Apartment 905, Sahin, Ned [black female authors .TXT] 📗

to find out if he bought my story. It’s hard to understand what he is thinking behind those gray dead eyes.

“Where is this bunker?” he asks.

“Unchain us. We will take you there,” I say. He grabs Kathleen’s hair and pulls it again.

“Don’t tell them, Matt!” Kathleen says, trying to punch him with her left hand and save her hair. I know that she is half improvising, but she is also in pain. I can’t stand hearing her screams and seeing tears in her eyes.

“Stop it! It’s under the ranger house… in Mark Twain!” I say. I am glad I remember the Mark Twain National Park sign a few miles back before coming to this town.

“Tell Reed to gather boys. We will check that out,” Harold instructs the two armed elders. They run back and disappear at the door.

“Bring some food to these hipsters. I need them alive until we confirm that stockpile,” Harold tells the mayor. The mayor glances at one of the guys chained around the table.

Harold leaves the warehouse. The mayor follows him, but still turns around to check on the guy. With the light coming out of the open door, I see the similarity between them now. The same bushy eyebrows and sharp jawlines.

“Are you okay?” I ask Kathleen and try to get closer to her. My chain stops me halfway. She looks at her dragged out hair in her hands. She can’t stop crying.

Toshi crawls and hugs her. He then turns his head to me. “That was a hell of a story, Matt. I wish they had let us go with them. What is the plan?” he asks while trying to comb her tousled hair with his hand. Every touch hurts Kathleen more.

“I don’t know yet, but I think we can get help from the mayor,” I say.

The mayor comes back with snacks and water. He leaves them between us. I try to read his thoughts from his face. All I see is a sad man in deep pain.

He goes to the chained guy next to the table closer to us. The other two guys stop what they are doing and watch him.

“Mr. Burke, I know you are a good person. Please help us…and save your son!” I say. I hope that man is really his son.

He glances at the man. Then he looks at me.

“They would kill me,” he says.

“You can come with us. We can protect you!” I say. He gets quiet while thinking about my offer. I know he is a logical person. I hope he figures that this is an opportunity for him to take his revenge on Harold and the elderly gang.

“I don’t have the keys. Harold has them...” he says.

“There is a bolt cutter in our truck. If you bring it, we can break the chains,” I say.

“They are taking the truck with them,” he says. Our beautiful Centaur is being stolen.

As much as I like the concise information he gives, I wish he could be a little bit more creative to get us and his son out of this situation.

“There must be a hammer or something we could use,” I say. I remember my days at the university dorm. A few bullies made it a habit to break the locker padlocks with hammers. Cheap padlocks like the ones holding the metal surrounding our wrists can open up after a few hard hammer hits.

“Dad, there must be a toolkit in the storage room,” his son says. His voice is weak, but it’s loud enough to urge the mayor to act quickly. He runs to the storage room fast for a person his age.

He comes back with a black metal box. He puts it on the table. They dig in the box together.

“I think we can try this,” his son says, pulling up a tool. It looks like a small hammer to use for nailing a screw on the wall.

His son is too weak to lift the hammer. The mayor takes it from his hand. Before making the first hit, he runs to the door and closes it. Smart move. We don’t need to be heard by wandering elderly outside.

It takes several hits, but they finally unlock the padlock. He gets under his son’s arm and helps him to walk.

“Mr. Burke?” I say. The other two guys also look at him. He walks to me and leaves the hammer near me.

“Get out of here as fast as you can,” he says.

We break our padlocks one by one. Toshi helps two guys to break theirs as well while Kathleen eats some snacks. I walk to her and look at her scalp closely. I see blood in some hair roots. We need a first-aid kit to clean the wound and ease her pain.

I go to the table the mayor’s son is working on. There are several bags with white powder. I have no idea what these are. They might be making heroin or something similar.

I keep looking through the mess on the table. I see pillboxes on one edge of the table. I recognize the fish image. This is the image I saw on the shelf in Harold’s basement.

These poor men are making antidepressants for the elderly. In other words, Harold is using these young guys as slaves so the elderly can have their medicine to stay human.

“We can’t thank you enough… We owe you,” one of the guys says after getting rid of the chain. He looks very weak, but he manages to walk slowly.

“Do you know if there is anything we can use here to start a fire?” I ask him.

Toshi smiles at me. He knows what I am about to do.

“Yes, sir, there is an oven we use to burn chemical waste.” The man points to the corner of the warehouse. I find a lighter and two bottles of lighter fluid near the oven.

We put all the powder and pillboxes together and fire them up. By the time someone notices the fire, the entire warehouse should be burned down. There