Flesh Worn Stone (2 page)

“It was you,” the girl said, “outside of Club One on Richmond…you…the van…”

“Club One?” John interrupted, “in Houston?”

The girl nodded agreement. “He was there.”

“I’ve never been to that club,” the big man said much more calmly than Steven would have thought. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It was you. You bought us both drinks…danced with us…then outside you…you had a mask on then, but I know it was you. I could smell your cheap ass Drakar cologne.”

The hits resumed until Hussein, as gently as he could, pulled the girl back. “Ma’am, what is it you think this man did? I’m not sure how he could have imprisoned us here when he is one of the prisoners.”

The other girl with hair the color of a campfire stirred, but wouldn’t look up. “Look at them Cassandra…show them.”

The girl did, showing blackened and puffy eyes, cuts across her lip, and bruises on her neck that looked suspiciously like a large man’s handprints.

“He beat her and…” the girl said, the tears flowing again like a waterfall, “I couldn’t stop him. In the van…with the other men in masks watching. They laughed,” she said as the tears and sobs began flowing harder and faster. “They laughed at us.”

“Ma’am…” Darius began, again surprising Steven with his calmness, considering the situation, “I don’t have any idea what you are talking about.”

“Darius, were you in Houston?”

“Yeah…I manage a grocery store there, in the Heights. It’s a little mom and pop affair and I’ve worked there since I was a teenager. I was walking home and this van pulled up.” The man stopped, obviously uncomfortable with the memory, not wanting to offer more. “I was in Houston but I don’t know these two girls.”

“I was in Houston as well,” John told them, “at my father’s home in River Oaks. Four men came through the door…” John was silent a moment and then turned to Steven. “You, sir…are you from the Houston area too?”

Steven stirred and Rebecca clung tighter. “My name is Steven Alexander and this is my wife, Rebecca. We have two sons…”

Rebecca started crying and Steven remembered explicitly.

* * *

It was a humid night in Houston, much more humid than December should be. Steven’s father used to joke that tourists coming to the Bayou City often got back on their airplanes once their eyeballs started sweating. Rebecca was in the kitchen, cooking spaghetti for the family meal that she and Steven insisted they have each evening. In the hustle and bustle of school, work, little league and the myriad of other events in a busy urban family’s life, they felt eating together each day was important.

Corry and Lonnie sat in front of the large plasma television, playing each other on the Xbox and laughing heartily. Steven sat on the couch, watching them play and enjoying their laughter more than anything else.

The front door opened in a scream of splinters and paint chips, and four men, dressed all in black with their faces covered with tight-fitting half masks burst in. Each was armed with a pistol-gripped pump shotgun and they immediately spread out through the foyer, a well-drilled team. For a moment, Steven thought that they were the police, maybe involved in a mistaken raid on a suspected drug house. He’d seen a similar circumstance on the news not too long ago. He stood, raising his hands as Rebecca screamed from the kitchen.

“Officers…”

Steven was interrupted with a shotgun butt to the gut, driving the air from his body and knocking him to the floor. The boys screamed as his hands were bound behind him and a hood quickly draped over his head. He heard Rebecca struggle and then scream, also forced to her knees.

The boys continued screaming until one of the shotguns rang out, once then twice.

The following silence was the loudest thing he’d ever heard.

* * *

“Men broke into our house. They killed my two sons.”

Steven stared at his wife, her black hair in tangles around her tear-streaked face. She’d loved the boys as her own, despite not being their biological mother, and they’d loved her just as fiercely as they’d loved their own mother. He’d met her shortly after Michelle, his first wife and the boy’s mother, had died in a horrific car crash in downtown Houston, a drunk driver hitting her small Prius and driving it over the I-45 guardrails. Rebecca was there for him shortly after, consoling him at work and eventually in their home. She was all he had left now.

“I’m sorry,” John told him, moving to shake his hand. “We are all from Houston…that has to mean something.”

“It doesn’t mean jack shit,” the blonde girl spat. “Ask him…he knows why we’re here. He knows where here is.”

“Lady…I’m very sorry for you,” Darius responded gently. “I can’t begin to imagine what happened to you, but I am really not the man you’re talking about. I don’t know you.”

“Why are we here?” Steven asked, desperately trying to push the sounds of his boys dying out of his mind. “What is this about?”

“I don’t know,” John said, standing and going to the side of the cage facing the ocean. “I have no idea. From the heat and humidity, I suspect we’re in the tropics somewhere. Maybe off the coast of Costa Rica?”

“That’s Spanish,” Steven said, pointing to the weatherworn motif carved into the stone near the cave entrance. “It says rebirth or death.”

“You speak Spanish?” John asked.

“Enough to get by.”

John went to the engraving, fingering its deep grooves. “It’s also a pirate emblem, is it not?”

“It could be,” Steven said. “They all had different emblems, different logos.”

“But rebirth or death? Isn’t the Christian tradition usually rebirth and then death, rebirth through the act of Baptism?”

“What makes you think it has anything to do with Christianity?” Steven asked. He wasn’t a believer and, when pressed in religious conversations, he didn’t like participating in any of its forms. Religion could be blamed for most of the world’s ills.

“God doesn’t mean anything,” Darius told them. “Why we are here is all that matters.”

Faint sounds of laughter mixed with fear and agony drifted out of the small cave entrance. There were also wisps of scents…meat cooking and filth.

“There might be answers in there. I…we have to be some sort of prisoners,” John told them. “Though I don’t know what crime I could have committed to be sentenced to such a place.”

“Maybe it’s a joke,” Steven offered, “some sort of reality television event. Maybe Ed McMann is about to jump out and hand us all a check.”

The group stared at him for a moment, silent, and he had to wonder if any of them could begin to imagine what sort of twisted and depraved individual would sentence someone to a place like this, kidnapped, cut, probably raped in the case of the young girls. What sort of person would put a person in a place like this in the name of television?

“I don’t know, but I don’t plan on finding out,” Darius told them, moving next to John by the cage entrance. The bamboo bars were smooth and weathered, like they’d been here for many, many years and had many hands on them, like the steel stair rails in an old refinery. The door at the center was fastened only with a piece of wire. Darius quickly untied it and stepped through.

As soon as he did, an ear splitting alarm sounded, forcing the group to cover their ears. Darius cowered and then stepped back through the doorway. The alarm went silent. He stepped back out and the siren wailed again.

“It knows when I step out,” he said to no one in particular as he stepped back into the cell.

“Motion detectors, perhaps?” John asked, testing the entrance way himself. Stepping outside the cell produced the same siren, rustling birds from the trees in the cliff face above. Stepping back in quieted it.

“Who cares if there’s an alarm?” Cassandra said, standing. Her red hair caught in the gentle ocean breeze like an angry solar flare. “There’s an alarm but there isn’t anyone coming. There isn’t anyone to prevent us from leaving. There aren’t any guards.”

“Cassandra,” the other girl said, putting her hand on the girl’s shoulder, “we don’t know anything yet. We don’t even know where we are.”

“I don’t care,” Cassandra told her, shrugging off the comforting hand. “I’m going. This is crap…I didn’t know it would be like this.”

“You didn’t know it would be like what?” Steven asked, but the girl didn’t answer.

The young girl took a few tentative steps away from the cage’s gate, turning and looking in wide circles, half expecting prison guards to materialize out of thin air as if Scotty had flipped the switch on the teleporter. When none appeared, she moved further down the beach, the alarm still wailing, until she was at the water’s edge. She knelt down, washing her face off with crystal clear seawater, then motioned for her friend to follow.

“It’s fine,” Cassandra hollered back to her friend, barely audible above the wail of the siren. “Come on!”

“There are people coming,” John, standing near the cave entrance, told them.

“What?” Steven asked, his hands over his ears.

“People…coming,” John repeated, pointing to the entrance.

They flowed from the cave entrance like water from the dike once the proverbial thumb was removed. The men and women were dressed in filthy rags and their combined stench made Steven want to give up the imaginary contents of his stomach. They were of all ages, all ethnicities. A man, his scruffy beard obscuring most of his face and neck, shoved Steven back against the bars of the cage.

“Stay out of the way,” he hissed, his breath reeking of rotten meat and soured milk.

“Where are we?” Steven choked out as he gasped for air. “What’s going on here? Please…I don’t understand.”

He was interrupted by a rough knee to the crotch, driving the air from his lungs and sending pain spiraling through his body.

The bearded man watched as others pushed the remaining new arrivals up and away from the gate, two men holding Darius who, surprisingly to Steven, didn’t resist. Amanda tried to surge forward, tried to stop them once she realized where the five men in the front were heading, but the woman in front of her kept her pressed back against the bars, her forearm against her neck.

Cassandra, once she saw the group of men sprinting from the open gate, tried to take off running down the pristine beach, but stumbled and fell face first into the sand. The men were upon here in a second, fists flashing. Steven couldn’t see around the man holding him to the bamboo bars, but could hear the girl’s screams even over the alarm. Amanda screamed just as loudly as her friend, her line of vision a little clearer. The fists continued to fly until finally the screaming from the beach stopped. They came back to the cage, carrying Cassandra between them like pallbearers at a funeral. She looked at Steven meekly, her already bruised face now a twisted mass of cuts and abrasions. Her eyes were blank, the girl solidly in a state of shock.

“Where are you taking her?” Amanda pleaded but the woman holding her didn’t answer, instead hitting her hard in the stomach and then releasing her. Amanda slumped to the ground, gasping for air.

The others were released as the entire mass of people retreated back into the cave tunnel as quickly as they had appeared. It was several more seconds before Steven realized that the alarm was no longer sounding either. His heart still raced, though, and he quickly went to Rebecca’s side.

“Are you all right?”

“They killed her…that poor girl. They killed her for getting out of the cage.”

Steven suspected she was right, suspected that there was a set of clearly defined rules for their new prison. He also grudgingly gave the prison masters a certain amount of respect, thinking that their system, if he was correct, was ingenious. The incisions could only mean that there were some sort of tracking devices embedded in their bodies and, instead of having guards, their fellow prisoners enforced the rules. It certainly cut down on the cost of guards, he though.

“I don’t think she was dead, Rebecca,” he answered.

“Nor do I,” John agreed, “but she was hurt quite badly.”

“We have to go get her,” Amanda demanded. “We have to go get her now.”

She stood and started towards the cave entrance, but Darius blocked her. “No, we can’t.”

“Get out of my way.”

“No. It’s not safe. We don’t know what’s going on. We don’t know if we’re supposed to leave this cage or not.”

John nodded in agreement. “And our current available evidence suggests that we should not, in fact, leave this cage, and that if we do, the penalty is death.”

“You can’t stop me from going in there.”

“How is the alarm set off?” John asked aloud, examining the gate for some sort of electrical connection.

“I think there are RFID chips here,” Steven offered, pointing to the general area of his still aching side. “They’re tracking us, at least through the gate.”

“Like a GPS?”

“No,” Steven said, “more like when someone tries to steal something from a department store. The sensors and wires have to be embedded inside the bamboo, or maybe there are some directional monitors on the cliff face that we can’t see yet.”

“Get out of my way,” Amanda again demanded of Darius who stood like a stone statue.

“I won’t allow you to go in there to your possible death. We don’t know if that’s within whatever rules govern this place. We don’t know anything.”

“I know that my friend and I were kidnapped, raped, drugged, cut and tattooed like animals,” Amanda began. “I don’t know why we’re here, or why they would do these evil things, but I do know that I will not let them hurt her anymore. Now get out of my way.”

Darius nodded gently then stepped out of the girl’s way, but Amanda stopped at the cave entrance, staring blankly ahead.

“I don’t really want to follow her,” Darius said. “I know I should, and that it would be the chivalrous thing to do, but I’m scared to set foot inside that tunnel.” The big man stared at his feet, apparently embarrassed by his lack of courage and thinking of what was going to happen to the two girls inside. Steven once again felt guilty for his initial impression of the big black man. He could see that in the current situation, Darius’ own fear was conflicting with his fear of what was happening to the girls, and it was having a profound effect on the man.