The Great Below

The Offer - Part 2

Alex snapped awake to the strobe of the emergency lights. He knew they existed but had never seen them go off. His first thought was, weather emergency – after all, he was propped against a hallway wall just like teachers had made him do in school when they demonstrated tornado drills. But it was unlikely that anything other than an earthquake could hurt the place.

A handful of men – Raul, Nick and two more – raced toward and then past him, jumping over his extended legs. Alex rose, stiff-jointed, and went to the Infirmary doors. "Octavia?" he asked, and in the spinning red light he caught glimpse after glimpse of an empty cot, blanket tossed on the floor.

He chased after the others.

#

There was a crowd in Dominic's room. Alex approached the backside of a semi-circle of men who were shoulder-to-shoulder, their weapons aimed at the same obscured target. "Hold!" he yelled. He reached instinctively for the semi-automatic under his arm, but his hand found an empty holster. Damn.

The girl was smaller than he'd remembered. When the light hit her, she was aiming his missing handgun at Dominic.

"Hold your fire," Alex told the men.

Dominic got to his feet next to the bed, forehead slick, trying to look nonchalant in his flannel pajamas. He picked up his cell phone and typed in a code that killed the alarm while Nick reached back and flipped on the overhead light.

Alex approached Octavia from the side, hand extended. "Give me the gun."

She bristled. "All I want to do is leave. I wouldn't have killed him." Her eyes were fixed on Dominic as he came around the foot of the bed, one arm rising angrily past his shoulder.

Alex had never hit a woman, nor seen any other man hit one. He had only seconds to intervene and forgot all of the protocol for addressing his boss, surprised as he was. "Wait!"

Dominic cracked her across the mouth with his open palm and her stolen gun clattered to the ground. The men behind them jumped a little, glad when it didn't misfire. "You'd better have a great explanation for this," he said to Alex.

"I thought you wanted me to heal," Octavia said through bloodied fingers. She'd bit down on something when he'd hit her. "I thought I had to get better because I was too ugly for you to force yourself on."

"Sir," Alex began, hopeful that an interruption would keep Dominic from doing any more than he already had. "It's my fault. I was guarding her and I fell asleep. I didn't think she was threat."

"She's not. Have you seen her aim?" Dominic pointed at a hole in the wall over the bed. "And what do you mean you were guarding her? If you were doing your job, you would have secured her to the bed. You could have sedated her. Or you could have, I don't know, not given her your fucking gun."

Seeing no more immediate threat, the men began to file out. Nick hesitated near the door, looking more uncomfortable than the rest at watching his boss berate a co-worker.

Dominic turned to Octavia, whose face was a red-smeared scowl. "How did you get in here?" he asked.

She opened a small fist to reveal Alex's key ring.

"Is there anything he didn't give you?" Dominic asked under his breath, scooping up the keys.

"I didn't give her anything, Sir. I swear. She's fast and she takes things. She grabbed the pocketknife off my belt earlier." Alex regretted his choice of words at about the same speed they came out of his mouth.

"So you knew she was a threat, that she was trying to arm herself, and you didn't think to secure her in the Infirmary?"

There was a rush of words waiting in his mouth to explain, but Dominic never wanted them, even when he asked. It made conversations between them devolve into a second-rate magic act in which the truth got yanked out of him like so many colorful scarves. "No, Sir."

"How did she steal them?"

"I fell asleep. She took them right off me."

"If you'd slept in your own quarters, where you belong, she wouldn't have had an idiot to rob."

Alex glanced back at the bullet hole that had pierced the drywall. It was only a few inches above the pillows. "Yes, Sir."

"You can't blame the girl for being resourceful." Dominic turned his attention back on her with a fresh curiosity. In general, his interests landed in one of two categories: things that made money and things he could sleep with. Alex feared that Octavia had just landed in an overlapping sweet spot. But then, why should he care? She had just sold him out to save her own skin. "How badly do you want that job?" Dominic asked.

"I'll do anything," she replied.

"Good." He hooked a finger at Nick, who waited near the door frame. "Lock her in Interrogation."

"What?" the girl asked. "Why?" Nick was trying to gently take her by the elbow, but she dug her heels into the rug. The blood from her mouth had dribbled down the front of her pink sweater.

Dominic shut Alex's key ring in the drawer of his bedside table. "Thanks to this little stunt. You want a job, you want to be treated like one of my employees? Earn it."

Alex watched helplessly as Nick wrestled her away down the hall, knowing that his scolding wasn't over yet. The weight of responsibility fixed him to the spot, souring his stomach.

"Do you have any more plans to get me killed tonight?"

"No, Sir."

"Good." Dominic ran a hand through his hair, looking more shaken than Alex had expected. "I should have known. I let one woman down here and the place goes to pot in a matter of hours. She may not be fast or clever, have you considered that? You might just be gullible. Or you might be too busy gawking to notice her hand in your holster." He looked down, noticing perhaps for the first time that he was too under-dressed for the conversation he was trying to have. "Go to bed."

#

Alex stripped down to his shorts and finally climbed into his own bed. He curled onto his side, hoping sleep would hurry and take him. There was a small bottle of pills on the end table; he glanced, allured by the orange plastic, but thought better of it.

He didn't want to admit that Dominic may have been right. There was something about being around a woman that made him long for freedom more than usual. It was a welcome break from monotony. He admired her determination to escape, which made his own ability to leave more tangible.

He rolled to his other side, agitated.

It wasn't like one whiff of a woman had driven him mad. He wondered if this was how monks felt, laboring and worshiping in seclusion. But then he felt ridiculous for comparing himself to a man of God. He'd be lucky if his work never caught up with him, spiritually or otherwise.

And then there was the touch of her fingers inside his jacket. He'd thought at first that he was dreaming it, propped up outside the Infirmary. He hadn't even brought himself to stop her for her own good, knowing the danger she might find, because she had been rifling through his pockets and touching him and it was like feeding a sparrow from the palm of his hand. He hadn't wanted to frighten her, and every inch of him had buzzed in anticipation.

The clock by the bed read 2:35 AM.

He pictured her strapped to a chair in Interrogation. That dragged him back down to reality. She would be too scared to sleep, and, in a few hours, Dominic would interrogate her for no other reason than he wanted revenge for her attempt on his life. The hole in his drywall would mock him. He would have it filled and repainted within the day, but that wouldn't fix it. The color would never quite match, or the brush strokes would show. The shine would be a little off when he looked at it in the right light. And the lingering ghost of that little hole would remind him that no amount of power, money or sex was going to put a stop to his mortality.

Alex turned the cap on the bottle and dry-swallowed a tablet.

Christ, if only she'd been a better shot. He might have shown her safely out the front door himself.