Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Author:Caitlin R. Kiernan [Kiernan, Caitlin R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2011-10-23T06:00:00+00:00

3:25 P.M.

Handcuffs and a blindfold tied too tightly around her face before the man and woman who clearly aren’t FBI agents shoved her into the back of a rust-green Ford van. And now she lies shivering on wet carpeting as they speed along streets that she can’t see. The air around her is as cold as a late December night and thick with the gassy, sour-sweet stench of something dead, something that should have been buried a long, long time ago.

“I already told you why,” the man in the black suit and sunglasses growls angrily, and Lacey thinks maybe there’s fear in his voice, too. “She didn’t have it, okay? And we couldn’t risk going onto the train after it. Monalisa’s people got to her first. I already fucking told you that.”

Whatever is in the back of the van with her answers him in its ragged, drowning voice like her grandmother dying of pneumonia when Lacey was seven years old. There are almost words in there, broken bits and pieces of words, vowel shards and consonant shrapnel, and the woman with the Caribbean accent curses and mumbles something to herself in Haitian Creole.

“Please,” Lacey begs them. “I don’t know what you want. Tell me what the fuck you want, and I’ll give it to you.”

“You think so?” the woman asks. “You think it would be that easy now? After all this shit, and you just gonna hand it over, and we just gonna go away and leave you alone?

Merde…”

The van squeals around a corner without bothering to slow down, and Lacey is thrown sideways into something that feels like a pile of wet rags. She tries to roll away from it, but strong hands hold her fast, and icy fingers brush slowly across her throat, her chin, her lips. There’s skin like sandpaper and Jell-O, fingertips that may as well be icicles, and she bites at them, but her teeth close on nothing at all, a mouthful of frigid air that tastes like raw fish and spoiled vegetables.

“We had strict fucking instructions to avoid a confrontation,” the man says, and the car takes another corner, pitching Lacey free of the rag pile again.

“You just shut up and drive this damn car,” the woman says. “You gonna get us all killed. You gonna have the cops on us.”

“Then you better tell that slimy, half-breed motherfucker back there to shut the hell up and stop threatening me,” the man snarls at the woman. “I’m just about ready to say fuck you and him both. Pop a fucking cap in his skull and take my chances with the Order.”

The rag pile gurgles and then makes a hollow, gulping noise. Lacey thinks it’s laughing, as close as it can ever come to laughing, and she wonders how long it’s going to be before it touches her again, wonders if they’ll kill her first, and which would be worse. She presses her face against the soggy carpeting, eyes open but nothing there to see, rough fabric against her eyeballs, and she tries to wipe its touch from her skin.

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