This is my Last Resort (Chapter Sixteen) by Lexikal
Spoilers: None.
Warnings: Dark themes; violence; missing children/implied child abuse, lots of Reid angst...
Summary: Spencer Reid, third season-ish (2008-ish), is kidnapped/taken hostage and abused/terrorized along with a host of other "unwanted" children. Please see chapter one for more info.
Author's Note: Whoa, this is an ancient one. I just re-read it, and have to apologize for all the typos and the crazy italicizations. Have no idea what I was thinking. This is an oldie, and I would just as soon axe it but it has a few fans left, so I will finish it off. The song Elle sings a line from is "Mairzy Doats" by Milton Drake, Al Hoffman and Jerry Livingston and recored by the Pied Pipers in 1944 and immortalized by "Leland Palmer" (played by the inimitable Ray Wise) on Twin Peaks. If you want to know what it sounds like, check it out on youtube, of course. The map information is part researched and part guessed. I can't get too obsessive with map directions for a fictional story like this, but those are all real places and that interstate is the right one. I am having a lot of trouble with this story because this sotry is so damn unrealistic and, frankly, over the top crazy. I am pretty sure I was hammered or high when I wrote the first fifteen chapters, because the plot is just ridiculous. But ridiculous can be fun, I guess (hope so). And before any new readers say it- this story was started LONG before the Moseley Lane episode, so please don't tell me I ripped that off. Please review (if you feel like it, that is)
The truck came to a stop after about an hour or so of movement. Elle kept still, waited. Heard the door open, heard a man say "Jesus Christ," and there was movement as someone ruffled through what sounded like papers. The door shut again and Elle heard heavy boot steps on the macadam. She held onto the scrap of metal- a crowbar, she was pretty sure it was called- but the steps got farther and farther away. She took a breath and peeked out from under the tarp.
She was on a suburban street lit up by low pressure sodium streetlamps. Everything was cast in an eldritch orange glow. Elle waited a beat, scanned the gloomy street. Nobody, she could see nobody. Carefully, slowly, she crawled out from under the tarp completely, launched herself over the bed of the truck and fell to the ground on her bare feet. An area on her hospital pyjamas, right where she had been shot, was blooming what looked like black paint under the street lamps. Elle scowled. She was bleeding again.
Carefully, she crept up along the side of the truck, tried the door. Like she'd expected, it opened easily. Elle squinted in the gloom, saw a disorganized interior scattered with newspapers and fast food wrappers and some little boy's action figure from some cartoon she didn't recognize. Elle grinned, grabbed at the action figure. Toys in the truck cab made it fairly likely that the driver had a child, and if the driver had a child... that was important information. Elle let the action figure fall back to the cluttered passanger seat and popped the glove compartment open. Inside, much to her delight, she found an opened twinkie and a juice box. The Twinkie was stale, but still edible. There was also a map of the whole state of Virginia in there. Elle grabbed the twinkie, juice box and the map, pulled out of the truck cab and carefully- as silently as possible- shut the door.
She was acutely aware of being noticed. Anyone might look out their window or come out late to put garbage out on the curb, and there they might see her, a little 6 year old in pajamas with bunnies on them and a growing bloom of blood on the abdomen like a hellish rorschach picture, and they would invariably yell at her, ask her what she was doing or, maybe even worse, try to "help".
She had to get out of the open, and get out sooner rather than later. Elle let her eyes adjust, pretended to be some great, wild cat that hunted at night and willed her vision to improve. She scanned the street for the darkest yards, yards where she could more easily disappear into the blackness. Two houses down on her left was a two-storey salt box set far back from the street. No lights on on the stoop or in the windows and the streetlamp outside it was off. Elle hunched over and half-stumbled, half-ran, towards it. She felt much, much safer when she was in the blackness, much more at home. She eyed the yard while drinking the juicebox (God, she'd been thirsty!), trying to take in eveything and anything that might be of use. There was a ceramic frog on the concrete stoop with stupid, cartoon eyes. Elle picked it up, looked it over. Nothing. She lifted up the rattan welcome mat. Nothing. She hit jackpack under the ugly garden gnome with the chipped hat. Taped to the bottom of the garden gnome was a little silver key. Elle looked at it, looked at the door of the house. Moved the key into the lock, and turned, as slowly and quietly and carefully as she could. The door opened with nary a sound and she edged the screen door shut.
The foyer of the little salt box was thick with shadows. Elle squinted and scanned the front hallway, took a step and checked to hear if her ankle cracked or the boards moaned. Nothing. No sounds. Her heart was beating a bit too fast, and she willed for it to shut the fuck up. She crept into a large living room with an old console television sitting on the carpet. Framed photos on the top of it. More photos on the walls. An older model chesterfield with a crochet throw on it's back. Hooked rugs of geese and kittens on the wall, macrame owl decorations from a long-ago time. God, these people had hideous fucking taste.
In the kitchen she found a row of jackets hanging on wooden pegs. There were also raincoats, including one child sized coat. Elle pulled it from it's hook and over her head. Bright pink- not really a colour she'd ever cared for- but it would have to do. In the shoe rack she found corresponding pink boots with cartoon lady bug faces on the toes. Elle scowled, kept looking. Found a pair of small sneakers with velcro straps that looked more or less her size. She undid the velcro straps and wiggled her feet into them. Perfect fit. Which meant there had to be more useful stuff around here that she could use. Elle glanced around. Wandered through the kitchen and found a door. She carefully cracked it open and was met with a staircase leading to what was, no doubt, a basement. Elle watched television and knew that most people, most families, did not have dungeons, but still, for a second or two, she was lit up with nervous energy. She willed herself down the steps, trying to ignore the nervous tremors now running through her legs.
"You stop that right now," Elle hissed at her legs. Sometimes her legs and arms did this, when she was scared, or excited. They started trembling, or shaking, and she had to take deep breaths and talk herself down. But she didn't have time to talk her body down right now. She tiptoed a few steps forward and put one sneakered foot on the first step of the staircase, wincing, almost expecting the stair to crumble under her or an alarm to go off, but the floor held and there was no noise.
Elle smiled and put down the other foot. The floor held steady. No traps. No noise. Slowly, carefully, the 6 year old descended the staircase in this manner until she was at the bottom, standing on concrete ground. She knew from television and the layout of her own "home" that there might be a light switch on the wall, but the idea of turning on the lights scared her. Someone upstairs, coming into the kitchen for a nocturnal drink of water or snack might see the thin band of light under the door. No. Elle squinted harder. There was some light down here coming from a few high-up windows. As the seconds passed, she could see more.
In the far right corner, flush with the wall, was what looked to be a hot water heater and an old boxey washing machine and dryer. Above the washer and dryer was a shelf of some sort. The child moved towards the washer and dryer, eyes slitted in the dark. A box of Tide laundry detergent rested on the shelf above, Fleecy fabric softener in a bottle, Biz stain remover, a box of dryer sheets and a plastic laundry basket. Suspicious eyes scanned the rest of the room. Half the room was concrete, the other half had a very cheap, thin carpetting on it. The thin carpetting side had a beat up old sofa and bean bag chairs, a small Television screwed into the wall and a VCR with a collection of old Disney VHS tapes. There was a large green table with a net across it (Elle wasn't sure what this was for, but she knew instinctively it was for playing some sort of game), and buckets along the wall opposite the washer and dryer, plastic buckets inside wooden cubes. She approached and slid one of the plastic buckets out of it's wooden frame, was confronted with foam puzzle pieces and plastic dinky cars, rag dolls and plastic farm animals. The walls were concrete but large metal boards had been bolted to the walls above the plastic buckets full of toys, and held on the metal boards with magnets were photographs of two children (always the same two) and a scattering of simplistic childrens' drawings etched out in crayon.
One of the pictures was of a small hand, traced with dark ink, then altered to look like a Thanksgiving turkey. The name in the corner, in boxy, stupid printing read: EMMA. Elle pulled this off the magnet board and sneered at it, suddenly furiously angry for a reason she could not consciously make sense of.
"Fucking stupid baby with her stupid hand turkey," Elle hissed in the gloom at the hand-cum-turkey, before crumbling the drawing up and tossing it unceremoniously to the floor. She moved more quickly around the basement after crumpling up that god-damned picture. In a hamper near the washing machine, on the concrete ground, she found a small backpack. "Dora the Explorer", the backpack read, and there was a cartoon of a large-eyed hispanic girl on the back smiling stupidly at the viewer. Elle knew the show because Julie liked it, and even though it was incredibly stupid, she had a tiny little soft sport in her heart for Julie. She had seen Dora three or four times, at Julie's insistence. Utterly, utterly stupid.
"Fucking idiots. What a load of crap," Elle mumbled, but unzipped the backpack and dumped the contents out. Inside was an ancient, squishy banana (luckily, it hadn't appeared to leak it's fruity goodness out inside the pack), a workbook entitled "Math Skills 1" and a pencil bag. Elle left the crap on the floor and crept back towards the washer and dryer. Holding her breath, she gently tugged open the dryer door and looked inside. There were little girl t-shirts and a pair of jeans and socks.
Elle pulled off her rain coat and then, quickly, feeling the sudden need to get dressed and get away, she pulled her pyjama top off her head. The black blossom on the abdomnen was larger and had grown cold and sticky. She let the pyjama top fall to the ground and shrugged into a T-shirt (some stupid, saccharine cartoon was on the front, of course), then wriggled out of the pyjama pants and into the jeans. The jeans were slightly baggy, but not so loose that there was any chance of them sliding down. Elle pulled on a pair of the socks and then quickly rammed her feet back into the sneakers, tightened the velcro straps. The bloody pyjamas she stuffed back into the backpack, along with the state map she'd liberated from the truck driver's glove compartment. Feeling watched and exposed, the child zipped everything into the bag, leaving only the top open for quick additions and crept back up the stairs. She wanted to get out of here (every impulse was telling her that the longer she stayed in this place, the more danger she was in) and once again entered the kitchen. In one of the cupboards she found a sealed box of fruit rollups and that she carefully shoved into the backpack, along with a foil wrapped pop tart. Her brain was screaming at her, suddenly, that she was thirsty as fuck and she had to scream back at it to shut up. Eyes closed, Elle tugged the fridge open. Inside were three unopened cans of pepsi. She added them to what she had looted and crept back into the main hallway. Reconsidered and marched back into the kitchen. She was certain that at any moment someone would ask her what she was doing or she would meet some scary adult in the shadows who would stare at her with dangerous, knowing eyes before tackling her to the ground, but none of that happened. She slid open drawers and found a long serrated knife- the kind used to slice bread- and that was added to the backpack. On the counter was a ceramic cookie jar and, instinct taking over, she found three 20 dollar bills inside. Elle took all three of them.
"Get out of here, now," She whispered to herself in the dark and it took every bit of effort not to physically run from the house. In the hallway a shadow moved across her lower field of vision and she yelped. Waited. No noise from the bedrooms upstairs. The shadow belonged to a rather fat house cat. It stood looking at her dispassionately, then tilted it's head and meowed at her.
"Shut up," Elle hissed at the cat scornfully. In response, it meowed louder, walked up to her, slid it's body against her legs. Elle scowled at it and shooed it away. It stumbled back and stared at her with equal parts indifference and knowing. She frowned at it. Elle had never liked cats. The cat looked at her lazily and then darted back into the gloom and she lost sight of it as it turned a corner in the hallway. She crept backwards to the front door, slowly crept out the door and over the threshold, and gently eased the door shut. She shut her eyes and counted to ten, expecting a trap, expecting bells and whistles to go off now that she had gotten the basics she needed to get back to Mommy, but there was no sudden squealing of alarms, no helicopter spotlights or police shouting mercilessly on loudspeakers. The 6 year old waited another 5 seconds, opened her eyes, and glanced around suspiciously. The street was still washed in that eerie, awful orange and still mercifully empty.
Elle crept off the front stoop, crept around in the garden, head lowered and bent, movements somehow both skitterish and slow. Her body wanted her to just grab one of the pepsis and chug, but she also knew that that would be impulsive, and a waste of resources. In the garden she found the hose and the tap, turned the handle to the right, waited. The water was warm and tasted like metal, but it did its trick and put a damper in that screaming, insistent she was done with her drink she wiped her face with the sleeve of the raincoat, hitched that fucking stupid Dora the Explorer backup higher on her back and marched back to the street. For a second she had considered creeping through backyards, but the idea that a motion sensored flood light might catch her in its beams was worse than being on the main street.
She didn't know where she was, but she knew that if she got to a main road she could check on the map. There had to be a bus stop or something around here no doubt, and when it lightened up a bit, she might be able to buy something at a convenience store with one of the twenty dollar bills and get change for the bus. Then it would be just a matter of waiting for the bus, and getting onboard.
Elle smiled to herself. Began to sing a song Daddy had had liked to play, something old and on "vinyl".
"Oh, mairzy doats and doazy doats and little amsy dive-y... a kiddly divey too, wouldn't you?" The song was silly, it was nonsense, some light-hearted number from a long-ago time in the past called the fifties. It made the dark and black creepy quiet of the night seem somehow not as scary, though.
"Oooohhh, if the words sound quuueeeer, and fun-neee to your earrr, a little bit jum-bled and ji-veeeey, sing: mares. eat. oats... and does. eat. oats...and litttttlllle laaaambss eat iv-eeeeey..."
Elle really wished she knew the time- it was so hard to tell what time it was just going off guessing alone- especially when doing something exciting- and forced herself to walk faster. She had small legs and they would figure out she had escaped soon enough. They, meaning the FBI. They, meaning Spencer.
"Ohhh, mairzy doats, and doazy doats... and little amsy dive-y... a kiddle eat ivy too, wouldn't you?"
She considered Spencer and frowned. Everything had gone wrong with him. It had gone wrong with David, but not nearly as fast. Spencer had freaked out at the drugs, true... and that was part of the fun, also true... but everything had seemed to fall apart other than that, too. Mommy, for instance. She had been even weirder than normal. The shit had hit the fan. Hit it in hours, not weeks. So much planning and work for such a little reward.
Fucking Spencer.
"A kid'll eat ivy, too, wouldn't you?"
Elle had been walking for at least an hour, by her own estimation. She was coated with a second skin of sweat under the little raincoat and her stomach was hurting her. She could feel where it was bleeding again, but the blood felt cold, so it was obviously not bleeding that hard. Elle was walking along a highway, far back from the cars. Tiredly, she sat down on the grass and rifled through the backpack. Pulled out one of the Pepsis and depressed the tab. She drank quickly, waited, burped. The sky was getting light, so it had to be about 6:30 in the morning, something like that. Inside the backpack were the bloody pyjamas. Elle frowned down at them, pulled them out and left them in a bundle where she sat. Damned things. They reeked of that fucking, evil hospital. When she was done with her pepsi she stood up, brushed over her backside and threw the can over her shoulder in the direction of the pyjamas. Continued to walk.
About 20 minutes later the highway seemed to form into something a little less wide and a sidewalk appeared. Elle kept back from the sidewalk, hidden by a copse of trees which ran the length of it. She didn't want to take a chance of walking on it, alone, in the very early morning hours and having some "good samaritan" pull out their cell phone and call the cops because a little kid was unaccompanied by an all-important adult. Elle didn't know if that was likely to happen or not (god, people could be such nosey buggers) and because she didn't know, she refused to take the chance.
About 10 minutes after the little sidewalk started she was in another suburban area. She followed the road and saw a bus stop, with a bench by it. She had no idea how much the bus cost, or even where it was going, but if it followed this road it was going in the general direction she needed. Elle pulled the map out, double checked the road she was on. She frowned at the map, irritated. So many little names, so many lines. All so confusing. The summer house was in a secluded little place called Tappahannock. Elle found it on the map, smiled. From looking at road signs, she knew she was just outside Richmond on Interstate 95. Tappahonnock was on some orange road called 17, nestled in trees with a squiggle of blue jutting in from the ocean. Elle sighed tiredly. Wasn't sure how many miles she had to go. 50? No. More than that. This map was crap. So hard to read.
But she had a general idea now. When she got a bit closer to Tappahonnock, maybe she could call Bucky. Bucky was 41 years old but had the mind of a child even younger than her (but, of course, she had the mind of a much older body). Bucky was Mommy's brother and he lived in a trailer park a stone's throw away from the summer house. Bucky would come get her. He didn't have a car, and he couldn't drive. He wasn't even allowed to have a license. But he had a bicycle with a wagon attached to the back and he was in shape. He'd come get her, or tell Mommy where she was and that would be that. As long as she got a bit closer, first. Had to be a local call, Buck didn't pick up the phone if the call was more than 10 or 12 miles away. He was weird that way.
Elle sat down on the bench and waited.
15 minutes after 7 in the morning a bus sighed to the stop and the doors fluttered open. Elle boarded the bus.
"How much?" She asked confidently, hating the high-pitched youngness of her own voice.
"Where's your mom? Or dad?" The driver said, gazing back out the door, eyes scanning for the mandatory adult chaperone. Elle scowled, told herself to smile.
"I'm twelve," she said confidently, forcing herself to make eye contact with the driver, a guy in his early thirties.
"Twelve?" The driver did not seem convinced.
"I have a growth disorder," Elle mumbled, and averted her eyes. "Anyway... how much is the ticket?"
"A buck fifty," the driver said, staring at her. She hated the way he was staring at her. "Where you going?"
It seemed so innocent, such a natural thing to say that Elle almost told him. Caught herself at the last minute. Remembered a name on the map further east.
"Reedsville,"
"Reedsville? Way out there? You got quite a way."
"Ah, it doesn't matter. My uncle is going to pick me up when I get close," Elle said, but in her head she was picturing burning the bus driver's brains out with the power of her mind, was watching hsi brains smoking and leaking out of his eye sockets and down his ugly, nosey face. "Do you go in that general direction at least?"
"I go north, then you can connect to one of the smaller busses going out that way. Might have to take a greyhound, I think."
"You go near one of those greyhound places?" Elle asked, trying to remain cool.
"Uh... I think the next one is in Fredericksburg," the driver said. "But... seriously, you're not twelve, are you? You look younger than twelve."
Elle blinked. Had the sudden urge to stab him with her serrated kitchen knife, or saw that ugly, fat head off his shoulders. Mr. Fucking nosey-pants. Mind your own fucking business, Mr. fucking nosey-pants...
"I'm twelve and I have a growth disorder," she said again, stiffly. The driver sighed, looked unsure of what to do. Elle made a decision then. She got off the bus. The hair on the back of her neck was prickling up. This asshole was asking waaaay too many questions.
"I thought you wanted...?" The bus driver trailed, trying to remember the destination the little girl had told him. "Reedsville?"
"I'll take the next one," Elle said coldly.
The driver stared at her a moment longer, blinked owlishly. The doors hissed shut and the bus pulled away. Elle watched him go, hating the way her heart was racing with fear.
"Mr. Nosey Pants. Mother fucker," She said sourly, and spat on the ground. But at least she knew busses stopped here, now, and that they went north (all the way to Fredericksburg, at the very least). Maybe she'd go all the way up there and jump on a greyhound bus, then double back to Tappahannock. It was hard to know what to do. All her instincts were telling her to run, or hide, or stay undetected. Not for the first time in her short life, Elle (previously Lise Miller, though she preferred not to think about that dreamy, long ago other life) wished she could become invisible at will. She knew only about busses from books and the television, and from Mommy and Daddy telling her about the "outside world". She loved them, sort of. Even though, in her gut, she knew they were different than normal "parents", maybe more violent... but they had saved her from those assholes who had put her in that hospital when she was little, that crazy torturous place where she was held down and pricked with needles, where blood was drawn even as she screamed at them not to steal it, where their poison had crept into her tiny almost-baby body and made her shiver and shake, made her puke and cry. Mommy and Daddy had saved her from those people, those horrible people that were only spoken of two or three times since they'd taken her from the car seat so many years ago. Her "biological" parents. Just thinking of them made her want to to hit something. Hit it hard.
Elle didn't get on a bus until 8:30 a.m. The previous experience had spooked her. This time, however, she had walked a bit farther and purchased a Baby Ruth at a gas station. When the bus arrived she dropped a dollar and two quarters into the meter, waited for the stub, and took it without a word. The driver didn't say a word, and for that, Elle was profoundly grateful. 6 was young, but 6 didn't mean stupid. It didn't mean baby. And a precocious 6 year old was capable of quite a lot.
Elle slumped into her seat and stared out the window. Her stomach began to cramp, hard, enough to make her moan in pain, about 5 minutes after she sat down and she hissed at it to stop. To be good. Stupid stomach. In that irritatingly juvenile Dora the Explorer backpack, a fruit rollup was waiting for her to eat it. She removed it, tore off the foil, wrapped the red, sticky film of candy around her right pointer finger and began to suckle it. Every minute she spent on the bus and got closer to Mommy, the better she felt.
Please review. I will force myself to write 5 paragraphs for each review (mental games like that are the main way I get things done in life)! And yes, I know this story is over-the-top unrealistic. I can't really believe I came up with it, but I did. I have to finish it now or it will bug me. I also know that I used way too many italics in the first 15 chapters, and again, I am sorry for that. I also know that a 6 year old, even a highly intelligent 6 year old with reactive attachment disorder, wouldn't be *this* precocious and capable- but hey, it's fiction, and I have always loved the evil, precocious child meme. That Rhoda Penmark from The Bad Seed left quite an impression in my mind, as did crazy little Kevin Khatchadourian from "We Need to Talk About Kevin" by Lionel Shriver (I love that movie, and love the book, but I can't see any way to write fan fic about it). Young kids are capable of quite a lot more than we give them credit for, anyway, so while this is unrealistic, it is not as unrealistic as many people might assume at first glance. And while evil children are fun to write, it is important to remember that pure evil is rarely as black-and-white as made out to be in fiction or movies (although, I do personally still believe in evil and sickness, and am not totally convinced that all violent or sadistic human behavior is a product of sickness or mental illness... I do believe in evil, lung-cancer-black evil, but the philsophical argument behind that doesn't play into this fic). If you like the tone of this fic, check out "child of rage" (it's a tv movie, and it is on youtube) or pm me and I might be able to help you with you evil-child-entertainment needs.