She grabbed her sister’s arm and pulled her along. “This whole place is going to blow.”
They reached the front porch and ran the short distance through the driving rain to the Porsche. Any second Pine expected to be hurled off her feet from the blast wave of a house disappearing and taking her and her sister along with it.
We’ll just be ash. Cremated together.
She flung open the driver’s-side door and Mercy did the same on the other side.
An instant later everything turned black, for both of them.
CHAPTER
68
PINE OPENED HER EYES FOR A MOMENT and then closed them. She did so again, fighting against the feeling of cement lodged between her eyelids and her face. It was like being in a nightmare and struggling to open your eyes to see the terrible things coming for you.
Finally, they stayed open and she was staring at a low ceiling of whitewashed brick. A brick ceiling was quite unusual. She slowly sat up and stared over at her sister. Mercy was sitting upright on a bunk, her back against the wall.
Pine looked around and took in the barred and chicken-wired window and barred door. “Where are we?”
Mercy shrugged. “We look to be in jail.”
Pine stood on wobbly legs, put a hand against the wall to steady herself, then stretched out her back. “Okay, I feel like I was hit by a tank.”
“Same here, but I don’t remember what happened after I opened the car door.”
Pine nodded and glanced out the window at the foreboding terrain outside. She also saw the high fence topped by concertina wire. “What the hell is this place?”
“Saw a guy with an AK walking by out there earlier.”
Pine checked her pocket for her phone. It was gone, along with both her pistols.
“Yeah, they took my gun, too,” said Mercy.
Pine sat down on her bunk, rubbed her eyes, and said in a bleak voice, “They killed Neil Bertrand. And the Atkinses are dead, too. And we’re here.”
“Yep,” said Mercy. “I think we got played. They were obviously waiting for us there.”
“But how could they know we were going to visit Wanda?”
“Don’t know. I wonder if the house burned up or blew up first,” said Mercy.
“Whoever took us was waiting for us in the Porsche. When I opened the door, I thought I saw something, but then everything went black. They might have hit us with some gas or something.”
Mercy nodded but said nothing.
They both perked up when they heard footsteps. It was a man dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. He was carrying two trays. He put one down, and waited. Then another man appeared, dressed similarly. He was carrying a riot shotgun, Pine noted, like they used in prisons. It was designed to kill over a wide, shallow field of bodies.
The first man unlocked the door and slid the two trays through.
Pine looked at each man; they did not look back at her.
She said, “Can you at least tell us where we are?”
The first man locked the door and they both left without speaking or ever looking at them. It was like they had left food for two invisible people.
Pine picked up one tray and handed it to Mercy while she took the other. They sat on their bunks and ate the food and drank the glasses of water provided.
When they were finished the same two men came back and retrieved the trays. This exact timing made Pine believe they were under surveillance.
Five minutes later another man appeared.