Gone Black (18 page)

Black's head was pounding mercilessly, booming from the inside out, vibrating like he was inside a kettledrum. It had been a while since Jaxy had fed him the drug, and he felt as if he had come down a little from the initial and overpowering effects of the lysergic acid diethylamide. Now he was so thirsty that he couldn't even force down a swallow. He heard the television set come on and opened his eyes and was thankful that he was alone inside the room. It was dark except from the flashing lights on the TV screens. A picture came up in front of him, all the screens lit up with the huge image, and he tried to focus his eyes. They were showing him a bedroom. The camera was set fairly high, but he could see the white four-poster bed and the red love seat beside the footboard. It was all very elaborate, like a bedchamber in a plush Victorian mansion. He couldn't see the rest of the room, but on the other side of the bed, he could see an opening that looked as if it led into an adjoining bath or something. The room was empty.

Black shut his eyes again. He was so damn tired of trying to control his mind, his thoughts now so whacked out and scattered all over the place, but he had to try to keep pulling it together. He had to. He dug deeply into his subconscious, stayed there as long as he could, trying to come to terms with the mental anguish he was feeling. The total lack of control over himself. It was a terrible feeling. The feeling of sliding slowly, slowly down into a morass of dark confusion.

Then he heard a sound from the television screen, and he looked at it again. There was a man in the picture now, and he had a suitcase with him. He laid it on one end of the canopy bed and opened the lid, and then he stepped back and looked up at the camera, apparently so Black could see what was inside it. Black knew at once that it was a bomb. He could tell that much. He also could tell that it was a small pipe bomb, designed to destroy a small area, and one forceful enough to demolish that entire bedroom, no doubt about it.

The man made a big show of setting the timer. He held up a cell phone, holding it between his thumb and forefinger, which Black knew was probably going to act as the detonator. Then the bomber set the clock on the explosive device to start ticking down, opened a deep drawer in the bedside table, carefully placed the bomb inside, and then locked the drawer. After that, he walked out of camera range and the room was empty again. Up in the corner of the big screen in front of Black, however, a digital clock had appeared, ticking down the minutes to detonation in large and blinking yellow lights. Four hours and counting.

Black knew that was just another form of torture, but he couldn't quite figure out what it meant. Maybe they were going to take him there. Strap him down on the bed and blow him up. That sounded like something Marcel would do. He kept trying to clear his head, think straight, and it finally began to work. He began to remember everything, and he struggled hard against the leather straps but wasn't strong enough to pull them loose. The clock kept ticking, on and on, every second on display, and it worked just as Marcel had intended. Black grew nervous, not knowing what was going to happen. But that's what they wanted and why they'd done it. To make him worried and stressed out. More psychological tactics to drive him crazy.

When he heard somebody outside the door, he tensed up again. He watched the door open, and then Jaxy walked in. There was a man with her this time, the same bearded guy who Black had watched set up the bomb. He stood by the door with a shotgun trained on Black. Jaxy walked over to Black, and the first thing she did was lean down and give him a long, disgusting, wet kiss on his mouth. He tried to turn his face away, but she held his jaw very tightly between her palms. She was strong for a woman, and he was tired, exhausted with tension and sleep deprivation and weakened from no food or water.

“Hello again, sweetie. I might just fall in love with you if I didn't hate your guts so much.” She grinned down at him, and Black stared back at her, not even trying to hide the hatred in his eyes. He said nothing, because he knew she wanted him to talk, to beg, to give in to despair when confronted by whatever depravity she had in store for him this time.

“Guess what, honey lamb? It's time for some more sugar. You had so much fun last time that we're gonna give you some every day. A lot of it. Don't thank me now, wait until later. No, I insist.”

Black watched her take several more sugar cubes out of her pocket. She held them up so he could see. This time there were four, colored an even deeper shade of pink, almost a coral hue. She kept smiling, smiling, and smiling. Evil emanated from her pores like rank perspiration.

“Okay, here we go. All ready now?”

Jaxy forced the drugs into his mouth again. The sugar dissolved quickly. “This little trip is going to be lots of fun. You are going to get really, really happy. We've got to get you used to LSD, darlin'. And then we'll have fun with the other stuff. One of these days, we'll give you shot after shot until you climb so damn high that you won't even know your own name. But no worries, we know when to stop. We wouldn't want you to overdose and ruin our future fun. No, we cannot have that.”

Black struggled to jerk away, to free himself, but he couldn't move his arms. Couldn't move anything. He had treated patients for all kinds of drug addiction, and he knew that these heavy amounts of LSD would not addict him, but it would distort his reality in ways he could not even imagine. He was already half-confused about the time and the truth, groggy and dizzy, and LSD would linger in his system for a long time. He would get very high and see things in a twisted way and become completely incoherent and then he would ride out a long and harrowing bad acid trip from hell. He couldn't fight it, no matter how hard he tried. The colors began to change first, appearing to flow in toward him like an ocean wave, but brighter and more colorful, glowing and warm and shimmering, moving in all around him like a current around a rock, tossing him up and down and streaming past. Beautiful auras pulsated around the woman standing in front of him after a while and around everything else in the room.

It was Jaxy Soquet, he realized blearily, and she was glowing and shimmering and pulsating. All the different colors melted together, up in the air around him, swirling in and out and over and under, and he watched the magnificent visual show, awestruck, thinking it was the most beautiful thing that he'd ever seen. He was mesmerized, haunted with the need to get up and blend himself into the different hues, to melt into the swirling shades and dance and dip and bob with the bright lights inside his head.

Then he caught sight of the flat screen again, the big one that stretched the length of the wall in front of him, and somehow through his daze of lilting dreams and dazzling lights and colors, he knew that it still showed the room with the white four-poster bed. Now, the bed was quivering and jumping and melting down until it ran down off the screen and onto the floor in front of him like soft candle wax sliding off a burning taper. He shut his eyes, very disoriented, the dancing lights making his head spin, the room careening around him and inundating with the vivid colors that were alive and breathing and coming for him.

When he tried again to focus, he saw a girl standing in that quavering room with the canopy bed, walking around in the midst of all those melting colors, looking at everything, as if she were searching, and then she seemed to see the camera up high, and she walked up close to it and waved at him. Her face was contorted, jerking around inside red jagged currents, and the yellow chevrons, and the purples and the oranges, swimming with wavy motions, but then he frowned, trying to make the woman's image stand still.

Claire, he thought dully. That's Claire. Oh, God. Claire is in that room, that room with the bomb inside the locked drawer. But no way, she couldn't be. It was another trick. She was at home. Wasn't she? Or was she? Who was that? He was too confused to figure it out. It seemed odd that he could see her now, while his mind was reeling every which way with the colors and the soft chiming sounds they were making, lovely and low, and he desperately tried to remember how Claire had gotten into that room, if she was there at all. Then he did remember. Oh, God, no, Soquet had lured her there somehow, and they were going to kill her. They were going to blow her up with the bomb hidden in that drawer. They were going to kill her the same way Lorraine Soquet had been murdered. They were going to make him watch her die. Struggling desperately to free his arms and legs, he suddenly stopped and stayed still. Or was it all a hallucination? A distortion of his reality. A manifestation of his greatest fear. Was he seeing something from inside his own worst nightmare?

Black fought the terrible sensations evoked by the drug, knowing now that he had to get loose, had to get to Claire before that bomb detonated. She didn't know it was there. She didn't know it was there! But he could taste the colors in the air now, on his lips, smooth and sweet inside his mouth, and the orange tasted like maple syrup, and the red tasted like lemonade, and he was straining against his bindings, trying to get loose.

“No, no, don't, don't,” he thought he was saying, but Jaxy was laughing and the sound of it was echoing everywhere, and she was enveloped in the shivering rainbow of lights that made up his perception. He kept jerking, struggling, and then finally she unbuckled his restraints and set him free and stepped back away from him. He rose up to his feet, unsteady, but he was so weak and disoriented that he couldn't think. He staggered to the screen, calling out to Claire, warning her to get out, get out, but he couldn't stand up for long. He fell onto his knees and put his hands on his head and rocked back and forth, the acid trip suddenly turning very bad, the vibrant colors turning into hideous black shapes and the light fading into swinging lightbulb shadows and faceless monsters until he fell on his back and stared at the beasts crouched all around the room, shrieking and growling at him and clawing at his chest.

When the nice woman named Claire yelled for him to run, Rico had raced as fast as he could into the dark woods. He was a real good runner. Once he got off that leash, Jaxy could hardly ever catch him before he reached the tunnels. But he was very worried about that Claire lady. Jaxy hated her even worse than she hated Rico. He could just tell. And Jaxy really hated Rico a lot, too. He was pretty scared they were going to lock Claire up in that room with that other guy, the one she kept asking about, the one she called Black. Jaxy was being really mean to him up there so she'd hurt that Claire girl, too.

Once he reached safety in the deepest shadows among the trees, he was fairly sure they couldn't find him. He knew how to hide now. He hadn't known what to do at first, when those bad people had come, or where he could go to hide. He had been so afraid after they shot his parents, scared to death they were going to shoot him, too. Especially Jaxy. The other one, Max, just sorta ignored him all the time, and he never had hit him or chased him. But Jaxy was afraid of Max.

Rico took off again, glancing behind him often as he raced through the tree trunks and thick bushes. Jaxy wasn't chasing him this time. He couldn't see her or anybody else in the night, but after a while, he could hear somebody thrashing through the undergrowth and coming closer all the time. Still, he was pretty sure that he could escape. He knew the land around the tower better than the bad people did; he had played all over the woods outside the courtyard walls.

Even better, he knew lots of hiding places where Jaxy and her men couldn't ever find him. So he scampered on through the brush, but the sticks on the ground and sharp rocks hurt the bottoms of his bare feet. But he was tough now. Jaxy always said he had to be tough when she was around. And he was. He had learned it real good. He hadn't been when the bad guys first came. He had cried all the time and wanted his mama and daddy. But now, he knew how to get away and how to hide, and they hardly ever caught him anymore, unless he got so hungry that he had to creep up to the kitchen and steal something to eat. That's why Jaxy kept him on the leash all the time now. But he had stored a little bit now so he wouldn't have to go to the kitchen much. But that had been the way Jaxy caught him the last time, so she could use him to be the bait to catch that big man in the white room. Jaxy called it her Fun Room, but Rico didn't think that black-haired man was having much fun. Not when Rico had seen him.

After a few minutes, he stopped again and leaned against a tree trunk, panting hard, listening. Heaving in big gulps of the warm night air, he couldn't hear any voices. He was very close to the front of the fortress now, and he could hear the ocean crashing into the big cliffs on the other side. Very relieved that he had gotten away, he squatted down in the dirt, resting and thinking about the pretty blond-haired lady. She was pretty brave for a girl. Nobody else had ever smacked Jaxy like that before. Not even the big men she was always ordering around, not even Max, who probably could if he wanted to. He smiled to think how that new girl had really walloped Jaxy up the side of her face. Jaxy had always been the one hitting people and making everybody scared. Rico was pretty afraid right now, too. He was afraid they'd kill the girl named Claire for hitting Jaxy. But Max had protected the girl instead of Jaxy. Rico didn't understand why he did that, but he was sure glad he did.

Waiting there for a little while, he finally caught the sound of the Jeep out on the road that led up into the courtyard. He felt much better then. He was not going to let them catch him and put that shock collar back on him. That thing hurt him really bad when Jaxy pressed that remote control. Sometimes she tied him to the bedpost and pressed it over and over, just to make him cry. At first, he had vowed never to cry, but then, after that night, he cried pretty fast, just so she'd stop. Sometimes she did and sometimes she didn't. She was just real mean, that lady. But she couldn't catch him all that much anymore, now that he knew where to hide.

Peeking through the bushes, he saw a flashlight beam sweeping back and forth among the trees behind him. So the bad men were still out there searching for him. Rico took off again, running hard up the hill toward the fortress, staying inside the trees. The old ruins were underneath it, and if he could reach those Roman water tunnels that led down to the safe room, the men would never be able to find him. None of them even knew about those ruins. But Rico's daddy did. Rico's eyes burned with tears to think about how they'd just shot him dead after they'd gunned down his mama. He cried some, got his cheeks all wet, but then he wiped them away. He couldn't be a cry baby right now, the men might hear him.

All he wanted to do now was find that Claire again. She had taken the shock collar off him and slapped Jaxy silly. All Jaxy ever wanted to do was hurt him. She liked to hurt anybody she could, so everybody stayed away from her, even her men. And now she was probably going to find a way to hurt that Claire lady real bad, too. And if those men behind Rico caught up to him, they would take him straight to Jaxy, and she would whip him and tie him to the bed and not give him anything to eat. But they weren't gonna catch him, no way. He took off again, running as fast as he could.

When he reached the outer wall, he stopped and looked behind him. There was no light glowing in the dark now, just the faint glow of moonlight filtering down through the clouds and making everything look all silver and gray. The bad men had given up. Rico slid down to the ground and lay there on his back, looking up at the stars and resting some more. He was not very afraid of being out in the dark night anymore. The night hid him from the bad ones. An owl hooted somewhere nearby, a real creepy low sound, but that didn't scare him, either. None of the night creatures scared him, not as much as Jaxy did. When she got hold of him, she just about scared the life out of him.

All he wanted to do now was find Claire and tell her the good places to hide inside the fortress. He didn't want them to hurt her the way they were hurting the big tall man with the blue eyes. He had seen them put their water hoses on him and knock him down, and he'd seen Jaxy hit him a bunch of times with her sap. He'd seen her kiss him, too, hold his head still while he tried to get away. They were going to kill him soon, he had heard Max say that, but they were waiting longer than they had done the other times they had put men inside Jaxy's Fun Room.

Lying there, he started thinking about his family, about how all of them were dead and thrown into the ocean. He wondered where they were now, if they were out there behind the house in the sea, still floating on top or down under the water, or maybe lying on the sandy bottom of the ocean. He missed them so much, but he didn't know where to go. Nobody else lived anywhere around them, and Jaxy's men were watching everywhere. He didn't know what to do, except to hide and try to find enough to eat.

When he heard the Jeep's horn at the gate, he knew they were taking Claire inside the house. He had to get back inside the fortress and find her. She helped him and so now he had to help her. She said she would look for him. He wanted her to take him away from the bad ones, far away where they'd never find them again. So he jumped back up on his feet and took off running toward the fortress again, barely even feeling all the rocks and gravel under his bare feet anymore.