Scattered

52

Red Earth

Olivia woke up with a startle.

'Easy there, tiger.'

A familiar guttural voice said to her immediate right; making her turn her head in the direction of the sound. Among the rubbles and ruins of the large red-stoned mansion, Detective Makelo Tucker stood seemingly at ease as he studied a range of sharp knives put on display over a dilapidated table. Olivia looked down and found her "good arm" handcuffed to the arm of the chair she sat. She rattled the cuffs against the cheap steel armchair in panic.

'It is useless.' He said as he picked up a rather sharp dagger and examined it under the strangely yellow-ish sunlight streaming through the cracks on the wall. 'I took it from the precinct. High grade, stainless carbon steel and polymer. You know better than me that once clipped, it stays unless you own an industrial sized metal saw.'

Olivia sagged against the uncomfortable chair with a heavy breath.

She really didn't see this coming. Detective Tucker had been a mentor-figure to her for the past five years, albeit a pretty distant one. The level of trust that was broken was astronomical. The fact that he stayed around to keep her close for his own selfish gains made her sick. It made her wonder who else was planted around her.

Could it be Natasha?

Lee?

Amber?

James?

Mom? Josh?

Each one of the possibilities was more painful than the last. She shook away the crippling pain that seemed to make her body more tired than it was. She needed to stay alert if she wanted to escape this psychopath and making herself more vulnerable was not the way out.

She looked around herself. She was in a badly damaged and age-worn palace... if it could be called that. It was barren and small hills of stone and concrete rubbles collected in various parts of the large hall. It overpoweringly smelt of fine dust and the air around her was extremely dry and hot. Although the heat picked at her skin harshly, strangely she couldn't feel herself gathering sweat.

'Where are we?'

She asked in what she assumed was nonchalance. She gathered that she was not in New York anymore and assumed that he might have crossed states while she was out. Perhaps if it is any state she knew, she could utilize her new-found teleportation skills to transport herself back to New York.

'Limbo.' He replied, surprisingly without any hesitation. 'It is a deserted realm between the underworld and Earth.'

'We are not on Earth?!'

This time Olivia didn't take any effort to mask her surprise. Being trapped in another realm was bad news to her as she didn't know anything as to how to take herself through another realm. And even if she did manage to make a run for it, where is she going to go? She didn't want to imagine the kind of freak show that would be waiting for her outside the crumbling red-oxide walls.