My Mission: Chapter 30

Nikki
Dark. It was dark. It had been dark for some time now. The blindfold over my eyes was itchy. The handcuffs that held me to a pole of some sort were too tight. It was hot here, wherever here was.
That was important. Where was here?
I had not a clue. I'd asked over and over. But never had I received an answer. I had no clue how long it had been since I'd been at school just this morning. How many hours had it been? Was Randy looking for me?
Probably. No, not probably. I knew he would be. He would know something was wrong the moment I didn't arrive to our fourth period class.
But would he find me?
"I have to pee," I said aloud, hoping someone was at least around to hear me. I really did have to go.
"Hold it," a man's voice said.
"I have been; for hours."
There was a loud sigh, then some footsteps. A hushed conversation somewhere. And then my blindfold was ripped down my face, hanging around my neck. I cringed. I was staring a man covered in scars in the face.
The left side of his face had been mangled by something, probably a long time ago, and the corner of his lips dragged down a bit. His left eye didn't look real, either. The man looked like he may have been attractive once, but he was just plain scary now.
But the gun in his hand was scarier than his face.
"You have to go to the bathroom? Fine. But you make one wrong move and I won't hesitate to shoot you dead; they'll still come looking for you," he threatened, undoing my handcuffs.
I nodded. "I know."
He prodded me with the barrel of his gun toward the bathroom. I took a good look around the room before I got to the bathroom. Old cement floors, large support beams, no AC or vents, no windows. There was a water pipe that must have been what I was cuffed to. There was only one door and three steps leading up to it. This was probably a basement, I decided.
When I was inside the bathroom and the door was shut, I locked it behind me, not trusting anyone here. The first thing I did was look around.
No windows. No vents. How disappointing.
My shoulders sagged. Looks like the only thing I would be doing in this bathroom is "going"; there would be no escaping from the bathroom. I did lean on the counter, though, head hung low, when I finished.
I looked up at the dirty, cracked mirror that showed my sad reflection, sweat beading on my forehead, my hair hanging in my face. "I'm screwed," I whispered.
There was a pounding on the door, making me jump. "Hurry it up in there!" the man shouted.
I opened the door, but I was not met by merely the one man that had been in the room before. There were three more men standing around just a few yards from the bathroom door. A woman was in their midst, arms folded. She was blonde, and her hair looked dyed. She wore sunglasses, despite the low lighting.
One of the men was dark skinned and thin. Another man was big and muscular with shaved brown hair. And the third was small but stocky.
I was about to back into the bathroom and shut myself up in it when the man with the mangled face backhanded me across the face, making me hit my head on the metal doorframe and sink to the floor, dizzy.
I saw him smile.
There was a throbbing, but I hardly felt the pain because I quickly slipped into unconsciousness.

"Oh, you're coming to," I heard a woman say. She sounded bored.
I moaned, rolling my head to the side and forcing my eyes open. Everything was blurry at first, but when everything became clear, I noticed the blonde woman was sitting across from me. Then I noticed I was propped up at a table, cuffed to the arms of the chair.
The woman was still wearing sunglasses, but the light in here was even dimmer than in the other room I'd been in before… This room was smaller. There was a single door on the far side of the room, behind the woman.
"Why don't we start with introductions?" she started off.
I drew my brows together, confused. I'd been kidnapped and this lady wanted to introduce herself to me?
"Call me Hal," she said.
"Hal?"
"Short for Hallie," she explained.
"Ah," I said. I inspected her face; what I could see of it. She wore a light red lipstick. Her skin was smooth and pale, didn't look very aged. I couldn't tell how old she was, though, when I couldn't see her eyes. Wrinkles and creases around the eyes always indicated age.
She sighed. "Not going to introduce yourself, then, are you?"
I rolled my eyes. "Oh please, you already know who I am."
Hallie shrugged. "Suit yourself. Listen, your sour attitude doesn't bother me a bit; I have to deal with big buffoons that call themselves thugs daily. But them? You might not want to piss them off. Your face is already bruised up."
Immediately, I went to touch my face, but all it did was tug on the cuffs. Can't believe I forgot those were there.
I shrugged. "What do you want, Hallie?"
"Ooh, getting straight down to it, are we?" There was a small, sardonic smile on her full lips.
I clenched my teeth shut to keep from saying something stupid.
"Alright then. You know what I want, Nikki." It sounded so weird for this strange woman with the sunglasses to say my name like she'd known me my whole life. Hallie stood and leisurely walked around to my side of the table, sitting on the edge right next to me.
She pulled a small knife from inside her boot and casually inspected it. I gulped, but the air caught in my throat and I found it hard to breathe.
Hallie leaned close to me and caressed my face with the flat of the blade, from my temple to my chin. She smelled like cigarettes.
I saw my reflection in her dark sunglasses, and I looked pitiful, like a scared wild animal. And she was right; my face was bruised up.
"I want to know where I can find your friends and how I can make them give me the microchip," she said softly, breathing the smell of alcohol onto my face.
I coughed. "You? Don't you mean Jag?"
"Oh, Barry?" she asked. She chuckled. "Please, I killed him last week."
My eyes widened. She couldn't be serious.
"Why, you ask? Because he was an idiot. Besides, he had no need for a microchip like that. But I sure could use one," she smiled a dark smile. "Now, where can I find your friends and how can I make them give me the chip?"
"You can't make them give it to you; they'll never give it up." I was thinking that I was doing better than Randy would have expected as far as answering around her questions goes rather than answering her questions directly. He would have been proud.
"Fine, then. What are their weaknesses? If they won't simply give it up, I'll kill them for it. C'mon, chronic illness? Strange disease? Emotional ties?"
I sat silently.
"How can I kill them!" she shouted. When I simply jumped at her sudden outburst, she huffed. "Alright then, be that way. I'll just do it the hard way. It'll be harder to cover up their deaths as natural causes, but they'll die regardless."
I remembered the few sessions Randy had given me about interrogations. He said a lot of his job had been interrogation and finding people that needed to be found. So he'd given me a few lessons about being interrogated, just in case the situation ever came.
One thing he'd said was to watch carefully for bluffing. Anyone who interrogated me would threaten me with either my death or the death of a friend or family member, but most of the time this was just bluffing.
But Hallie didn't seem to be bluffing at all. I knew she was telling the whole truth.
Hallie had gotten up and begun to pace slowly, seeming to talk to herself. "The most strategic to remove first… should I take out the nurse…?" she wondered aloud. She shook her head. "No, maybe the smaller male…" She was referring to Tyler.
I wondered if she wasn't quite right in the head, talking to herself like this.
"The most dangerous," she decided. "The one with the gray eyes. He's rash, reckless—"
"No!" I shrieked, unable to hold back my desperation. I bit down on my lip, hard, and closed my eyes. What did I just do?
When I opened my eyes again, Hallie had taken her sunglasses off and was watching me with a malicious grin. Curiosity danced in her multicolored eyes—one was blue and the other was brown. No wonder she wore sunglasses all the time.
She was moving closer to me. "Did I strike a nerve there?" she asked quietly, smugly, insensibly. "Do you…have feelings for that one?"
I was frozen.
Her grin grew. "So you do. How…inconvenient. For you." She studied me. "Does he have feelings for you as well?"
I'm an idiot.
She nodded knowingly. "Of course he does, pretty girl like you." She picked up a bit of my hair and then patted it back down against my head. "I believe you just won me a ticket, Nikki. Do you know what you just won me a ticket for?"
I squeezed my eyes shut.
Then her whisper was in my ear. "You just won me a ticket to kill off the gray eyed one. And if he's out of the picture… the whole picture will fall apart. I'll kill him first, then maybe his friend will follow; the Hispanic one? And the nurse after that. Those two have a close relationship, do they not?"
I refused to answer.
"Yes, if I am not mistaken, they do. And then the other female; the nurse's friend. And following her…the techie. See, Nikki, if I follow each one up with a hit close to home… they will all be weak. I will break them before I kill them."
A single tear rolled down my cheek.
"Soon I'll kill your special little friend, following his death with the others'. And to think; it all started with y. o. u."