Campbell_Book One

Chapter 7




October 2001

Los Angeles, California



Leah, Tal, and Rachel looked numbly at Tal’s brother Rob as he shivered on the couch. At fifteen, he was a tall kid, broad from years of rugby, which he much preferred to the academic ventures, unlike his siblings who were both lankier.

“I think it’s just a cold,” he chattered, wrapping the blanket around himself tightly. “I feel okay.”

Tal wasn’t sure if Rob was broken and in denial from all the death, or just too empty to care about himself anymore.

“I’ll get you some tea,” Leah said, smiling bravely at her cousin. “Rach, you want to turn up the heat a bit?”

She nodded, scampering off to play with the thermostat.

Tal kept his distance from Rob, opting to sit across the room in his mom’s favourite armchair. “I should go out for some things.”

“Make sure you take Dad’s gun,” Rob rasped. “And don’t lead anyone back here, whatever you do.”

Tal nodded his head. “I know.”

“We’ve got more than most,” Rob choked and squeezed his eyes shut. “They made sure we’d be okay.”

“I know,” Tal replied, thinking of the cans and cans of things in the cupboards. “And we are.”

Rob looked at Tal critically for a few moments. “If it’s just you, what are you going to do?” Rob whispered. “If I’m gone? Are you going to take care of them?”

Tal swallowed hard, the realization that Rob had determined what was going to become of him sinking in for the first time: it could have been a cold. But it wasn’t. They both knew that.

“I’ll take care of them,” Tal said, his voice wavering. “I’ll do whatever I need to do. We’ll take care of each other.”

“They say kids aren’t dying,” Rob continued. “That it’s just grown-ups.”

“Rob, maybe you’re not a grown-up,” Tal said, mustering as much hope as he could in his weak voice. “Maybe it’s just a cold—”

Tal’s brother sat up a little. “Maybe it’s thirteen, like we always learned. Maybe that’s where it ends.”

“I don’t know how to go on,” Tal replied, his voice small as he pulled his legs up to his chest. “What happens now?”

“I don’t know,” Rob said honestly. “I guess you’ll get to figure that out. Just…be smart. Don’t pull a Richard Cohen.”

Richard Cohen was a boy from Tal’s class who, upon his parent’s death, had burned their house down a few blocks away, after firing into a crowd of kids waiting in line at a gas station with an automatic weapon that he’d found in his father’s gun case. Luckily he was a lousy aim and only a couple of people were hurt. No one was sure where he’d gone after that.

“I don’t think anyone but Richard Cohen could pull a Richard Cohen,” Tal said, unable to fight a grin. “That kid always was a dumbass.”

“Just like his big sister,” Rob said, shaking his head. “F*cking idiots. I want you to promise me something.” He leaned in as far as he could. “It’s the same thing that Adam made me promise him.”

Tal leaned in too, deciding that if Rob was sick, he was sick, and sitting a little closer to his brother wasn’t going to make it any worse. “What?”

“Before you make any big decisions, or when you’re in trouble, think of what Mom and Dad would do if they were in the situation.” Rob smiled. “And then try and do the closest thing to that, that isn’t going to get you beat up.”

“Okay,” Tal nodded, smiling back. “I can do that.”

“And don’t forget to brush your teeth.”

“Only you forget to brush your teeth,” Tal said, laughing. “That message was just for you.”

“I love you,” Rob said, ruffling his brother’s hair. “And you’ll be okay. You know that.”

Tal nodded, fighting back what had to be the last tears he had left. “You’ll be okay too,” he sniffed, pulling the blanket over his brother’s shoulders. “And we’ll take care of you.”

“I know you will,” Rob nodded, pulling his knees up and wrapping his arms around them, in an attempt to warm himself. “Now, go make sure Rachel isn’t f*cking with the thermostat too much. It’s like an icebox in here.”



September 2012

Somewhere south of Campbell



When Tal came to, he found himself happy to be alive, but otherwise furious. A piece of duct tape was spackled over his mouth and his hands were tied behind his back with what he assumed as a piece from the same roll, because both places tugged equally. He felt groggy, and between heavy blinks and his eyes adjusting to the dim light from some rust holes, he saw that wherever he was, he was not alone.

Lucy Campbell was there too, inches from him and similarly bound, but not as lucid as he. In fact, the giant bruise on her forehead and her limp posture led Tal to believe she was much worse off than him. It took him a minute, but he determined that they were horizontal, and that whatever space they were in, it wasn’t very big.


It was a car trunk and they were moving, Tal deduced, with his weakened mental state. Each bump in the road made him wince from the duct tape pulling on his arm and leg hair, and the cramping in his arms, legs, and back was the most excruciating pain he’d ever experienced.

He’d been taken in what he’d slept in; a pair of sweatpants, boxers, his shirt from the day before, and a pair of socks he’d pulled on when his feet felt cold in the night. The trunk was warm though, presumably from their two bodies heating the space.

Tal narrowed his focus on Lucy, and wondered for a minute if she might be dead. He’d seen dead bodies before, lots of them, but he’d never been locked in a moving vehicle with one, and the thought of it freaked him out. She was dressed in more than he was—a grey sweatshirt and a pair of stretchy black pants, with bright blue slip on canvas sneakers. He slid over a couple of inches and pushed at her with his bound feet, breathing a huge sigh of relief out his nose when she stirred, ever so slightly.

“Mmm,” Tal enunciated as loudly and eloquently as possible, as he continued nudging her foot and leg with his.

She squinted, which he understood to be a wince, before slowly opening her eyes. He didn’t know Lucy very well, but her expression was an unmistakable mix of pain and anger as she realized that she was as immobile as Tal was.

They stared at each other silently for an indeterminate amount of time. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours. Time lost all meaning when you were locked in a mystery trunk, Tal decided.

He’d always wondered what he’d think about if he knew he was going to die. Now, Tal remembered a conversation that had occurred after his father had come to realize his own death was imminent. The conversation focused around baseball—his father wished he’d gone to more baseball games when there were enough players to have a league. He wished he’d paid for the good seats, and he wished he’d taken afternoons off to go, now and then. He also wished he’d eaten more pork, because despite doing a fairly good job of staying kosher, Tal’s dad had really, really enjoyed bacon.

Near the end, like everyone from the generations that died, the man had spent a lot of time bargaining, making donations to health organizations that were working towards some sort of cure, even though a cause hadn’t been isolated. The saddest part, Tal always thought, was that it was an unpredictably predictable ailment, because one day you were fine, and the next day, you most certainly weren’t. People thought they were cured quite often, from a variety of remedies, only to drop dead a few days later.

It hadn’t hurt, when they’d died, not as far as those left behind were aware. However, Tal was certain if he was to die now, unless it was of asphyxiation—which was quite possible—it was going to hurt, a lot. He’d do what he could to not die, of course, but when one was drugged and stuck in a trunk by a largely unknown foe, it was hard to say what the future held. He sighed to himself loudly.

Lucy blinked a few times at Tal and appeared to be trying to communicate something, but whatever her message was, it was lost on him. He gave a little shrug in the dim light, which seemed to be coming from a smashed out taillight. Lucy rolled her eyes in response, and winced.

Eventually they settled into a silent conversation lead by blinks and guttural sounds. Tal decided if he could tell Lucy anything at that moment it would probably have been that her breasts were tremendous, and that he wished they’d had more opportunity to work together, because he probably could have learned a lot from her. He decided he’d also ask her about her garden, because in the passing glances he’d taken, it was very impressive.



***



Lucy tried to tell Tal to lick around his mouth like she was doing so the duct tape would come loose and they could formulate a plan before someone came and stuck some more on them, and probably roughed them up for removing it, and for existing. She’d express her dislike of him if they lived, but that was fairly trivial now; they were stronger together.

The light in the trunk dimmed, which Lucy took as a sign that dusk had fallen, and her mind raced with possibilities for survival as her headache slowly dissipated. They were going fast, she guessed, and eventually they’d need to stop whatever this vehicle was for gas, and possibly for the driver to rest. She was certain someone would check on them at some point, but she had her doubts about how valuable either of them were alive. With her out of the way, any number of possibilities could present themselves. Lucy was polarizing and there was no one to instantly take her place. Her companion was one of few who knew how West’s economy operated, so he had a little more value, possibly to ransom.

Maybe they weren’t interested in that. Lucy had never heard anything good about East’s diplomatic skills, but she’d assumed it was them that had her, although she knew it could have also been some fringe group.

Finally, as they were plunged into pitch black by the setting sun, and she’d used up every ounce of saliva in her mouth, the duct tape gave way enough that she felt that she could pull it into her mouth and then spit it out.

She tried to speak but it came out sounding like dried leaves on the ground for a minute or so before she could formulate words. She couldn’t see Tal any more but she could feel the tiniest bit of his breath on her face.

“Come closer,” she croaked. “I’ll rip your tape off.”

He let out what she took as an affirmative moan, and she flinched as she felt his body press against hers, and his duct tape brush against her face. Now was not the time to let her intimacy issues get the best of her, Lucy told herself, as she searched for the corner with her nose before grasping it firmly in her teeth.

Tal let out a sharp grunt as she began tugging at it, likely taking off a layer or two of skin as she went. Her mouth hurt terribly from the lack of saliva and from being more chapped than she could ever remember, but she kept on tugging, doing her best to ignore the heat from his body, which made her uncomfortable in every way. Lucy was relieved that she couldn’t see him. It made it a little better somehow.

“You should probably just take West,” he mumbled, once she spat his tape out. “I never would have figured out how to do that.”

“I’m going to ask you to do something, and if we live, and you ever bring this up, I’ll kill you,” she rasped.

“Anything,” he replied, inhaling the deepest breath of his life.

“I need you to spit in my mouth.” She narrowed her eyes and caught his outline, as their noses bumped. “Please.”

Tal exhaled, and swallowed, which Lucy found herself envious of. “You want me to spit in your mouth?”

“Yes,” she choked.

“I don’t know where your mouth is.”

If there’d been light in the car, Tal would have seen Lucy give him the most obvious eye roll of her life, as she drove her nose into his cheek, and pressed her mouth against his.

His breath was terrible, which helped take her mind off the awkwardness of borrowing someone else’s saliva, through what was possibly the world’s worst and most uncomfortable farce of a kiss. He obliged her and transferred over as much spit as he could to her very dry mouth, and after a minute or so, she pulled away.

“Don’t you brush your teeth?” she gasped. “Ugh.”

“Sorry, I usually do in the morning, but there was this thing that came up that kept me otherwise occupied.” He smiled at her in the darkness, and Lucy was glad he chose not to comment on her breath, which she knew was equally foul. “Your teeth are crooked on the bottom. I didn’t notice.”


She rolled her eyes. “I was supposed to get braces when I turned twelve.”

He moved his face away from hers as much as he could, and inched his body over to give them both a bit of personal space, or the illusion of some, at least. “So what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I guess it would help if we knew what the end game was, to see if it’s worth risking a tuck-and-roll.”

She knew Tal was not putting much stock in that option from the exaggerated sigh he gave her. “We’re going pretty fast, I think.”

“But we’ll have to slow down eventually. We’ve been driving for the better part of a day.”

“That depends on how long we were out for. Maybe we already stopped for fuel.”

They let out a concurrent groan as they went over a bump.

“Did you see who took you?” Lucy asked, hoping something might come to mind if they talked about how they’d ended up there.

“Big kid in a ski mask. He killed my friend. The pilot.” As soon as he said it she noticed how sticky he felt next to her, likely from the Mexican’s blood. “Then he stuck me with something, and then I woke up here. You?”

“Blunt object to the head.”

“I saw the bruise earlier.”

“I don’t suppose you have a Vicodin?” She smiled to herself. “Okay, seriously. What are we going to do?”

“Do you think you could roll over, and I could try and chew through your duct tape?” Tal offered. “I need to piss.”

At the mention of it, Lucy noticed the ache in her bladder. “This sucks.”

“Let’s wiggle around so I can try and undo your tape, then you can rip mine off and we’ll see what we can figure out.”

It took Lucy what she guessed was the better part of twenty minutes to wiggle around so they were spooning, and the jostling exacerbated their need to use the bathroom until it was so bad that it was impossible to ignore. Shifting so Tal’s mouth was at the small of her back where her hands were stuck took another fifteen or so, and just as he got into position, they came to a jarring stop.

“We’re f*cked,” Lucy muttered. “How fast can you chew?”

He responded by tearing into the tape with as much fervor as he could. One of the car doors slammed, and they both tensed up. Lucy wiggled her arms as much as she could, attempting to help the process along.

“…so we just finish it and leave them wherever,” a male voice said outside the car. “I guess we have to bury them?”

A female voice piped in, “The boss said he wanted pictures of them in a hole. Burying them is part of the deal.”

“How will they ever know? We’re in the middle of buttf*ck nowhere.”

“Pictures, jackass. Don’t you listen? He doesn’t want anyone finding the bodies. He said he wants them to just disappear.”

“You opposed to me having a little fun first?” the male voice said. “It’s not every day you have Lucy Campbell tied up.”

“I don’t give a shit, as long as you dig the hole first. No half-assing this or we won’t get paid.”

Tal chewed faster, and Lucy, her desperation taking over at the thought of whatever this stranger’s idea of a little fun was, managed to wiggle a foot free.

“Shh...” she whispered desperately, as the voices trailed off, presumably to dig the hole. “If we can get free, we’ve got a chance.”

Tal nodded into her wrist as she finally pulled it free and immediately reached for his hands. Her wrists were extremely cramped and it took a minute for her fingers to work properly, but she eventually found the edge of the tape in the dark and moved it enough to release his hands. They both awkwardly fumbled with the tape at his feet, and she exhaled with relief as her hands finally remembered how to properly function and she ripped the tape in one sharp burst.

“Go for the eyes,” Tal whispered, desperately moving his hands to try and regain motor function. “That’s the only chance we got, because there’s no way in hell our legs are going to work when we get out of here.”

“I’m going to bite whatever I can get my mouth on,” Lucy muttered. “I suggest you do the same.”

They both wriggled their hands and feet like fish on a dock, their adrenaline levels building as they contemplated what was bound to come, in either minutes or hours.

“I’m sorry,” Tal whispered, after a few minutes of squirming.

“Why?” Lucy asked, wondering if part of his mental process in dealing with what to come was some sort of f*cked up confession.

“I just pissed. In my pants,” he replied sheepishly. “I figured it would help me focus.”

The smell of urine was suddenly overpowering. “So gross,” she muttered.

“You should go too. I don’t mind. I’m sure you’d feel better.”

She thought about it for a minute before giving in. It felt incredible, and he was right; it did give her renewed focus towards whatever it was she was going to have to do.

“We’re never speaking of this,” she whispered. “Never, ever.”

“Believe me, I’m pretty happy to forget this day ever happened.”

They lay there in wait for what could have been seconds or hours, both of them breathing steadily as they did their best to ignore the smell, which was a pungent mix of bodily fluids, and Lucy felt might actually distract their captors when they opened the trunk.

Waiting was torturous. She’d always been impatient.

Finally, the voices started moving closer, and Lucy poked him in the ribs, hard, to make sure he was paying attention since they weren’t saying anything.

He responded by poking her in the breast.

“F*ck off,” she whispered. “And once we’re out of here, keep your f*cking hands to yourself.”

“Until you want some more of my spit?” he joked. “I didn’t mean to poke your breast. What happens in the trunk stays in the trunk.”

Lucy decided she was going to torch the car, simply for the satisfaction of it, if they lived.

“…you want to cut him up a bit before?” the male voice asked, “Since that’s your thing?”

“I don’t know. How long you going to be with her?” the female voice said.

“I could be a while,” he said nonchalantly. “See how much of a fight she’s got left in her.”

Lucy glared into the darkness and resigned herself to the realization that she had no idea what she was going to have to do to survive, but she’d do anything to come out the other end alive. She thought of all the things she’d never do if she didn’t make it; she’d never see her brothers again, never have the chance to see a calf born that next spring. She thought about all the books she’d planned to read, and wondered if the words would have made any difference in her current situation.

“He’s big, but not tall,” Tal whispered under his breath. “Probably two-fifty, maybe my height. I don’t know about her.”

“Just survive,” she replied as the jingle of keys signaled the beginning of what could be the end. “Whatever you need to do.”

“You too,” he muttered. As the lock turned, the tiniest sliver of light hit his eyes and sheer adrenaline flooded his veins.

This just wasn’t the kind of situation you could plan for, she regretfully decided.