Two Weeks' Notice

“Wow,” she said. “You’re serious about your torture. Green Jell-O.”



“You’re going to need your strength,” Jane said. She pulled up a chair and sat down, spooned up a bit of the gelatin, and guided it to Bryn’s mouth. “Here’s the mama bird, feeding the baby bird.…Open wide.…”



There was utterly no point in resisting; cooperating would at least get her a little something in her stomach, and it would be humiliating to spend the rest of her captivity smeared with fragments of the stuff. So Bryn opened her mouth, and Jane tipped the spoon. It went on like that, with Jane trying out bits of probably half-remembered cooing from her own mother. Choo-choo trains. Airplanes and airports. The glee Jane took in it was unholy, really, but as soon as the spoon clinked against an empty bowl, the fun was over. Jane put the bowl aside and shoved the cart out of the way with her foot, then sat back and crossed her legs.



She still had the spoon, and Bryn watched her turn it over and over nimbly in her fingers. “So,” Jane said. “Do you have any idea the damage a spoon can really do? Scoop things, obviously. It’s best for eyes, but that’s so obvious that it hardly even needs a remark. But it’s also great for damage to the soft palate inside the mouth. If you’re energetic, you can drive it all the way up into the brain and start scooping out things there, too.”



Bryn’s mouth had suddenly gone very dry, but she forced herself to respond with a tight, sarcastic, “Tease.”



Jane laughed. “Oh, I like you. You really do think you’re a hard-ass, don’t you? Been there, done that? Well, you haven’t. Not like I have.” There was a flush in her cheeks, a sparkle in her eyes. Jane, Bryn realized with a cold little devastation, was a true sadist—and not the kind with a convenient safe word. She was a sociopath in the truest sense. “I get paid for answers, and most people don’t have the…resilience you do. So this is pretty interesting work for me. No taboos.”



“Just tell me what you want to know and we can get this over with,” Bryn said.



“What, now? I hope you’re not going to let me down, Bryn, and get all girlie on me. C’mon, woman up.” She gave Bryn’s arm a friendly shake. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you a sample question, and you can decide whether or not to answer it.” She paused—a dramatic pause—and then said, “Boxers, briefs, or boxer briefs?”



“I don’t wear any of them,” Bryn said.



“No, no, no, the question is, what does Patrick McCallister wear? Come on, Bryn. I know this is an easy one for you.”



Bryn smiled back at her, and it felt wild and fierce. “Ask him yourself, bitch.”



“You think I have to ask?” Jane said. The smile disappeared, and what was left in her eyes was dark and endless. “It’s just a simple question, Bryn. C’mon, you can tell me. It’s just us girls.” There was something behind all that, a trap Bryn didn’t understand and didn’t want to even try to guess. Something to do with Patrick.



And she wasn’t going to go there.



“Fuck you,” Bryn said. “Ask your question.”



Jane tapped her lips with the rounded end of the spoon, then said, “What did you find at Graydon when you went into the building?”



“Dead people,” she said. “Wrapped in plastic. And a bomb.”



“Oh, Bryn, I really was giving you a softball. Come on, now. We already know the answer. You’re just being stubborn.”



Poor little fly, wrapped in your cocoon.



“A thumb drive,” Bryn said, because it was obvious by now that Jane did know. “With encrypted data. We broke the encryption. It was three video files showing executions of Revived people.”



“Huh.” Jane’s eyebrows rose, just a little. “Truth. Interesting tactic. I’d appreciate you telling me just who helpfully decrypted that information for you—I always like to know who out there has special expertise, and I know my employers would really want to have a chat with them to find out the extent of what they know about all this. Trouble is, your friends who were in that warehouse seem to be a little difficult to find. Moved, left no forwarding address, that kind of thing. So how about parting with their names, for a start?”



Bryn shut her mouth. Time to stop talking. She’d wasted as much of the hour as she could, with the Jell-O and playing to Jane’s catlike instincts, but she wouldn’t give up Manny and Pansy. Not by name. These people might be able to find them, but she wasn’t going to help. Sorry, Manny. This is your worst nightmare, and I’m sorry I dragged you into it.



Manny’s extreme paranoia, in retrospect, didn’t seem all that unreasonable after all. Not after meeting this woman.



“Oh,” Jane said happily, as Bryn turned her head and focused on the fluttering spiderweb on the ceiling, pressing her lips together. “You really don’t know how much this means to me. Thank you, Bryn. Thank you.”



The spoon touched her cheek and slid upward in a cool, sticky, damp trail, and Bryn shut her eyes.



It didn’t help.



There were points where Bryn talked. Babbled, in fact, once her body had healed enough to allow words to come out. She confessed a few things—the fact that she had already figured out how many of the Revived were missing, the fact that she knew someone was experimenting on them. She gave the names of those whom she’d identified. She even mentioned Fast Freddy Watson and Jonathan Mercer, just for the hell of it, but she didn’t mention Annalie’s name.



Jane probably knew it anyway.



Bryn didn’t, out of sheer bloody fury, give up Manny’s and Pansy’s names, though that was the most persistent question that was being asked of her. She didn’t know anything but their names, and a couple of other locations where they’d been, but she wasn’t about to let Jane have even that much of a chance at either of them. I can take it, she told herself. It’s just pain. Wounds heal. I can take it. Jane couldn’t scare her with permanent scarring, or even death; she needed her talking, so Mr. Smith and his diamond-saw necklace weren’t in the picture, either.



In the end, she made up names for Manny and Pansy, cribbed from two of her least favored fellow soldiers back in basic training. Steve Hyatt and Terry Mueller. Steve and Terry were bullies. They deserved it, if Jane came looking. Steve…Steve had grabbed her ass, threatened her, stolen from her. Terry, his girlfriend, had helped lure her into a dark room where Steve was waiting to get the drop on her. It hadn’t happened, because Lieutenant…Lieutenant…Bardley—his name was Bardley—had walked in on them. Terry had sworn on the Bible that Bryn had come on to the two of them and it was all just some sick consensual game.…



They deserved Jane, deserved it, oh God can’t think oh God oh God…



Jane finally took a break; apparently, working with only a spoon was hard work. She left it lying bloody on the tray, with the dried bowl still sticky with Jell-O, and promised to come back with something sharper. Bryn lay trembling in the blood-soaked bed as gouged tissue healed, and thought, I can’t. I can’t hold out for another— How long would it be? Twelve hours? Eighteen? God. Jane wasn’t even really interested in the answers to the questions yet. She hadn’t, Bryn realized, really come down to business; she was still pleasuring herself.



The mattress under her body was cold with her blood, saturated and stinking of it. Her eyes were still shut, because she was afraid to open them, afraid she’d see darkness; Jane hadn’t been kind to her there.



But she couldn’t let the fear rule her, because once that started, it would never, ever stop. So Bryn forced herself to look.



Jane had turned on the lights at some point, and the harsh fluorescents were dizzying, throwing back red splashes on the walls, red beads and smears on her pale flesh. Overhead, the spiderweb still fluttered like a tattered flag.



I’m the spider. I’m the goddamn fucking spider. This is my web. See if it isn’t.



She pulled at her restraints. The left wrist, the one that Jane had leaned over for hours, was looser than it had been because its Velcro closure had been rolled back a little from the friction—not much, but a little. Bryn grimly worked her hand back and forth, back and forth, and then steeled herself once she had braced at an awkward angle.



Then she threw her weight against it, violently, and snapped bones. She didn’t try to smother the cry; as Jane had mentioned, no one cared. The bones compressed along the back of her hand now, shifting and grating as she pulled, and finally deformed enough that, in a white-hot burst of agony, she pulled free.



“Fuck,” she whispered, and took a few seconds to just breathe before she raised her hand to her mouth, gripped her fingers one by one in her teeth, and pulled to put the bones back in line. She couldn’t wait on the healing; it would take too long. She used her undamaged pinkie finger to reach out and hook under the edge of the rolling steel cart that held the Jell-O bowl…



And the spoon.



It was an Olympic-level effort to reach for it, grasp it, and slip it under her hip, concealed in case Jane returned unexpectedly. Once Bryn had a weapon—and she’d never underestimate a spoon again—she began clumsily working on her other wrist restraint. It came loose after a torturous amount of effort. Her undamaged right hand was more than willing to take charge of releasing the chest, waist, thigh, and ankle straps.



As she felt the icy-hot snap of the nanites knitting bones together, Bryn sat up. In the dull metal mirror she looked like something out of a horror movie—matted and soaked in gore, with drying blood running like terrifying clown makeup from her eyes. She bared her teeth. Scary. She didn’t feel scary, though; she felt fragile, wounded, desperate, and yet, at the same time, angry. A kind of fury she’d never felt before in her life.



In the drawer she found the bundled-up clothes she’d had on when she arrived, and she wiped most of the blood off her with the ruined hospital gown before pulling the pants and shirt on. Then she retrieved the spoon, used a wadded-up old, thin pillow under the discarded bloody gown to at least hint at a body lying in the bed, refastened the restraints, and turned off the overhead lights. Before she did, though, she looked up at the spider’s web, at the little hunter sitting in the center with infinite patience.