The rest of my friends were divided into the two other cells, a mix of girls and boys.
“Pays to be the VIP,” I snarked to no one in particular.
One of the men eyed me up and down with a curled lip and narrowed eyes. He spit out some kind of ugly response in rapid Spanish. I had no idea what he said, but my social cues told me it was something along the lines of, “Shut up, Woman!”
Or maybe he had used a substitute for woman…
I decided that was probably a good idea and moved over to the lone cot along the wall. My cell was the one built furthest from the door. The building made up two of my walls, and bars made up the other two. I guessed this was the most secure of the three cells.
Whatever happened to the other two cells, they apparently wanted to make sure didn’t happen to me.
Because I was oh, so dangerous.
Once we were securely locked away, the gunmen left us alone, returning to tasks around the office. Whatever those were. They seemed to mostly sit around on desks or in chairs and eye the ten of us with an ominous kind of hunger.
I tried not to look directly at them.
Diego walked over shortly after we’d been locked inside. He directed his triumphant grin at me and revealed a line of gold top teeth and a scar that reached from the corner of his eye to the corner of his mouth. I hadn’t noticed it earlier, but I hadn’t really looked at him closely.
It was faint enough to be missed when the sun shone brightly on his face, but now, in the natural light of our prison, I could see the jagged line and believe he was the badass he swaggered around as.
Shit.
“It was good fortune to find you.” He stood three inches from the bars. If I had a weapon, I could jam it through the slender space and gut him.
I discretely looked around for a sharp object. There wasn’t one.
Hendrix had been right to want to kill the bounty hunters first. We should have gone after them last night. We should have hunted our hunters.
“Your English is very good.” I didn’t know why I said that. The words were out of my mouth before I could think better of them. I wanted to slap my hand over my mouth, but refrained. I didn’t think this guy appreciated remorse. If I showed him I had some tenacity though… well, he might respect that.
Or shoot me on the spot.
One or the other.
His grin widened. Whew. “I’ve been doing business with Americans for long before the borders collapsed.” He raised his eyebrows. “In fact, not much has changed for me.”
“You mean human trafficking.”
His eyebrows raised, my answer impressed him. “Among other things.”
If possible, I hated him more than ever. My blood boiled with righteous anger and my skin tingled from the force of my loathing. This man wasn’t a man. He was a subspecies of demon. My hand twitched and my eyes scanned my empty cell for that sharp object again.
I watched his demeanor shift slightly. He went from comfortable cockiness to paranoid mistrust. I needed to stop digging into his past. With a creature like this, it probably wasn’t the best way to make friends.
Still, I couldn’t help but push my luck. “How do you know I’m worth something? They could have been lying to you.”
“What reasons did they have for lying to me?”
“We killed one of their friends. They wanted revenge.”
“They told me that. But they also told me about this Colony that is after you.”
“It’s not a real thing.” My voice didn’t waver and my confidence didn’t wane. If I wanted him to believe this lie, I had to believe it too. Or at least make it believable.
“So you’re telling me that they made up a man and a government and a poster when they chased you across the border in case they needed help from someone like me?”
When he put it like that, my lie seemed stupid. I adjusted. “I’m not saying that there aren’t people after me. There definitely are. I’m saying there’s no pot of gold waiting for you at the end of this rainbow.”
“Pot of gold?”
“You’re being swindled.”
He raised his eyebrows at me.
Okay, speak clearly. “This guy doesn’t have anything for you. He doesn’t have riches or dinero or agua; he has nada. He’ll come down here and kill you to get to me. That poster is nothing but empty promises.”
He tilted his chin and regarded me seriously. “That’s why I sent my men. They will see what he has and report back to me. You think I’m stupid?”
“No,” I answered quickly. “I think you’re very smart.”
His expression didn’t change, but his shoulders relaxed some, as if he had figured me out. I didn’t like that. It insulted my pride. “What did you do to this man? You’re nothing but a little girl. Why does he want to get to you so badly?”
I looked to the side, through all of the bars and found my friends watching me with pale expressions. My focus fell to Page. I worried about her future more than ever before.
After everything that happened with Matthias…
I sometimes wondered if he wasn’t after her just as hard. If maybe there wasn’t a poster with her face on it because people would be less inclined to hunt a little girl. I didn’t know how he couldn’t have been desperate to hurt her in some way too.
She shared some of the blame with me. But this man didn’t need to know that.
I made a decision. I turned back to Diego. “I killed his wife. And I’m the reason his son is dead.”
Diego’s smile returned. “You killed his wife?”
I met his scary gaze and nodded, “I did.”
“You’re tiny.”
“I’m deadly.”
His malevolent smile grew. “Good thing you’re locked in this cage then.” He tapped the metal with the tip of his gun. The clinking sound sent a shiver down my spine. I was so messing with the wrong guy. “Say your name.”
I thought about making something up, but I knew it would just come back to haunt me. “Reagan,” I told him.
“Reagan, bienvenida a mi casa.” Welcome to my house.
I didn’t know whether he meant this prison, this station or this town. Or, hell, maybe he meant Mexico. It didn’t really matter though because I was in his house whether I wanted to be or not.
“Gracias,” I told him, knowing my knowledge of the Spanish language was reaching its limits.
With a scary laugh he turned around and left us to rot.
After he disappeared, I felt this intense release of pressure. I stumbled backward until my back hit the cool wall and I dropped my head against it. I took deep breaths and tried to regain my equilibrium.
I had seen a lot of evil things in my life. I had fought Zombies nearly daily for three years. I had killed my boyfriend when he tried to eat me. I had gone up against Matthias and walked away alive.
There had been so much evil in my life, I could hardly separate it from the non-evil things.
But now there was Diego.
Ex Mexican Cartel? Probably. Human trafficker? Definitely. He’d already admitted to that. And if someone was willing to sell humans, what else were they willing to do? Drugs? Weapons? Chicken fights? Probably all of the above.
Now he ran this tiny Mexican village and kept Zombies locked up in the desert. This was the kind of guy that welcomed a Zombie Apocalypse because he knew he could win.
An Apocalypse played to his strengths.
This was Matthias’s Mexican brother.
And somehow I’d managed to catch his attention.
Holy shit.
“Reagan.”
I turned to find Hendrix at the bars that separated my cell from his. His hands hung limply at his sides and his expression could have been chiseled from stone.
“Hmm?”
“Come here,” he demanded in a low voice.
Like my body responded to his command by voice recognition, I pushed off the wall and walked to him. His hands slipped through the narrowly spaced bars a
nd reached for my hands.
His skin burned against mine, a hot reminder that he was still alive. That I was still alive. He represented everything that was the opposite of Matthias and Diego. He represented hope and goodness, loyalty and truth. Hendrix was light to their sadistic darkness.
He was life when they were only death.
“Don’t do that to me again.” His gravelly voice scraped at my chest, pulling out all kinds of feelings from my furiously pounding heart.
I blinked at him slowly and questioned him even slower. I couldn’t get his words to make sense. He’d either blurred my thoughts with his overwhelming presence or he’d started speaking in code. “Do what?”
Where I hesitated, he did not. “Make me think I’m going to lose you,” he answered immediately. “I don’t know what is going to happen in here, Reagan, but pissing off the Mexican is not going to help us.”
“I’m sorry. I should have known better.” I did know better. I just couldn’t seem to get control of my tongue.
His lips twitched, “Silence is golden, Willow. Try not to get us killed before Matthias even gets here.”
“I’ll do my best,” I promised. And my words were sincere, so very sincere… it was just that they also rang pretty false. I would try to keep quiet. I would try to stay out of trouble. But my track record predicted a different future.
I thought about pulling my hands away from his, but before I could follow through, his thumb rubbed a slow circle in the palm of my hand. My entire body shivered in reaction. I blushed immediately, embarrassed by what his tiny touch could do to me.
He didn’t seem to notice, his gaze had locked on my lips and didn’t let go. When he leaned forward, I couldn’t help but mimic his movement. Our lips met briefly, through the cold metal on either side of our faces. His mouth brushed over mine in a soft, tender kiss and then he pulled back.
My eyes were still closed when he said, “That’s all I ask.” He let out a deep breath and I had a feeling it was his first one in a while. Then he let go of my hands and moved across his cell.
I licked my lips, savoring the taste of him there. I let myself enjoy that small, confusing, out-of-nowhere kiss and stepped back from the bars and surveyed my tiny living space.
I imagined I would have to stay here for at least a month while we waited out Matthias’s arrival. I knew he could get here way faster than we had, but it would still take time.
And who knew what Diego had planned in the meantime.
Activity around the office fascinated me. And since Vaughan had been locked in the outermost cell and everyone had congregated near him to speak in low voices, probably discussing our plans for escape, I was left alone with nothing to do but watch the drama in front of me.
Lots of people stopped by to check out the group of Americans that had been captured. Once, someone brought in a muzzled Feeder. The office had exploded with shouting and Spanish cursing. They had practically shoved the filthy creature and his even filthier keeper from the building, waving guns at him and throwing their arms around.
That kept us entertained for several minutes. The entire office jumped into action. I thought for sure we were going to have to watch another person get killed today. But eventually they got him outside, along with his Feeder pet. Or prisoner? Or whatever it was.
Then the office smelled like Zombie rot. When the men came back in they couldn’t stand the smell. I didn’t have to understand what they were saying to interpret the wild waving of their arms and opening of the windows. The grimy desert air filtered in on sporadic gusts of dust. The heat from the afternoon followed it and I slumped onto my bed feeling exhausted and depleted of every ounce of energy.
We hadn’t eaten since breakfast that morning and I wasn’t sure when we would get our next meal. Our diet wasn’t extravagant anyway, but I’d burned through enough adrenaline today to feel a little sick from hunger.
I chatted with my friends in different cells throughout the rest of the day, but we were all too nervous to truly focus on anything other than finding a way to escape. I watched the men closely, hoping to pick up on some kind of pattern to their shifts and activity, but nothing obvious stuck out. The only keys I knew of sat across the room on a cluttered desk.
I eyed the small toilet in the corner of the room and the flurry of humans surrounding me. Friend or foe, there was no way in Hades that I was going to pee in front of all of these people.
And I probably didn’t have privacy options.
So my obvious solution was to just not eat or drink for the next… foreseeable future.
“Get me out of here,” I groaned. This pulled a reaction from all of the men that heard me complain. They burst to life with a cacophony of Spanish insults. Well, I didn’t know for sure that they were insults. They could have been saying nice things about me…
Then again… their hand gestures weren’t exactly flattering.
“You and me both, Reags.” Haley sprawled out on the only cot in her cell. Her knees were bent and her hands propped beneath her back to give her some kind of leverage. Honestly, I had no idea why she was laying like that. I hoped the baby was okay.
“How are you feeling, Hales? How’s the peanut?”
She lifted her head and smiled sweetly at me. “We’re okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“So sure. He’s just a little active right now. Nothing to be concerned about.”
I hoped she was right.
Something like gunshots burst in short succession outside. The men moved into action again. For being bad guys, they had the whole efficiency thing down. Furniture scraped against the red tiled floor as they rushed out to solve this new problem.
I could say that sitting in this cell wasn’t boring. Diego’s men knew how to entertain.
The door opened and I expected the same seedy characters to reappear. They didn’t. Instead, the teenage girl from earlier walked in the station with the grandmother on her arm. The little boy was nowhere to be seen.
I watched them closely, wondering what they were up to. They watched the ten of us with something fierce flashing in their eyes. Determination, maybe?
But determination for what?
The girl picked up the set of cell door keys and walked over to us, grandmother still at her side. The old woman looked us over with a very critical eye and if I didn’t know better, I would have thought she found us lacking.
“You take my Adela with you and I give you these.”
She spoke to Vaughan and Harrison in the farthest cell. Her English was heavily accented and clipped, but we understood what she meant. She dangled the keys in front of the bars as if enticing Vaughan to say yes.
“Take her with us where? We don’t have a vehicle. They’ll just hunt us down again.”
“She knows this country. She knows this desert. She will help you.”
“Does she speak English?” Vaughan eyed the young girl.
The old woman looked at her and shook her head. “Enough,” she said. But I didn’t know if that was true. Still, if the woman wanted this girl out of town, I had to believe it was for a good reason.
“She can get us away from here? Away from these men?” Vaughan pressed.
The grandmother nodded quickly. “Si.”
The girl fidgeted nervously. Her gaze bounced between us, never quite settling on one face. She crossed her arms tightly over her chest and seemed to need to hold herself together.
“You don’t touch her, si?” the grandmother barked at us.
“Mama Rosa…”
“No, Adela…” And then the old woman went off in Spanish. The girl quieted and nodded obediently.
“We can take you too,” Vaughan offered.
“No, no,” the old woman quickly disagreed.
“What about the little boy that was with you? We could take him-”
“No!” The old woman sliced her hand through the air and cut off any more offers Vaughan tried to make. “Diego is my son. Comprende? He will not
hurt me. And Marco is his son. It is Adela I am worried about. He stole her from another territory. He stole her to make her his wife. But she is too young. And he is too mean. Take her with you. Si?”
So the old woman was a grandmother, but not Adela’s. And she was to be Diego’s wife? How noble of him to make an honest woman out of her in days like these. Especially after kidnapping her from her home…
Vaughan looked at the girl again and nodded. “Si. We’ll take her.”
Adela held out the keys and dropped them into his hands. She spoke in Spanish again to Mama Rosa then left as quickly as she could.
Mama Rosa looked at Vaughan, from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet and then back to his eyes again. “Do not touch that chica, comprende?”
“I understand. I do. She’ll be safe with us.”
“This is the girl that they talk about?” Mama Rosa’s gaze flickered down the way at me.
Vaughan cleared his throat. We really had no way of knowing that… I mean… A few posters. Some obscure rumors. It wasn’t like there was a Lifetime movie about me! Come on guys!
Vaughan hesitated, but finally said, “It’s her.”
That was apparently the answer Mama Rosa was looking for. “If you can keep her safe, you can keep my Adela safe.”
“Yes,” Vaughan agreed. “We’ll keep her safe. Gracias.” He waved the keys at her.
She looked at them sharply so Vaughan tucked them into his jeans pocket. “When the sirens go off, find Adela. She will be near the trucks. Don’t be slow.”
I shared a look with Tyler and Haley. What did that mean?
“The sirens?” Vaughan pressed.
She grinned a nearly toothless smile at him. “You’ll know them. They’re…” she searched for the word and mimed muffling her ears with her gnarled hands. “Loud!”
That was as much as we were going to get out of her. She turned around and hurried out of here. We all huddled around the dividing bars so we could conference quickly about what we’d just agreed to.
On one hand, we had keys to escape.
On the other, I was pretty sure we’d be shot on sight if they found us escaping.
And I didn’t even want to think about what would happen to Mama Rosa.