Monica O'Rourke - Suffer the Flesh

The door was closed, unlike the others. She licked her lips and reached out with tentative fingers… unable to imagine the horror of what James would consider punishment… what other deviation could he have concocted that would be worse than what they had already survived?

She turned the knob… the door creaked open.

Inside, leaning against one corner, a mop and broom. Small sink on the opposite side of the tiny room.

Zoey expelled a sigh of disbelief.

“A goddamned utility closet,” Claudia muttered.

James had terrified them with a utility closet.

They reached the cafeteria. Claudia checked it, as well as the kitchen and pantry. Came out a few minutes later. “Empty.”

“I hope this means they’re gone. Where the hell is the exit? Have you ever seen a way out? Or how they come in?”

Claudia shook her head. “We were released from the cells after everyone was already here. There’s that freak Sullivan’s office. Maybe it’s there. We need to check the cells too, even though that would be a stupid place for them to hide.”

One door down the short hall, near the cafeteria, led to the cells. The door beside it led to Sullivan’s office. She hadn’t seen him since the coup, but he only showed up a couple times a week anyway.

Zoey opened the cell door, Claudia flanking her, gun held two-fisted and chin high. No movement inside. Claudia entered, searched. It would have been easy to spot anyone hiding, even beneath the cots.

The sight of the cells made Zoey’s knees weak. For some reason, seeing them disturbed her more than seeing the torture rooms. Especially strong, now that she had a renewed taste of freedom, the cells represented everything about this underground torture chamber, the confinement, the despair, the utter hopelessness.

They reached the one door they had not yet checked.

“Ready?” Claudia whispered.

No, she wasn’t ready. Her palms were slick, fingers sticky, the gun trying to slip from one hand, the phone from the other. She licked her lips and took a few shallow breaths. “Let’s go.”

Claudia peered up the short stairway and ascended with Zoey close behind. The landing outside the office was small, and solid.

No exit there.

They skirted the office door. Claudia turned the knob, pushed the door open, and it slammed against the wall.

Empty.

They searched, checking beneath the desk, behind the high-back chair, inside the rather large bathroom. No sign of the men, but no sign of an exit either.

Claudia tried the phone on the desk, checked the outlet for the connection. “Dammit. Phone’s dead.”

Zoey slumped in a leather chair. “This is nuts. Maybe we should bargain with James…”

“No, Zoey. There has to be an exit. There has to be a way in and out of this godforsaken place. We’ll just have to start our search again. Maybe it’s behind a hidden panel or something. Or in the vent system?” Claudia searched the desk drawers.

Zoey got up and headed toward the bathroom. “I’ll be right out.” She’d put her injuries out of her mind until now, ignoring the pain, ignoring the wounds that reopened and spilled drops of blood every so often. Using the toilet wasn’t going to be a pleasant experience. She winced against the inevitable pain and released her bladder. It hurt like hell but was somehow tolerable. A gentle, cool breeze refreshed her flushed skin.

Each room flashed in her mind, but she couldn’t recall ever seeing anything that remotely resembled an exit. A hidden door, perhaps—there was bound to be one somewhere. But where?

Slumped against the back of the toilet seat, her heart now filled with renewed frustration. They’d come too far to be stopped this way. There had to be a way to get the information out of James.

She moistened a wad of toilet paper in the sink and tried to clean the blood and urine, winced against the febrile pain. Suddenly she looked up.

A cool breeze?

There was no air conditioning in the bathroom, no vents. She leaned against the sink and stood, walked toward the shower stall.

“I think I found something,” Claudia said from the other side of the closed bathroom door. “On the desk, there was—”

It wasn’t a shower after all. On the back wall, a door, obscured behind white tiles, the doorknob impossible to miss. “Claudia! Come here!”

Using their same cautious approach, they opened the door and entered another office.

They searched it. A deep closet held dozens of outfits, including the clothes Zoey had been wearing the day she’d been kidnapped.

She and Claudia quickly dressed. Zoey pulled on her too-large sweater and stroked the fabric, hugged herself, savoring the warmth and comfort. It smelled faintly of Chanel , the fragrance she had been wearing that dreadful day. She climbed into her pants and they slid down her hips. She yanked them up and cinched them with the cord from the dead phone. Once she slipped into her socks and boots she felt whole again.

The next room over was quarters for the guards, and they discovered identification, personal items; beds lined the walls military style.

They returned to the office. Several file cabinets housed hundreds of folders, each containing records and personal histories of the women downstairs, and presumably the women who had been here before them. Zoey’s file was missing. Claudia searched for her own, but it too wasn’t there.

Another door. They opened it, peered up a staircase dozens of steps high. They ascended, and once at the top discovered the door that James had described: solid oak, heavy, highly polished veneer. The keypad was near the knob.

“Fuck,” Zoey muttered, leaning against the wall. “What do we do? Start punching numbers?”

Claudia smiled and held up a note pad. “Let’s start with these.”

“What’s that?”

“Maybe nothing, but I found it on the desk downstairs. There are several sets of numbers on here. Maybe James gave Sullivan the combination.”

They punched the numbers at the bottom of the list into the keypad. Nothing. Several more attempts, and the lock clicked. Claudia turned the knob, and opened the door.

Zoey’s stomach flip-flopped. Claudia peered out, gun raised.

They entered yet another room, a small cabin. A tiny kitchenette in one corner, sofa near the fireplace. A deer head over the mantle sported a Yankees cap. The bathroom and closet were empty.

“This is their front,” Claudia said, checking behind and beneath the sparse furniture. “A hunting cabin. Must have been their diversion.”

The back of the oak door—the door to their personal hell—was disguised to look like part of the paneling.

Outside, several cars were parked, covered in a layer of fresh snow. Patterns of fresh tire tracks indicated that several cars had recently taken off.

Claudia tried the cell phone. This time there was a signal. Dialed 911 and didn’t know how to begin to explain.

Gun raised, Zoey checked the perimeter of the cabin, which looked deceptively ordinary from a distance. No indication of the atrocities inside.

The landscape left her awe-struck. Crystalline snow embellished the trees like shards of glass, shining beneath the brilliance of a commanding moon. Zoey sobbed, lowered her gun, arms trembling. Breath plumed before her like clouds.

Claudia joined her. “They’re on the way. I gave them the address of then mailbox. I’m not sure they believed me at first.”

Zoey nodded, unable to speak for the moment.

Claudia wrapped her arms around Zoey’s neck and hugged, sobbed into her shoulders.

“That’s it,” Zoey whispered, voice hitching, not wanting to let go. “This is finally over.”

Claudia nodded against Zoey’s neck. “Let’s go tell everyone. I want to see the expression on James’s face.”