Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (31 page)

I realized with a sickening vertiginous sensation like falling off a cliff that the four of us no longer had any chance of getting away.

Only one thing to do.
   “Get them out of here,” I ordered Steve. Then I ran straight at the flashlights.

They wavered and halted, confused that their prey was charging straight at them, and they were just close enough together, and I opened my arms wide and leapt off my feet at the last minute, kicking my legs out to make the path of my impact as wide as possible, and knocked them all down like bowling pins.
   “Paul!” I heard Talena shriek. I wanted to turn and give her one last look, but I was too occupied with trying to pull down all four of my opponents, ensuring that they could not break free of me to chase her. I scrambled and wrestled for what felt like a long time with a tangle of arms and legs and torsos.

The last thing I heard was Talena cry “Let me go!”, her voice gratifyingly further away. I imagined Steve throwing her over his Herculean shoulder and running for the Esplanade, Saskia in tow, and in the moment before Zoltan slammed my forehead into the ground with all the considerable force he could muster, I offered Steve a thousand mental thanks. Then the world went away.

“He’s waking up,” a rough male voice reported.
   It was very hot. I was nauseous. My head hurt like somebody had drilled a hole in my forehead and dumped sulfuric acid into my skull. My shoulders ached, because my arms were drawn uncomfortably behind me, and my hands were half-numb, half-agony. I knew without trying that breathing deeply would be a very bad idea.

My mouth was full of something cotton. I tried to spit whatever it was out, but it seemed to be stuck in place.
I tried to remember why I hurt so much. I must have been in a car accident. Yes, and suffered a concussion, that was why I couldn’t remember anything. But what had the doctors done to my arms? Why was I sitting instead of lying down? And why did the furnace-hot hospital room smell so pungently of shit?
   I made my left eye flutter open. For some reason my right eye wouldn’t. I saw Zoltan, Zorana, Sinisa, and the Mexican in front of me, the full Fearsome Foursome, all of them barely dressed thanks to the heat, the men shirtless, Zorana in a blue bikini. The gates of memory opened and I cringed with understanding. I had been captured. I was in the Winnebago, stripped naked, perched on a folding chair next to the sabotaged toilet, my arms bound behind me. The worst-case scenario.

No; second-worst. Talena had gotten away.
   Zorana approached, holding a curved blade, smiling cheerfully.
   “Do you know what kind of knife this is?” she asked, in the same time of voice she might use if she wanted to know the time. “It is used to skin animals. My mother taught me how to use it, a long time ago, before the Ustasha killed her.”
   I looked at her dully. I was already in too much pain, my mind too muddled and quicksand-thick, to have room to feel any more fear. All I felt was vague surprise that I was still alive and still at Burning Man. I had assumed, when I charged them, that after catching me they would take me out to some empty patch of playa, kill me, and leave. Keeping me alive was risky. By now Talena and Steve and Lawrence had surely gone to the police.
   “He does not listen,” Zoltan said. “I think we scrambled his head.”
   “You would have killed him if I had not stopped you,” Sinisa scolded him.
   Zoltan muttered something angry in Serbian. I struggled to open my right eye but nothing happened. For a moment I was afraid the eye was gone, but then I realized what had happened; the whole right side of my face was covered with dried blood, gluing my eye shut. I was surprised the heat hadn’t made the blood melt again. It had to be well over a hundred degrees in the Winnebago.
   “This is so messed up,” the Mexican said, his accent more American than mine. “I just came here to help fly you out of here. This is kidnapping. It was almost murder. I don’t know –”

I never found out what he didn’t know, because that was when I ceased to be able to hold back my nausea, and just as I had when Zoltan and Zorana had invaded our home and tied me up in this same manner, I started to throw up. But this time was infinitely worse. For one thing, the beating they had given me had cracked at least two ribs, and with every convulsion a white-hot bolt of pain lanced through my chest, as if somebody had made me swallow a huge fishhook with a line still attached and then repeatedly yanked on the line as hard as they could. For another, they had gagged me, and I immediately started to choke.

My gut was still trying to expel its contents, my lungs were desperately trying to draw in air, my throat seemed to have been filled with concrete, and as I thrashed every twitch caused my cracked ribs to erupt with further agony. This seemed to go on for hours. I would have fallen over if the tattooed Mexican had not rushed over and righted the chair. My vision started to fade, like the colour draining from an old TV after the plug is pulled. I was distantly aware that I was on the verge of passing out, and maybe dying, when Zorana pushed the Mexican aside, ripped the gag from my mouth, and performed a Heimlich maneuver. I coughed a fountain of vomit all over myself and started to breathe again, in great whooping gasps.

I moaned incoherently as my vision returned. I almost wished I had been allowed to sink into unconsciousness. I felt newly alert, almost energetic, acutely aware of the myriad agonies throbbing throughout my body.

Zorana turned to the Mexican and said “Clean him up.”

“What? Fuck you! I’m not cleaning up puke! “

Zoltan took a step towards the Mexican before Sinisa intervened.

“Never mind,” he said. “We will leave him like this.”

I thought he was talking about leaving my corpse. I closed my working eye and tried to steel myself for death. Not today, I supposed, not in the sun, but tonight, as the Man burned, they would kill me and leave me in the playa.

“You should pray,” Zorana said to me. “Pray your friends did not lie to us. Pray they are not so stupid that they attempt to deceive us.”
   My left eye snapped open and I stared at him with new understanding. Ransom. Of course. They were holding me for ransom. That was why I was still alive.
   “Personally,” Sinisa said, “I hope they are neither liars nor stupid. You have betrayed us, Paul, and gravely inconvenienced us, but I do admire your courage. You are not the little man I thought. You do not deserve to die. And I do not kill those who do not deserve it.”
   I should have kept my mouth shut, I could only cause trouble for myself and the effort required to speak made my head spin, but his hypocrisy made me irrationally furious. “Like all those bodies in the forest in Albania?” I asked, my voice a hoarse croak. “Did they deserve it?”
   He raised his eyebrows. “Interesting. How interesting. I did not know you had discovered those. But the answer is yes. Except for one man whose death was an unavoidable necessity. As yours may yet become. But if your friends return my property, I promise, Paul, you will all be spared. I am a man of honour.”
   “Who hires war criminals to do his dirty work.”

He sighed. “You disappoint me. As I told you once before, Zoltan, Zorana, the rest of my associates, they were created by the war, not the other way around. Afterwards, of course, they were considered monsters, irredeemable, fit only for prison or death. The usual terrified simplistic morality of the weak. I had hoped for better from you. Think about it, Paul. Far better that they work for me, helping bring the victims of war to freedom and safety, than languish in prison at great public expense, no?”

I didn’t answer.

“I suppose you are in no condition for a philosophical discussion,” he said. He actually sounded disappointed.

They left me alone after that, left me to sit in my own filth and agony for the rest of the day, drifting in and out of consciousness. That day seemed to move so glacially that I remember wondering if the Earth’s revolution had slowed, or halted, or even reversed. It was an endless shapeless miasma of pain, fear, hate, exhaustion, rage, and powerlessness. But finally, like a kidney stone, it passed.
* * *
   “Get up,” Sinisa said to me. “It is time to go.”
   I had somehow managed to doze off. I opened my left eye – the right was still, amazingly, glued shut by my own dried blood – and looked around. The Fearsome Foursome were all dressed in black. Sinisa and the Mexican carried poster tubes and the Couple From Hell wore zipped-up gun-concealing windbreakers.
   I managed to stand. It wasn’t easy, my legs felt weak, filled with mercury rather than muscle. Motion caused my head to start pounding once more, as if pain was a physical thing that had condensed into a large amorphous glob right behind my eyes. My shoulders were on fire, I could no longer feel my hands, most of my muscles were cramped or bruised or both, and every breath reminded me of my cracked ribs.
   Zorana smiled, amused, as she tightened a yellow rope around my neck. “My little pet,” she said fondly, and kissed me on the back of my neck. “Walk. Be quiet. You know I can make you quiet very quickly if I want.”
   Anywhere else it would have been an unthinkably bizarre and surreal sight; four people leading a man, naked and drenched in blood and sweat and vomit, on a leash. At Burning Man we could easily have been written off as some particularly weird fetish camp. A moot point; nobody was witnessing anything. This was the night of the Burn, the pyromaniacal bacchanal that was Burning Man’s climax, and all thirty thousand burners in attendance were crammed into a thick riotous crowd surrounding the Man. Around that hundred-foot neon-and-wood statue, a mile behind us, hundreds of drums thumped and rattled in tribal blood-maddening rhythms. The hum of the crowd was savage, primal, electric.

I suppose there must have been a few other stragglers, substance abusers sleeping off an overdose, thieves prowling through the sea of empty camps looking for anything valuable, adulterous lovers slipping off to a prearranged tent, but we didn’t see any. The back streets of Black Rock City were dark and postapocalyptically quiet. We walked along 3:00 to Vision Street, the very edge of Black Rock City’s horseshoe, and into the empty playa, towards the distant silhouette of the chrome spider-car we had so recently stolen from Sinisa.

We paused so Sinisa and the Mexican could withdraw their sniper rifles from the poster tubes that concealed them. Zoltan and Zorana drew guns from beneath their windbreakers as we walked. The spider-car’s lights were off, and we saw no movement, no one around.
   When we were about two hundred feet away, Zorana froze and said something to Zoltan and Sinisa. I followed their gaze, dully, just wishing that it was all over. A little distance from the spider-car, parked behind it and to its left, separated by maybe fifty feet, there was another vehicle, a pickup truck. And resting between the spider-car and the pickup I saw the dark shape of a familiar crate against the pale desert. The money.
   The pickup’s engine roared and its headlights came on, high-beams, all but blinding us. Zoltan and Sinisa and the Mexican dropped prone, aiming guns at it. Zorana pulled hard on the leash and dragged me in front of her.
   “Paul!” Talena cried, her voice desperate. “Paul! Are you okay? Are you
okay?
”
   I didn’t trust myself to speak loudly enough to be heard so far, so I just nodded.
   “All right,” a voice called out, Lawrence’s voice. “Let him go. Let him walk over here.”
   Zorana looked over at Sinisa. Sinisa nodded.
   “Just one thing,” Lawrence said. “If anything happens before we’re all safe and sound…show them, Steve.”
   A torrent of flame leapt out of the back of the pickup truck and through the air, angled upwards from the pickup truck, passing over the wooden crate and some distance beyond, very nearly reaching the spider-car. Sinisa grunted with disconcerted surprise. I smiled for the first time all day. Rogue. They were in Rogue, DeathGuild’s art car, armed with souped-up-by-Steve flamethrowers, and they had the money hostage.
   “I realize modern financial instruments have grown increasingly abstract,” Lawrence said, “but you’ll still find it difficult to spend that money if it all goes up in smoke.”
   Sinisa and Zoltan and Zorana muttered to one another. Finally Sinisa called out, “And how can I be assured that that is in fact my money in there?”
   “Come on up and see for yourself,” Lawrence said.
   After a brief discussion it was Zoltan who advanced towards the crate.
   “In the interests of a peaceful exchange,” Lawrence said, “please remember we can turn you into kebab meat with one squeeze of the trigger.”
   Zoltan knelt over the crate, inspected it by flashlight, and walked back to us. He said something to Sinisa, which I guess meant that the money was real, because he said somethinig to Zorana, and she let me go and gave me a little push.
   “Goodbye, Paul,” she said. “I do so hope we meet again someday.”
   It was a long walk on weak legs, but it was a walk to freedom, and that gave me all the strength I needed. When I finally reached Rogue, Steve and Talena grabbed me and lifted me bodily up and into the bed of the pickup. I didn’t have to move a muscle.

Talena turned on her Maglite and played it over me.
   “Oh my God,” she said, horrified. “Oh god. Oh god. What did they do to you?”
   “Looks worse than it is,” I croaked. “I’ll be okay. Maybe…do you have a towel or something?”
   “Not to worry, mate,” Steve said as he cut my hands free. “We’ll clean you up. But first I reckon we better bail out.”
   He rapped twice on the cab, which contained Lawrence and Saskia. Lawrence switched off the headlights, shifted into reverse, and stamped on the accelerator. I would have fallen over if Talena hadn’t held me. Rogue swung around and sped away, trailing a plume of playa dust. I struggled to keep my balance. Steve took off his T-shirt, wet it with some water from a four-liter container, and gave it to Talena, who began to wipe the blood off my head. I motioned for water and when Steve gave me his bottle I drank deeply.
   “We should have burned the money,” I said. “Fuck. We shouldn’t have left it with them.”
   “Au contraire, mate,” Steve said. “We wanted to give them a reason to fly away home.”
   “What do you mean?”
   “He means this isn’t over,” Talena said grimly. “We’re not letting them go.”
   Lawrence drove Rogue most of the way to Black Rock City’s outskirts, then swerved around in a quick circle and stopped dead, facing the distant spider-car. Steve peered through the binoculars.
   “They’re taking a look-see before they put the money in,” he reported. “Let’s move.”
   “And let’s hope they’re heading for the airstrip,” Lawrence said from the cab. He kicked Rogue into gear and we leapt away, headed for Black Rock Airport.

“Why?” I asked.
   Lawrence explained. “Both of the planes big enough to reach Mexico now have propane tanks discreetly duct-taped onto them. The idea is we get there before they do, turn on the tanks, hurry them along so they don’t notice what’s going on, and just as they take off we drive along beside them and light them up with a blast from one of these flamethrowers. Steve rigged the tanks so if the propane catches it’ll be like a fuse and the tank will blow a few minutes later.”
   “Oh,” I said. It didn’t sound like a very good plan to me, but it wasn’t like I had a better one handy, and my mind and body were both badly shaken. Still, there was something about it that bothered me, and not just the fact it relied on Rube Goldberg propane bombs. I tried to work out what it was. I was distracted by sensation slowly returning to my hands. An intensely painful, pins-and-needles-on-fire sensation that brought tears to my eyes. But there was something wrong, something very wrong.
   “Shit,” I said. “They can see us.”
   “What?”
   “They’ve got two rifles with fuck-off nightvision scopes. That’s how they caught me. They can see us fine right –”
   There was a loud bang as something metallic slammed hard into Rogue’s side. Steve, Talena and I fell to the bed. I howled as my cracked ribs collided with a propane tank.
   “Fucking hell,” Steve said.