It has now been well over three days, and they have yet to see any sign of
their captors, besides the fact that someone had to break into their condo,
knock them out, and transport them to this fishbowl cell. Marie, Heath, and
Kivi occasionally exchange looks. The fourth prisoner may not be a prisoner
at all, but be here to observe them in some way. She doesn’t ask questions,
or do anything else to complicate matters. She’s been answering simple
questions simply, and generally gives off a vibe of trustworthiness. But
perhaps that’s just what she wants them to think. Maybe it’s all a grand
act.
The food is running out. Soon, they will have nothing to ration, and will
have to subsist on water alone, but eventually, even that won’t be enough.
They’ll waste away and die in this box, just as Heath predicted. Marie is
regretting some of the choices she made, and she’s about to fess up to them
when they hear a noise. It came and went so quickly, none of them is sure it
ever happened at all. Based on each other’s faces, something had to have
happened, though. It couldn’t just have been in their heads. Another sound;
a pop, really. More pops, some closer than others. They’re gunshots, mostly
handguns and a few automatic weapons. They can hear screams and maybe war
cries too. They’re muffled and still distant, but they’re definitely human
voices.
“This is it,” Andile says in a defeatist tone. “They’re coming for us.”
“No, they can’t be,” Kivi contends. “They wouldn’t be shooting if they were
just gonna come and kill us. This is a rescue.”
“Is it Leona, maybe with all of our other friends?” Heath hopes.
“No.” It can’t be their friends. After all of her experiences in war
simulations, Marie can tell that at least two opposing sides are shooting at
each other, and that’s not something that Leona would tolerate. She would
come in surgically and rather quietly. It’s not an execution either. What is
it? “This is something else.”
The firefight grows either louder, or closer, or both. They hear a pounding
on a wall or door that must be just a few meters away in the darkness.
Another pounding is followed by a heavy click, and then a second click,
which is immediately followed by blinding lights. The rest of the room is
illuminated, besides just their cell. A man in black is holding a gun. He is
covered in blood, and grimacing at them. He looks around until he finds what
he’s searching for. On the other side of the door is another one of those
huge power levers, but this one has a cage around it so it can’t be pulled.
He shoots the lock off, and opens it. He doesn’t pull the lever down,
though. Instead, he pops the panel open, and presses a blue button. They
start to hear rushing water, and quickly realize that it’s coming from under
the sink. The room is flooding.
“What about the air holes?” Heath questions, assuming that the guy is trying
to drown them.
“Get on top of the cots,” Marie orders.
The other prisoner, Andile follows the suggestion.
“No, he’s right,” Kivi says. “The water will drain before it reaches our
waists.”
As the man is pivoting over to the other side of the box on the wall, Marie
repeats herself, but more earnestly this time, “get on top of the cots!”
Kivi and Heath finally do as they’re told, but the man just chuckles. He
knows that the water is going to get high enough to electrocute them anyway.
Marie desperately looks around for something to grab onto, or maybe
something to hang the sheets over like a hammock. There’s nothing. If they
don’t find a way out of here, this guy is going to get his way. The water
keeps rising and rising, until it does spill over the cots, and kisses their
feet. Marie tries to balance on the frame, which is just a tiny bit higher,
but the water gets high enough to cover that too. The man reaches up and
takes hold of the lever. He’s about to pull it down when they hear one more
gunshot. His head jerks over to the side, and he falls down to his face.
Winona Honeycutt walks all the way through the door, and presses the green
button on the panel. The water begins to drain away. She shoots their
attacker in the head one more time for good measure. She too is covered in
blood.
“Thanks for saving us,” Heath tells Winona as she approaches the glass.
“Could you open the door now?
She examines the cell, particularly in one spot, which must sport a keypad
that the prisoners can’t see. “I don’t have the code.”
“Of anyone, I would think you would be entrusted with the code,” Marie
muses.
Winona winces. She looks back at the dead guy on the floor. “Wait, do you
think we’re the ones who locked you up?”
“Who else would?” Kivi asks.
“There are things that you do not know,” Winona begins. “We have been
searching for you for the past three days. Once we realized that you freed
the wrong Amir Hussain—which, by the way, my father and I don’t care about;
he wasn’t our objective—we thought you may be in danger. We knew that the
people who actually wanted the right Amir would not be happy about it.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t get to you in time, and it’s taken us this long
to figure out the location of this black site.”
“Who? Who did this to us?” Heath demands to know.
Winona puts her watch up to her lips. “Bring me the highest clearance you
can find.” She returns her attention to the prisoners. “You’re not allowed
to know that. You’ll have to commit to us to be read in.”
“Commit to who?” Heath asks impolitely.
She smiles, then looks behind her as they’re dragging a bloodied man up to
them. “Senator Morton? What luck that you just so happened to be on site
during our siege.”
“Go screw yourself, Honeybutt,” he spits. Then he spits some blood at her.
“Like I haven’t heard that one before,” Winona spits back. “Give me the
code, or your daughter and I are gonna have a playdate, like we did in the
old days. Except the guns won’t be imaginary this time.”
Scowling, Senator Morton recites, “Zero-nine-one-one.”
“Her birthday?” Winona asks rhetorically. “How typical of your generation.”
She punches in the code, and lets the prisoners out.
Morton looks up at Marie as she’s stepping out. “I finally remember how I
knew you. Did you ever get your dress fixed, Madam Milf—” He can’t finish
his sentence when Winona shoots him in the head, like she did with the other
guy.
“Daddy’s not gonna like that, but secretly...he will.”
The other three are horrified, but Marie is grateful. She thinks that she
can explain away what he managed to say before his death, but she wouldn’t
have been able to if he had been allowed to keep talking. She signs
thank you to Winona as she’s backing away, hoping that no one else
notices.
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