Page 81 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“And we’re carrying an unconscious woman through the bookstore how?” asked one of the men. I couldn’t tell them apart by voice alone.

“Employee exit,” she said, briskly. “We can take the back hall down to one and go out the back. If anyone spots us, I’ll pay them to look the other way.”

“They may talk anyway,” said the other man.

“And if they do, we’ll come back and make them understand why they shouldn’t have done that.” She was starting to sound annoyed. “Give me the damn drugs, before I have to fracture her skull to keep her out!”

I made a mental note to start hitting again if she made any more noises that implied she’d be going with skull fractures as a solution. Thomas would forgive me for letting myself be captured in order to lead us to the missing kids. He might not be as pleased if I got a concussion for the cause, especially when the cause was currently “that half-assed plan I came up with in less than five minutes, without consulting anyone else.”

The needle bit into the flesh of my neck, and my feigned unconsciousness transitioned smoothly into the real thing, carrying me along on a tide of peaceful nothingness. I didn’t feel them scoop me off the bathroom floor and carry me out of the bathroom. I didn’t feel them carry me down the hallway.

I didn’t feel anything at all.

Eighteen

“You have to let people make their own mistakes. If you don’t, they’re never going to grow, and you’re never going to get the chance to say I told you so.”

—Enid Healy

Waking up in an unfamiliar place, still clothed, which is a nice change, but tied to a chair, which isn’t

THE ROOM WAS DARK.

That wasn’t much of a surprise—virtually every time I’ve been taken captive, I’ve woken up in a dark room, which is marginally better than the other popular option, “room lit by blinding floodlights, probably filled with the looming shadows of your captors”—but it was a bit of a relief. If they had me in a dark room, it meant they didn’t want me to see where they were hiding, and they were at least ensconced enough to be prepared to take prisoners. And yeah, sometimes it’s a good thing if your enemies have had time to dig in like ticks. Makes it easier to decapitate them when you dig them out.

The propofol had done its job, and they must have hit me with something else in the bargain; I had no idea how much time had passed between the bookstore and now. Judging by the knots on my wrists, ankles, and calves, it had been long enough for them to carry me out of the bookstore and to a secured location, put me down, and really take their time getting me tied up. Propofol was the best drug I knew of for knocking people out quickly, but it wore off in less than ten minutes when injected; it had to have taken longer than that for them to move me to wherever this was and tie me up. Okay, so say they were working with something that had been spiced up a little somehow. That might explain the lack of headache or pain at the injection site: if you’re taking people captive instead of killing them, you’d want them to be cogent as soon as they woke up.

So, propofol, but not alone, even if they were still calling it that. Maybe fentanyl or some kind of benzodiazepine? Since I was waking up here and not back in the slaughterhouse with Thomas glaring at me and Sally saying I’d missed all the fun, I thought it was fair to say that whatever this was had a relatively short half-life, or they’d given me a lower dose than they’d intended to—another thing my weird form of coincidence has been known to influence, often to my detriment, since there have been times when I wanted the painkillers to last as long as the pain did, not cut out midway through whatever was going on. Whatever.

Call it at most somewhere between thirty and forty-five minutes. That was sufficient time for Ryan to have forced his way out of the vents, returned to bipedal form, and gone looking for the others. Say that took fifteen minutes . . .

All the scenarios I could run ended with “and the rest of my people will be here very, very soon,” and that didn’t leave me with long for my part in things.

“Hello?” I yelled, trying to sound at least a little querulous, like I wasn’t sure what was going on, like they might have taken the wrong woman after all. I hadn’t actually identified myself, just reacted to aggression with aggression, and that’s a very New York thing to do, Price or not. But even the toughest New Yorker isn’t going to be thrilled to be drugged in a bookstore bathroom and tied to a chair in a dark room. “Hello, is there anybody there?”

No answer came. I was starting to think I’d need to get to work freeing myself from the chair—it was going to have to happen anyway, might as well get started—when a rectangle of light appeared on one wall, violently bright in the darkness. I squinted my eyes shut and turned my face away from the opening door, making a small sound of protest. I hate this part.

“You’re awake,” said a voice I recognized as Margaret Healy. “Even sooner than I thought you’d be. You’re a sturdy one, traitor. I’ll have to put that in my notes.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, injecting a quaver into my voice.

One really nice thing about having been outside this dimension for so many years: if I’m not carrying my backpack, I don’t have much on me. When they’d searched me, and I knew they’d searched me, they would have gotten an assortment of knives, none of which I was particularly emotionally attached to; a garrote that they might have mistaken for a simple loop of wire; my Metro card; a multitool; my wedding ring; and my mother’s revolvers. Of those, the only things I needed to get back were the ring and the revolvers. The rest was utterly replaceable, and none of it could be used to identify me. My bluff wasn’t going to work, but at least it might buy me a little time.

“You expect me to believe that?” She reached up, pulling a chain, and the ceiling light came on to illuminate the room.

It was small and boxy, with cement walls that seemed to be lightly sloped, like we were in the middle of a giant tube. Looking up, I couldn’t find any corners where they hit the ceiling, just a smooth, continual blend. Definitely a tunnel of some sort. We were probably underground.

Well, wasn’t that just dandy? New York has a lot of underground to be lost in. Between the subway and the currently active sewer system, you’re already looking at miles, and that’s before you start checking old blueprints for the stretches that have been sealed off and forgotten. New York has a thriving bogeyman community because of those tunnels, and some people say there are hide-behinds down there, too, although that one’s more difficult to prove. If we were underground, this was going to be harder.

“I don’t know what to expect you to believe,” I said. “You attacked me in a bathroom! I was just minding my own business!”

“If you want to do this the hard way, we can absolutely do this the hard way.”

She turned as if to leave the room. But she didn’t turn off the light, and that was something of a relief. I don’t have a problem with the dark, and I knew where the door was now, which would certainly make things easier. At the same time, I didn’t really want to be stumbling around in the darkness if I didn’t have to.

“Where are you going?” I asked, careful to whine.

She stopped. “Either you’re one of the people we’ve been looking for, or you’re not, and we’ve just abducted an innocent woman,” she said, voice chillingly calm. “Either way, you have to know you’re not leaving here alive. A little time to think about what that means should make you a lot more accommodating. You’ll talk, when you get hungry enough, or when the ropes get tight enough. What you say then will be a lot more honest, and a lot more educational, than whatever it is you might decide to say now.”