Lisa Miscione - Twice

“Fucking midget,” answered Dax. “I’m going to kill that little turd.”

“What’s your situation right now?”

“I’m in trouble, man,” he said, his voice thick and slow, as if he were just barely holding on to consciousness. “That little dwarf sliced the back of my calves. I think I’m missing some teeth. I taste blood. I’m bound, can’t move.”

“Shit,” said Jeff, his stomach hollowing out. “Hang in there, buddy. It’s going to be okay.” Panic was replaced by a lethargy, a feeling of desperate hopelessness.

That was the other way in which life was so different from fiction. Not everyone always gets out alive.

Lydia felt an odd calm as she walked down the cold empty street, a light snowfall crunching beneath her feet. The lamps created circles of light in a dark winter sky and the snowflakes that fell there glittered like stardust. On one level, she was scared-terrified, of course. That part of herself seemed to exist beneath a surface of soundproof glass, banging, screaming, but unheard. Mostly, she was numb. She had the sense that every moment of her life since the death of her mother had led her to this moment. She thought of what Julian Ross had said about the music written for her, the notes one chose to play or not. But Lydia wasn’t quite as passive as that. She had written this symphony for all of them and she recognized it now. Hadn’t she in a way forced the hand of fate? If she hadn’t lived the life she had, chasing monsters, pulling back the curtain on evil, would she be here now? Would Dax and Jeffrey be in danger… or worse? She knew as a fact that they would all be somewhere else this moment. She couldn’t say if it would be a better situation or a worse one, though it was a safe bet it couldn’t be much worse. But they wouldn’t be here.

If she hadn’t written With a Vengeance , the book about Jed McIntyre and his crimes, he may never even have thought of her again while he rotted away in the New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane. If she and Jeffrey hadn’t gotten into that mess in Miami, Jed McIntyre would still be locked away. She took a sharply cold breath of air into her lungs and stopped herself. This was a mental spiral that could only lead to a loss of focus. And she needed to be focused right now. She could self-flagellate later, when they were all safe.

She didn’t have far to go. Just to the abandoned subway station at Prince and Lafayette. She was to walk down the stairs and wait at the gate. She thought of the network of tunnels Dax and Jeffrey had described to her. She was about to see them for herself. She paused at the top of the stairs and wondered, not for the first time, if she should call Ford or Agent Goban. Somehow she didn’t quite believe that McIntyre had the ability to know what she was doing, that he was watching her, or had some way to listen to her phone; but she was reluctant to take the chance. As if in answer to her musings, the phone in her pocket rang. She retrieved it and put it to her ear.

“Well,” said Jed McIntyre. “What are we waiting for?”

Jeffrey was sitting on some kind of rickety wooden chair, each ankle bound to a chair leg, each wrist bound to its arms. Dax was gnawing at the binding on Jeffrey’s ankle like a rat. Since Dax was tied and on his belly, that was the only binding he could reach. Occasionally he would stop and spit, make a noise of distaste. Jeffrey slowly moved his foot and ankle forward, trying to put stress on the tape. They didn’t seem to be making much progress, until suddenly Jeffrey had more freedom of movement. The hope gave him strength and after a few minutes, he snapped the ankle free.

“Now what?” said Dax. “What are we going to do with this free ankle? Kick our way out?”

He had a point.

“Knock yourself over,” suggested Dax. “And I’ll try to get the bindings on your hands.”

Jeffrey began to rock himself and eventually toppled to the side, landing hard on cold concrete.

“Does this type of thing really happen?” he asked.

“I heard that some people are actually hiring companies to kidnap them. I mean, like, attack them on the street, take them away in a van, and tie them up like this. They predetermine the number of days they’ll be held, what kinds of things they want to happen to them. They try to get away. For fun. Can you imagine? There are too many idiots with money in this city.”

“No shit.”

Awkwardly, they snaked their bodies closer to each other, and after a few minutes of adjustment, Dax went to work on one of Jeffrey’s wrists.

“You know,” said Jeffrey, “in some cultures we’d have to get married now.”

Dax spit. “Bloody homo.”

Standing behind the gate was a homely midget. He was filthy, with a big face and a striped stocking cap; in his hand he held a key, which he passed through the gate to her. Lydia suppressed the urge to run screaming. When she leaned in to him, she saw that his beard was full of crumbs and that he gave off a strange odor, some combination of body odor, foot rot, and baked goods. He smiled a dirty smile at her, his teeth brown and filmy, as she swung open the gate. He took the key back from her and locked it behind them, then he jumped down on the tracks. She followed quickly, landing awkwardly and almost dropping to her knees. She’d never thought to carry a flashlight. The dwarf seemed comfortable with the darkness, so she kept her eyes on him and stayed close to the wall as the relative light from the abandoned station behind them faded, becoming smaller until it disappeared altogether.

The dwarf jumped though a hole in the concrete, and, pausing to look through, all Lydia could see was black. The darkness seemed alive with ugly possibilities and she was aware that her heart was pounding in her chest, every nerve ending in her body pulsing with fear and the desire to flee. She could hear the skittering of rats, but she couldn’t see them. The sound of their tiny, clawed paws seemed to come from above and below her, all around. She steeled herself and followed the midget through the hole like Alice in some sick urban Underland.

They were making progress until Dax passed out. His head just kind of got heavier against Jeffrey’s arm, and Jeffrey felt a wave of fear.

“Dax? Dax?” he said uselessly, his voice bouncing off the concrete that surrounded them. He forced his own breathing to quiet, and was relieved to hear Dax’s. He couldn’t begin to imagine how much blood Dax had lost.

For a second he almost believed that this was a nightmare, not real. He didn’t want to believe they were going to die down here; thinking thoughts like that was suicide. But things were looking grim. He continued to turn his wrist, working it in circles and trying to stretch the tape and put stress on the tear Dax had made. He thought of Lydia, imagining that this piece of tape was the only thing that kept him from seeing her again, that kept him from holding her safe and warm in their apartment. He imagined that it was the only thing that kept them from putting an end to Jed McIntyre. Finally, he pulled his hand free. He had a moment of elation and relief. He reached out his hand to touch Dax’s neck, feeling for a pulse. It was weak; but he was alive.

He went to work on the other hand, the left half of his body free now. He imagined that getting this hand loose was the only thing that was going to save Dax. And it wasn’t far from the truth. Dax groaned next to him.

“Hang in there, Dax. Hold on.”

It was then that he heard someone approaching in the darkness. Jeffrey held his breath, every nerve in his body on edge. There was silence again and he started pulling desperately on the other bindings. The sound of chains and a padlock coming undone made him freeze. He came as close to praying as he ever had. A door swung open and a large form stood in the doorway. It was lighter outside than it was in the room where they were being held, but he still couldn’t see the face of the person standing before them.