Surviving the Dead 03: Warrior Within (31 page)

These people they worked on, broke them down with beatings and hard labor. They kept at it until they had pushed them to the point of extreme mental and physical exhaustion, and then they started building them back up. But they didn’t do this with all of their captives, only the ones that had the fortitude and the strength of will to endure it. The people who had the raw, stubborn spirit that the Legion could warp, and twist, and defile into something despicable. What Rat-Face was doing right now, the whole boot-licking thing, was the first step in the process. Their first indication as to what I was made of.

At least I could stop pretending to be scared.

“No way. Fuck that,” I said.

Rat-Face smiled. “Y’know, I was hoping you’d say that.” He took a couple of running steps, and his arm blurred toward me, swinging the baton.

There is a right way, and a wrong way, to block a strike from a bludgeon. You never want to cross your arms over your face in the classic defensive posture. This will only result in a broken ulna, in most cases. The proper way is to extend your arm straight outward, and let the offending object skirt down the outside of your arm until it deflects off the muscle of your shoulder. It’s best to do this with one arm, while guiding the object away from you and moving forward to immobilize your opponent. Fortunately for Rat-Face, the cuffs on my wrists limited my mobility; otherwise, I would have taken that baton from him and rammed it down his scrawny throat.

Instead, I settled for stretching both arms forward, palms together as if in prayer, and circling them into the arc of the swing to disperse as much kinetic energy as possible. It still hurt like hell, but not bad enough to paralyze my left arm. More importantly, nothing broke.

The maneuver left Rat-Face off balance, so I stepped in and bumped him with my hip. I outweighed him by a good thirty pounds, and the impact sent him sprawling over onto his side. The other thug, the one still pointing his gun at me, laughed loudly.

“You are being pathetic,” he said, in a heavily accented voice. Eastern European, maybe Russian. “Even he is being chained, and he beat you.”

Rat-Face got to his feet. When he turned to face me, his skin had turned a dark shade of red and his knuckles were white around the grip of his baton. His thin lips stretched into a greasy smile. “You’re gonna pay for that, sweetheart.”

Next, he tried staying at the edge of where I could walk, bound as I was by the leg irons. He circled back and forth, trying to make me trip over my own feet, while sweeping the baton in short, flicking strikes. I countered by keeping my base planted and moving around from the waist to dodge the little ball of iron at the baton’s tip. His arms weren’t very long, and after seven or eight misses, he stepped back out of reach to ponder what to do next. All the while, the Russian laughed.

“He is being fast, this one,” he said. “How do you say …
lusaf
?”

“I think you mean ‘elusive,’ you inbred Cossack fuck.”

The Russian nodded, ignoring the insult. “
Da
, that is it. He is being elusive.”

“Fine, here you go.” Rat-Face flipped the baton around and offered the handle to the Russian. “Why don’t you give it a try?”

The Russian shrugged, handed his rifle to Rat-Face, and took the baton. As he approached, I could tell just by the way he moved that he knew how to handle himself, unlike his uncoordinated friend.

His first swipe was a lateral, aimed at my waist. I bent forward and thrust my hips backward to avoid it. The Russian reversed the baton and brought it around toward my head in a deft, backhanded swing. I had to duck to get out of the way, which was exactly what my tormentor wanted. He let his momentum spin him around, and then sent a hammer-fist crashing into the back of my neck. My vision swam, my legs turned to rubber, and I fell forward onto my knees.

Yep. This one knew his business. That was exactly what I would have done.

The Russian chuckled, and from the corner of my eye, I saw him toss the baton in the air, let it spin a few times, and catch it. He held the handle toward Rat-Face.

“That is how you are to be doing it.”

While I was still too dazed to move, Rat-Face took the baton and swung it with everything he had. It hit me on the small of my back, directly over the sensitive kidney area. The kidneys are a bad place to get hit; the two organs are not only filled with blood and big arteries, they are also filled with thousands upon thousands of nerve endings. A hard strike to the kidney hurts so bad that you literally cannot scream. Your muscles lock up, you can’t breathe, and you suffer temporary paralysis of the torso and limbs. I was off balance when Rat-Face hit me, and the blow sent me toppling over onto my side.

I saw him making ready to strike again, and managed to go flat so that the only target he had available was my back. The baton bounced off my shoulder blade hard enough to make me wonder if it was broken. There was a whistling sound, and then the baton struck me again in the thick muscle at the middle of my back. Just as I was anticipating a fourth strike, I heard a single, fleshy clap.

“Not in the head, you fool. How are we to be having women and drink if we are having no slave?” the Russian said.

“LET GO OF MY HAND, YOU PINKO FUCK!”

I turned my head and saw the blurry outline of the Russian holding Rat-Face by the wrist, with the smaller man struggling to pull his hand away. Casually, with the same unworried ease as
if he were swatting a fly, the Russian planted a knee in Rat-Face’s gut. The little bastard gasped as his breath left him, eyes bulging, and went down to his knees. The Russian twisted the baton out his grasp like taking a lollipop from a petulant toddler, and shoved the other man over onto his back.

“Maybe you are not caring about pussy,” he said, planting a boot on Rat-Face’s chest, “but I am. We get nothing if this man is dead,
da
?”

He took a step back, tapped the baton against the sole of his boot to loosen the segments, collapsed it, and tossed it onto Rat-Face’s chest.

“Get up,” he said. “We are to be going back on duty now. I will to be coming back later and taking him to the mines.”

He strolled casually back toward the entrance while Rat-Face struggled to his feet. He shot me a hateful glare as he got up, his eyes promising murder. He shoved the baton back into its holster, stared angrily for another moment, and then turned to follow the Russian out the door. When he had shut the door behind him, I rolled over onto my side, groaning.

“You shouldn’t have done that.” I heard a voice say from behind me. It was soft and whispering. Definitely feminine. I sat up slowly and craned my head to look.

“What?”

“You shouldn’t have fought them like that. They’ll come back, and there will be more of them. They’ll make a game of it.”

My vision cleared enough to see the person talking to me. She was young, maybe early twenties. She had long, blond hair that hung in filthy clumps down her dirt-encrusted face. Tear streaks marred the mud on her cheeks, leaving twin clean spots in their wake. She had a blanket wrapped around her but still shivered in the cold. I could see enough of her skin to know that she wasn’t wearing any clothes, and that if she were cleaned up and fed, she would be quite pretty.

“Why are they doing this?” I asked. Of course, I already knew why, but I wanted to maintain my cover.

“They need workers,” she said. “People to dig their tunnels.”

Her eyes darted around, and she craned her head to see if anyone was listening. Then she leaned forward and whispered, “You’re strong, and you can fight. If you stay alive, they’ll try to recruit you. Try to make you one of them. But you have to keep fighting. Don’t let them break you, no matter what. If you get through it, they’ll let you live.”

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Miranda,” she replied. “But don’t tell anybody that. If they ask you for your name, say ‘maggot’. Otherwise, they’ll beat you again.”

“Hey, shut the fuck up over there!” A voice called out from the table where the off-duty raiders were eating. We both sat quietly until the shouter went back to his meal.

“There’ll be trouble for you now,” the girl said. “You’ve caused a stir.”

I chuckled, and lay back on my mattress. “Story of my life, Miranda. Story of my life.”

*****

A few hours later, the Legion proved Grayson Morrow, as well as Miranda, wrong. They skipped the part where they sent a bunch of burly men to drag me off somewhere and beat the hell out of me. Maybe they figured they had done enough of that already. Instead, they went straight to phase two—isolation.

Not that I knew this right away. When I saw three raiders coming for me, one of them the big Russian, I thought my day was about to get a lot worse. I was right on that note, just not in the way that I thought I would be. They cuffed my hands behind my back, disconnected me from the iron ring in the floor, and fettered my ankles with another set of leg irons.

As they escorted me across the warehouse floor, the dank, earthy smell that pervaded the place grew stronger. Eventually, a lantern that one of the raiders carried illuminated the edges of a pile of dirt to our left. Craning my neck, I tried to see the top of it, but it disappeared into the murky black beyond the lantern’s light. We passed more piles of dirt along the way, until finally we came to a stop.

Looking down, I saw a square had been cut into the thick concrete under my feet. The edges were fairly straight, and from the look of it, it had not been done recently. My guess was that whoever cut this hole had done so with heavy equipment, back when gasoline was still available. Which meant it could have been there for as long as two years.

There was a wooden platform built over the hole, with a smaller, square hatch in the middle of it. One of the raiders produced a key, opened a padlock on the hatch, and then disappeared down the ladder beneath. The Russian nudged me in my sore kidney with the barrel of his AK.

“Go on, maggot. Down the ladder.”

I did as he said, and followed the fading light of the lantern down into the darkness. The ladder ended abruptly after only about twenty feet, and my feet hit bare dirt as I stepped away.

“Don’t move,” a voice said from the other side of the lantern. I squinted and turned my head away from it. “Stay right where you are. Try anything, and I’ll kill you where you stand.”

I waited, blinking and standing in place. The other two men climbed down behind me, grabbed me by the arms, and urged me forward.

“Let’s go,” one of them said.

I followed them down the tunnel and tried to glean as much information as I could along the way. So far, what Morrow had told me was holding up. Just as he had said, the tunnels were low and narrow, barely wide enough for two men to walk abreast while standing up straight. If I had been a few inches taller, I would have had to duck my head to avoid hitting the arched roof.

Every few feet along the walls, wooden supports ran from floor to ceiling and connected to thick, reinforced joists overhead. I’m no architect, but it looked to me that whoever had designed this tunnel system knew what the hell he or she was doing. It didn’t look like one of those crumbling death traps that drug smugglers had used along the U.S.-Mexico border back during
the drug wars. This tunnel smacked of careful planning, and the expertise of a structural engineer.

After walking for what felt like miles, but was probably only a couple of hundred yards, the tunnel branched off in three directions. The lantern-bearer turned right, and the other two dragged me after him. The tunnel widened into a chamber that was maybe a hundred feet long, with six doors lining the walls on either side of a central walkway. The door frames were made of bricks and mortar that had been anchored into the surrounding hard-packed dirt, and the doors themselves had been fabricated from rebar and sections of angle-iron. Each one connected to its frame on heavy-duty steel hinges and had a large padlock holding it shut. The man with the lantern produced another key and unlocked one of the doors.

“In you go,” he said, grabbing me by the arm and shoving me through the door. I tripped over my leg irons and fell headlong onto the floor, just managing to turn sideways on the way down to avoid smacking my face into the dirt. The impact jarred my shoulder, and set my kidney to aching all over again.

“Enjoy your stay, maggot,” Lantern-Man said, laughing as he shut the door and locked it. The light faded with the sound of footsteps walking away, leaving me in complete darkness.

When I was sure that they were gone, I stood up and began walking the perimeter of the cell. It was square, and I measured it by walking heel to toe along all four sides. The walls were ten feet long, giving me a total of a hundred square feet of floor space. Not exactly the Waldorf-Astoria.

The floor was bare dirt, but it was hard-packed and dry. In one corner, I stumbled upon a five-gallon plastic bucket and wondered if my captors really wanted me to use it, or if it was some kind of psychological ploy. It wasn’t as if I could unbutton my pants with my hands cuffed behind my back.

“Speaking of …” I muttered, and sat down against the wall.

I had been hoping against hope that they would leave my hands bound in front of me, but evidently, my little display with Rat-Face and the Russian had made them cautious. If I wanted to avoid pissing my pants or shitting myself, I would have to get my handcuffs past my hips.