Bloodbath by Stephanie Ahn

Author:Stephanie Ahn [Ahn, Stephanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kindle Direct Publishing
Published: 2019-05-29T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Judgment Day

Awkward car rides get much more awkward when the people arresting you refuse to put a hood over your head. And they’re even shittier when you’re squished between two of those people in the backseat. And they’re the absolute shittiest when the radio’s playing a flute cover of The Girl from Ipanema, and the driver has no apparent intention of changing the station.

The car jostles; my head thumps into the ceiling, and the crown of brambles around my head sticks me with two dozen genetically-modified thorns. I grunt and reach up on instinct, but the manacles chaining my wrists to my waist stop me short.

“Motherbitch,” I spit.

“Do we even need to put that on her?” the Enforcer to my right says without turning his head. He’s wearing a leather jacket with the collar popped up and sunglasses as opaque as the car’s blacked-out windows. Somehow, they obscure his eyes even from my angle.

“Better safe than sorry,” comes the reply from my left. This one’s in a gray hood pulled so far forward her entire face is shadowed.

“I’m right here, you know,” I complain.

The first Enforcer to speak tilts his head to glance at my scar, then scoffs quietly and leans back in his seat. I’m about to say something again when the car goes over a particularly large bump and my head lights up with concussive fireworks.

As the sparks fade and the throbbing pain sets in, I catch the driver’s eye in the rearview mirror—or at least, I see a glint in the shadows between the brim of a Bobcat baseball cap and a clean white surgical mask. Is that a look of burning hate or just mockery?

The flute cover of The Girl from Ipanema finally ends… and then transitions to a xylophone cover. Yup, the driver definitely hates me.

Two minutes into that torture, the car screeches to a halt. I turn to the hooded Enforcer to ask if we’ve arrived—just in time to see the ballooning blackness of a burlap sack engulfing my head. The fabric catches on the thorn crown in a dozen different places, filling my ears with a ripping noise, smearing the trickles of blood across my nose and forehead.

A door opens. One hand clamps around the back of my neck and another twists taut the chains between my wrists, and they push-drag me out of the car. My feet land on flat concrete, then stumble across a patch of spongy earth, then slip on blades of rain-slick grass. Steel hands wrap around my biceps, and then it’s all I can do to stay upright while the Enforcers tow me forward with inhuman speed.

The transit from car to trial takes way longer than expected. It’s like a hike where the top of the mountain is always visible but somehow never getting closer. I start sweating under the burlap sack, and I can eventually taste a salty droplet at the corner of my lip, mixed with blood and loose fibers. My ankles feel like they’ve

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