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But not two.
Turning my face to the side, I scanned the field for anything I could use as a weapon. I scanned the hills for any sign of him. But I knew he wasn’t coming. Even if he had the strength to climb the cliff, he’d never find me in time. I was on my own.
As usual.
The bearded bastard knelt on the backs of my legs, holding them open, as he unfastened his belt and trousers. A wave of nausea purged my stomach of the only thing I’d put in it that day—a single sip of water—mixed with stomach acid. It burned my throat like liquid fire, reminding me that it was still raw from the guttural scream I’d let out that night after finding Sheila.
That scream.
My eyes widened.
I knew how to get a gun.
Thick fingers, cruel and rough, fisted the material between my legs, pulling the crotch of my shorts and knickers to one side, and I let out a scream so loud and so long that it echoed off the hills and shredded what was left of my vocal chords.
I screamed until the man holding my wrists eventually released one of them, but only so that he could punch me in the back of the head to make it stop.
And it did.
For one serene moment, the world was quiet again. Blissfully dark. Mercifully still. There were no hands on my body. No weight shackling me to the earth. Just a murky, watery oblivion. I didn’t know how long I stayed suspended in that nothingness, but I knew if I could just find my way to the surface, I would see him there, arms outstretched, gray eyes glinting like moonlit steel as he commanded me to jump.
But there was no surface, and the next voice I heard wasn’t his.
It wasn’t even human.
“This is a message from President Abramov.”
Scrambling sounds brought me back into my body. A hasty zip, a jingling buckle.
I then heard the voices of my attackers, barking angry orders at each other or possibly at the drone, but it wasn’t listening to them. It was there for me. And if they didn’t get off me in the next ten seconds, I was going to let it pump all three of us full of bullets.
The pig who’d just refastened his trousers pulled a gun identical to the one I’d stolen out of his own holster and pointed it over his shoulder at the drone.
“Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!” His comrade released my wrists, allowing me to turn just enough to see him holding his hands up in a panic as the drone’s machine-gun barrel swiveled from the back of my head to the bearded face of the man holding the gun.
“Nine,” the robotic recording continued.
The gunman lowered his pistol, but continued to yell at the drone, as if he were talking to a real person on the other side of that camera lens.
The drone ignored him, retraining its aim on me, and I sucked in a relieved breath as both men begrudgingly removed their knees from my thighs and shoulder blades.
“Seven.”
Then, I coughed it back out as a boot careened into my side.
Gasping for air, I pushed up onto my hands and knees and felt another kick, this time to my stomach. My body collapsed and curled into the fetal position, my arms flying up to cover my head as more kicks landed, maybe three, maybe ten, before the bang of a gun brought everything to a standstill.
“Five.”
Cracking one eyelid open, I peeked through the crook of my elbow and saw that both men were now facing the drone with their hands up. It must have fired a warning shot to get them to stop attacking me.
“Four.”
But my relief immediately morphed into dread when the machine’s attention fell on me again, blinding my open eye with its all-seeing spotlight. My heart seized, my body aching in a dozen different places, as I squeezed my eyes closed again, desperately searching for that blissful nothingness. But the beam penetrated through my closed lids, plunging me into an endless expanse of white. It was so tempting, that tunnel of light, the promise of a swift end to all this pain. All I had to do was stay still for three more seconds, and it would be over. I could see my family again, escape this nightmare once and for all, but I couldn’t do it. Because deep down, I didn’t want to go to heaven. I wanted to stay there, in hell, with him.
Delusion or not, I’d found something worth living for, and when I pulled myself into a sitting position and raised my shaky hands above my head, I prayed that he really was just a delusion.
If he was a figment of my imagination, then I could take him with me.
