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I walked like a ninja in a cartoon to the front door. I hadn’t seen the guy, but I knew that he had to be sleeping somewhere. I was grateful that he was somewhere else, but it made me wonder where. He had to be sleeping, I was convinced, and he wasn’t coming to get me, so I was in the clear. Or so I thought.
When I pushed the door, it was unlocked, and I was able to get out. I didn’t know what I thought was going to happen, it would be locked, or some loud alarm would go off and alert my captor that I was leaving. None of that happened though and I was breathing a sigh of relief. I didn’t know how it was possible, but I was out of there. The air was sweeter with each step out of the house, I swear. It didn’t make any sense, but none of this did.
The first few steps were timid, but then I just started to run. I’d seen a few houses down the road some, half a mile tops. It wasn’t going to take long to get there. It was all going to be okay if I could get away, get some help. The cruelty of it all was that I thought I was going to make it.
I saw the closest house in front of me. I was only a few hundred yards away, when something knocked me down from behind. It was like a force that was hard and fast. I had no way of knowing that it was coming or ducking out of the way. I looked back to see my captor with a grin on his face, no shirt and the devil in his eyes.
“Did you really think I was going to let you get away?”
I had thought that, of course, but I was informed that the door had an alarm, and it was just silent. It had rung next to him, and I was sure that he had taken his time to get out here. He likely wanted me to think that I was getting away, just so that he could squash my dreams a while later. It was cruel and it had done what I suspected it had been meant to do. It broke me a little bit and I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to pick myself up from that failure. That’s what it looked like and felt like too, failure.
* * *
I was knocked out,which wasn’t that hard to understand why. The guy was pissed that I had awakened him from his slumber. I was likely no closer to getting free than when I had started and when I came to, the consequences of my actions were clear. I was no longer able to be free at all, not even with my movements. My arms and legs were tied to the chair, and I was barely able to move. I had a piece of tape and a gag in my mouth for good measure. He was going to get some sleep, one way or another.
There was nothing I could do but silently cry for a little while, feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t know how I had gotten here. A damn letter was what started it all.
I couldn’t feel sorry for myself for too long, that one letter had killed many people now. I didn’t want to go back and think about how many. It was not at all what I thought was going to happen. I was sorry that it had all gone downhill, but what could I do, really? I was stuck and I wasn’t going to be able to save Frank. No, now I needed him to save me. Did I deserve it though? That was a hard question to answer.
Since I wasn’t going anywhere for the night. I tried to sleep. It was impossible, but it gave me time to think. I should have thought my way through this mess I was in. I was sure that there was a way around the alarms. Maybe I could go through a window… That’s not what I thought about though. I thought about Frank, our time together, and how I might very well not even know the man and his first real name. Whatever his name was didn’t really feel all that relevant to me. I knew that it was supposed to matter, probably did in some way, but it was only how he had made me feel that seemed to really matter to me. He made me feel amazing. I was never going to feel the same way again. I couldn’t imagine anyone taking his place in my life.
Thinking about Frank gave me a little bit of hope and encouragement to find a way out of here. I wasn’t going to get away tonight, the sun was coming up, and my bindings were too tight. I had to find a way to talk to my captor and make him see reason. I was just going to wait for my opportunity. I still had to get free and warn Frank/Baron. Whoever he was, I loved him, and I wasn’t going to stop until I was back in his arms. I couldn’t let these guys break me. I had to use it, even if it was painstakingly harder than I thought it would be.
20
Frank
Icouldn’t get Tony’s mind away from the fact that it was Amber that had done it all. I will admit that her sending off letters to my unit was suspicious. I tried to remember where she told me she had gotten her information. I tried, but I was drawing a blank. Every corner I turned, I was made to second guess her even more.
We were on day two of looking for her and looking for the people that had taken her, killed the rest of our unit. It was just Tony and me now. I still was no closer to calming him down, and I didn’t know why any of this was happening. I liked to believe if the why was said, then I would be able to move on. I didn’t believe that though. How was I to move on from Amber? I loved her and I hadn’t even gotten to tell her how I really felt about her. She would never know and that was the saddest bit of all. Tony was worried about his own death, but I had given up on myself a long time ago.
Driving through the city that was closest to where it had all gone wrong, I saw nothing out of the ordinary. We had the police looking for leads, as well as the military, but nothing was coming up. It was like these guys were ghosts. No one seemed to know what the mark was that I had copied, the tattoo that the five had on them before I burned their bodies.
That was the only real clue that we had, besides it was people who didn’t like the whole unit. They had attacked all of us. What that meant, I had no idea. I really didn’t. I was sick of running with no information. I was going in blind, and it wasn’t helping my cause at all.
Tony got a call while he was driving, and he had an almost instant smile on his face. He motioned for me to take the wheel and he started to write a few things down. Immediately, he pulled off the road and did a U-turn. Information had been found out and when he was off the phone, he told me the good news. The good news was that they had finally gotten a hit on the tattoo and what the information came back as, surprised me even more than I could imagine. They were military, our military, and Tony knew the commander. Apparently, they didn’t get along very well. All this time I had thought it was me they were looking for. Could it be that they wanted Tony the whole time? And still, why? I asked him and he didn’t have an answer.
“How well do you know him? Why would he do this?”
Tony waved me off and said that Jeff was a bit off and that he had been released from the military a while back because he cracked up. “All I know is that he lost someone in his unit, maybe two people and he was never the same. He started making bad decisions, erratic behavior that almost got another killed. They gave him a good discharge, even though they probably shouldn’t have. He really did lose it.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t see why that has anything to do with what this guy is doing now. Why is he targeting us? I just don’t get how we got from Point A to Point B.”
“Because I didn’t take a mission that he was sent on with his people. I had a choice. I didn’t want to take the maritime work that was with the Coast Guard, you know how much I hate them, so that was when his guy died. They were really close, if you know what I mean.”
I did, and that meant that it was our fault that someone he loved was dead. That didn’t lead to anything good as far as I could tell, and he had who I loved. Tony didn’t love anyone, didn’t have any family. It was just him and he was fighting for his own life. I was fighting for Amber, and it was different. I was so worried that he would hurt Amber, just so that I would know what he felt like.
“So, that’s why he is killing us now, because they fucked up their mission and someone got killed?” I asked incredulously, because it was a bit of a freak out for nothing as far as I could tell. Was it all worth this?
“No, they are killing us now because your little girlfriend pulled you out of hiding and then they found the rest of us. Who knows how much they know, but we all changed our names and disbanded that unit for a reason. She just brought the enemy to our doorstep.”
I sighed. “She is not like that and that’s not what happened. You’ll see.”
“The easiest answer is usually the right one. She wrote us all letters and then we were attacked and killed one by one. What do you think that points towards?”
I knew what he wanted to imply, and I thought that he might be right, but at the same time, I didn’t want him to be right. I needed him to be wrong and I didn’t want to show even a second of doubt. I knew Tony well and I wanted him to stop thinking about Amber as the enemy. With him, there was no telling what he would do if given a chance.
* * *
