Free RATH - Redemption by Jeff Olah

returned, she looked confused. “Who were you talking to?”
     
    Returning the switch to its off position, Archer turned to her. “No one…I mean, I was just talking to myself. I think being up here behind the controls for so long; I’m starting to go a little stir crazy. I’ll be better once we get out of this cockpit.”
     
    Sliding back into the co-pilot’s seat Tonya said, “Aren’t you at all worried about what Boothe and his men have waiting for us once we do land?”
     
    “If Samuel did his job, we’ll be the ones surprising him. Once Symon, Rath, and the others hit the beach, we shouldn’t have any problems with Boothe or his men.”
     
    “Okay, I’ll just follow your lead.”
     
    .      .      .
     
    Not eating more than few bites of the previous night’s so-called dinner, Sarah’s head pounded as she lifted off the mattress and her stomach pulled in toward her spine. The thought of what awaited them and the prospect of having to spend another minute in the presence of that man left her with little hope that she’d ever see her husband again. She sat forward, turned to Lauren, and noticed her roommate had already awoken.
     
    Lauren, now seated along the bed she’d already straightened, with her back against the wall and her head hung between her legs, quietly cried. The past twelve hours had inched by without the pair speaking and with the last conversation once again ending with Sarah scolding the young mother; neither knew where to begin the new day.
     
    Although the room she’d been locked away in was void of windows, her internal clock told her it was morning. With that realization, Sarah watched the door like it held life, waiting for her captor to return and calming the voices in her head that spoke of the terror that awaited her. The dream she’d continually told herself to hold on to was slowly fading, as were her hopes that her husband would somehow find her. Sarah knew what she needed to do; she just no longer believed that she could.
     
    Standing, the polished concrete floors were cool to the touch. As she began to cross the floor to Lauren, the key entered the lock and the door swung open. Emerson Boothe entered the room just ahead of his three guards. “Ladies, it’s time, please follow me.”
     
    Into the stairwell and up to the ground floor, they followed the madman. Reaching the same door Sarah had gone through with Jonah at nearly the same time a day before, she stopped. Lauren also stopped.
     
    Boothe, already out into the dissipating morning fog, turned and motioned to his guards. They moved toward the women and pulled them, barefoot, out into the sand. They were dragged to the top of the dune and turned back toward the facility they’d been prisoners in for the last several days.
     
    The air thick and warm on her face, Sarah slid in next to Lauren and hugged her. Lauren neither responded nor acknowledged the gesture. She simply remained standing and stared at the sand below her feet.
     
    Boothe shouted from his perch high above the beach, now only a few feet from the women. “Bring them out.”
     
    Two additional guards forced four men out onto the beach, each chained to the one before and bloodied from head to toe. Void of any clothing, they were marched to a spot twenty feet from the foot of the dune and forced to their knees.
     
    Out of the cloudless sky over her left shoulder, drifted another of Boothe’s jet-black transport drones. Sarah turned from Lauren and watched as the aircraft slowed overhead and began its vertical descent less than a hundred yards from where she stood, unable to move her focus from the tortured men in the sand.
     
    Boothe turned to the women and said, “Right on time, that Archer is punctual if nothing else.” And as the drone finished touching down near the shore break, he made his way to the four men lying in the sand. Back to Sarah he said. “Your husband is out there, somewhere close, waiting for his chance to