Free Monument 14: Savage Drift (Monument 14 Series) by Emmy Laybourne Page A

standing over me and I can smell his god-awful breath intertwined with the cigarette smoke.
    “Here’s what I want you to keep in mind: I can send you somewhere even worse than this.”
    I can’t help it. I laugh.
    I say the word, “Really?”
    The thought is so absurd.
    And I hear a sound from him and it sounds like a laugh.
    I dart a look over my shoulder and he is laughing, too.
    Somehow I think this means I can get up. The ordeal seems over.
    I lean back on my heels. Wipe off my brow.
    “What’re you doing?” he asks me, still chuckling.
    “I thought … I thought we were done.”
    “No,” he says. “Not yet. I’m gonna keep you out here till the last group goes in. Safer for you if we wait until after lockdown.”
    “I think … please,” I say. “Can I go now?”
    He leans down to me, nodding, liking what he is seeing, I guess. That I am broken.
    He opens up his maw and says, “Not. Just. Yet.”
    *   *   *
    I hear the next group go over to Plaza 900.
    I hear them come back.
    My knees are bleeding now.
    Crickets somewhere start singing. It isn’t too cold for them, I guess.
    Soon they will die.
    My left hand keeps cramping up.
    *   *   *
    The last group goes over for dinner.
    Forty-five minute shifts.
    Then another thirty minutes to get everyone locked down.
    My hips feel raw in their sockets.
    *   *   *
    Tears fall from my eyes and that is fine, I use the water for my cleaning. Spot, spot, drip, drip, drip. The dark little tear-marks vanishing under the arc of my towel.
    I didn’t know I could cry, anymore. I nearly thought they were rain.
    I should have stayed out of it.
    “I can take care of myself, for Pete’s sake,” Mario had grouched the day after I kept Venger from cracking his head open at the fence. I was supposed to let the guards bust his head like a melon, if it came to that.
    I was supposed to keep my head down until I was set free.
    “I’m an old man,” he had said. “I’m not afraid to die—but you, you’re my project. You’re my last good deed on this earth and you’re making it out of here alive.”
    Ha-ha. I saw the trick.
    I should take care of myself for his sake.
    The stain is long gone and the towel, now, shredded into long, sinewy strings that I hold cupped between my palms.
    I ask God if this might be a good time to get it over with.
    I know all I’d have to do is rise to my feet and take a weary swing at Venger and he’d put me down.
    He wears a gun. He wears it so we can all see the leather holster.
    It isn’t the kind of riot-control gun the other guards wear. Those ones are big, semiautomatic guns, loaded with tranquilizer darts.
    Venger’s gun is a pistol loaded with bullets.
    God, I pray. Send me a sign if I should get this over with.
    There is no sign.
    “Send me a sign if I should not get this over with.” I must have mumbled aloud.
    “What’s that you say?” Venger asks.
    “I said, God, please send me a sign if I should not end this!” I sit back on my heels, holding my wet face in my hands.
    Venger leans over and grabs me by one of my hair knots. He pulls up and I rise to my knees, my neck taut.
    “I guess you’re feeling pretty sorry for yourself,” Venger says. “Maybe by now you’re thinking, ‘This a-hole Venger, he’s serious. He MEANS what he SAYS. Maybe I won’t PUSH him anymore.’”
    I start shaking now. And the poor sucker thinks I am shaking scared.
    No, my blood is rising and I am keeping my weary self from trying to kill him.
    Battered, bleeding, wrung out as I am, I want to wrap my two hands around his neck and SQUEEZE.
    “Excuse me, Mr. Venger,” comes a voice and the sound of heels clicking across the courtyard. “Is this really necessary?”
    Venger releases my hair and I fall forward, catching myself on my bleeding knuckles.
    “You’ve been forcing this young girl to scrub this same spot since I left to make my rounds, two hours ago.”
    “She might look harmless to you, Dr. Neman, but this