Crisis Event: Jagged White Line

Crisis Event: Jagged White Line

by

Greg Shows and Zachary Womack

Crisis Event: Jagged White Line
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Greg Shows and Zachary Womack

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

without the express written permission of the publisher

except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Published in the United States.

Cover art by Anna Fritzel and Zach Womack

Cover model: Michelle Church

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following people for their assistance, encouragement, advice, technical input, proofreading, and all around awesomeness: George Proctor, Michelle Church, Kimberly Yee, Kathryn Ehlers, and Anna Fritzel.
 

Contact Sadie at:

website: www.sadiehalloman.com

email:
[email protected]

Twitter:
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A Note from the Authors:

We hope you enjoy the third episode of the Crisis Event series. If you have questions about the upcoming release of new episodes, feel free to email us. If you enjoyed the book and would like to join our mailing list, feel free to click the link below and send us a message. We would be honored to hear from you.

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Crisis Event: Part 3

Jagged White Line

Chapter 1

    “Where’s the goddamned package?” General Titman yelled. He loomed over Sadie, his bloodshot eyes stretched wide, his breath a noxious horror. Spit dribbled from his mouth and splattered over Sadie’s forehead and wet hair.

She hardly noticed.

She was too busy trying to breathe.

Water had saturated the white cloth covering her nose and mouth, and now with every sucking breath, more water leaked into her sinuses and throat.

    “Naaaahh!” she screamed.

But screaming made it worse. Every scream brought another breath that drew in more water and seemed to threaten her with drowning.

    She wasn’t really drowning. There wasn’t enough water leaking into her sinuses or lungs to drown her.

She knew this. But her body didn’t, and every time one of  Titman’s men dribbled more water over the cloth, she jerked her shoulders and tried to pull against the ropes that were immobilizing her wrists and ankles. When the water was flowing and her autonomic nervous system was in full panic mode, she couldn’t even think. All she could do was let her body react—her gag reflex triggering a vomit attack, her arms and legs jerking involuntarily as she tried to escape the sensation of drowning.

One of the men lifted the cloth from her face.

Sadie coughed and gasped. She tried to shake her head but they’d screwed eye bolts into the pool table rails so they could completely immobilize her head with ropes and a leather strap. Then they had stacked bricks beneath one end of the pool table so that blood would pour into her skull and make her temples throb with every heartbeat.

Thunder boomed, penetrating deep inside the mansion they’d appropriated for their interrogation.

    “Why’d you become a terrorist?” Titman yelled. “Was it your grandmother? Were you involved in the D.C. attack?”

    Sadie said nothing. She stared up at the ceiling, which looked yellow from the glow of the lamp light.A pool table light had hung over the surface she now occupied, but Titman’s torturers had ripped it out. Now two jagged holes like knife wounds remained in the plaster where the support anchors had been. Bare wires hung down, as if the house’s entrails had been revealed.

Titman reached out and grabbed Sadie’s right breast, pinching the nipple so hard it turned purple.

Sadie screamed and screamed, her arms jerking at the ropes that held her fast. HEr breaths came in choking gasps, and she couldn’t help but look at Titman’s bloated face—despite her hope that dissociation would soon take her outside her body and away from this nightmare.

Maybe things haven’t gotten bad enough yet.

“Tell me where the goddamned package is!” Titman shouted suddenly, the same command he’d been shouting since the one they called “Blakely” had tossed her into the general’s Humvee an hour before. Now Blakely was nowhere to be seen, apparently too squeamish to watch the torture.

That was okay, Sadie decided. He’d be present for his own torture and death if she had her way.

Not that she really expected to have her way.

Titman had already betrayed more information than any she could give him. Whatever the “package” was, it meant the difference between the continuance of the United States government post-Crisis, or the complete dissolution of that institution for all eternity. Since she had nothing to offer in that regard, it seemed unlikely she would get off the pool table alive.

The one called “Mallick” lifted the cloth and waited for Sadie to stop coughing.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe if you told me what you’re looking for I can help.”

General Titman glanced at Mallick. He grinned and draped the cloth over Sadie’s face again.

“Please, no!” Sadie wailed. “I don’t know anything.”

Sadie sensed movement to her right and glanced over, straining to see through the gap between the cloth and her face. A feeble spark of hope that someone was stepping in to stop things faded when she caught a glimpse of Getter.

Getter was Mallick’s buddy. He’d left a short time ago—after inserting his latex-gloved fingers inside her to “search her.” He’d done this eight or nine times before she lost count and he wandered off, giggling about how he would have to keep checking up there to see if anything had “shaken loose.”

Now he was back.  

“I put a little tabasco in it,” he said, and handed a ceramic coffee cup to Mallick. “That was real fortunate, let me tell you. When I give you another cavity search you’ll find out just how fortunate.”

Sadie’s groan was involuntary, and was followed immediately by a few drops of water that hit the cloth over her face.

“Noooo!” Sadie screamed. “Pleeeaaase!”

Getter giggled and Mallick asked him to light a cigarette for him. Somehow Sadie was able to focus on the sound of the lighter even as the water saturated the cloth and began to drip into her nostrils again.

She gasped as the burning water ran into her mouth and sinuses poured down her throat.

Ten minutes later the cloth had been removed. Sadie was shrieking, crying, and choking, convinced she would go insane if the three of them kept up the torture much longer. She’d been probed again—sexually assaulted by Getter and his Tabasco sauce-covered gloves—and Mallick had put his cigarette out on the bottom of her right big toe. Now General Titman was threatening to slice off her eyelids with a combat knife. Already he’d cut a two-inch gash along the inner part of her upper right thigh. Blood was dripping down into a puddle beneath her.

On top of it all she needed to pee.

“Or maybe I’ll cut your nose off next,” Titman said. “And pour salt in.”

“No, wait,” Mallick said. He had a big smile on his face.

“For what?” Titman asked.

Sadie’s eyes darted to her right, where Mallick stood. He had pulled a small plastic canister out of her backpack and was holding it up.

“A little lye for the liar,” he said.

“No!” Sadie begged.

“It’ll be just like
Fight Club
,” he said.

“Oh my God, I
so
love that movie,” Getter said, his voice sounding a lot like a teenage girl talking about her favorite boy band. He jumped up and down and clapped his hands together three times. “Soooo love it.”

“Except,” Mallick continued, “It’ll be worse than
Fight Club
.”

Suddenly Getter turned to Sadie and leaned in close.

“And we’re gonna make sure you don’t talk about it!” he giggled, his head nodding up and down with glee. “It’s the first rule, you know?”

“And the second!” Mallick said.

“Oh my God,” Sadie whimpered, and her bladder let go. Urine flowed over the soggy cardboard box beneath her.

Sadie’s face burned and her entire body flushed red.

“She’s a gusher!” Mallick yelped with a thick Texas accent.

“It’s not my fault,” Sadie told herself again and again. “They did this. Not me.”

She kept repeating the thought like a mantra, even as Getter and Mallick cackled and made jokes. She felt something tight and hot swelling in her chest, a rage cycling up so high she could hear it buzzing inside her head.

“See,” Titman said, turning back to Sadie and leaning down close. “Right now you got something to sell. This body’ll keep you fed and fucking in some trading town. But what’re you going to sell if you make us carve out all your good parts?”

The general’s hand traced a circle around her navel.

“You’re not going to be a hot piece of ass for long at this rate.”

Sadie shuddered, and she felt like her whole body was convulsing. She needed to make something up. To convince the three maniacs to stop torturing her—even if it meant they killed her afterward.

They weren’t going to believe she didn’t know anything. They’d already convinced themselves she did. And once someone was a hundred percent convinced of something—true or not—you could almost never get them to believe anything else. As one of her neuroscience professors had once said: “This is the most ironic tragedy of human existence...the cause of war and terrorism and murder and genocide.”

“Owwwww!” Sadie shrieked suddenly. Her back arched and she pulled at the ropes securing her to the pool table. While she’d let her mind wander off to a long-past cog sci lecture, Titman had poured salt into his hand and clamped it down on her right thigh. Now he was was grinding the granules into the incision, his nose barely six inches above her own, half his body up on the table with her. “Nooooooo!”

Mallick was cackling again, but Getter was there beside the general.

“Who gets to fuck her first, General,” Getter asked. “Me or Mallick? Or you?”

    Sadie snarled, and decided that if her hands were ever cut loose, she’d go for the nearest weapon and try to kill at least one of them.

“Sir!” someone shouted.

Titman looked up and glared.

Sadie couldn’t see the shouter. But she could see Mallick and Getter—both of whom had turned toward the voice. Both stepped away from the table, moving in opposite directions from each other as if they’d been trained to make tactical decisions automatically, in any situation they found themselves.

CIA? Private contractors? What the hell for?

Sadie heard feet clomping on the room’s tiled floor.

“Something wrong?” Titman asked, his voice straining to remain level.

“It’s time for the good cop, sir,” the new arrival said, and Sadie recognized Blakely’s voice. Despite hating him for turning her over to the three torturers, she felt relief. Maybe even gratitude.

Maybe he’d stop the torture for a while.

Maybe he’d tell her what was going on.

   
Or maybe he’ll be worse.

Titman’s eyes narrowed. The sergeant was standing just inside the doorway, and the three men Titman considered to be Blakely’s loyal lackeys—Duck, Hider, and Meadowlark—spread themselves out along the wall. Their rifles were slung over their shoulders—horizontal and not pointing anywhere in particular, but ready to fire.