CHAPTER TWO
1747 Words
CHAPTER TWO
Consciousness returned slowly. At first Alexa heard sounds—the buzz of a circular saw on metal, the groans of a man, the creak and screech of a bent door being forced open. All of these things registered on her already half-alert consciousness even before her vision returned.
At first, only hazy shapes in a bleary light.
Then, the pain.
Alexa hurt all over, a uniform ache that focused especially in her midsection. There she felt a tremendous weight that made every breath a jabbing agony. There was also a burning agony down the length of her left forearm.
Even as her vision began to clear, she lowered her hand to her holster, only to find jagged metal in the way. She fumbled for a moment, searching by feel as she blinked her eyes, trying to focus. The seat had twisted and pressed against her. That was what hurt her midsection and stopped her moving. The seat belt was still around her, digging painfully into flesh.
She managed to find her holster, and a jolt of fear ran through her as she realized it was empty. Her other hand went for the holster containing her bottle of pepper spray. That was gone too, as was the telescopic metal baton that hung next to it.
She blinked a couple more times, and the world came into focus.
The prison bus lay on its side. She lay crushed against one wall, now against the ground, pinned by the row of seating that had crumpled and twisted to wrap around her like a restraining arm.
Her entire side was soaked in blood, which flowed freely from a deep gash running from the heel of her left palm almost to her elbow.
A burly man wearing a ski mask stood above Alexa, her Glock in his hand.
The interior of the bus shook and clanged with the sound of hurried activity. Alexa looked around, neck aching in protest as she did so, and saw Drake above and a bit behind her, suspended in the air by his chains, grinning from ear to ear.
“You can’t keep a good man down,” he said, and gave her a wink.
Alexa’s blood ran cold. She looked to Powers, and saw him stretched out, unconscious, a great gash to his head. His seatbelt and half the seat had been torn out with him on impact.
She wanted to call out to him, and yet didn’t dare. She didn’t want to bring any attention to her partner.
That was in vain. The man who had taken her g*n bent over Powers and took his as well.
“He’s alive,” the masked man said with the trace of a Mexican accent. His skin, where it showed between gloves and sleeve, was that of a Caucasian. Strange.
Another man clambered through the open door in the back of bus. He was shorter, thinner, but moved with grace and strength, carrying a large pair of bolt cutters.
The buzz of a circular saw, the same sound that had woken her up, sounded from the front of the bus. Alexa looked in that direction and through a cracked window saw a masked woman kneeling on the side, now the top, of the bus, cutting through the metal door. Sparks flew in a great jet from the metal grinding at metal. A man stood beside her, a sawed-off shotgun in his hands. Both prison guards hung slack in their seats.
“Wake up!” Alexa shouted at them.
She felt the cold muzzle of her own g*n pressed against her temple.
“Another word and you’re dead,” the masked man told her.
A loud snip made her turn her eyes, although she didn’t dare move her head. The man with the bolt cutters cut through Drake’s leg chains, freeing them so he could awkwardly support himself by standing on tiptoe on the wreckage beneath him. The masked man turned his attention to the chains on his wrists.
Desperately, Alexa looked back at the woman working with the circular saw. She finished the work, set the saw to one side, and hauled open the door. Her companion with the shotgun aimed down at the two helpless prison guards.
Just at that moment, one of the guards stopped pretending to be unconscious, yanked out a pistol, and fired.
The man with the shotgun jerked back, blood gushing from his chest, and toppled off the bus. The woman with the buzz saw leaped off.
Shouting and confusion from two masked men in the back of the bus, cut off short by Drake’s commanding voice.
“Do what you came here to do!”
The guy with the bolt cutters got back to work on Drake’s chains. His companion, wielding a U.S. Marshal Service g*n in each hand, stood a bit back, covering both Alexa and Robert.
The sound of someone clambering onto the bus up front made Alexa turn again. The woman was back, now gripping the shotgun. Keeping out of sight of the open doorway, she reached around with her g*n, ducked back as the guard fired at her hands, missing, then reached around again and blasted the shotgun at point blank range.
A spray of blood against the window at the back of the cab made Alexa cry out. While she could barely see through it, she did see the guard still moving. His g*n barked again, but to no effect. The woman fired a second time, pumped another shell into the chamber, and fired again.
She fired three more times before she finally stopped. By then the entire window was a mass of dripping gore.
Alexa slumped, all feeling gone. She knew she would die in the next few moments.
Die a painful, humiliating death.
“Well, now,” Drake said as if he had spotted an especially pretty girl at a square dance.
Alexa forced herself to look at him. He stood in the overturned bus hunched somewhat under a hanging seat. He smiled and rubbed his wrists.
“Get it over with,” Alexa grumbled.
Drake put on an innocent face. “Get what over with?”
“Shut up and do it. After I’m dead, you’re going to set off the biggest manhunt in American history.”
Drake waggled a finger at her. “Wrong on several accounts. First, they’re not catching me. Not with as many friends as I got.” He slapped the gunman on the back. “Second, I’m not a rabid dog. I’m a shining light to oppressed humanity.” Alexa snorted. He said this without any irony whatsoever. “And third, I’m not going to kill you.”
A little spark of hope flickered in her. Alexa dismissed it. She would die in the next couple of minutes, in the horrible, demeaning way he killed all his victims.
Drake turned to the man with the bolt cutters, who handed him a Bowie knife.
Alexa took a deep breath and prepared herself.
I did some good in the world. Was kind to my family and friends. Caught a lot of bad guys. So I die at 31. I did a lot more than most people who live twice as long.
All that reasoning couldn’t dampen her terror, but it did give her the strength to hide it. She wouldn’t give him the pleasure of seeing her tremble, hearing her beg.
“Prison gives you a lot of time to read,” Drake said, testing the blade with his thumb. “I’ve read a lot about these Islamic radicals that seem to pop up everywhere these days. They’re my kind of people. Oh, I don’t like their religion. Too oppressive to women. I believe a strong spirit can be found in either a man or a woman.” At that he made a little bow toward Alexa, and in the direction of the woman who had murdered two prison guards. “What I do like about them is how they find strength from a position of weakness. Here they are, squaring up against the world’s biggest superpower, and fighting it to a standstill. And how do they do it? They’re outnumbered and way outgunned, but they have more savagery than all the United States armed forces and all its allies put together. Terror. That’s their weapon, and it’s a weapon the entire West can’t beat.”
Drake leaned over Robert Powers, lifted him up by the hair, and put the knife to his neck.
“Stop!” Alexa shouted.
Drake grinned at her. “What? You think I’m going to cut his head off and trail his DNA all across the state? Come on, Alexa. I’m smarter than that. I’m just going to kill him.”
Alexa struggled against the cordon of steel wrapped around her, panicked at seeing her friend and mentor helpless in a psychopath’s hands.
“Drake, wait! Take me as a hostage. You can get away. I won’t try to fight. Just leave him be.”
Drake tut-tutted.
“You haven’t learned a single thing I’ve tried to teach you. If I take you as a hostage, you can’t play the game. You can’t grow.”
Robert Powers’s eyes flicked open, bleary and unfocused. For a second they met Alexa’s own.
And focused on her.
Alexa looked into those eyes, those eyes that were always confident, always reassuring and wise. Those eyes that always told her she could do more than she thought she could.
And despite the fear and resignation she saw in them now, they still told her the same thing.
Then Drake drew the knife across his throat and a great gush of blood burst forth.
“No!” Alexa screamed, feeling like that knife was cutting her own throat, her own soul.
Powers choked and flailed for a moment, then gradually went slack. Drake tossed him aside like an empty wrapper.
Alexa’s gut wrenched, bile rising in her throat. The horrible vision was thankfully blurred by her own tears.
“I’m going to kill you,” Alexa sobbed, tears blurring her vision. “I swear to God I’m going to hunt you down and kill you.”
“Good,” Drake said in a cheerful voice. “Now you’re learning.”
He snapped his fingers and he and his men clambered out of the van, leaving Alexa to sob all alone, trapped with the dead bodies of three of her colleagues.
- Writer
