22
Patrena
The high piercing sound coming from my mouth would make a howler monkey proud. My lungs were proving that they’d been built to last. I attempted to flip myself over, but my efforts were unsuccessful. I kicked and stomped and was acting like a damn wild woman. If this band of dick-for-brains, women-snatching fools thought I wasn’t going to make their job of taking me a hard one, they needed to delete, reload, and think again.
“She is a little wild bitch, isn’t she?” one of the men yelled out to his friend who had me by the ankles while the talker gripped me under my armpits.
I let myself go limp, inhaled a good deep breath, and yelled my ass off. “Let me go, you sons of fucking bitches!”
The men ignored my curses and continued their job of attempting to drag me from the back seat of their SUV. I drew my knees up and threw my body with a harsh jerk into its full length, making one man hit the back of his head on the inside of the back passenger’s side doorway.
“Fuck!” he yelled out. “Calm the fuck down or I’m going to give you something to yell and kick about!” he shouted angrily, snatching my legs so hard that the man at my head lost his grip of my shoulders, and I fell with a thump onto the seat.
“They don’t want her damaged. We almost fucked up with that crash so we can’t fuck this up too. We have no idea where something may be hidden,” the one at my head said, his voice loud because he had ducked back into the vehicle to retake my shoulders.
“I’ll drag her out this way, and you come around and take her ankles once she’s out,” the one who had finally gathered that it was easier to drag my ass out than to carry me out, shouted.
However, hearing that whoever wanted me didn’t want me damaged calmed me down. “What the hell are you talking about? Who doesn’t want me damaged?” I probed, my voice choppy from his jerk-and-drag technique of hauling me off the back seat.
“Don’t you worry about that. If you don’t give them what they want, all of this nice treatment will go out the window.”
My face creased in a mix of concern and curiosity. They were careful in the way they were responding and their cryptic words had me running all kinds of scenarios through my head. They had driven around to the backside of what I believed was a government facility after passing through two secured checkpoints.
The building we’d arrived at sat on the outskirts of Denver at least thirty minutes in the opposite direction of where the crash had taken place. Tall and imposing, the architecture was as impressive as the intricately paved walkways that ran off the street. One was immediately aware of the amount of money that went into this setup, and I was sure that they were just as awed as I was, wondering who the hell these people were.
I remembered driving past this building on multiple occasions in the past. Not sure who it belonged to or what they did there, but sure no one just walked in off the street and was given entry without a serious security check first.
Once the men assumed I had gotten all of the fight out of my system, they stood me on my feet and each took an arm before snatching me along. I was too busy taking in information to help myself get the hell out of this place to keep up my fight with them. You had to have a key card to access the gates and the doors.
A sneaky smile inched across my face when I was finally able to reach my hand into the pocket of the one who wasn’t using his badge. The other was busy glancing up at a device that was doing a retinal scan. Dammit! The scan meant I would have to get my hands dirty during my escape and take an eye.
The thick metal doors opened and we were three steps inside a hallway passage. Up ahead of us was a single door with a tall rectangular glass viewing window cut into it that required a badge swipe. The guy on my left reached for his badge, patting his pocket, but the one on the right thankfully, already had his out and scanning.
We walked past the door and entered a long sterile hallway. There were no windows or doors but a bright white corridor that reminded me of the passage Tywin and I had trekked through in the mall’s underground garage.
A third scan and a six-digit code into a small white box like a house alarm keypad, 895381, opened the door and revealed another lobby area. This area had a sterile hospital vibe about it, but we didn’t stay long. Our heavy steps thundered throughout the wide hall passage connected to the area except this hallway provided a view inside a large open bay-type room.
There were perfectly aligned desks with men wearing white-on-white uniforms sitting behind workstations. I assume they were either inputting data or data mining for it. Whatever they were doing, it wasn’t legal. Why else would guards be standing on a raised platform at the front of the open area keeping watch?
What the hell was this place? This couldn’t have been a government facility. Once we cleared the hall, we headed in the direction of what I assumed were the elevators, hidden from view of the front open lobby area of the building.
Based on the number of turns and hallways we had traveled; I believed we were moving towards the front of the building. Another key-card scan and secondary pin, 222345, opened the elevator. We entered and the man on my left tapped the fourteenth floor.
When the doors opened, a woman and two men wearing white lab coats were waiting. The way they smiled made my skin crawl. There was an alarming gleam in the never-ending depths of their beady eyes like they couldn’t wait to get their hands on me.
“This way,” the woman instructed with a hand gesture and a friendly nod like she knew me.
She wasn’t my damn friend. The first chance I got, I was going to slap the piss out of her and knee the men in their balls. My escort guards stayed on the elevator, one flashing me a wicked smile and the other sending me a fuck-you salute before the doors closed and left me staring at my distorted reflection in the shiny metal surface.
The woman took the lead, and the beady-eyed men, one tall and slender and the other short and stout, stood on each side of me while we walked. They were forced to shove me along when I conveniently forgot what direction I was headed.
When we stopped in front of an in-descript room, a peek inside showed that it was a treatment room equipped with a hospital bed with restraints and stirrups. I went ape-shit and wild like an unbroken stallion, punching, kicking, and biting. I was winning until that bitch got me with a needle in the neck and introduced me to the power of liquid restraints. It was like gaining a pound of weight every second and it became too much to carry. My legs began to shake and I wobbled, fighting the drug.
I kept chanting, “Fight it,” but my body said, “Fuck it,” and my legs gave.
The men didn’t let me fall despite the attack I had launched on them. They dragged me to the bed and began securing my legs and arms, knowing my ass was not going to play nice despite being drugged.
What was I going to do now?