The Vacuum

Part 5

"Please...Please stop..."

Her eyes closed at the sounds coming from the other room. At first it was screaming and fighting; the sounds of the human spirit struggling to survive in all of its divine strength. She liked the fighting of the others but it died quickly, turning into the crying voice from the other side of the flimsy wall. A broken testament that the mind was really just as pliable as the skin and bones in control.

She yanked down hard on her bindings, pulling at the ropes on her wrist as one of the men stood in front of her, taking photos with her own camera to send to the people that would want them back alive. The flash that she normally hardly used stung her eyes and made her squint through her black eyes.

"You don't like that do you?" He asked in surprisingly perfect but accented English. Maybe they had been preparing for this. Not for them specifically but for some dumb Americans to wander off the road.

Her head snapped up as sharply as it could on her tensed shoulders and neck. Her body was burning, surges of electricity frying her nerve endings and weighing on her ability to stay awake. Sparks still jolted her body from the wires that hung from her body. A fly sitting on her curled finger jolted into flight as it twitched with aftershocks.

"They cry like children...but you..."

Her leg jetted out and kicked the precious camera that was her livelihood from his hand, sending it shattering to the gravel and dust floor into a million pieces that were probably worth more than her life at this point.

"You little..."

The shot to her stomach came swift and hard, making saliva drip from her mouth as her body hunched against the ropes. Blood from a cut on her ribs leaked open in a fresh spill. It was starting to look like oil against the floor when her eyes blinked down at it: black dried and sticky.

She held back the pained scream, chocking instead. Their crying and begging were driving her insane but they would never hear hers. She hated them for it.

Alex leaned against the glass in the shower, her arms braced above her and crossed on the foggy glass with the hard water of the shower pelting at her back. She ran her small hands over her face as drops flooded down it, catching in her button nose. She pushed it off and starred in front of her, knowing that the figure there with the mask over his face was just a figment of her imagination, just like it was in the photo.

She wiped the water from her nose and lips and shut it off behind her before wrapping a towel around herself. She liked the way that the air felt on her skin...the way it dried off naturally in the heat that still engulfed the crappy air conditioning of the house.

Sliding over onto the sofa, she opened her laptop and pulled over her bag, taking out the camera. She turned it over in her hand and pulled the memory card, plugging it into the laptop and beginning to scan through the photos from the day. Her eyes ran over them quickly before sighing.

She put her arms over her head and stretched. "Is there anything alive out here?" She muttered to herself, leaning her head back in the sofa as she closed her eyes for a few long moments hearing the fan above her and that was all. She didn't need a lot of noise to distract her, music to break up the silence when she was alone. Stillness had its own sound.

Shaking her head, she got up. She needed to get a drink and find someone to buy some more weed from. Being a functioning pothead meant that you needed to function and she couldn't do that if she was rationing so much that the effects were lost.