Undercover Badge; Next Generation

Chapter fourteen

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I'd like to say I struggled and left some bruises. But, I'd be lying. I was a kitten. When he pointed a gun at my chest, I went quiet. When he told me to put my hands behind my back, I did. I didn't struggle when my hands were zip-tied and when he covered my mouth in duck tape, I didn't so much as breathe hard. I could feel the skin on my body at a temperature of ice and a pallor of snow, and my eyes wide as saucers. I was so going to die.

He didn't look scary. He was slim, tanned and blonde. Probably only a decade my senior and half an inch taller than I. The man behind me was stout and round, and had long red hair tied back with a leather thong. He carried most of his weight in the spare tire around his waist but some of it was in the substantial tree trunks of his arms. Yes, he wouldn't win the award for fitness but in strength the man was a behemoth.

They led me across the road from the car where a white sedan was parked. I was gently helped into the trunk by the large man- I felt like a feather. He literally, strangely delicately, picked me up and put me down on my side before slamming the trunk closed.

The darkness woke me up.

Still bound I began to writhe enthusiastically, kicking out , shouldering, banging my head on any flat surface. Really, it was a useless process that only served to jar my old bruises and give me a headache, but panic was surfacing and it was squeezing my brain and making adrenaline pour into my veins near my kidneys and it felt like liquid nitrogen freezing my blood. And I succumbed to it. It was probably the most pathetic moment of my life. I began screaming, shrieking but it was all muttered and guttural yells that came from my throat but never passed my lips with the ductape keeping them shut. Tears poured out of my eyes and I bashed, thunked and knocked around fruitlessly, a puppet of the deep terror that had taken hold in my soul. All I knew was the fear.

Two men had kidnapped me and now what? I was terrified of my fate, my death, my life.

I don't know how long it was, that I shrieked until my throat was raw and I swear it tasted blood and it felt like all my old bruises had returned. I felt like I'd spent days shrieking. In reality, I'd later find, it was hours. Seven, to be exact.

I'd given up around hour four, lain on my left side, cheek pressed to the fabric on the bottom of the trunk, one knee pulled up to my chest and both arms having gone numb and my fingers, toes and feet ice cold. I'd basically accepted that I was going to die. I could hear them in the car. The second I'd finally given up and lain down I could hear one of them growl a "Thank fucking God." the other had nervously chuckled and muttered the words "At lest we know she's a screamer." the other laughed loudly, boomingly, ugly.

"And at least we know she can go all night."

The words had me squeezing my eyes tightly shut and tears flowing, a silent sob building in my chest.

So there. My great story ended with being too weak to retaliate, to be a hero. I had lost. At some point I'd begun to wonder if they'd found my car. I wondered if anyone had realized I was gone. Would my parents be terrified or simply think id stayed late at school? Did Ingrid know? Had Tommy figured it out? Who else would care?

Did Matthew know?

I wanted him to. Was it strange that I wanted him to know? A man I didn't know, not at all. A man that I had spent years being terrified of. Who'd haunted my nightmares, and lately, my daydreams. I didn't understand anything about him and the only side i'd ever seen from him was cruel or harsh or on the other side of a gun's barrel. Until recently... but only a few choice encounters was enough to make me wish that after being gone for seven hours, he'd be the first to notice? And to some part of me it wasn't a wish but a belief. I believed, that Matthew knew.

When I finally descended into my own silence, my quiet, there were things I saw behind closed eyelids. I didn't want to admit them, but I kept seeing hi-

Tires squealed and metal shrieked and my body was thrown into the side of the trunk. Groaning continued and the men in the sedan were roaring, yelling profanity after prof- the car hit something, stopping the skidding scream. We'd been smashed into by another car. T-boned from the left. I heard the car reverse out of us, and I'd have been screaming if my throat wasn't killing me.

Another hit came, the car screeching and slamming into us again, then repeating the process. Each time they did I heard more metal protest from my right, outside the car.
"Hey!" I tried to yell.
"Hey! Help me! Help!"

The lid of the trunk had began to warp upward, creating a bowl turnover above my head. The men inside had stopped yelling. And then my world lost its bearing.

Suddenly, with the last hit and a ear shattering snap from the right we were air born. My body raised off of the floor for a moment- and then I was slammed into the roof of the trunk then back to the trunk's bottom, and I felt us sinking and I knew. We'd been run off a bridge, and now we were in water, sinking, fast.

Well, no. Truthfully it was a slow process, but my pulsing heart made it feel like the time flew. "Hey!" I tried to yell, back to kicking at the warped trunk-top. There was a small fissure where it had come loose from the bottom and I could see outside it and feel the air through a gap the size of a quarter. Wherever we'd gone over the last seven hours, it was cold. Ice cold.

The angle I lay at was tilting- the engine in the hood pulling us down. I leveraged my back against the seat's backs and kicked as hard upward as I could. I didn't want to die. My ankles and knees protested at the inability to build momentum in the small space that was resulting in me hurting myself more than anything.

I was half grunting, half crying. Water began seeping in through the little gap between the trunk and the cars frame. It was freezing.

I was going to drown, that much was obvious. It didn't stop my mewling, my internal praying to every deity I could pronounce, anyone who could help me. They never answered my call.

And so the car sank and water dribbled in the crack. I just law down on my side, and closed my eyes, the space rapidly cooling. The seats had been soaked through and the angle I lat at now was mostly with my back on the soaked material. We, the car and I, the two men in the car, still silent were already completely submerged. I could hear the bubbles, precious air racing to the surface, and I could feel us continue to sink to the bottom of the- what was it? A lake, a dam, a river? I'd like to know where the hell I was drowning.

My jeans and shirt were soaked, half my body frozen and numb from the ice cold water, it crawled up my cheeks... I started to float. I'd begun gasping when the car's bumper hit the bottom with a hard thud that rattled me in the water. Slowly, the rear end began to sink before it, too, made contact. I was out of time. The trunk was full now, me pressing my face to the top of the lid, nose being squished to breathe in a few precious gulps.

And then it was just water.

I opened my eyes to a squint, somehow still aware of my contact lenses and attempting to keep them in my eyes rather than washing out in the ice cold water. My body started shivering, convulsing as I twisted this way and that, thrashed and writhed kicked at the door bound. This was it.

My lungs began burning inside, contrasting stark to the ice outside. Then I stopped struggling and lay back, and gave into the temptation to breathe out, even though air never escaped my ductaped mouth. Through my nose a stream of bubbles escaped and in my last moment I watched a full lungful of air pool in upturned cup the distorted metal of the trunk made- there'd already been some precious oxygen in the cup, some I'd missed.

But it was too late, so I drowned.

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