Going Gone, Book 2 of the Irish End Games (21 page)

It was when she reached the end of the small disorderly queue that it happened.

A child squealed and burst from the group. Sarah watched the little girl run careening along the edge of the pier. Her mother screamed and the crowd stopped moving onto the boat long enough to witness whatever might happen. Sarah's spotted the ferryman, as interested in the drama unfolding as anyone, as he moved around the crowd to get a better look.

She wouldn't waste the gift. She moved silently, unobtrusively, onto the gangplank and onto the boat. Behind her she heard shouting, but the voices were directed away from her. She ran to the bow of the boat, invisible to any just standing at the entrance and scanning the passengers. She sat on the far side of the largest bulwark. Her heart was pounding in her ears as, within seconds, a couple sauntered over to her, clearly having just been allowed on by the ferryman.

“I'd give her a blistering, were she mine,” the man said, as he shoved his hands in his pocket.

“She's just a baby.”

“Baby or not.”

As diversions went, Sarah thought, it hadn't been much. But it had been enough. She was onboard. She smiled at the couple and pretended to dig into her backpack to hide her face. No point in giving anybody anything to remember, she thought.

Was she safe? She shivered inside her sweater and felt the rain splash against her jeans, which weren't under the protective arc of the heavy bulwark. The rest of the boarding seemed to take forever. Sarah glanced at the sky and prayed it wouldn't rain any harder. To make her way onboard just to have to turn back…

She noticed the couple next to her was still holding their tickets in their hands. She felt the color drop from her face. Peering around the bulwark, she saw the ferryman standing in the center aisle. He was doing a head count.

Shit! She looked under the bench to see if there was a place she could squeeze under but it was solid. She knew the couple on the bench next to her was watching her with some concern. Short of slipping over the side of the boat, there was no place she could go if the ferryman stepped around the bulwark to complete his count. She looked at the railing.
Do it! There's no time to think about it!
She bit her lip and stood up…

“Oy! You there! Did I get your ticket?”

Sarah jerked her head around to see the ferryman standing twenty feet away staring at her. He was clearly in the middle of his head count because he still held the fingers of his hand up to his face.

“Of course,” Sarah said. Her accent sounded fake even to her.

He approached, his posture aggressive and brash with his intention. “Let's see it then.”

“You took it, didn't you?” Sarah said. She looked at the couple next to her but they seemed to edge away from her, as if afraid to be infected by her.

“You're a feckin' stowaway, you are!” the man bellowed, reaching out to grab Sarah by the shoulders.

She twisted away, stepping on the foot of the man next to her. Without thinking of what she was doing, she pulled the gun out of her jeans and aimed it at the ferryman.

He stopped and held up his hands, his eyes gone from her face to the gun. “Oy, Danny! Get out ‘ere! Got a feckin' stowaway with a feckin' gun!”

Sarah stumbled against someone else, her eyes darting to the opening to the gangplank—the opening which the ferryman was standing directly in front of.

“Move out of my way,” she said, flicking the gun barrel at him to indicate she wanted him to move.

“Jaysus, Joseph and Mary, it's a feckin' Yank!” the ferryman said.

Sarah could hear the murmuring of the crowd become louder.

And the man didn't move.

There was no way she was going to get off this boat short of shooting him and stepping over his body on her way out.

And she knew she couldn't do that.

“I don't want to hurt you,” she said, sick with regret for having ever pulled the gun.

“Goddam Americans are the reason we're in this fix!” someone yelled. Sarah heard a rumble of agreement and she could tell the people on the ferry were crowding in closer to get a look at her. “Grab ‘er gun! She can't shoot all of us!”

The second Sarah glanced away from the ferryman to see who had spoken, he lunged at her. With a deep grunt, he hit full in the chest and batted the gun away. The air in her lungs whooshed out of her as she hit the railing of the boat, the sound of the gun skittering across the plank flooring ricocheting in her ears. She sank slowly to her knees as the nightmare turned to blessed blackness.

F
iona threw back
the covers and sat up straight in bed, her heart pounding in building alarm, her body poised for flight. The bedroom was quiet except for her breath, coming in loud, rasping pants.

Are we being attacked?

And then she heard it again, louder. A long moan of anguish that slipped under the door to her room like a snake.

The lad was having another nightmare.

Fiona's feet hit the cold wooden floor as she grabbed up her robe at the end of the bed. They could probably both use a cup of tea first. It might take awhile to get him back to sleep.

She hurried across the cottage sitting area, the fireplace long gone cold, to the other bedroom. It was freezing in his room.

“John, lad?” She moved to his bed and knelt. She could see his face was wet with sweat.
He'd been in hell a good while before the horror of it finally woke him to cry out.

“She needs me, Fi,” he said, his eyes still closed. “I can tell she does.”

Well, that's a safe bet,
Fiona thought sadly.
Wherever the poor woman is she's likely to need a lot of things.

“
Whisht
, John,” she said soothingly, straightening his covers. “It's just a dream,
leanbha
.'”

“It felt so real,” he whimpered.

“They always do. I'll make us a cup of tea, aye? Unless you think you can go back to sleep?”

He shook his head.

“Didn't think so.” She stood up to leave.

“Fi, does it mean nothing that I can feel her alive somewhere in the world?”

A breath caught in Fi's throat and she returned to kneel by his bed again. Tonight the lad would break her heart in every way that it could be broken. “I'm sure it means something,” she said.

“And with Mr. Donovan home, I'm just to hope she finds her way back home on her own?”

The lad used to call her brother
Uncle Mike
. Should she tell him that Mike might go out looking for her again someday? Mike already talked about doing just that. Would it only be getting the boy's hopes up?

“Your mother's a resourceful woman,” she said, finally.

“I know. Mr. Donovan used to call her a female John Wayne.”

“Aye, he did, I remember.” She watched a tear escape his eye and trail down his cheek.
Did everything have to feel like a knife to the heart these days?
She squeezed his hand. “I'll get us that tea,
leanbha
.”

S
arah heard
them talking before she opened her eyes. Men's rough voices. She could tell she was no longer on the boat and that she had been placed on something a little more comfortable than a wooden floor. It was a pallet of some kind, probably straw. Her head hurt terribly and as much as she dreaded making anyone aware of the fact that she was conscious, she couldn't help it. She turned her head and retched up bile and water.

“Aw, feck me, she's puking all over the floor! Get a bucket, ya eejit! I told ya I wouldn't put her there.”

Sarah wiped her mouth and opened her eyes. She was lying on the floor of what clearly used to be a convenience store of some kind. Long stripped of its shelves, the place looked naked and menacing. Two men stood over her. One of them had her gun.

“Oy! Awake are ya? Tried to feckin' sneak on the ferry, didn't ya? Ya bastard Yank.” The man squatted near her. He was slightly balding. He wore a pair of glasses with the frames taped. He looked exactly like someone she would expect to see in an H&R Block Tax office, or perhaps a manager of a corporate office. Maybe that's who he had been.

In another life.

She looked from him to the other man, who returned her look with a sneer of disgust on his face. She could see it wasn't the ferryman. This man was older and much, much angrier.

“Water,” Sarah said, her voice a rasping croak.

The bald man barked out a rude laugh. “Jaysus! She's asking for water. You don't at all understand your situation, do you, luv? Not at all.”

As soon as he spoke the words, it was as if another level of volume turned up in Sarah's head and she was suddenly able to hear the sounds of people shouting outside. Her eyes glanced in the direction of the door, flanked by two large windows.

“That's right, luv. There's a lot of people ain't too happy with you right now. There's a lot who've lost loved ones, not to mention their homes, their feckin' jobs…”

Sarah was pretty sure the bald guy was talking about himself.

“I…I didn't do this,” she said. She knew it was a mistake before the words were out of her mouth. These people didn't want to believe she wasn't responsible. They were angry.

They
needed
someone to be responsible.

“What? Are you Canadian, then? Is that what you're going to tell me?”

“That's right. I'm Canadian.”

He turned from her and spoke to the man behind him. “Get Brian in here. He's got cousins in Winnipeg. We'll just do a little Q and A, eh?”

Shit.
Sarah didn't know anything about Canada except they had Mounties, and she wasn't even sure they still did. “It sounds like you've made up your mind about me. Why are you holding me?”

“We're holding you, because you tried to steal passage on the Blue Lady, which is a very serious crime during these times. But don't worry,” the man said standing up and towering over Sarah, “we're gonna try ya proper-like. With a jury of yer peers and a judge and everything.” He leaned over and smiled at her in what looked like a genuine sign of affection. “And then we're gonna kill you.”

Sarah felt the blood drain from her face. The expression on the men's faces was like nothing she had seen before.
Possession
. They were both clearly in the grip of a belief so profound and so unshakable that nothing she said would dissuade them. They wanted to kill her and unless she could find a way to escape, they would.

She wouldn't waste any more words. She needed to look around, take stock in her surroundings and find a way, find some way out.

“Oy! American bitch! What's the capital of Canada?”

Sarah looked at the newcomer, Brian. The one with the nail ready to drive into her coffin. He was middle age and flabby, as if he might have been chubby before The Crisis but now did not have that luxury.

Sarah stared at him.
Nova Scotia? Toronto?
Her shoulders sagged in defeat.
What did it matter? Even if she'd been able to rattle off the entire Canadian parliamentary charter by heart, it wouldn't help. She could see that by the mad glint in their eyes.

And she had no idea anyway of what the sodding capital was.

She shrugged. “I'm pretty sure it's Go-Fuck-Yourself. Am I right?”

At first Brian just looked at her as if trying to decipher her answer.

Finally, the bald guy pushed past him. “Right. She's American. Nobody else'd be so bloody arrogant about not knowing the capital of a neighborin' country. Makes me sick.” He grabbed Sarah by her sweater and jerked her to her feet. Her head spun and she grabbed at the store counter to steady herself.

“Alright, Miss America, your accommodations await. Dinner'll be in directly. That's a joke, by the way.”

Sarah's knees gave out on her and for a moment she wondered if they hadn't drugged her. She looked wildly around the store to see if there wasn't something she could use as a weapon. She could see the people now on the other side of the window.

Where had they all come from? Were they just waiting for some likely candidate to come along so they could all vent their frustrations?

Brian moved ahead of her and pulled open the heavy door to the walk-in freezer. “Don't worry, thanks to you lot the electricity's turned off. You'll still freeze your tits off, though.”

“I can't…there's no air in there,” Sarah said, panic leaping into her throat.
I can't go in that freezer.

“There's just enough,” the bald guy said, giving her a shove that sent her falling head-first into the cold storage. Without another word, he shut the door behind her and she heard the lock slam down.

H
er cell was roughly
twenty feet by ten. What little she knew about freezers, she assumed the ceiling, walls, floor and door were at least four inches thick, probably with some kind of insulation, but covered in sheets of impermeable steel. It was totally dark. She was able to feel empty shelves in the freezer but nothing else. After her initial ten minutes of frantic groping, her heart pounding in panic, she settled on the floor and drew herself into a tight ball, gripping her knees with her hands.

So here she was, she thought, shivering violently. Everyone she ever loved in her life was either dead, missing or all alone in the world. And unless a miracle happened, she would die before the week was out.

Is this really the end? Is this how it all ends?
If she had left Papin, if she had just walked on to Balinagh and Donovan's Lot, she would be with friends tonight, her boy in her arms. But she couldn't stop the thought that reminded her that she had to go back for Papin, even if it meant the death of her. She succumbed completely to the full brunt of that knowledge as the tears came. Hearing her hopeless sobs reverberate off the walls of steel—the gasping cries of a person who's lost everything and everyone—drove her deeper into despair.

She must have slept at some point, cold or not, because when the door opened blinding her with the dim light from the store interior, it felt like only minutes since she'd been entombed. Weak from lack of food and gasping for air, Sarah sat hunched against the wall as her captors shoved a tray of bread and cheese across the floor to her. She saw an uncapped bottle of cola and looked at it with as much stunned amazement as if it had been a seven-tiered wedding cake.

“Eat, Yank,” the man said. Sarah looked up, but he was backlit against the glare of the store windows and she couldn't see his face. She crawled to the tray and reached for the cola first. It was flat and warm but also sweet. Her stomach lurched with nausea at the first sip but she forced herself to keep it down. Her eyes filled with unwanted memories of a childhood of cold sodas in the summer.

“We had the trial last night,” the man said. She recognized the voice as the bald man's. “Sorry to have to tell ya, but you were found guilty.”

His words just felt like water pinging off a tin roof. Their meaning meant nothing to her. This mob would do what it wanted and words and entreaties or even proof, if she'd anything like that to show them, would not stop them from their endgame. She tore a piece of bread in half and stuffed it in her mouth. It tasted of mold.

“We'll have it all read out to you good and proper later today. Didn't want you to be so weak with hunger you didn't know what was happening.”

She finished chewing and took a last sip of cola to wash it down. “What is your name?”

That seemed to startle him. He even took a step backward. “Not that you need to know,” he said, “but it's Edgar MacIntyre.”

Sarah nodded. “Who were you before The Crisis?”

“Who was I?
Who was I
?”

She could see he was clenching his fists in frustration. He glanced over his shoulder and Sarah wondered if they were alone in the store. She didn't hear anybody else. Even the noises from the mob outside were gone, and she wondered if they'd left to go back to their cold little cottages to curse the Yanks and blame the woman they held in their local Jiffy-Market for all their miseries and discomforts.

“I was the manager of an auto parts distribution plant, if you want to know,” he said, biting off every word. “That's who.”

Sarah ate the last piece of bread and slumped back against the cold steel wall of her prison. “So you were somebody important,” she said in a soft voice.

“Bloody right, I was.” He hesitated for a moment, as if he would say more, then turned and stomped out of her sight, leaving the door open and the tray on the floor.