This place was abandoned.
He almost called out, but something stopped him, some wise wisp of self that wasn’t still hazy from the raspberry Jell-O shooters. He tried to sit up, but pain shot from his hands and pooled in his shoulders like liquid fire. His arms were bound.
He craned to see, blinking to clear his vision. His arms were pulled up high in a V and shackled with old-fashioned iron cuffs chained to rings. His legs were stretched out too, similarly secured, his body making a dual V. He was naked. Instantly his body constricted and his breathing sped. He struggled to rise and discovered that he lay on a wide black square stone, cool to the touch despite the Louisianarips heat. On the ground around the stone, touching the four corners, was a circle of metal, black in the light.
Terror shot through his veins, clearing the last of the alcohol out of his system. His heart pounded. His breath came fast, gasping. He broke into a hot sweat, which instantly cooled into a clammy stink.
He jerked his arms and legs hard, giving it all he had to pull himself free. But nothing gave. The pain multiplied in his legs and arms like lightning agony, at shoulders and groin with liquid fire. His wrists and ankles burned, the iron cuffs binding him, cutting into his flesh. He turned his head to the side and retched, but his stomach was empty and his mouth dry as desert sand.
When the nausea passed, Rick dropped his head back. Forced himself to breathe deeply, slowly, despite his racing heart. To analyze. To think. To be calm. He closed his eyes and mouth, and worked to slow his mind, to contain his racing fear. Around him the barn was silent. Lifeless. Where the hell am I?
When he was calmer, he raised his head again, and studied everything he could see, everything he could hear, analyzing it all. The barn was old, of post-and-beam construction, the frame of twelve-by-twelve beams fitted together with pegs and notches and the vertical boards of the walls nailed in place to the frame. There were four box stalls, one on each corner, with a tack room on one side between two stalls, and opposite the tack room, between the stalls on the other side, was a wide space to saddle and groom horses. The center area was an open passageway more than twelve feet wide, with moldy hay stacked on the wall opposite the double front doors. It had to be more than fifty years old, and the wood showed signs of termites and the kind of damage only time and disuse will provide. Foliage grew up close to the sides of the barn, vines and tree limbs reaching into the interior. Part of the tin roof was missing, and birds flew in and out, twittering and cooing. He could hear no sound of engines, which meant he was miles from any highway, miles from any airport, from any city, far from help. He could hear the faint sound of water rippling, echoing, a soft trickle, like a bayou moving sluggishly nearby. Rarely, he could hear a plop as something fell into the water. All of that was bad. But at least he was alone. For now. That much was good.
When he was calmer, he looked down at himself. If his body had been a clock, his arms would have been nearly at ten and two, and his legs close to eight and four. It looked familiar, and from his alcohol-and drug-fogged brain came an image: He was positioned like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Like an archetype. Bound in a witches’ circle, on a square altar. Like a goat for slaughter.
Was it the full moon? The new moon? Was he the sacrifice in some black-magic ceremony? A long shiver racked down his spine. Rick had a lot of specialized training under his belt, but nothing he’d learned in his criminal justice classes at Tulane, at the police academy afterward, or in the focused and elite training provided by his current covert employers had prepared him for this.
Judging from the angle of the sunbeam, the sun was setting. Or rising. The beam fell across the barn onto a rat-eaten saddle and bridle, and a bedraggled red horse blanket across a joist. As he watched, a bird alighted on the blanket and pecked, eating whatever it found in the ripped, rotting cloth. It pulled out a bit of C oufaint s stuffing and, with a flutter of wings, carried it away into the darkness of the rafters. To the side, against the nearest stall wall, was a glass of water, with a red straw in it. His mouth felt even drier at the sight, but there was no way for him to reach it. Rick dropped back his head.