Chapter 6
A nia listened to the sparse explanation Sanders gave. “I feel bad leaving Riff behind.”
“I do too, but, one thing I know for sure is, Riff is quite capable of looking after himself. He has a way of making things work out.”
“Maybe, but I would have thought the same thing about myself. The lesson I’ve learned here lately is that everybody needs help sometimes.”
“If we learn that Riff needs help, we’ll be there to give it to him,” Sanders stated. “But first we have to get you away from here, and that means moving fast. Riff’s on his way, and we’ll pick him up somewhere else.” After a moment, Sanders looked over at her and said, “I could really use some of that coffee.”
With a startled exclamation, she nodded and put one in the cup holder between them. “That’s yours. We’ll keep Riff’s here, in case we pick him up soon.”
Sanders nodded but didn’t say anything.
“Do you think it’s okay if I eat without waiting for him?” Ania asked.
“The reality is, it could be days before we pick him up,” Sanders shared, his tone steady. “So you eat whenever you are hungry, and I would say, sooner is better.” His gaze kept going to the rearview mirror.
“I gather we’re in trouble,” she noted hesitantly.
“My orders were to drive us out of there and quickly. Terk asked me not to wait for Riff, so I’m not sure that we’re in trouble, as much as we needed to get down the road so we can avoid trouble.”
“Avoiding trouble sounds good to me,” she muttered.
He laughed. “Anytime we can get out of a scenario safely, we’re all for it.”
She nodded. “I know that it wasn’t just your doing, and, given the choice, you would probably be somewhere far away from where you are right now,” she shared, feeling quite emotional, “but I have to tell you how much I appreciate the fact that you came back for me.”
He frowned at her. “Are you kidding? Of course I came back for you, and I will always come back for you. You were the only one who kept me sane for a long time. Once I realized that I would make it, I knew I was coming back for you, come hell or high water. However, it took me a little while to regain my strength, and I am not anywhere close to there yet,” he added, with a nod. “So, if you see me getting really tired, that could become an issue. Regardless I wouldn’t leave you alone to suffer like that. I wasn’t sure exactly what your scenario was, but the last thing I remember was something about your father being behind it.”
“Yeah, I probably told you that in a weak moment,” she admitted, with a laugh. “I’m not used to talking about my problems.”
“I understand. Yet, when you’re a prisoner, and it’s dark and lonely, and we can only talk through our minds,” he explained, “it’s very normal to reach out and to talk to somebody about circumstances which were horrific for all of us. I didn’t think I would ever get out of there, so connecting with you made it a lot more bearable.”
“Do you have any idea how long you were a prisoner?”
“At least six months,” he estimated, “but I’m not sure beyond that because I’m not certain when I was snatched, especially after being pumped up with drugs. The last thing I remember is being in a movie theater, where I met a bunch of friends.” He stared ahead, taking a moment. “Then it all just blew up in my face.”
“Right. That would be my father. He has a tendency to do things like that. He must have found out that you had some ability, then had you picked up out of the blue, leaving you with no idea what happened.”
“Exactly. I don’t even know whether it happened that night or it was later, but that is the last memory I have, before I was kidnapped,” he shared, with a shrug. “When you realize something like that can happen, and you can’t even think rationally anymore, you just react. So don’t ever apologize or worry about us going out of our way to help you,” Sanders said. “We would help anybody in a situation like that.”
“Oh.”
At that, he winced. “That didn’t come out right. I didn’t mean to make it sound as if you weren’t special because you are,” he clarified, quickly trying to correct himself. “You are very special to me. I know I’m making a mess of this, but I don’t want you thinking we would have done this for anybody, yet obviously we would have done this for anybody.” Then he stopped again, confused, not sure how to undo what he had just implied, while trying to explain.
She burst out laughing. “In other words, I’m special, but you still would help ordinary people too.”
“Exactly. Wow, you spelled that out much better than I did. Maybe I’m more tired than I thought.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be driving,” she suggested, eyeing him intently. “I am so glad to see you, but I don’t want to escape my father’s goons just to die in a car crash.”
“That won’t happen,” he said, “but, if my energy drops too much lower, we may have to find a place to hide so I can rest.”
“Or I could drive,” she offered.
He frowned at her, and she laughed. “Yes, I can drive—and very well, thank you—but I would need to know our destination.”
“How about you hand me one of those sandwiches,” he replied. “That will give me some energy to keep going for a while.”
“Food,” she muttered, directing her gaze to the large bag they’d grabbed from the waitress. “How much did you order anyway?” she asked, as she opened it up and saw multiple sandwiches.
“Lots,” he stated, with a smile. “I didn’t know how long it would be between stops, and we didn’t get breakfast.” He shrugged. “Besides, I’m a big eater, and Riff has a whole thing for food too. I needed something I could keep eating throughout the day, particularly at times when my energy is pretty nonexistent.”
“Makes sense to me,” she murmured, as she handed him a sandwich, partially unwrapped, so he could just hold it and take a bite.
For the next ten minutes, they both dug into the food and the coffee, enjoying the sustenance. By the time he was done with his sandwich, he picked up his coffee again and sipped several times. “It’s almost calm enough to make me feel as if everything is nice and rosy again.”
“ Almost ,” she noted. “It’s pretty upsetting when I think about it, though.”
“That’s why you don’t dwell on it,” he declared. “Your father will still be there to deal with down the road, but, at this moment, we don’t have to deal with him. He can wait.”
She chuckled. “I’m glad if that Pollyanna attitude has gotten you a long way in life.”
“It has, to some degree,” he confirmed, “but maybe not as far as I may have hoped.”
“So, maybe you need to tell me a little bit about your life and about yourself.”
“You mean, more than we already talked about?” he asked.
She shrugged. “It seems different now that you’re right here beside me.”
“It is, in a way,” he agreed. “I was in the US Navy for many years and went into secret ops. Then I was badly injured in an accident. After that, I had many surgeries and spent quite a few years in rehab, just trying to rebuild my life. It’s been quite a struggle since then. But how do you rebuild a life that is so opposite to what you had always felt was destined for you? Talk about a fish out of water. I went from one job to another, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I considered going back to school. Anyway I was bumming around with some friends, who had come into town, then boom. I was kidnapped.”
She looked at him, puzzled. “But how would my father have discovered that you had any skills in the first place? That’s the part that doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“I’ve wondered about that a lot,” he admitted, “because there really wasn’t any reason for it. I had been joking with some friends because I had done some work, some testing in the navy, looking to join a couple different teams working on some Cold War programs. I was wondering if it was worth even trying something like that again. Maybe that’s how your father found out.
“Not that my friends sold me out, but that your father may have been spying on these programs and their participants. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that maybe some tester in the program told him how I had been part of it, how I had performed well or whatever. I don’t know,” he said, with a headshake.
“It was quite a shock to wake up and to find out I was a prisoner and being tested for my psychic skills. Plus, I needed to protect myself—physically, mentally, emotionally, psychically —so that was tough because I didn’t have any skills yet, not in regard to my gifts. It wasn’t the field that I was working in, or anything I necessarily wanted to do, so I hadn’t pursued it. All I know is that it’s just what I ended up doing,” he muttered.
“Did you ever give him any positive results?”
“Not really. I tried to make it all as confusing as possible, which was easy because I was confused about my so-called gifts,” he replied, with a laugh. “I figured that, if he got even a little bit of positive feedback, it would make him all the more excited. Then he would just push me for more and more and more. So I balked. I underperformed.”
“Exactly. My father and his goons would have done just that,” she stated, with a nod. “Smart of you to figure that out early on.”
“Hey, I was a prisoner, and I was looking to find a way to get the hell out of there. But I was kept locked up underground, and that was starting to weigh me down,” he muttered. “It’s hard to forgive their harsh treatment. We, as a species, need sunshine and fresh air and food and water and even someone to talk to, and when all of that is taken away, you don’t forget, and you just fight harder and harder because the only other option is to give up. Yet, when you do that, it’s permanent.”
She nodded. “I hadn’t gotten to that point and was still trying to figure out how serious my father was about all of this and how he even found out that I had any abilities to begin with. After my father found my journal, he was quite livid, stating he had burned the vile creation. I can only think that there must have been a journal in my mother’s things as well. that he went through after she was gone. Even that he read her journal is surprising because I normally would have expected him to just toss her things out as trash. He didn’t seem to care about her anyway, but it’s all still a mystery at this point.”
“Maybe it’s better to leave it a mystery for now,” he murmured. “We can’t get carried away or have anyone question it and get into trouble themselves. It’s just better to wait and see what turns up.”
“He doesn’t take to questioning, by the way,” she shared. “He’s a bully and a hardhead on top of all his power-mad craziness.”
“Sounds like it,” Sanders muttered. “The thing is, everybody has something they want. In your father’s case, obviously it was more power, and he thought using our gifts was a way to get it for him. The flip side is also the crux of our problem right now because, if having us under his control could increase his access to power and could put a feather in his cap, losing us will make him lose badly, especially if he’s overinflated our potential usefulness.”
“And you can bet that some people have already been punished for losing us,” Ania pointed out. “However, we can’t help that because, when you’re fighting for your life, you don’t have the luxury of compassion for whoever else gets hurt, particularly if they were among your jailors.”
“You can’t care,” he agreed. “That’s the problem. You can’t care, and you shouldn’t feel bad about it. Once you get to this point, it’s an ongoing fight for your life and your freedom. As soon as you’re in a fight with stakes that high, you can’t consider anything but how to get out. Once it’s become a life-and-death deal, it no longer matters who else gets hurt.”
“Except for my mother and my aunt,” she muttered.
“Hey, you can’t feel guilty about what your father did.”
“Yet it shouldn’t ever have come to that, where innocent people are killed, even people in his own family,” she cried out softly.
They talked for a few more minutes. As they drove along, she appeared to relax and let go a bit.
Smiling, he suggested, “You should get some sleep, right?”
“No, my job is to keep you awake,” she declared, “so that’ll hardly work.” But, since they’d eaten, she had been yawning with some frequency.
“I’m fine for now,” Sanders noted. “Go ahead and get some sleep. It’s better that you get some rest now, in case I do get too tired. Go ahead and sleep, so I can call on you to take over later.”
She straightened up and frowned at him.
He chuckled. “I’m fine, but we don’t know what’ll happen next, so best you get some rest while you can.”
She nodded. “Are you sure?”
“I’m very sure. Go ahead, get some sleep.”
And, with that assurance, she curled up against the door and whispered, “You’ll wake me if anything goes wrong, right?”
He laughed. “We’re both in the same car. Trust me that you will know.”
With that, she smiled, closed her eyes, and very quickly drifted off.
He watched her slip into a deep sleep at his side and smiled. She was doing so well. Everything she’d been through—the loss of her mother, her father drugging her to control her, then the loss of her aunt, the stress, the drugs, all the running, and fear of not having a roof over her head—it was too much.
As Sanders saw it, the last few days had to be catching up with her, and it would take more than a few days to recover. That’s what happened when people did shit like this, and Sanders could only imagine how much worse it was for her, knowing her own father was taking away the people in Ania’s life, trying so hard to exploit her abilities and to essentially imprison her for life.
The stress was unimaginable, and it would take a while for it to finally ease back and for her to realize that she was safe again. In her case, it would probably take a lot longer, since it involved her father, who seemed to have a long reach. Ania would always be looking over her shoulder, especially until they got her out of the country. Sanders was still waiting for instructions on how to make that happen, but he was driving and would continue to drive as long as required to keep them both safe. They needed to stay ahead of the trouble because he was under no illusion where her father was concerned.
If her father found out that Sanders was here and had been instrumental in Ania’s rescue, Sanders expected there would be hell to pay in more ways than he was prepared to think about. It also raised the stakes in terms of their recapture in so many ways, since her father would dearly love to have not just Ania but the both of them, back under his control. That was something Sanders wasn’t prepared to let happen and would do whatever it took to prevent it.
When his phone buzzed about an hour later, he pulled over to the shoulder, reached for his cell, and quickly answered. “Riff, is that you?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he murmured, sounding tired. “Take down this address. Head there, and I’ll meet you in the morning.”
“How far away is it?”
“About a six-hour drive.”
Sanders winced at that. “Okay,” he muttered. “We’ll make it. Are you okay?”
“Yeah,… I’m fine. I’m—I’m fine. Tired, but that’s all right. I’ll make it.”
Once the call ended, Sanders punched in the address to his GPS, confirming they were six hours away easily, if not seven. He returned to the roadway and picked up his speed and opened the window, letting the vehicle run as hard and as fast as he could. The only thing that would hold him back tonight would be gas, so he checked the tank and would continue to do so. With their vehicle being stolen, he had no idea if it was a top-heavy tank reading or not.
Still, he would get as far as he could and then find a place to gas up. Hopefully she would sleep until then. With the window open and the coffee in his hand, he faced the highway and let the miles run.