The box. That damned box.
I slipped down the stairs to the basement, leaving the wreckage of the living room behind me, replete with the smell of gore. The lights were still hanging overhead, the mats still bloody where Zack and I had left our contribution from the fight with Wolfe. I stepped over them and made my way to the corner to look at it.
It didn’t matter if I grew ten feet taller, I would still look at it as a huge, metal, imposing figure. The side that swung open hung off its hinges, moved from where I left it. The last time…I tried to put the hinges back together, tried to set it right again, to make it look like it wasn’t broken. It stood open, the darkness inside a silent reminder of days spent within.
I wish there was some brave, exciting reason why I tried to fix it, but the truth is that as irrational as it sounds, I feared Mom’s reaction when she saw I’d broken out. It was the act of a scared little girl that vainly hoped her mother wouldn’t realize that when she left the house, I was locked in a metal sarcophagus and when she got back, I was sleeping in my own bed and sitting on my own couch and going about my life unfettered by the metal prison she’d confined me to before she left.
Of course, she never came back, so it didn’t matter. I wondered what Mom would say when she found out what happened to me. If she found out. I wondered if Wolfe had caught up with her, as well. Mom was a fighter; way better than me. If he did, I bet she hurt him before the end. The thought of the pen sticking out of his ear, blood trailing down his face, came back to me, along with the thought of tranquilizer darts and the knife I had buried in him last time I was here. Yeah. Mom would have given him hell.
“Little doll,” I heard from behind me, turning to face the staircase. He strolled down, an idle man with all the time in the world. His nose was sniffing, as if he were savoring the meal he was about to eat. He paused at the last step. “So nice of you to call on Wolfe. I was beginning to question how many people I was going to have to kill before you’d pay attention…of course,” he admitted with a broad grin, worthy of his name, “Wolfe can’t take credit for all the kills the news has been giving to him…someone else has joined in on Wolfe’s good times…”
“Who?” A brief spark of interest crossed my mind as my brain scrambled for ways to avoid the fate I knew was moments away.
A shrug from the beast. “Wolfe doesn’t know. Wolfe doesn’t care.” A grin. “Wolfe cares about you, little doll. Wolfe knows from the little samples how good you taste…now he wants the full course.” He paused and wagged his finger at me. “Wolfe thinks you know that you can’t beat him. But before we start, he wants to hear you promise you won’t try.”
An involuntary shudder passed through me and I gave my full effort to blotting out thoughts of what was about to happen. “I can’t beat you,” I admitted. “And if I kept running, I believe you will keep killing forever; everyone you could – men, women and children. It would never get better. It would be my fault. And that realization would sap every ounce of joy from my life – or what passes for my life – forever.”
He took another step closer. “Wise, for one so young, to know the Wolfe so well. Wolfe is amazed that one so cut off all her life can feel connected to this world…but it matters not.” He swept closer in one swift movement and I didn’t resist as he closed his hand around my neck. “Wolfe is going to hurt you now…and this will go on for quite some time…until you can’t resist even if you want to…and then, when you can’t move, but you can still feel…then we’ll start the real fun…”
He slammed me against the wall and it felt like the world ended. My ears rang as though someone had set off the planet’s worst rock band in them, and it hurt like hell. My brain was swimming and for a moment the world spun upside down and then righted itself. Wolfe was still staring back at me with those black, lifeless eyes, like I was an insect he was studying. “I don’t want you to move for your own good, little doll…dolls shouldn’t move themselves when Wolfe plays with them…so this is for your own good…”
He reached back for a windup and threw me across the room and headfirst into the concrete. I don’t know for sure that it fractured my skull, but the gawdawful cracking noise told me that either my bones or the wall had given. Blood covered my face, trickling over my eyes. I could only feel it, not see it, because my eyelids had snapped shut. He grabbed hold of me again and hauled me into the air. My hands twitched at my side.
“Wolfe wouldn’t be doing this if you hadn’t hurt him. He would have handed you over to his masters, like they wanted, all safe and sound, but you had to hurt the Wolfe…not once, not twice, but thrice…and now you’re in his blood, and he needs you…and you need to learn not to trifle with big men…bad men…”
My eyes were lolling in my head as I tried to brace for the next impact, but I relaxed myself. Then he started to choke me, hard. I felt the stifling as I tried for a breath, then attempted to will myself not to breathe, hoping to get it over before he started having his fun with me, but I couldn’t. My lungs strained and I began to panic.
I tried to gasp, but couldn’t. No M-Squad was coming to save me. No cops. No…Mom. I was on my own.
Completely alone.
My eyes opened and my gaze lifted over his shoulder and I saw the box in the corner, door still open, almost leering, as though it were taunting me. Now the flashbacks came, at the end, as my pitiful life waited in the balance and I remembered moments I had tried to forget. All those years, Mom had held me in this house, like Wolfe was holding me now, keeping me captive, slowly squeezing the life out of me – and I let her, afraid of the box. Years of helpless imprisonment, putting aside everything I wanted out of my life.
It taunted me, in that corner. Years of being stuck in it, trapped, helpless.
Emotions poured over me like the icy water that had hit me earlier, a sudden, sharp shock. I remembered the last time I was stuck in that metal coffin, days without getting a breath of fresh air, and my fear built and built until I exploded, anger and hatred and sadness all rushing out. I pounded on the metal of the door, put everything into it and felt something I had never felt in all the times I had been in there.
It moved. The door moved, just a little. I hit it again and again and it budged a little more, and a crack of light from the outside peeked in. I hammered at the door, kicked, pushed at it, screaming, grunting, my weary and cramped muscles crying out to get free. The corner bent enough that I could stick my fingers through, and I pushed and the metal bent as I applied more and more pressure. With a final kick and punch I heard the top and bottom hinges strain and break and I ripped the door free, sucking in the breaths of life and falling to the basement floor, the cold concrete and breathable air letting me know that I was alive, and for once…I wasn’t helpless.
I wasn’t.
I stared back at Wolfe’s soulless eyes and the same fury washed over me, the same desperate hunger for air and life. He held me at arm’s length and my bare hands came up of their own accord and surged forward, wrapping themselves around his hairy neck. The black eyes looked at me in surprise and a smile found its way to his lips. His grip tightened on me as mine tightened on his neck. There was no way I would be able to kill him before he killed me, I knew that. And I didn’t care. I would not die without him knowing that I wasn’t a helpless, defenseless little doll just here for him to play with.
My fingers dug into his throat and he laughed. “You’re going to have to squeeze much harder than that to make Wolfe feel it, my little doll. All you’re doing is giving Wolfe a case of the tingles.”
I gripped him tighter and he squeezed me so hard my head pushed back. I worried for a moment it was going to pop off, but I maintained my furious hold on him. I could feel a tingle of my own in my hands, likely from the fact that he was depriving my brain of oxygen. I dug my fingernails into his skin and I saw faint trickles of blood well up beneath them, even as I started to feel a sensation of lightheadedness percolate through my being.