Callie Wakes

IMPORTANT - This is the serialized version of the crime novel Bad Boys. It has MOVED. It’s available on my other Substack: Crappy First Draft. Please click here to subscribe to the FREE subscription to read the rest of this novel.

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She woke. Callie wasn't surprised to come to consciousness with a thudding heart. Nightmares were routine. But she was surprised when her waking cry was muffled. A grunt, not a wail. Not the loose and cathartic release that always prompted Conor to reach across the floor between their beds and lay his hand on her arm. There was something in her mouth. No, not in her mouth, but stretched across it. The tight skin at both corners of her lips had split. It stung like the remains of a cold sore running rampant. She pushed her tongue forward, rubbed the tip against a sticky, grainy surface, and tasted plastic. This was real, not the dregs of one of her nightmares. She was awake but blind. She struggled to blink, but her eyelashes were glued to something sticky (tape?) strapped across them. Flashes of light and colour filled her wide staring pupils.

"Conor!" Her brother's name left her mouth as an unintelligible moan.

The tears came now, and with them, the hitching breaths of her growing panic. Bile rose in her throat, so she swallowed hard. She would not drown in her vomit.

She drew a deep inhalation through her nose. Mildew, mothballs, stale cigarette smoke, sweat, urine, almost all hidden under the powerful stench of a cigar. The pain blocked her breath from reaching her diaphragm. Had someone kicked her in the stomach? Bruises on her arm ache like Hell.

"Help!" the blocked scream tore at her throat but barely made a sound.

Callie swallowed hard and tried to slow her panicked breath. She counted out slow, measured inhalations through her nose – just like the nutty shrink had taught her, the one her Dad made her go to. It didn't help. A soft, keening cry tore through her numb lips, silenced by the tape. Her heavy nasal breathing filled her ears, and she strained to hear beyond the sound. Where was she? Maybe she would hear Conor. Was he here, too? Beyond the walls of her prison, there was a distant murmur of cars passing, the screech of an angry seagull, and the occasional squeal of a child, but inside? Nothing. Not even the hypnotic hiss of the breath of the unconscious. Hope sank under the weight of her fear. No one could hear her. She was alone.

"Just grab some stuff and shove it in a bag. Hurry up! We need to go now! Patrick's waiting outside."

Conor spoke in her memory as though he were standing next to her. She reached for him, reaching toward the spot where she always found him, but her hand dropped through the emptiness onto the floor, and she felt a pinch, a sting, and a liquid release of blood from her fingertips. Broken glass. Wherever she was, she must be abandoned.

Was she still in the furniture store? No. It wasn't this quiet there.

When had Conor said those words? How long ago? It must have been at least three days. She remembered two nights in the crowded store. Two nights of shivering in a borrowed sweat-stained sleeping bag. The building was bleak and drafty even in July. Two nights of endless hours of darkness and no sleep, just spiraling thoughts dragging her deeper into the insomniac's emotional state of choice... anxiety. She remembered those two nights all right. After that? Nothing.

She needed Conor. She couldn't do this without him. She'd been scared for the past three days already, but now her level of terror was careening toward a breakdown. Conor would be able to keep her calm. Was he still at the furniture store? Was he looking for her? He'd find her. Conor would find her. Her muffled sobs echoed in her ears as she tried to resist the panic. It was an inky trail of smoke slinking stealthily toward her, creeping up her nose to muddy her thoughts and into her chest to quicken her heart. She struggled against the tape at her wrists, tried to pull apart her ankles, and then gave in to her fear as the silent sobs wrenched at her throat.

What was that? She strained to hear.

The sound of heavy, hesitant steps. Someone was coming.