It was true. I knew this would happen. All it took was an open door.
The agreement left Heather’s mind when it came to curiosity. When it came to finding the truth. Especially if her sister was involved. She was a challenge. The type of woman I relished in learning to control.
“She’s not one of Eric’s,” Grant said. “She’s innocent.”
“You think I don’t know that?” I asked. I turned and faced him. Grant adjusted his stance. At the very start of the company, after I had protected him and his mother from an abusive step-father, it was clear that Grant needed more. He had the same drive to protect as I had. I had guided him, trained him, and once he knew he was positive his mother was safe, he worked for me. He was one of the few people I trusted to be honest; everyone else had a hidden motive. Which also meant that he sometimes voiced his disagreement with my decisions.
“It’s unfair,” Grant said.
Life was unfair. From when you were born until the moment you died, the world fucked with you. Heather was lucky her sister was still alive. That I had rescued both of them from Eric.
On the screen, Heather and her sister tried to escape, both of them frantically searching for a way out, but it was hopeless.
“Have they been provided for?” I asked.
It was a rhetorical question. He knew who I meant. They. They who waited in the depths. He knew what I was capable of, and what my rules were.
“No casualties.”
Yet. But we both knew that. Until then, they were under my guard, even if that meant living a perilous existence.
“Guard the doors,” I instructed Grant. “Once I’m finished at the cells, we’ll get the sisters.”
I grabbed the key and Donna’s prepared provisions and left the house through the backyard. Morning would approach soon, but now, the darkest part of the night surrounded the house. A garden of different desert breeds sat at the end of the backyard, leading into the woods and mountain terrain. I climbed through the trees and bushes, following the pathway cut from use, to a small door in the ground. I unlocked the hatch, then used the ladder to descend.
The moans of the twenty captured were an orchestra of torture, the humidity stark in contrast with the night air. They were shackled into varying positions. Each of these prisoners had been key in the deaths of members of the Afterglow, people with families. With children. These prisoners were Eric’s parasites.
And they were cowards, every one of them.
The thud of my boots alerted each prisoner to my presence. Even in these cells, they were better off under me, well-kept, despite how the victim’s families urged that they deserved far less. Donna provided excellent sustenance, and they had shelter, medical attention, and freedom from their emotional slavery. I placed a small container of provisions in front of the cell. A man, completely hairless, frantically raced to the can, then fell into the bars.
“Help me,” he cried.
Did they know the pain they caused? They had not attended the funerals as I had. A squeaky, youthful voice came into my head. The daughter asking why her daddy wouldn’t wake up. Didn’t he know it was morning? His wife, her mother, had heaved, the sobs convulsing her entire body.
The only way I could forget the sound of her weeping tears was to move forward. To secure another prisoner. To protect the Afterglow.
I had given the prisoners a choice. Save yourselves, denounce your loyalty to Eric, pay your debts by helping me take his life. But it wasn’t loyalty that kept them in these cages. It was fear of what Eric would do, when he learned that they had abandoned him. The torture I had bestowed upon them was minimal compared to what they had done to others, what he did to them, but there was still time.
They didn’t know me. What I had planned for them.
After entering a control on the hidden panel, I grabbed a nightstick off of the wall, ran the handle along the cages. I put another container in front of a cell. The man reached out, but the chains were too short. I kicked it closer to him, the provisions falling on the ground.
A memory flashed through my mind: A woman with dark hair panicked, as a man with leathery folds of skin around his mouth, came towards her. Rage filled his eyes. She knew of the blood on his hands, years gone by as his follower, but she had failed him for the last time. She pleaded that he take her body; it had paid for her crimes in the past. But he took her by the neck of her shirt in one hand, a knife in the other.
I placed another container at the end of a cell. This time, the woman’s chains were long enough.
In the memory, a ten-year-old boy, dark-haired like his mother and with brown eyes like his father, raced to his mother, flung himself at the man, a brash attempt to knock the knife from the man’s grip. Even though his mother had been the man’s loyal servant for decades, had even started to train her own son to follow him too, the man got rid of whatever stood in his way. He struck the boy down, his knife slicing across the boy’s face, and the boy held his cheek, the blood streaking down in ribbons across his brow, down his lips. The boy, frozen in fear, watched as the man cut his mother’s throat.
The boy did nothing.
I did nothing.
Cowards were despicable excuses for life. And why my mother should die while I lived remained a mystery. All I could do was ready myself to repay Eric the favor. Fuck his followers. I was doing them a favor by releasing them from his mental captivity.
They knew what they did. How many people they ripped from the embraces of their loved ones. I would make sure they paid too.
I observed as they ate, using their hands like animals, one using the container like a cup.
