Six Bits (19 page)

She focused and could feel the blood vessels in his groin. With trepidation she focused on the big artery there and created a port from there to his pants. A bloody spot appeared near his crotch.

Roger guffawed, pointing at Dean’s crotch, “Hey buddy, she rupture something there when she kicked ya?

Dean looked down and began a panicked cursing. Out of the corner of her eye Allie saw Raspy getting up to look. After a moment, Raspy calmly told Dean to change his pants, wash up and figure out what was bleeding. Dean went into the bathroom to desperately examine himself for the source of bleeding, swearing all the while. Roger and Raspy chuckled at Dean’s condition, even though they were obviously a little spooked themselves.

Allie looked up apprehensively as Roger stepped up beside her. He grinned, but the expression looked evil on him. “I guess it’s just you and me, Cutie.” He said, reaching out, “I like to choke cute girls like you,” he said, raising his eyebrows as if she were supposed to be amazed by this revelation. He grasped her neck and started squeezing.

Allie gasped for breath as his grip slowly tightened. Her mother was screaming into her gag and Allie heard a crash as her Dad’s chair fell over. She thrashed to try to get free without success, Roger was far too strong. His face was flushed, the veins standing out. He was excited and dangerous, she concluded, and she was going to be unconscious soon. She couldn’t wait any longer to be sure whether there were other accomplices or to think of some better strategy. Reaching out with her odd sense she felt the pulsating arteries in his neck and the flow of air in his windpipe. Allie created a port from his carotid artery into to his trachea and Roger suddenly let go of her neck as he began spasmodically coughing up blood just like the big drunk behind the bar. Raspy hove into view desperately waving his gun in all directions, shouting, “What the
hell
just happened Roger?!”

Through a bloody moustache and goatee Roger gasped out, “Don’t…
cough, cough
... know!” then resumed hacking.

Raspy pointed the gun at Allie’s leg, “Step into view or I put a bullet in the girl’s leg!” When nothing happened, he said, “Now!”

Allie realized that Raspy thought her family had an accomplice. She didn’t want to make him spasm with coughing; he might pull the trigger when she did. While she dithered Allie saw his finger tighten on the trigger. Desperately she tried to twist her leg out of the way.  He used his left hand to hold her leg down, then pulled the trigger!

Agony scythed through Allie’s calf. She tried to reach out and sense Raspy’s neck, but found that her tele-sense couldn’t feel anything while her leg was hurting so badly! She curled up and grasped at her leg with her hands, though she had difficulty doing it with her wrists bound together. It seemed like the bullet had missed the bone as her leg wasn’t flopping around. The hole was in the fleshy part of her calf, but it still hurt terribly. She had to do something about their guns!

Raspy continued waving his gun about, but seemed less frantic as nothing had happened after he shot Allie. Roger’s coughing had died down, though he still bent over and braced against his knees. Dean came back into the room from the bathroom wearing new shorts, but no shoes. He waved his gun around too, but both he and Raspy slowly became calmer when nothing else happened.

Allie’s pain diminished to a dull throb and she sent her sense into her leg. Nothing broken, the bullet had gone in the front and out the back between the bones.

With a sudden idea, Allie reached out with her sense and found the water pipe in the kitchen wall right behind her. She focused on Raspy’s gun, feeling the bullet in the chamber, then the powder in the shell behind the bullet. She opened a tiny port and was rewarded by the sensation of water spraying into the powder. Was it enough? She worried that if she opened the port too far, the water pressure might push the bullet out of the end of the cartridge and she surely didn’t want water dripping out of the gun to warn them that something was wrong. With a mental shrug, she turned to the gun that Dean had stopped waving and put back in his waistband holster, then to the one in Roger’s holster wetting them all. She considered wetting the powder in the second cartridge in each gun, in case they just jacked the slide if the first bullet didn’t fire. Her leg was throbbing and she was finding it harder to concentrate and sense the water pipe so she closed her eyes for a moment’s rest.
There must be something better she could do!

Allie’s dad croaked, “If you’ll just let my family go, I’ll show you how I made the first device.”

Raspy chuckled, “Oh sure, that’s a good one! You betcha Albert, you just promise, cross your heart, hope to die and we’ll let the family go to the police while you’re ‘splainin’ how to make the port machine. Sho’ ‘nuff Albert, tha’d be jes’ fine!” He laughed some more. There was a grunt and scraping of chair legs as he set the chair Dr. Dans was tied to back up right. “Oopsie, no,
that
wouldn’t work! Instead why don’t you start explaining and drawing pictures of the device right now, just so’s I
won’t
put any more bullets into your daughter?”

“OK, but first put a bandage on her leg and take the gag off my wife.”

“We’ll bandage the girl’s leg, but your wife makes too much noise. I ain’t takin’ that gag off.”

“OK, but you’ve got to let one of us check on Stephen.”

Allie felt surprised that her dad appeared to be negotiating in such a level headed fashion. He’d always seemed brilliant, in an absent-minded, nebulous sort of way. Far too fuzzy headed for this type of negotiation.

Someone started cutting her pants leg open. She opened her eyes and saw Dean cutting them with a knife. Allie looked over at her dad. Her dad gave her a little half wink! He must realize what had caused the storm of coughing? She looked at the small wound on her calf, the entrance, she presumed. The exit wound would be around back. They weren’t bleeding much. She wiggled her foot. It hurt, but the muscles worked.

Dean said, “Hell, she ain’t hurt.” But he cut her pants leg into strips and wrapped them around her calf anyway.

“Let me check my brother,” Allie said.

Raspy said, “Soon as your dad starts drawing.”

Allie looked and saw that Roger had lifted her dad’s chair and put it next to the table. They cut her dad’s hands loose and shoved paper and pencil in front of him. Her dad stared at Allie with a look of concentration as if he was trying to tell her something, but she had no idea what. Then he pulled the paper to himself and started drawing.

Dean cut Allie’s hands, then her feet loose, then stepped back and pointed his gun at her. Allie swung her legs off the table and stood gingerly. Her leg hurt, but not horribly.
Best not to let on though.

Playing her injury up, she limped and stumbled over to Stephen and crouched down. He was still breathing and had a strong pulse but didn’t respond when she said his name. She pulled back an eyelid because she knew that’s what medical people did, but she had no idea what to look for. So she reached out with her strange sense to feel the inside of his head. She wondered what his brain was supposed to feel like, never having done this before. The left side was different than the right!
Crap, was it supposed to be that way?
There was an area between the skull and what Allie assumed must be his brain on the left side that seemed different. She realized the pressure was higher there! She’d heard of people bleeding into their heads and knew that such bleeding was bad! Her first impulse was to demand that they take Stephen to a hospital, but she knew that would
never
happen. Could she let out the pressure? What if she did some harm? Her thoughts raced desperately, but after a moment she decided she was pretty sure he
was
going to die if she
didn’t
do anything!

Allie gritted her teeth and formed a port from the area of high pressure inside his skull, to the outside of his head. She was immediately relieved to see blood staining his hair, indicating she wasn’t letting grey matter leak out. At least she didn’t
think
it was grey matter. She ran her fingers through it to be sure there wasn’t any brain in the stuff leaking out and was relieved to find only blood. She looked up and saw her mother’s wide eyes; her dad just looked grim at the sight of the blood on her fingers. She looked back down at Stephen and let more blood out until the pressure was low enough that it didn’t flow any more. By the time she’d finished doing that she had a headache and knew she wouldn’t be able to make more than a tiny port for a while. She hoped that the bleeding in his head had stopped.

Raspy said, “Keep drawing!”

Allie looked back over at her dad and saw him look back down from her and focus on whatever he was drawing.

Allie sat down next to Stephen and tried to look non-threatening so that they wouldn’t tie her back up. For a moment, she wondered what her dad was actually drawing and what they would do when they found out it wasn’t really a port producing machine. She put her head back and closed her eyes as if exhausted, which she actually was. If she were to make these guys bleed into their skulls like Stephen had, how long would it take them to become unconscious? Her leg was hurting in this position, she reached down and grasped her thigh to move it.

Her hand struck a lump in the pocket of her baggy cargo jeans. Her little tube of Mace pepper spray! She restrained the impulse to whoop and instead considered how to use it? She needed to wait a while because right now she would be limited in her ability to make ports. She just rested her head back on the wall with one hand on Stephen’s neck and closed her eyes. She needed some way to deal with these guys one at a time. But how…?

Stephen moved under Allie’s hand and she was startled to realize that she was so exhausted that she’d actually dozed off! She looked down at her brother. His eyes were open! He looked muzzy headed and unfocused, but he was awake! “Stephen,” she bent over him, “you got hit on the head and you’re just waking up.” Allie sensed that a little blood had reaccumulated, though it wasn’t much. She drained it out anyway. She looked over at her parents. “Stephen’s awake! Still looks pretty stunned though.” She turned to Raspy, “We need to get him to a hospital.”

“Sure, Honey. Soon’s your dad finishes his drawings and explanations, we’ll be on our way.”

From the smirk on Raspy’s face she could tell that it
wasn’t
going to happen. She thought for a few more moments and decided that things probably wouldn’t get better. She was untied and at least her dad’s hands were free. “I’ve gotta pee,” she said as plaintively as she could.

Raspy looked up from where he was watching Dr. Dans draw. He caught Dean’s eye and jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

Dean waved her to her feet with his gun and she limped across the living room area to the hallway where she presumed the bathroom was. Just down the hall an open door revealed a dirty bathroom. She stepped inside and started to close the door but to her startlement Dean blocked the door with his foot. “Nah, I gotta be with you,” he said with a nasty grin.

At first Allie was dismayed to have this man in the bathroom with her but then realized that this played right into her intentions. She said, “OK, but you gotta turn your back.”

“Sure,” he snickered and faced into the corner. Allie thought he probably planned to peek into the mirror on the back of the door or something so she did pull down her pants and sat on the toilet. Then she reached out with her odd sense for the cold water pipe under the sink and also for Dean’s skull. She aligned the port to face toward his skull so that the spray of water wouldn’t cut into the soft matter of his brain, then opened a port as big as she could. She’d heard that the brain didn’t have any sensory nerves in it, but Dean must have felt the vibration of the spray right through his skull because he reached tentatively up to the side of his head. But a moment later he made a little grunting sound, swayed and started to fall over backward. Allie scrambled up from the toilet and caught him before he crashed to the floor. She laid him down gently, then sat back down and peed because she really did have to go. She flushed the toilet, washed her hands and went back out to the living room, glancing at the closed bedroom doors on her way. She wondered if there was someone else in one of the bedrooms, then she saw a tiny TV camera up in the corner of the hall. Probably, she decided. Someone monitoring things on the camera.

Raspy grunted and said, “Where’s Dean?”

Allie shrugged, “He had to pee too.” She noticed that Stephen had rolled over and thought that must be a good sign. Allie’s mother was watching her intently, and as Allie looked at her, Sarah’s eyes flicked over at Roger where he sat on the couch, picking his nose.

Allie’s dad cleared his throat, “Do you want me to explain the drawings I’ve made so far to you? Or should I wait to explain them to Randy?”

Raspy said, “To Mr. Forst?” He glanced up at the light fixture over the table where Allie recognized the lens of another camera. Raspy looked back down at the drawing, “Naw, you can explain it to me.”

Her dad started talking and pointing to things on the drawing, but Allie tuned him out and focused on the pipe in the kitchen wall and on the inside of Roger’s skull. Once she was sure of her locations, she again opened as big a port as she could. Roger looked puzzled and also reached up to the side of his head. Allie was finding that it was difficult to hold this port open, but she strained to do so for a few moments longer until she saw Roger slumping and making convulsive swallowing movements. Then his head flopped back and he started to snore. Loudly! Allie gasped as she let the port drop shut.

Raspy turned to look at his compatriot who was now slumping to the side and drooling as he snorted another breath. “Roger! You idiot! Wake up!”

When Roger didn’t move, Raspy’s eyes opened wide and he stepped over and kicked Roger’s leg. “Roger!” The big man just sagged farther to the side and Raspy pulled out his gun with startling swiftness. “Dean! Get your butt in here!” Allie knew she didn’t have the strength to make another port big enough and long enough to put Raspy out too! Raspy was looking wildly around the room as if suspecting someone of shooting poisoned darts or something. Worse, he was moving around constantly, presumably to avoid such darts, but also making it hard for Allie to consider making a port inside Raspy in precisely the right location. Raspy suddenly shouted, “Come out you bastard or I kill the kid!” He pointed his gun at Stephen!