70: Kati Quigley woke with a start. It had begun slowly, her ascent from sleep, but that last moment when her consciousness climbed out of the well and burst through the opening at the top came fast, and it caused her to jump.
Her hands were tied behind her back. Her feet were bound too. Her eyes covered, some kind of blindfold. The ground felt damp beneath her. The air smelled of waste—feces and urine and something else.
“Hello?”
The sound of her own voice seemed thin, a stranger’s voice. A pain throbbed against her temple, and for a moment she couldn’t remember why. Then the memories of what happened came flooding back, a horrid onslaught of images ending with the man with the disgusting wound on his head chasing her down the hallway, bashing her into the door.
Oh God.
“Wesley?”
A shuffle beside her, only a few feet away.
A thin light crept through the cloth over her eyes but not enough for her to really see—only vague shapes and shadows, strange monsters dancing in the distance.
“Wesley? Is that you? Are you okay?”
She remembered the ugly man diving across the table and slamming his cocoa mug into Wesley’s head, the terrible cracking sound it made followed by Wesley falling to the floor. She ran then. She should have tried to help him, but instead she ran, thinking of nothing but herself as the ugly man came after her.
“I’m sorry, Wesley,” she said quietly, sobs threatening to choke her words.
A groan then, again, only a few feet away—not Wesley. This was a girl’s voice. Even though it was muffled and faint, she could tell.
“Who’s there? Who are you?” Kati pulled her knees to her face, tried to slide the blindfold from her eyes with her knee. It didn’t work, though. The cloth was secure, too tight.
She forced her body to shuffle toward the voice, like an inchworm, using her legs to push the rest of her. The pain on the side of her head cried out with each movement, rushing over her with waves of nausea. She didn’t stop, though. She forced herself toward the voice until her arm brushed against something soft, something warm.
The other girl jerked as their skin came in contact, and then she pulled some sort of blanket or quilt up between them.
“Who are you?” Kati said again, feeling the squirm beside her.
“She wasn’t pure, she will never see. Instead, she has cast herself into the fiery lake to drown in her own blood.”
Kati jumped at the voice, a shiver rushing over her body like fingers across a coffin lid.
A man’s voice, the man with the wound. He had trouble with the letter s. He said the words at just above a whisper from only a few feet away, from the direction she had just moved.
Kati shuffled closer to the warm body next to her. She felt the body twitch beneath the blanket. “Where are we? Where’s Wesley?”
The man coughed, his breath catching, sounding wet. “Your friend Wesley is there with you. He is not doing well.”
Kati thought of the smells—feces, urine, and something else. She didn’t want to think about that something else. “The people at the Kingdom Hall, they know where we are. They know we were on this street, what houses we planned to visit. If you let me go, I’ll tell them it was an accident. I’ll tell them Wesley fell and you tried to help him.”
“I don’t care if they come for you. I don’t care if they come for me. We’ll be done by then.”
His voice drew closer now. Kati could hear him crossing the floor, the slight drag of one of his feet. She could hear it, something wrong with the way he walked.
A rattling noise, metal on metal. A door opening.
“Will you see for me?”
Beside her now. She could feel his hot breath on her neck.
“Will you tell me what you see?”
Kati screamed, and the moment the sound left her lips, he shoved something into her mouth, a rag or cloth. It tasted like dirt and something sour. Then his arms were around her—he lifted her off the ground and carried her. A hand came out from the blanket beside her and wrapped around her arm for a brief second before falling away.
“You are a believer, a follower. You will see.”
Dropping then.
The man let her go, or lowered her, she couldn’t be sure. She felt the water first, then his arms were gone, and she sank deeper into it, whatever it was. She sank until almost completely submerged, all but her face, her blindfolded face reaching for air from the highest point. Her hands and feet touched bottom, and if she tilted her head, she could keep it above the water line.
The water was warm, nearly hot.
Had Kati been able to see, she would have watched the man in the black knit cap as he pulled the tarp from the stack of car batteries wired in a series next to the freezer converted into a water tank. She would have seen him pick up both ends of the jumper cables attached to the last battery in the series. She would have seen him drop both ends down into the water.
Kati didn’t see any of those things.
Kati saw nothing at all as the electricity caused her body to spasm with such strength, she broke the zip ties at her hands and feet.
She saw nothing but the brightest of white lights.