Extreme Danger (McClouds & Friends #5)(135)

The kids huddled around him in a semicircle, staring as if he were an alien fallen from space. Like they might start worshipping him as a god. The girl leaned forward with her bloody rag and dabbed his forehead again. She said something. Said it again, louder. It wasn’t until the third repetition that he realized she was trying to say something in English. “Hurts?” she said again. It had sounded more like “huts.”

“Yeah,” he croaked. Speaking made him cough, which provoked instant, skull-crushing agony with every jolt of his chest. Once he started, he couldn’t stop. Bam, crash, pound, f*ck.

It was starting to come back, in broken, jagged pieces. He remembered feelings—horror, betrayal, fear, shame—but the memories and sequences that had provoked them were broken to shards.

Image by image, he fit them together. Nadia, in the bedroom, naked. Hands clamped over her mouth, eyes streaming tears, watching silently as three big guys tied him up and kicked the shit out of him.

And the fat guy. He remembered him, too. Looming over him at some bizarre sideways angle, smiling. The bags of his puffy, bloated face swelling as he gloated. Crazy, blank gray eyes. He’d nudged Josh’s face with the toe of his expensive loafers, and taunted him about something…something that scared him out of his mind, even before the memory slid back into place. Carrie. Becca.

“Carrie?” he said loudly. He looked around at the other kids. “Becca? Are my sisters here? Have you seen my sisters?”

The oldest girl frowned. “Sister?” she repeated slowly.

“My sisters! Have you seen them?”

The girl looked around at the others. The kids shuffled back. His vista opened up. Cinder-block walls, painted white. Concrete floor. Very cold. He was lying on it. There was a series of small mattresses. Each had a dirty blanket.

Holy shit. These kids lived here, in this freaky white limbo.

Carrie lay on the mattress nearest him. Her eyes were closed. She wore only underwear. Her hair was draped over her face.

Josh jerked up, tried to move, but he was trussed like a bird for the oven. “Carrie,” he yelled. “Carrie? You OK?”

The girl tapped him on the cheek, a brisk pat-pat. Then she held up a white plastic knife, leaned behind him, and began to saw.

It took a long time, but finally his hands came loose. They burned as blood flowed back into them. He reached up, prodded his head. Found a big, blood-encrusted lump on his temple. Then the rag, knotted around his neck. The corners of his mouth were chafed and sore.

He twisted round to look at the dark-haired girl, who was now working on his ankles. She mimed a gag in his mouth and nodded.

“You took it out,” he said. “Thanks.”

She gave him a cautious, fleeting smile. His legs came free, and he pulled himself up to his knees, wobbling like a baby who had never walked. Still wearing nothing but those stupid silk boxers.

He crawled to Carrie, brushed her hair away. Her face was white, with dark smudges under purplish eyelids. She didn’t respond when he shook her. Her pulse was faint and rapid. She felt clammy. She made a raspy sound with each shallow breath. He couldn’t stop shaking her, begging her to wake up. He realized after a while that he was sobbing.

He felt that pat-pat on his shoulder again, so he wiped his face and turned to look into the girl’s big somber eyes. She mimed the injection of a hypodermic in her arm, and gestured towards Carrie.

Drugged, then. Those pricks had drugged his little sister. He tried to comfort himself with the fact that she was breathing.

He snorted back the tears, wiped his nose. “What’s your name?”

She looked confused, so he pointed to himself. “I’m Josh.” He stroked Carrie’s hair. “This is my sister. Carrie.”

She gave him that fleeting, beautiful smile again. “Sveti.” She started in on the others, rattling off a list of foreign names, too fast for his battered brain to take in. She finished with the littlest one, a toddler who was clinging to her arm, ruffling the child’s snarled black curls tenderly. “Rachel,” she said.

Rachel held up her arms to be picked up. Two years old, maybe less. Scratchy little voice. The kid’s face was so thin, she looked like a wizened little monkey. Sveti picked her up and settled the child on her slender hip. Skinny arms wound around the girl’s neck; dirty little legs with black-soled feet wrapped around her waist like a strangling vine. The toddler wore a tunic made from an adult’s white T-shirt, artfully knotted so that it would stay on her tiny body.

Sveti cuddled Rachel and gazed at Josh. Her calm, steady regard made him feel nervous. He was scared shitless, but she looked like she’d been afraid and miserable for so long, she’d made some strange peace with it. Her eyes looked old. A hundred-year-old woman, in the body of a thirteen-year-old. Twelve, maybe. Hard to tell.

He looked around. A tide of dread rose inside him as the children stared at him hungrily. Jesus, how could people do this to little kids? No tables, chairs, books, toys, music, pictures. No windows, even. The place smelled of piss, dirty diapers, rotted food. Big, overflowing plastic bags of garbage bulged along the wall. This place was like a holding pen for animals, doomed to be put down whenever someone got around to it. “Where are you from?” he asked Sveti.

She considered the question carefully. “Ukraina,” she replied.

The Ukraine. It was coming together. Becca’s mobster was Ukrainian. Nadia had been Moldovan, or so she said. But what the f*ck was a mobster doing with a cage full of sad, dirty little kids?