More than anything, Dan hated being afraid. He’d lived his entire childhood in fear. The consuming, soul-numbing kind. His pedophile father had used Dan’s fear like a sharp blade to separate him from any thought of rebellion or betrayal. Wielded it masterfully to keep Dan compliant and an accomplice in the man’s perverse sexual proclivities.
When, at sixteen, Dan had killed his first victim, the act washed through him like a revelation: he had power. A realization that reinforced itself like the rebar in a concrete wall when he’d stood over Asha Tan’s dead body a mere year later. That he never suffered a moment’s remorse was, he realized, a blessing. One that he could never fully comprehend but deeply appreciated.
Despite the bone-chilling fear in his youth, he’d never known it like he did in that plexiglass box: numbing, crushing, soul-devouring. And all the while, Windman’s severed head was mashed against the plastic. The nose had been flattened against the transparency; the lips had pulled back, mouth gaping with the bugs crawling in and out and up the nostrils. Those eyes—drying, shrinking, turning gray—kept watching Dan with a haunting gaze. The damn head mocked him, belittled his impotence. A witness to Dan Wirth’s total helplessness and terror.
All of it was compounded by the suffering heat, the thirst, and hopelessness.
Just when he could take no more, when he was on the verge of unlatching the door and throwing it wide, a quetzal would appear. The thing would gnaw on the box or attack it with those razor claws. Helpless and mesmerized, Dan would watch shavings of plastic curl away under the blade-like teeth or peel in strips as the claws carved off long curlicues of material.
By the time the first rays of dawn had lightened the eastern horizon, they’d chewed a hole in the corner just above Dan’s head. The smell of quetzal breath had choked him.
He’d been delirious by then, fantasizing a thousand nightmarish images. In some he was back in his father’s bed, hearing the old man’s cooing voice as he forced Dan from one degrading act to another. Or in Hong Kong, ducking and running as Corporate security forces hunted him, chased him past piles of dead rioters, their bodies all interlaced.
Then had come the numb surrender into oblivion . . .
Windman’s head was hanging in a gray haze, talking to him. The man’s voice couldn’t quite penetrate the plastic. Sounded muffled and indistinct.
Fucking prick. What a candy-dicked screw up. Couldn’t make himself understood, even in death.
A piercing sting in Dan’s arm shattered the image, caused him to start. To pay full attention.
“He’s coming around.” This was a woman’s voice, not Windman’s.
“Dan?”
He knew that voice: Allison. But how had she gotten into the box with him?
He tried to speak, heard a rasping.
“Dan? Wake up.”
His head hurt. When he tried to swallow, it was with effort, and a terrible taste filled his mouth.
He got his eyes open, blinked his vision clear. Saw a ceiling. And then Ali leaned over, a reserve behind her blue eyes, tension in her lips. “Dan? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” he croaked. The rasping? That was his voice? “What the fuck?”
Raya Turnienko leaned into his field of view. “You almost died. We have you stabilized, rehydrated, and you’re on an electrolyte and sucrose drip. Your organs are rebounding. You’ll be weak for a day or two, but there’s no permanent damage.”
“I was . . . in that fucking box. Quetzals.”
Allison crossed her arms, studying him with an unnerving intensity. Disoriented as Dan was, he could see the change in her. Something dangerous and new. Predatory. Reminded him of the fucking quetzals that had been chewing on that shit-sucking box.
“You know,” Allison observed, “it’s a miracle that you got into that arbor box. As it was, another hour or two, and you would have shut down. We’d be digging a grave for you up at the cemetery. As it is, Fred Han Chou only needs a soil auger to dig a hole big enough for Windman’s head.”
Dan winced. That fart-sucking head. The fricking thing was going to fill his nightmares from here on out as it was. Maybe he’d go up and piss on the thing’s final resting place.
“When can I get out of here?”
“Tomorrow . . . if there are no complications,” Raya told him.
To Allison, he croaked, “What’s happening at The Jewel?”
“Shin, Vik, and Kalen have it under control. Everyone’s delighted that you’re alive.”
He heard the lie in that. Fought down a cold sliver of anger. Anger? Why? What the hell did he care?
The image of three deadly eyes in a huge triangular head filled his memory. He could feel the vibrations as teeth chewed away plastic. The snot-sucking thing wanted to eat me.
Now that he’d made it, his people couldn’t have cared less.
I’ve got two big safes filled with plunder.
And what was he going to do with them?
“Did Taglioni come back?”
Allison’s eyebrow quivered, as if in a question. “He’s out with Talina at Tyson Station. Something’s gone really wrong out there. There’s been no contact.”
So, the rich prick was probably quetzal shit, or maybe lunch for a bunch of cannibals.
“Figures. My fucking luck.” I could have gotten out.