A Day in the Life, The Beatles
Who will hear her silent scream?
She has flashes of a cell with a dirt floor and no windows. . . . and fear stalking her. . . voices seesaw into her consciousness. . . . Spanish intersects with Chinese and death surrounds her. . . .
The concrete floor beneath her is unforgiving, but to lie as they left her is to buy more time. . . . to move might draw attention. . . make them think she is conscious. . . make them think she is ready. . . .
The trunk lid descends. . . blocking light. . . trapping her. . . with stale air. . . her own stale fear. . . .
She lies playing opossum. . . . fuzzy and unfocused. . . lost in dreams. . . . flashes of a car buried underground. . .no air to breathe. . . . and blood. . . . rivers of blood. . . blood on her hands. . . .
She bolts upright, unmindful of her ribs that scream their own kind of pain, her voice filling her head, filling the room.
"Dr. Brennan?" She takes too long to realize they are talking to her. Everything around her seems slow and unfathomable. She is underwater, underground.
"Booth?"
She hears his name in her head, but it won't leave that place. "Booth," she screams again, but she can make out no sound. Her voice is silent. His name shatters against the hard concrete in a silent wave and fails to save her.
She tries again and again.
Her thoughts dart in and out taking her deeper into what must be a dream. A nightmare.
No, if hell exists, this is it.
"Booth," she screams, but he cannot hear her.
For who can hear a silent scream?
oOo
The cold water actually slaps her into consciousness. She tries to twist and turn from the cold and biting water, but her ribs protest any movement and her head feels the betrayal as well.
Then she realizes what it is meant to do.
Yes, she tells herself, they are ready for her.
Mere flashes of images are more than enough to remind her. She'd gone back to her apartment and Paxton, Agent Paxton. . . .
She hears a cruel laughter as she sputters and tries to evade the wall of water that seems intent on drowning her. Her hands are useless. . . somehow they are tied together. . . . She twists, turning her back on the spray which is unrelenting. . . .
The water has a dual purpose, she knows. It is meant to revive her, wash away the last remnants of the drugs that subdued her.
And the water will better conduct the searing force of the electric shock that will surely char her from the inside out.
She fights the impromptu shower and the ropes that burn her wrists and the fear that threatens to rob her of any rational thought.
For now she needs to think.
When the spray ends, she finds herself curled in on herself like a coiled spring. She hears a foreign phrase in rapid-fire Chinese and wills herself to concentrate.
Shivering now with cold, it is so, so difficult to concentrate.
"Are you ready yet?" she translates.
The reply is something akin to the stupid inbred stack of donkey poo is not ready, but her thoughts are still muddled.
The two men leave her dripping on the floor, hurling insults at the machinery of her destruction which is just outside the door.
"Niǎoshì! The thing is full of shiong mao niao."
She trains an ear on their conversation which devolves into grunts and curses as she tries to assess her situation.
Her head throbs with what must certainly be a combination of the latent effects of the drugs—temazepam or gamma-hydrobutyrate, perhaps—and the hard knock she took at her apartment. Her ribs catch when she breathes, but when she presses her fists into her side, she decides nothing is broken. Various aches make themselves known as she quakes.
Fear holds her in its grip.
Knowing how they will torture her gives her little advantage only new images of skeletons splayed across a lighted table. Her mind continues to lose focus, caught between trying to translate their conversation and trying to tamp down the panic that comes in intermittent shivers that almost paralyze her.
Only when the two of them leave the room, the large door ajar, does she fight back the panic and look around.
Studying the room, she catalogs what she can see in the gloom. The room is 18' by 20' with high ceilings. Windows line one wall, but they are too high to offer much help. Cables and chains dangle enticingly from the ceiling—again too high for her to reach.
There is nothing in the room except fear.
She cannot help but react to each sound that somehow filters in from outside. She knows exactly when the generator engine finally engages and roars to life, then sputters and dies. Their curses carom against the concrete outside this room until they dissolve into the shadows here.
Instantly, she knows exactly what will happen.
In the past 6 weeks, she has examined too many files, too many bodies, not to know. When they are ready for her, they will hang her from the hook by her hands or a harness. When they finally engage the generator, a rheostat will control the voltage.
But amps are where the power is.
She'd explained this to Angela days ago. Touching a Van Der Graaf generator with 2 million volts does little more than make one's hair stand up. It is the current that does the damage.
A Taser is at most .04 amps, a heart defibrillator 2, a common vacuum 12.
At one end of the spectrum, one will be incapacitated for seconds, maybe minutes. At the other end, one could die.
They will start relatively low. Perhaps 10,000-12,000 volts at .02 amps. Then they will ramp up the voltage slowly as she resists.
And they will raise the amperage to watch her die.
Each shock will be unpleasant, an affront to muscles and nerves, sending them into spasms as the body's own electrical impulses are disrupted.
Eventually, when she had told them everything they want or when her body has nothing more to give, the last shock will stop her heart and give her peace.
In the profile Sweets had provided to Paxton, he had called the Hong Choi tortures "experiments in the depravity of human creativity."
She'd thought the phrase too poetic for such a report.
Brennan only knows now that she desperately needs to change the parameters of the next experiment.
oOo
She is their first woman.
The thought hits her as she hears the generator sputter outside the chamber and she can hear the snippets of conversation in Chinese as they alternate between cursing the machine and wondering aloud about how long it will take her to die.
The generator finally starts and she tenses her muscles and prepares herself.
She expects them to walk in and drag her to the hook; she will meet them with something unexpected. Oh, she will try.
She does not fear death, but she certainly won't welcome it.
Then a scream erupts from somewhere beyond the room and she feels as if a blow has struck her chest.
It can only be Paxton.
Another scream drowns out the steady hum of the generator and she finds herself on her feet awkwardly backing away from the sound.
Her body reacts to the screams that echo past the door and invade this space. Twisting and turning as if to evade the screams as if they were blows, she backs herself into the deeper shadows of the room until her back hits the all-too-solid cinder block and she slides down into a heap on the floor.
Each scream breaks the boundaries of the doors and walls and seems to pummel her.
And her own fears make her bleed.
oOo
The silence is welcome.
The generator hums in the distance, but the screams have faded. But not the fear.
She can barely stop her body's tremors.
Again and again she tries to calm herself, but ghosts of the screams remain to haunt her.
Finally, she wills herself to calm.
It is a struggle, but it is battle she has won before. Rational vs. emotional; logic vs, chaos. Only later, much, much later, will she realize that so many of her rational arguments were informed by her emotional needs.
She lays out her rational arguments:
She cannot give in because Booth will come.
Of that she is sure. It is an absolute in a world where she does not believe in absolutes.
She can give him time. It may be the only thing she can do, but she will do it for him because she cannot bear him living with the guilt if she were to die. She loves him too much to leave him with that.
And he will feel guilty even though her death would not be his fault. Of that she is absolutely sure. And she does not want that for him. No.
She cannot give in because she wants to spend time with Angela and the baby. And Hodgins.
She cannot give in because she wants something of what Angela has with Hodgins and the baby.
She cannot give in because she wants to spend time with her brother and Amy and the girls and her father.
She cannot give in because she has an outline for a new novel and a pushy publisher and journal articles to write. . . .
She cannot give in because Cam has a proposal for the FBI that will rid them of Paxton and free them of his incessant. . . .
Then she realizes something. Something insidious and cruel. Something meant to break her.
When the screams begin anew, she lets them wash over her, although the emotional pain evident in each makes her shudder.
When the second wave ends, one of her captors slides the door open and walks the 12 feet to her position at the wall.
"Dr. Brennan?" He smiles, his expression almost feral. "We can save you a great deal of pain. Agent Paxton has told us much, but even he does not know everything."
"Qingwa hóuzi rén'ài àizǐ de yīgè kūn quǎn," she hurls back at him. "Qù jùyǒu yīgè shǐ diūzhe jǐnbiāosài gēn tóngde nǐde fūren."
She translates in case her Mandarin is faulty. "You monkey-humping son of a bitch. Go have an excrement-throwing contest with your wife."
oOo
There is no sense of time in this place, only the faulty rhythms of the generator.
Paxton is dead, she reminds herself. And Booth is coming.
She remembers how Paxton tried to shield her, how he'd fought hard. But she'd heard only one gunshot, only one thud when they threw her into the van. Only one.
Psychological terrorists, Sweets had called torturers. He'd been proud of the term as if he had invented it.
They'd tried to heightened her panic and fear. They'd tried to take away some part of her.
Paxton is dead, she thinks. And Booth will come.
She repeats the last words as a mantra, a chant, a tenet of her faith.
Booth will come.
Her mind flips through images of what might have been left behind in her apartment. Fibers from clothing. Dirt tracked in from outside. Dust and particulates and insect activity and. . . .
Booth will come.
Hodgins will read the particulates and create a roadmap to this place.
And Booth will come.
Her rational mind wants to rail against the emotion of hope, but she indulges it. She has to.
Then the generator hum breaks through her thoughts and she feels the now all-too-familiar terror that must be tamped down. Or harnessed.
For the experiment begins again and she must rewrite it.
The shorter man re-enters and she counts the number of steps to the door. She listens for the other man's footsteps, but hears nothing, only the generator's hum taunting her.
She rolls onto her stomach, trapping her hands beneath her.
In this experiment, she cannot give away too much.
The man orders her to turn over, but she sees no logic in obeying. She's rewarded with a kick to the ribs.
Immediately she is caught in the quake of searing pain that radiates from the epicenter of her ribs. Instinctively, she curls around her injured ribs to protect them.
He laughs and tells her he will enjoy watching her die. And he leans in a little too much.
She drives her foot into his testicles.
The effort creates another seismic wave of pain. Gasping for air, she scrambles to her feet awkwardly, her tied hands keeping her unbalanced, and Brennan turns to see her handiwork. As she thought he would, her abductor has collapsed to his knees and is about to fold onto the concrete.
She hesitates, deciding if she can do more damage when she hears a shout and turns to see the second man hurtling toward her.
When she tries to deflect the impact of his body against hers, he simply holds onto her soggy clothes and drags them both to the concrete. Then it is a flurry of kicks and jabs and wild attempts to fight back the inevitable. A cocktail of adrenaline and fear and anger prolongs her struggle, but she is eventually pinned to the ground by one man while the other limps off to find more restraints.
"Crazy hell cat bitch," he says as he grabs her hair. "You will tell us everything before you die."
He grinds her face into the concrete and leans closer, until she can smell his breath which reeks of blood and death. "They all beg me to kill them. They beg for hours."
"My record's three days." His spittle burns her face where it lands. "For you, I'll give you four days. Four days to wish you were dead."
oOo
Pain strangles her as they draw the harness around her.
They've wrestled her to the spot near the door where the cable snake ends just shy of a puddle of water. Each man holds her roughly, their fists iron and unforgiving as they strap her in.
The harness is like a heavy vest with electrodes embedded along the inside. She takes little pleasure in knowing that she was right about the placement of the electrodes and the markings on the bones of the victims.
The theory she had posited had been this: a harness of some water-resistant material had electrodes positioned evenly along the ribs. Cuffs of the same configuration were placed at each of the extremities. Once plugged in, the harness and cuffs could be electrified and energy could be directed along any of the wires.
In its own perverse way, it was an elegant design.
She had counted six wires at the torso and at least the same number in each of the four cuffs.
She had spent too much time with the files and with the bodies not to know how each victim was killed.
Once they have her strapped in, one man lowers the hook while the other man works the pulley. As the taller of the two men begins to draw her up into air, the other directs the hose toward her. Under the shower of water, she struggles, then concedes a kind of defeat.
"Cats don't like water much, eh?" one of them taunts her in Chinese.
The moment the water is turned off, she waits for the tall one to near her to attach wires to her harness and she lashes out, driving her heel into his face. She can feel the cartilage break and is rewarded with a stream of red from his nose.
And another cold shower.
oOo
The false starts with the generator are meant to taunt her, cause her to lose control just as the playacting involving Paxton was meant to loosen her tongue.
The generator hums outside the room
And time, right now, is her greatest enemy and her best weapon.
That and the water.
She hurls more insults toward the shorter man and is rewarded with another shower. With no drain in the floor, the water puddles then pools, forcing them to splash through it to reach her.
"An experiment, Dr. Brennan?" The shorter man glares at her as he turns off the water. "You want to see what we will be doing to you for four hours?"
The taller man holds up a rat caged in a steel basket. "You like to see cause and effect?" He bends down awkwardly, the tissues stuffed into his nose to stem the bleeding giving him a lumpy appearance. He dips the basket into water at his feet and splashes it around to wet the rodent which scrambles frantically along the wires. "Science teachers like experiments, now, don't they?"
He slams the basket onto the seat of a wooden chair they've dragged in from somewhere and nods to the shorter man as he picks up two insulated wires with almost an inch of bare copper showing at the ends. With a faint click, she can only imagine that electricity pulses through the wires.
And she knows too well what will happen.
When it is over, she can smell scorched fur and flesh and she tries to gulp in huge breaths of air only to choke on the stench.
The tall man waves the wires in front of him, touching the wires together where they spark and smoke. "Ready?"
They've learned from before and they've tied her feet together at the ankles, secure that harnessed and hobbled she cannot fight back. He approaches her, rattling off Chinese insults, the wires inches apart, one in each hand. He calls out a command and the electricity crackles between the wires in an undulating bridge of fierce fire that arches dramatically, then falls just as dramatically into a jagged line of light.
And then she attacks.
Drawing up her knees, she drives both feet into his neck.
She has no idea if she's broken his hyoid, but he gasps, goes ashen, then collapses with a splash to the floor.
All at once she hears shouts and a small explosion, and smells the stench of cooked flesh.
oOo
This time when the cold water washes over her, she tries to hang onto unconsciousness just a tad longer. When she does open her eyes, the drug seems to have burned off the edges of linear thought leaving her only fragments of ideas.
"How many bodies were recovered, Dr. Brennan?"
"You need to be see-pif-ic, spa-fic-sic, spa-sif-tic. . . ," she replies.
"I need a number for the number of bodies recovered in the Hong Choi case."
"A," she begins then fades. "A is for aardwolf, genus Proteles. . . ."
"How many bodies?"
"A through S, aaazzz not aassss."
"A number."
"One, two. . . ," she tries to order her mind to make the calculation, but it wants to jump around, to play games. "Ten, thirteen, fourteen." She tries to think. "Seventeen."
Her head feels heavy and she leans against the ropes that hold her in place. Her eyelids flutter like the wings of a wounded bird, truly unable to sustain flight.
"I need names, Dr. Brennan."
"No names, no names. Just alphabet. B is for babirusas, genus Babyrousa. . . ."
She hears cursing in Chinese, so she echoes back the phrase.
And she is rewarded with a slap.
The edges become less obscure. Her left eye refuses to open. Her feet and legs cannot move. Her arms are frozen in place.
"Go home," she cries. "I need to go home." She begins to struggle, but the restraints are tight and her body will not obey. The drug ties down her mind.
"You'll go home, Temperance," the voice tries to soothe her, but she hears a jagged edge to it, "when you tell me about the 17 bodies that were recovered. The bodies that are part of the Hong Choi investigation. Agent Paxton needs to know."
"Paxton knows," she says feeling herself sliding into something she cannot control. "Paxton knows all about the bodies."
"He wants you to tell me."
"He's dead you know."
"Who's dead?"
"C. Coelacanth. Thought to be extinct 65 million years ago." She tries to stop the spinning thoughts in her head. "They found one. Not extinct. So not dead."
"The FBI wants you to give us a run through of all the people that you have identified as possibly being victims of the Hong Choi crime syndicate."
"It's in the report."
"They want a verbal report."
"They want, they want. . . ."
"Booth wants it. Booth wants you to tell him all about the 17 cases. Something that he can use to identify the bodies."
"Booth?" A wave of hope clears away some of her muddied thoughts and she realizes something in the name. "Booth? Is he here?"
"He'll be here as soon as you tell me all the details."
"Details?" She leans against the chair. "Usually he doesn't like the details."
"He needs them now."
She nods. Details.
And so she begins.
oOo
No light begins to glow through the cracks in the high windows. She has no idea how long they have been at this game of. . . what game is it? Elephant and peanut? Dog and cat? She swings her head, heavy with drugs and fatigue and pain and looks straight at the inquisitor. He is the same short, stocky man he was at the beginning of this ordeal, but his clothes are spattered and he looks. . . .
She decides he looks disheveled. Unkempt even.
But not as bad as she feels.
"The twelvth victim was male. Thirty to thirty-five years of age. One hundred and eight centimeters. Weight estimated to be between one hundred seventy to one hundred ninety pounds."
"Race?"
"Mixed." The word comes out raspy. "Asian. Caucasian."
"Good, Dr. Brennan." He leans back and stretches. "Distinguishing characteristics?"
She closes her eyes. "Dental records indicated that he was. . . bruxism. . . a teeth grinder." She opens her eyes and tries to read the man's expression. She's already committed everything about him to memory—she can give Angela enough details for a sketch. Her throat protests more words.
"Water?"
"I need the details."
"And I need water." I need warmth and sleep and Booth, she thinks. "Water, please."
He grunts and rises slowly. She can read his injuries in his gait, the years of violence in his body.
Lolling her head backward, she tries to find some position that does not ache, that allows her some small rest.
And then she sees it. Something moves one of the windows in the corner. The angle changes on the soot-coated rectangle.
And she knows: Booth has come.
She knows what is happening outside. Thermo-imaging to determine where she is. Visual confirmation. A quiet approah.
And danger inside the steel door.
The generator was disabled as was the second man. Yes. There was a second man? The drugs pummel recent memory and she decides—there is a second man. Yes. Booth will need to know that.
And the gun.
Before she can consider a course of action, an orderly transition between one state and another, the cold water assaults her and she tries to fight it, tries to see beyond the spray so that Booth will be safe. . . .
Then she hears it: "FBI. Put down the. . . ."
"He's got a gun, Booth. He's got a gun," she screams as the water suddenly releases her. "There's two men. Two."
Her captor uses the spray from the hose as a shield as he grabs the gun and then steps behind her.
Then in a blink, something happens. Time, which has been both her friend and her enemy remains still, silent. Then the eerie calm shatters all around her: the hose becomes a tamed snake that hisses no more and somebody is sawing at the ropes and she is falling into someone's arms.
oOo
Cocooned in layers of blankets, she leans against Booth who is sitting with her in the back seat of his SUV.
It feels good to be dry and warm again, she thinks. And Booth is solid and warm and real.
The mars lights of the ambulance and the various police vehicles continue to light the darkness, but she shuts them out, closes her eyes and tries to lean further into Booth. Part of her wants to sleep, but another part knows that there will be nightmares.
She can control so much in her life, just not her dreams.
He wraps his arm around her and she is finally beginning to feel safe again.
"Thank you," she says, her word muffled by the blankets. "For coming to get me."
"What?" She can almost feel his smile.
"Thank you for coming to get me."
She knows her words tumble out at odd angles right now and she carefully reviews each word.
"Thank you, Bones." His arms encircle her and she wonders how nightmares could ever trespass on her nights with him beside her.
"For what?" In her muddled thinking, she cannot fathom why he would be thanking her.
"Thank you for giving me another chance at, I don't know, Bones," he says, pausing to make his words clear for her, "another day with you, another day in the life of Temperance Brennan."
"It's everything, babe," he murmurs as he kisses her forehead. "Everything."
Author's note: Fans of Firefly might notice that Brennan's Chinese is inspired by Josh Whedon's show. Whedon's genius is this story's gain; I take no credit for his creative work.
I should also give credit to the fine people who create Wikipedia articles. I've consulted many in order to create this series. Thank you, oh anonymous smarty pants.
I tried to abide by a guideline from The Avengers, an old British television show imported into the United States in the '60s. The producers refused to show the inimitable Mrs. Peel being tortured or a woman killed and I followed that idea here. I know it's somewhat old-fashioned, but I rather like the old Alfred Hitchcock standard of hinting at the horror rather than showing all the gruesome details. Mrs. Peel could fight back, even best her male opponents or kill them, but she rarely came away with a scratch. Brennan, here, does come away worse for wear, but whole and victorious and sharing hero honors with Booth.
That is how it ought to be in the Bones universe.
And a final note: Thank you for those people who have reviewed my efforts here. You deserve some credit for the encouragement a note can bring. A story should stand on its own, but feedback is welcome and much appreciated.
Next up: Layla by Eric Clapton.