He got an arm free. He hit somebody. They pinned him down and then came a loud ripping sound like cloth torn.They tried to hold his head as somebody tried to tape his face and got his hair. He bucked as they continued sitting on him, he tried to get knees or a foot into action, scored once someone else sat on his legs, but they still managed to get tape wrapped around his face.
“Watch his nose, watch his nose,” somebody said, “don’t cut his air off.”
It was a stupid kid game and he was It. He’d been It before, and he didn’t want any part of it or them. He kept fighting, but it was a cramped space and somebody was winding cord around his feet, struggle as he would.
At the same time they pasted tape across his eyes and one cheek, hard, got it across his mouth in spite of his spitting and cursing. He was running out of wind and there were enough of them finally to twist his arms together and get cord around his hands, and sloppily around his body. He couldn’t get enough air past the tape and a nose gone stuffy from being hit, and meanwhile they picked him up like a half-limp package and slung him onto the bed. He hit his head on somebody’s leg and stars shot through his vision.
“Fights damn good,” somebody said, and there was a lot of panting and spitting and sniffing, while the cousin he’d collided with swore and while he tried to find a target to kick with both feet. “Hey, enough of that!”
They flung bedclothes around him, wrapped him, as he guessed, in blankets, and then hauled him up and over somebody’s shoulder, for another toss—he had no idea. Being head down with someone’s shoulder in his gut made it hard to breathe. Blood rushing to his head made his nose stuff up worse. He tried to kick, tried to advise the damn fools holding him he was having trouble breathing, but they carried him—out the door, because there was nowhere in the room to go with him. Out the door, down the corridor with him blindfolded to the light and choking and struggling all the way.
“Stay still,” somebody said, slapping him on the back, and they went onto a different-sounding floor, like metal. Sounds reached him then of elevator doors closing, then of a lift working, as the floor dropped.
He kicked wildly, tried to score in the cramped space, running out of air as they reached the bottom. They carried him out of the lift into the ice-cold he’d felt only in the freezer, and he heard the ring of their steps on metal grid as they walked.
It was the freezer, it was the damn galley freezer they’d brought him to. He began to think he’d pass out, maybe die in their stupidity. Or of purpose. He didn’t know now. He might never know. He’d be dead and they’d catch hell.
The guy carrying him dumped him down and let his feet hit the floor. The pressure in his head shifted as they pushed him back against cold pipe, and somebody tore the tape off his mouth.
He sucked in a fast deep gasp of ice-cold air and found something like pipe and steps against his back, metal so cold it burned the bare skin of his hands. He was still blind, he was still tied hand and foot, his head was still pounding and his brain was hazed from want of oxygen.
Something touched his face, burning hot or burning cold, he couldn’t tell.
Then they left him. He thought they did.
“Hey!” he yelled, and tried to hold himself up, unbalanced as he was, lost his balance and fell—into someone’s arms. They shoved him and he fell toward somebody else, and around, and around. He knew the game. At any moment somebody wouldn’t catch him and he’d hit the metal floor, but he couldn’t save himself, couldn’t do a damned thing unless he could get his balance.
They laughed. There were at least ten, twelve of them. High voices, girls, among the others.
One caught him, held him upright. He hung there shivering and heard the quiet shuffling of steps, the panting breaths around him.
“We have here Fletcher,” that one said. “Who am I, Fletcher? Do you know?”
“Chad.” He knew the voice. He’d never in his life forget it.
“You’re right.” Chad tossed him off balance. Another caught him.
“Do you know me?” another voice asked.
“Go to hell,” he said. He’d like to bring a knee up. With his feet tied, he couldn’t. They spun him around and tossed him from one to the next, until they stopped and somebody sawed free the cords holding his feet.
He kicked. And missed, being blind.
“Temper, temper,” the voice said.
“Find us, Fletcher,” a female voice called to him, echoing in distance and metal dark. “Find us and name us and you’re free.”
“He doesn’t know our names.” Male voice, on his left. Footsteps echoing on metal grid.
“Fletcher.” A voice he did know. Vince.
“Damn you, brat.” It was still another direction. He was blind. He had no concept what the place was shaped like, whether he could blunder off an edge, down steps…
“Fletcher.” Another voice. Older.
“Fletcher!” Jeremy. “Fletcher, come to me!”
Jeremy was in on it. He stopped turning, stopped playing their game at all, no matter how they called.
“Fletcher, come here, come this way.”
“Fletcher!”
“I said go to hell!” he yelled.
An icy bath of liquid hit him, full in the chest. He jerked, and convulsed, and spat, and fell, hard, helplessly, on the grating.
“Dammit!” a male voice yelled. “Sue!”
He heard movement around him. He was drenched, in bitter, burning cold. He couldn’t get his legs to bear under him, he began to shiver so, muscles knotting so it drove his knees together and his elbows against their ordinary flex. He’d hurt his arm on the grating. It burned with a different fire.
“Who am I?” a female voice said. “Try again.”
He couldn’t talk coherently. He was shivering so violently he couldn’t get his jaws to work.
“Hey, guys,” somebody said in a warning tone. Someone was close to him. He tried to defend himself with a kick, but that one touched his face, got the edge of the tape on his cheek, and then pulled away the tape across his eyes, ripping brows and strands of hair along with it.
He was lying soaked, still with his hands tied, in the dark, and their faces were lit with a lantern on the echoing metal grid, so they assumed a horror-show aspect, gathered all around him against tall cannisters and girders and machinery. It wasn’t the freezer. It was somewhere else. Chad was there. He knew that broad face. Vince and Linda were there. Jeremy was there, not saying a thing.
He just stared at Jeremy. Even when they introduced themselves, one by one, and said he had to learn the names to get loose, he just stared at Jeremy.
“My name’s Jeremy,” Jeremy said when it was his turn to talk, “and I was the last they did this to. It’s a Welcome-in, Fletcher, you got to go along with it, you got to say what they say and learn the stuff and then you’re one of us, that’s all, for good and ever. Welcome in.”
He didn’t know whether he ever wanted to talk to Jeremy again. What Jeremy said he didn’t doubt in the least: it was some form of Get the New Guy and he was supposed to bend to the group and kiss ass until they’d gotten their bluff in.
But it wasn’t just roughhousing. They’d put bruises on him and half-frozen him, soaking him with water, they’d dumped him on the burning cold deck, and he didn’t give a damn what else they were doing, or threatened to do, he wasn’t playing their silly games to get In with them, not if he froze to death.
He started memorizing names and faces, all right. They wanted him to, and he would, to remember where he owed what and for how long. He knew Chad, who’d started this and set him up, and he learned Wayne who was the second voice, who’d shoved him, and Connor, and a thin-faced girl named Lyra. Ashley was another thin one, the quietest voice, Sue was a broad-faced girl with a cleft in her chin, and that voice and her name had accompanied the water; Wayne had protested it. There were two different scores. They sat there in the dark, lit up like a horror show and going on with their stupid game, while he shivered and his hair stopped dripping, probably frozen. They told him how he was welcome to the ship, and how it was a great ship, and how he was lucky to be a Neihart and how he’d put up a good fight.
Fine, he thought. They hadn’t seen fight yet.