuanced than 'shoot them if they say no.' When they sent me down here to help open a new franchise, I butted heads with management. Eventually, there was a falling out."

"I heard it was more of a coup."

"All depends on who's telling the story, doesn't it? From my end, it felt more like firing the unimaginative fuckheads who couldn't come up with anything more elegant than bullets. After I took over, killings in the valley decreased by two-thirds."

"I imagine it's hard for people to die in this valley when you've sold them to a bunch of creeps in L.A."

"That wasn't part of the plan." She kept her voice steady, but he could see the effort in her face. "Once things settled down with the Skulls, everything looked good. Keeping things stable required regrettable actions, but they were necessary for lasting peace. I had no regrets. Then, two years ago, on a day a lot like this one, I sent my kids out to play. Ethan and Serah. They never came back."

"The Dead Stars?"

She nodded. "I heard from them a few days later. I was supposed to start sending them people. In exchange, they wouldn't hurt my kids."

"That's as messed up as a mess can get," Walt said. "But you don't strike me as the type to roll over."

"When I went to the drop-off to deliver my first quota, I captured their people. Interrogated them. Their bodies broke before their wills did. When the Dead Stars didn't receive their delivery, they sent me one instead."

"Do I want to know?"

"All that matters is I folded. I couldn't do anything else. As punishment, they added another year to our 'contract.' As of last month, I've got two years down. Two left to go."

"I'm happy to listen, if that's all this is," Walt said. "But at the risk of being an asshole, is there a reason you're telling me this?"

"How did you bring yourself to attack the ship?"

"What else was I going to do? It was either that or watch them finish exterminating us."

"You make it sound so easy." She bared her teeth. "Then again, self-sacrifice
is
easy when all you've got to lose is yourself."

He laughed. "What else is there?"

"You can't even imagine it, can you? It doesn't so much as cross your mind."

"
You're
the one who chose to have kids."

"Serah was born a year before the Panhandler. I was pregnant with Ethan when it hit. If I'd known what was coming, I'd have gone on the pill."

He gazed at the lake twinkling in the sun. "Lucky to keep both of them through the virus, though."

"For a while, I thought I was the luckiest person on earth." She ran her hand through her short blond hair. "If you could trade your life for hers, would you do it?"

"I would," he said after a moment. "But probably because my brain wouldn't truly believe I was going to die until after it happened."

"You know yourself pretty well."

"Happy side effect of going insane and having to find your way back."

That was the end of the talk. On their way back inside, he knelt beside a graying shrub and adjusted the tongue of his laceless shoes, picking out cheat grass seeds and flicking them aside. Liss glanced over her shoulder and walked on. At the front of the building, she beckoned over one of the troopers, then jerked her head at Walt. The man patted him down, removing the finger-sized piece of metal pipe Walt had picked up and tucked in his sock while fiddling with his shoes. Liss gave him a disapproving look.

"Hey, you're the one holding me captive," he said. "I should be mad at
you.
"

Back inside the dimness of his room, he sat on his bed and stared at the line of light peeping below the door. Smart as she was, Liss was being awfully naive. No way the Dead Stars intended to honor the terms of their "contract." If Liss continued to appease them for another two years, once the release date arrived, she'd find it suddenly extended. And then again after that. What incentive did they have to give up their free source of captives? The farmer doesn't strike deals with the horses. Cows don't get contracts. They get milked—or turned into meat.

If Liss were to die, though? Her replacement within Abyss wouldn't have anything to bind them to the deal. They could void it on the spot. Her kids would die, probably, but the type of person to take over a gang like Abyss wouldn't dither over that for longer than three seconds. At most, they would express their anguished concern to their lieutenant, who could then reassure Thoughtful Leader that Serah and Ethan, cute as they were, weren't worth continuing to risk all of Abyss over. And that would be the end of it.

Unless he got Carrie back and could walk away from all of this, he'd have to kill Liss. To break the chain. To make a shitty world a little less shitty. There was no way around it. He didn't think he'd
want
to find a way around it.

Over the next few days, he quit fantasizing about sailing around the world and started fantasizing about killing Liss instead. He didn't think it would be that hard. All he had to do was keep acting like he had been: blabby and docile. He was already inside her lair. Had carved out a certain amount of her trust. He could have jammed that pipe right into her aorta like a rusty straw spitting cherry soda.

The next time she summoned him, it wasn't to the dusty fields. Instead, his minders shepherded him to the dock overlooking the lake. Liss crouched at its end, reaching for but not touching the riffled waters.

"Got a proposal for you," she said.

"Propose away."

"You get back my kids, and I'll get back Carrie."

"Sure thing," he said. "How?"

"They don't want you. But they don't know what you look like. I send you down with a fake assessment. One guaranteed to get you assigned to the heart of the Stars where they're keeping Serah and Ethan."

He hadn't bathed in days and the smell of the lake made him want to dive in fully clothed. "And how do I get Carrie?"

"You don't have to worry about that. Thing is, I don't see a way for you to get them out and survive in the process."

"That's because my survival doesn't matter to you," he said. "I, however, will be significantly more motivated to find a way."

She turned from the lake and squinted up at him. "All you have to worry about is Serah and Ethan. If you get them to me, I swear on their lives I'll bring Carrie home."

"Sounds like there's more than a few details left to work out."

"Before I set anything in motion, I wanted to make sure you meant what you said last week."

"I'll want to hear the plan first," Walt said. "But I don't seem to have a lot of choice, do I?"

He returned to his cell annoyed that his plans had been turned on their ear once again. He supposed that was common when you were a prisoner. A pawn. A poker chip whose only value was to be gambled. He tried to sleep, but for the first time since being captured, he had a hard time dropping off.

Some time later, the door clicked open. He groaned and rolled over, ready to gripe at someone for waking him after he'd finally fallen asleep. Instead, he frowned. Normally when they dragged him outside to meet Liss or dump some water over him, it was mid-day. Right now, the hall outside the door was nearly as dim as his room.

A short man stood in the entry, his dark hair cut severely short, his eyes sharp within his light brown face. "Come with me."

"Liss leave something out of her proposal?" Walt stepped into his laceless shoes. "Can't it wait until morning?"

"Let's go. No chatter."

The man glanced behind them, then led Walt down the hall and out a side door. It was dark out, but it turned out the stars made for a pretty straightforward clock, so long as you kept up with the seasons. Cooped up inside as he'd been, Walt had started to lose touch with that, but judging by Orion, it was the deepest part of the night: two, three, four in the morning. The man headed downhill through the weeds on a parallel track with the road.

Sleepily, Walt hunched within his jacket. "If I'd known you were bringing me on a hike, I would have demanded a thicker coat."

"You talk too much."