Gone Black (24 page)

Still shaking uncontrollably from her desperate struggle, Claire felt sick and woozy, both from a curious sort of macabre delayed reaction and from her own loss of blood. She stood perfectly still now, her back against the wall, staring down at Max Soquet's lifeless body and the huge pool of blood. Then she opened her right hand and stared down at the deep, gaping, and very ugly wound. The glass had sliced through the middle of her palm from side to side, almost all the way down to the bone. It hurt so much that she wasn't sure if she could stand it. She ground her teeth, as blood ran down over her wrist and forearm and dripped onto the floor and onto her tennis shoes. She had blood all over her, soaking into her clothes, making them glisten dark red. Her hair was coated with his blood, and she could even taste it in her mouth.

Trying to press the edges of the wound together with the fingers of her left hand, she groaned, the pain excruciating. She felt almost as if she was going to pass out, but she just waited, terrified, for guards to burst inside the room and kill her. But it remained quiet. There was nobody outside, not that she could hear, anyway. Trying to get a grip on her fractured, shivering, and quivering nerves, she realized that Max's cell phone was still recording. She moved quickly across the room, grabbed it up in trembling, blood-slick fingers, and clumsily punched in Novak's number. Oh, God, what happened to him? Why hadn't they come to get them out? They should've made their assault before now. She needed them. She needed help. She clutched the smartphone in her left hand, mentally willing Novak to
pick up, pick up, damn it!
But the phone showed no reception and that the batteries would need recharging soon. She had to find a place where she could get satellite reception. She had to get outside and call for help.

Not sure what to do next, she cursed Booker and the others, and then stood very still and tried to think. She was still in way too much pain and too rattled to think clearly but she had to. Black was gonna die, if she didn't get to him soon. That's when his face came into her mind, bound and drugged and tortured in God only knew what ways. Jaxy taunting him and striking him across the face and hitting him with that stupid pink sap, forcing her mouth down on his mouth. Those terrible images did the trick. Calm descended over her then, like a nice cool, damp fog. She set her jaw, resolve returning, determination coming down hard over her shredded nerves. She tried to ignore the agony of the pain in her right hand. She had to move, get out, hide, and she had to do it now.

Claire moved swiftly across the room, avoiding the growing puddle of blood, and then got down on her knees close to the body. She took one very deep breath, catching the disgusting odor of the unbelievably bloody crime scene, Max's blood still warm and barely oozing after his heart had stopped. She searched rapidly through the dead man's clothes for anything that she could use as a weapon. The shard of mirror was still sticking out of Max's neck. She didn't want to jerk it out, not unless she had to. Once she left that room, she was going to face some very tough odds. She found no gun, but just like Black's report had indicated, there was the Chinese silver dagger, snug and secure in its leather scabbard. She jerked it out and then pulled the sheath off his belt.

Then she found the key to her freedom, wet, red, and slippery with Max's blood. There was more blood around the back of his head and mutilated throat, that had run out in a slanting line and was oozing underneath the bed. She avoided the blood, kneeling on the other side and jerking a white handkerchief out of his other pocket. She quickly wrapped it around her slashed palm, yelling out loud with the horrible pain as she pulled the open wound tightly together to stop the bleeding and then tried to knot it with her teeth. She couldn't think about the pain, she couldn't think about it and how bad the deep cut on her palm looked, how bad it hurt, or she surely would faint.

Claire forced herself to get back up and search through his blue jacket for a gun but didn't find one. He preferred killing with the knife, no doubt, or with his bare hands, unlike his sister, who preferred to bludgeon her victims to death. He had not armed himself to the teeth for his encounter with her, but he should have. He had been secure in his size and ability to maim with his hands and dagger, no doubt thinking his two large fists were weapon enough to rape and beat one unarmed woman into submission. That scenario had probably worked for him well enough in the past. But not this time.

She realized again that her own clothes were saturated with his blood. The spewing stream of red had hit her mainly in the face and chest. The front of her black T-shirt was soaked and sticky against her skin, and she jerked the bloody, gory thing off over her head, wanting his blood and torn flesh off her. She stood there a moment, fighting the stunned realization that she had killed a man with a jagged piece of glass, cut his jugular and killed him, in the most brutal and ugly way possible. Her jeans were soaked to the skin, too, and she was shivering as she stood there in the bloody jeans and black sports bra. She looked down at Max again. His eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling, lots of tiny rivulets of blood running down his chin and off onto his neck. She had butchered his throat down to the spine, and he had bled completely out. Oh, God.

Putting that image out of her mind, she knew she had to forget what she'd done and flee the room before the guards came back. She had to get out now. But they would search for her, search every inch of the place. She had to find a secure place to hide. But where? And even if she did manage to get away, she would leave a blood spoor for them to follow. She couldn't do that or they'd find her soon enough and she would be very dead, very fast. Quickly, she squatted down and unlaced her high-top Nikes, jerked them off, and her socks, and then she unzipped and stripped off her bloody jeans. She could not leave a trail of blood. She had to think things through. Stay calm. Be smart. Do what she had to do to save Black's life and her own. But she didn't have much time. She had to move fast.

Grabbing the white dress shirt and blue jacket that Max had thrown over the bed, she pulled them both on and buttoned the shirt and zipped the jacket, and then she pulled up the blanket from the bed and wiped the blood off her face and arms and blotted it out of her hair. The blood was drying out on her skin already, making her face cinch into a tight and terrible mask. But she didn't have time to wash it off, didn't have time to do anything else. This was her only chance. This was Black's only chance.

Fairly calm now, her heartbeat had slowed almost to a normal rate but not quite. She stuck the phone down inside the front of her bra and kept the dagger in her left hand. Her right hand was absolutely killing her, the pain so ungodly terrible that she felt like she was going to faint dead away. It felt as if her hand had been cut in two and was only hanging together by tendons.

Claire ignored the pain and ran to the vent. She whispered for Rico but he still hadn't come back. She tried to remove the grate but it was locked down, and she couldn't find the latch and it hurt her hand too much to try to pull it loose. Cursing, she moved over to the door and listened. Still no sounds outside; no movement, either, not that she could detect. The guys were still on their break, probably waiting for Max to call and tell them he was finished molesting her. God, these people were savages. She turned the key in the lock and eased the door open a mere crack.

Outside, the hall was still deserted, thank God, but she was pretty sure that wouldn't last long. They'd be back, and soon. That's when she remembered the grenade vest. It still sat where Max had placed it, right beside the door. She closed the door and knelt down beside it. It had lots of red and blue and white and yellow wires intersecting and attached to the grenades. But Max had told her that it wasn't activated, which meant that it wouldn't blow up if she removed the grenades. Or would it? Oh, God, she had to try.

Examining the grenades closely, she realized they were attached to the vest with straps that could be unbuckled. All the wires were threaded through the pins. He had said he would activate it after he put it on her. Didn't he? Wasn't that what he said? Oh, God, what was she gonna do? She looked at it some more, and then she took Max's dagger, held her breath, and sliced through one of the wires. Nothing happened.

So relieved that she almost fainted, she slid the wire out and unstrapped the grenade and got it in her good hand. She picked up the vest and put it on top of Max's bloody corpse, and then took the grenade out into the deserted hall and shut the door. She stood and listened again, knowing what she had to do. She opened the door again, and pulled the pin on the grenade. She tossed it inside the room, aiming it so that it would roll up and stop against the dead man. Then she shut the door and took off running down the long stone hallway, cradling her injured hand up against her breast so blood wouldn't seep through the already red-soaked handkerchief.

The bomb blast was quick and thunderous. It shook the floor beneath her feet as all the grenades were ignited. It went off about the time she reached the turn in the corridor that led to the staircase. Sucking in air, she stopped there and leaned against the wall. She could hear her heart pounding inside her ears. Both from fear and the surge of adrenaline now blasting through her. She was out; she was free. Max was dead. And maybe they'd think the body was hers and wouldn't come looking for her. She was beginning to feel very weak now, her knees shaky from blood loss, her stomach rolling with queasiness, and then she almost did pass out. She bent over and held her knees, took a few giant breaths of oxygen, drew it down deep into her lungs, and then she heard men yelling from the hall, down toward where the stairs were.

Claire took off back the way she'd come, frantic to find a place to hide. She jumped over the door that had been blown outward, reached the far end of the hall in seconds, turned down a different hallway, and quickly realized that it dead-ended at a gray stone wall at the back of the house. Desperate now to find a safe place, Claire turned to run the other direction. That's when she saw the little boy again. Rico was standing right there in front of her, not two yards away. Where had he come from?

He looked frightened, but he motioned her to follow him, and then darted into the open door right beside him. Claire ran into the room after him and found a large furnished bedroom like the one in which she'd been imprisoned, but this one had
Star Wars
posters tacked up on the walls, lots of little action figures of Han Solo and Princess Leia and Chewbacca, and other kinds of toys sitting around. This must have been Rico's room before Marcel Soquet had invaded his home and murdered anybody who got in his way. Rico had already disappeared through another door, and she sprinted after him into the closet, just in time to see him wriggle on his belly through another ornate brass grate that was standing wide open.

Claire wasted no time and dove in after him, headfirst, still holding the knife, scrambling frantically to turn around in the cramped space and pull the grate shut behind her. She found the latch, secured it, and inched backward into the darkness of the cool stone air vent that seemed to be about three feet square. She held her aching hand against her stomach, but kept the knife out and ready in her left hand, trying to control her thundering fear and racing heart. The boy was still on the move; she could just barely hear him, but he was crawling down through the dark tunnel somewhere behind her. She waited a few more seconds, expecting Soquet's men to burst into the closet and jerk open the grate, but it didn't happen. So she turned around and crawled as fast and as quietly as she could on her good hand and her knees, down the short passage to where Rico had disappeared into a deeper kind of darkness.

A couple of seconds later, she stopped at the other end. In the very dim light, she could see Rico's legs where he was standing up just outside the opening. She crawled out, too, and found herself in a different passageway, one that was also about three feet wide but tall enough for her to stand up. The tunnel stretched out on both sides of them, long and dark and cold under her bare feet, but all along its length thin bars of light filtered in from rooms on the other side of the wall and looked like a long row of tall skinny sconces.

The minute she was out and up on her feet, Rico ran to her and grabbed her tightly around her knees. He was still breathing hard and trembling all over. Claire was, too, but she went down onto her knees in front of him and gathered the frightened child up close against her. She hugged him close and whispered into his ear, “Ssh, ssh, baby, you're okay now. They didn't see us. They aren't coming after us. Okay? We got away, but we've gotta be quiet or they'll hear us.”

Rico tightened his arms around her neck, kept them there in a stranglehold, utterly terrified. Claire could feel his heart thundering. It was shaking his entire body. He started whispering to her. “I hate them, I hate them. They hurt me. They hurt my mama and daddy.” Then he started sobbing into her neck, but so softly she could barely hear him, almost without any sound whatsoever, as if he had learned to suffer in silence inside those dark and cold and lonely tunnels.

“C'mon now, don't cry, Rico. We got away from them, didn't we? And I've got a phone, baby. I've got a phone now, but I've gotta find a place where I can get a signal. Is there somewhere that I can do that, Rico? Is there somewhere inside these tunnels that is open to the sky, somewhere where they won't see us, where we'll be safe? Think, Rico, this is so important. I know men who'll come help us, but I don't think they can find us. They've got to find us so they can help us escape. Okay? You understand?”

Rico nodded but didn't let go of her neck. Claire pushed him back away from her a bit, until she could look into his face. “Do these tunnels run all through this place?”