One Minute

Chapter Thirteen- Contingency

Everything was black—I couldn’t see anything. It felt like I almost didn’t have a body, but I must have been so tied up that I couldn’t tell. Disembodied voices came from the front of me.

“Is she awake yet?” A manly voice asked.

“I don’t know. But at least Roivas is going to do this now before he and Zora actually got involved.” A Russian voice replied.

Eric. Nikolay. The two men that I called Asshole and Dipshit. The ones that took Raymond’s phone.

It was a hoax, and everyone was in on it, but me.

“Too bad Roivas had to take a different car.” Eric grunted.

“He couldn’t see Zora like this—damn him. We told him to do a specific thing and he just had to prolong it and make it harder on himself. I mean sure, you’ve killed your parents and I killed my ex-fiancée, but still! We all had to deal with this shit!” Nikolay slammed his fist on the armrest in between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s seat. I could tell by the rattling sound.

A car.

That’s what I was in. I was probably in the back seat, bagged and tied up. I couldn’t scream—no. That would make Eric and Nikolay aware that I was up and listening to the conversation. I wanted to hear more.

“Damn Roivas, if he had kissed Zora, he wouldn’t have heard the end of it from the Cadre. He’d be exiled for at least a week.”

“Why? Where do they send him off to?” Nikolay asked.

“They send us all different places. Like, for my  parents, apparently I didn’t do the procedure right, and so they sent me off to Saudi Arabia for the week in God knows what part of it. It was so fucking hot, and they didn’t even bother to give me water! I had to drink of the ‘sewage’, and so when I got back home, I was sick for almost two weeks, just constantly vomiting.”

“See!” Nikolay huffed, “This is the information that I’m not told! The fucking boss just says ‘Nikolay, you gotta fill in for so and so because they went on a short leave. They got sick and blah blah blah.” He said this with a failed American accent.

“I thought with you being part of the intelligence core, you’d get the information. Well, you see, what the boss does is he gets a big ass map, and throws a dart on it. Like all those fucking hipsters. So sometimes you’re lucky and get Paris or Venice and Rome, but other times you get bad places, like the middle of the ocean, or Antarctica or something.”

“Ohooiet’!” He exclaimed.

“I know, right?” Eric chuckled and the car must have come to a stop, because I heard the keys turn and the engine quiet down. “Here we are, back in Hollister.”

“What do you want me to do now?”

“Take the bag off her.”

I squinted as the bright light blinded me for a brief second before I saw Nikolay and Eric. They both look at me with grim expressions on their face—they took their jobs very seriously.

Before I could do anything, Eric held me down and Nikolay looked at me before taking a flask with a bright blue liquid inside. He moved the flask over to me, the rim pressed against my lips. I kept my mouth shut, trying not to let it enter my body.

“Open up!” Nikolay growled, pinching my nose. He held on until I gasped for air and shoved the liquid down my throat. I gurgled and tried to spit, but could not. I had to swallow and finally, Nikolay let go of me. I felt the muscles in my body grow weak and my eyelids grew heavy. Everything around me because a blur, and soon, the last thing that I saw was the car door open, and I heard vague screams.