Her Worst Nightmare
Monsters Chapter 3
Disclaimer: Yes I own 24! I really do! The DVDs are very shiny and pretty and they snap right into the foldy box thingy. I just don't own the rights to the characters that's all.
Warning: The next two chapters are going to get pretty dark and horrible these people are some pretty terrible people. Don't say I didn't warn you. The last chapter will be better with flowers, sunshine, and fluffy kittens.
After much negotiation with the bad guys they finally agreed on a location for the exchange. Chloe actually suggested the site. A railroad trestle out in the boondocks, it crossed a fairly wide valley with a rapid river flowing through it. The only way to get across quickly would be on the tracks in plain view. It also had good views of the surrounding territory making it very difficult to sneak up on. The kidnappers assured them that the children were all right and didn't know what happened to Amy King. Thank God for small favors.
All the drive up there, Agent Mueller kept apologizing for the mess and promising to do anything he could to get her back. Chloe kept silent. She didn't think of him as being the arrogant womanizer she disliked so much but as a frightened father and fellow agent in trouble. Her mind searched for some sliver of hope that she might actually get out of this alive. 'Maybe these are the same guys holding Jack,' she thought, 'The two of us together will find a way to escape. Yeah! And maybe they're holding Amelia Earhart and she'll fly us away in her magic airplane.' It wasn't any use. She was going to die.
At the trestle Chloe could see the small group assembled on the other side. Three large figures and two small ones, Mueller was behind a rock with his gun out in case of some kind of treachery. Chloe stepped out on the tracks. They had a thin patina of rust showing that this line wasn't used much anymore. She looked around as only a doomed soul might. Everything was so beautiful! The trees, the grass, the sky with its scattered soft clouds, she inhaled deeply it smelled so planty! Being a city girl she didn't know much about the woods. 'Maybe I should have gone out more instead of holing up in my apartment so much.' She picked up another scent. Something scared a skunk! She inhaled the musk like it was the sweetest perfume. It seemed like every one of her senses was super charged. She never felt so alive. The children started slowly across the trestle so she stepped out and began walking. Good thing she wasn't wearing high heels. She wished she'd worn slacks. She felt ridiculous walking out there in her black dress as if going to a prom. Not that Chloe had ever been to a prom. 'Never been a teenager, not really. Kissed my first boy two months shy of my twentieth birthday.' Resentment rose inside her, 'It's not fair! It might not have been a great life but it's the only one I'll ever have and they have no right to take it from me!' She then thought of poor Amy King. She didn't even have a face anymore! Empty eye sockets and a jaw still open in a final scream, hatred welled inside Chloe overpowering her fear. 'Those evil wicked bastards! She was just a kid doing babysitting on the weekends! She never really had a life. Sixteen years of hope and promise ending in one morning of terror and agony.' The hate was burning like a white hot fire in Chloe. Taking out these A-holes would be worth dying for.
As Veronica and little Paul drew closer Chloe's heart grew softer. Oh! They're so cute! Paul was obviously frightened and Veronica had her hands on his shoulders encouraging him. Brave girl. Not like cowardly Chloe who is scared to death. Chloe wanted children. She craved children. She sometimes thought about her and Jack married and living in a little house together with babies. It wasn't very realistic. She wasn't Jack's type. She wasn't anybody's type. Probably would have been a crappy mother anyway. But a girl's entitled to her silly little dreams. She looked past the children at the three figures at the end of the trestle. Those monsters were going to take away her dreams. Chloe stepped aside so the children can pass by. She gave them a smile that she hoped looked natural. "Don't worry, Daddy's just on the other side. You'll be safe there." Veronica smiled back and nodded. Chloe turned and watched the children walk away. 'For all the lost people trying to find their way home, Lord hear our prayer.' The sunset was so beautiful. It would probably be the last one she would ever see. She looked over the side of the trestle. Long way down. If she jumped it would be all over, there would be no torture, no blowtorch. And neither one of those two children would reach the end alive. And another part of her rebelled against suicide, it was a sin. 'Yeah, me and Gael, sticking it out to the bitter end.'
When Chloe turned back around she noticed a small red spot over her heart. A laser sight, ooooh scarreee! Right now a bullet in the heart was looking pretty darn good. She knew they weren't going to shoot her. They were going through a lot of trouble to take her alive. She wondered where the sniper was and scanned the area. A flash of light caught her attention on a low ridgeline about fifty yards to the left of the small group. She focused on the area and caught another flash. 'There he is! Camouflage face paint and mirrored sunglasses. Way to go genius! You want to look really cool while you're, uhh, hiding. He must be like a cross between Daniel Boone and Alvin York. And the way he keeps squirming around scratching himself he must have graduated the elite sniper school at Fort Benning!' She wished Jack were here, he would have eaten that guy for breakfast. She slowly moved on to the three guys waiting for her. She wished she were more heroic. Buffy would have creamed these guys. Xena would do that yipping thing with the flips and toasted them. Modesty Blaise would have some clever plan worked up with Willie Garvin to take them out. She was just a geek. She didn't know how to fight. 'Without my brains I'm nothing. Well your brains aren't going to get you off this trestle.'
Chloe made sure the children were safe before she moved among the bad guys. Three of them, all young, white and muscular, one of them had a tattoo on his cheek of a swastika with the words "White Power" over it. Now the dummy is probably wondering why he can't get a job at MacDonald's. A second one was bald with a goatee, the third had a rather thick reddish blond beard. She decided to think of them as
Tat-face, Chromedome, and Whiskers. Chromedome searched her then Whiskers and Tat-face. She had been patted down earlier by Peter who had done a professional job but these guys seemed more interested in groping her private parts than searching for weapons or devices. By the time Tat-face finished with her the sniper had arrived and decided to search her for good measure. "Where's your laptop?" Chromedome asked.
Did they think she was hiding it under her skirt? "Home," she answered. These super geniuses must have just figured out that she didn't bring it. "You never asked for the laptop."
"What do we do now?" Tat-face whined.
"We got her, that's all that's important. The boss will get us the rest!" Whiskers answered.
They threw a cloth bag over her head and handcuffed her before leading her away. She was loaded in the back of what felt like a van and driven away. She twisted her hands until she got her finger on her wrist. Her heart was racing. 'Calm down Chloe, concentrate, get into The Zone, don't think about the blowtorch. Stay calm.' Chloe slipped into The Zone. Her heart slowed. 75 beats a minute. ' Count the pulses. One, two, three, four…' The guys in the van didn't speak much. They mentioned that they weren't through with that God Damned traitor Mueller. Later they laughed about how the babysitter screamed and begged for her life. Rage rose inside Chloe and her heart rate increased. 'No, stay calm! 2676, 2677,2678…' The van stayed in the back roads. She couldn't hear any traffic noises that would indicate an interstate. '3750, 3751, 3752.' Eventually the van slowed down to a stop and she heard the doors open. '3914, about 52 minutes.' The ride felt like winding hill roads. Figure an average speed of 40 to 45 mph, they must have traveled around 34 to 40 miles from the trestle. She didn't know if this would be relevant but as an analyst she catalogued all information never knowing what might be vital. It was quiet, must be a rural area. She was standing on pavement. A road or parking lot, she heard a strange sounding bird. 'Don't know anything about birds, irrelevant.' A train whistle off to her left about half a mile away. Possible escape route, remember that. The dull thrum of a diesel engine, possibly a generator.
They led her into a door and pulled the bag off her head. It looked like a large industrial building of some kind, abandoned and dusty. Temporary lights had been rigged. As she looked around they removed her handcuffs. As Chloe rubbed her wrists she realized that removing the handcuffs was actually an insult. They weren't afraid of her. She couldn't fight four men at once and they probably wanted her to try. This was the nightmare she'd had since childhood. Helpless and surrounded by monsters. The man with the mirrored sunglasses who she was thinking of as Shades took her left arm and manhandled her into another room. Sitting behind a long folding table was a fifth man. He had long wavy blond hair that framed a strong handsome face. The type of man that looked out from the covers of dozens of romance novels she had around the apartment. Chloe would have thought he was pretty hot if she didn't keep thinking of a sixteen year old girl in the basement. He looked her over with cold, cruel blue eyes then nodded at Shades. Chloe gritted her teeth as Shades pulled out a large Bowie knife and began cutting her clothes off. In less than a minute she was nude. 'Well, I didn't hate the dress that much,' She thought. She knew what they were doing. Stripping the prisoner dehumanizes her and makes her feel vulnerable. It was an old technique. She did feel more vulnerable so that part worked but for dehumanizing, as far as she was concerned she was the only human in the building. Her first instinct was to hunch over and try to cover herself as much as she could but that's just what these animals wanted so she forced herself to stand tall with her hands on her hips. 'Take a good look slimeballs!' she thought. Guys had seen her naked before, not very many guys but, guys. She stepped to the table where the long haired man she dubbed Goldilocks sat and kept her thoughts to herself as the taunts and catcalls washed over her, 'Yeah, I haven't shaved my legs in a few days Chromdome, yeah that is freakin hilarious. Oh and my breasts are a bit small Whiskers, I kind of like them that way. No Tat-face, I don't need a boob job.' Chloe scowled at Goldilocks, "This isn't going to work."
He gave her a thin smile, "What?"
"This," she gestured at herself, "I'm not ashamed of my body."
He grinned "Oh, an exhibitionist eh?"
"No," she said in her talking to idiots voice, "You're the one insisting on the exhibition, not me."
He poured out a glass of water from the pitcher, "Here, have some water." She eyed the glass suspiciously. "I assure you it's not poison, if we wanted to poison you we wouldn't have to be so subtle."
"Fine!" She picked up the glass and drank it.
"So Chloe, you prefer I call you Chloe don't you?" He poured out another glass of water.
"I prefer you call me Agent O'Brian or Ms. O'Brian." She drank the water.
His eyes darkened with anger, "How about if I just call you Bitch!"
Chloe shrugged "Fine, why not? Everyone else does." She really had to go pee.
Goldilocks poured out another glass of water. "We're lucky to have you Bitch, we were going to do this with the Chinaman in Boston but this is even better."
"The who?"
"The Chinaman, Robert Lee, but you're even better. Drink some more water, it's very good."
"No thanks," Robert E. Lee was Chinese? All these years of phone calls and e-mails and she didn't know. She didn't really care but it seemed important to these guys. Probably white supremacists. That would tie in with Tat-face's tattoo.
"I insist!" Chromedome seems to have brought a cattle prod in from somewhere, he brandished it in her face.
"Well, since you asked so nicely." She drank down the water, the pressure on her bladder increased.
Goldilocks poured out another glass. "Here, have some more."
Chloe crossed her arms "Look! I know what you're trying to do." She said in an irritated voice. "You're going to keep feeding me water until I piddle on the floor. I'm supposed to feel really ashamed and degraded. Then I'm supposed to get all psychologically vulnerable. Your buddies over there will have a good laugh and tell some tinkle jokes that I'm sure will be very mature and sophisticated but you're going to pretend to be really mad at me for peeing all over your nice floor and punish me as if you weren't going to do it anyway. Now we can stand around playing silly games or you can tell me what you want!"
Goldilocks looked angry, it was obvious that the interview wasn't going the way he wanted. "OK Bitch, what we want you to get us is the Sigma File!"
Chloe took a sharp breath, "Never heard of it."
"Permit me to refresh your memory. It is a list of all of America's undercover agents around the world. We should be able to sell individual names to interested parties. It would be worth tens of millions of dollars."
Chloe had never seen the Sigma File. She never wanted to see it. It was beyond Top Secret. Only two or three people in the whole world have ever seen it and the President wasn't one of them. It not only had the identities and aliases but also escape routes for who knows how many agents in hostile foreign governments and terrorist groups. Some of them had been in place for decades. Giving up the list would not only cost the lives of the agents but also countless lives of people killed in attacks that could have been prevented. It would be a crushing blow to the United States and her allies and make the world suck even more than it does now. "Well genius, as soon as I was reported missing they canceled all my access codes. I couldn't get in if I wanted to."
"Oh but you designed the system. I'm sure you could break in if you really wanted to. Am I right?" Chloe remained silent. "If you don't say anything I will assume I am right."
"You can assume anything you like."
"With the money we will rebuild our organization that Mueller destroyed. Don't think we're through with him or his family. We trusted him as a brother and he betrayed us and everything we stand for. We were decimated. Dozens of us were killed or arrested!"
Chloe patted her naked body, "Sorry, I don't seem to have a hankie on me."
"You think it's amusing! He sold us out like Judas sold Jesus!"
"So now you're like Jesus?"
"Closer than you know! One of the greatest lies in history was that Jesus was some kind of Jewish hippie when our historians and theologians have proved he was a pure Nordic Aryan warrior as were most of his disciples. THE ONLY JEW WAS JUDAS!"
Chloe's nut-o-meter was starting to move off the scale. This was going to be bad.
They locked Chloe in a wire equipment cage with a dirty old mattress, a jug of water, a loaf of white bread, and a bucket for sanitary purposes. They didn't give her any clothes. So she sat on the mattress hugging her legs. If she was more heroic she could pick the padlock and sneak out. Unfortunately she didn't know the first thing about picking locks. For some reason Goldilocks had a large digital clock hung up where she could see it. They also had a nylon line with the bitter end strung through an eye splice making a loop and run through a pulley in the overhead. She didn't like the looks of that. She also didn't like the blowtorch sitting on the table in the corner. Most of the equipment looked new. They must have bought it after flying in from Boston. Off in the distance she could hear another train whistle. If only she could signal the engineer somehow! Maybe a flashing light or something, it was no use. The engineer probably wouldn't notice if she burned the building down. All it did was tantalize her with the thought of freedom.
At ten o'clock they opened the cage and led her to the rope. Tat-face and Whiskers held her down while Shades slipped the loop over her ankles and Chromedome hoisted her up and tied off the rope leaving her hanging upside down. As the blood rushed to her head Goldilocks stepped up to her. "Are you going to give us the Sigma File?"
"No! Who are you anyway?"
He smirked "I'm your worst nightmare."
"Umm no, that would be Octopus Head."
Goldilocks smirk faded as he stepped back and flicked two fingers. Tat-face and Chromedome approached with leather belts as Whiskers came up with the cattle prod. Chloe's eyes widened and her heart started pounding. 'This is gonna suck.' She thought, 'Who are these guys anyway?'
CTU"Reich Reborn," Bill Buchanan declared. "A particularly vicious Nazi splinter group. Amelia King isn't the first civilian they've killed with a blowtorch. Mueller infiltrated the group nineteen months ago and remained an active member until about five months ago when it was broken up in a series of raids by CTU-Boston and Boston PD. They were planning to overwhelm the city with simultaneous truck bombings. Think Oklahoma City times twenty. Only a handful escaped. Five days ago this white Dodge van registered to Larry and Ruth Weber was stolen from long term parking at the airport just an hour after a flight from Boston arrived. Security cameras showed three known members of Reich Reborn leaving that flight. Carl Baum, John Snow, and Richard Hardt." His phone rang and Bill picked it up. "Buchanan."
"Curtis here, I've interviewed Dr. Palani, she confirmed that Chloe arrived at her house between 12:15 and 12:30 where they had a conversation that is none of our damned business. She confirms that Chloe was in her house when we contacted her and that she left alone at about a quarter to three after asking Dr. Palani to attend Agent Hollister's funeral. She didn't see Chloe get into her car and doesn't know how her purse ended up in the bushes."
"Sir," Shari interrupted, "I've got a call from Agent Mueller. He's on his way in with his children."
Chloe lay huddled on the dirty mattress shivering. She wanted to be brave and take the beating without a sound but they just kept hitting her and poking her with that damned cattle prod. At first she started whimpering and then she started screaming. Her body was crisscrossed with welts. She poked one with a finger and hissed. She knew now what the clock was for. Every hour they were going to take her out and beat on her for ten minutes. Just thirty-five minutes until they do it again. The next time was going to be worse. Her skin was now super sensitive, every time it was going to get worse until she became a traitor.