28 • Starkey

He is abducted in the middle of the night. It’s different from the time the clappers came for him. This time his attackers are of the stealth kind, rather than from the school of brute force. They sneak up to him instead of bludgeoning their way through the rank and file. Without a commotion to alert him, Starkey has no warning before the tranq bullet pierces his thigh. Not a tranq dart, which is kinder and gentler, but a full-payload chemical bullet that explodes like a bug on a windshield but only after penetrating deep into the epidermis. Tranq bullets hurt like hell, even if they don’t do any real damage.

The pain jolts Starkey awake just long enough to register that he’s been tranq’d, then he’s swallowed by unconsciousness once more.

• • •

He’s awakened sometime later by a slap to the face. A hard one. Then another, because the first slap didn’t quite do the job. The third slap is purely gratuitous on the part of the assailant, whoever he is.

“Awake yet, stork boy?” says a man with tousled hair and a severe expression. “Or do you need another one?”

“Go to hell,” Starkey grunts out. That summons forth another slap, this one backhanded and brutal. It would sting quite a lot if he weren’t still numb from the tranqs. He feels blood on his face, though. The guy has a ring that cut Starkey’s cheek.

“Whoever you are, you’re a dead man,” Starkey tells him, trying not to slur his words. “My storks will find you, kill you, and string you up as a warning for all the other idiots out there.”

“Will they, now?” The man is amused. Sure of himself. This does not bode well for Starkey, and so Starkey takes a moment to measure the situation.

He’s outside in the woods. It’s chilly. Starkey can see only in scant grays and deep royal blues. It must be dawn. He’s bound but not gagged, which means they want him to be able to talk. Negotiate perhaps. His attacker, however, is angry. Very angry.

“Let me go, and we’ll pretend this never happened,” Starkey suggests. He knows it won’t work, but how the man responds will define Starkey’s parameters.

The man’s response is a swift kick to Starkey’s ribs, and he feels at least two of them crack. Starkey falls to the side, moaning in pain that can’t be quelled by the tranqs still in his system. He now knows his parameters. They’re roughly the dimensions of a coffin.

“Don’t break him,” hisses a voice in the shadows. Barely a voice at all—more like the breathy rasp of ghost. Starkey sees a figure shift. The silhouette of a shoulder, but the rest is obscured by a tree. “The less he’s broken, the more he’s worth.”

The man backs off, but he doesn’t seem any less angry. Although he’s not all that big, not all that muscular, his simmering rage makes up for it. Starkey tries not to let the pain in his side drive him toward panic. There’s never been a trap he hasn’t been able to get out of. He escaped from the Juvey-rounders who came to unwind him, and killed one of them in the process. He escaped from the Graveyard, even though he had to shatter his own hand to do it. The lesson? He can escape from any situation . . . but he must be willing to do the unthinkable.

“Let me kill him!” says the brutal one, clearly the enforcer of this team. “Let me kill him and be done with it.”

“Stick to the plan,” rasps the voice in the shadows. “He’s worth more to us alive.”

Starkey tries to calculate how far he might be from safety. The growing light confirms that it’s daybreak. They took him sometime during the night. He could be hours away from his storks, or just outside the gate of the abandoned power plant they’ve been calling home. The plant is on the banks of the Mississippi. He tries to listen for the river, but realizes that the river moves so slowly, you couldn’t hear it if it were right behind you. You can smell it, though. He takes a deep whiff. The air does not have the unpleasant smell of organic decay married to chemical runoff that typifies the Mississippi. His panic begins bubbling to the surface again.

And this on what should be the day of his greatest harvest camp attack.

“What do you want?” he asks.

Finally the second assailant steps out of the shadows. There’s a third one too. Shorter than the other two, lingering back. He holds something in his hand. Could be a weapon of some sort. While the enforcer’s face is fully exposed, these other two wear black ski masks hiding their faces in wool-knit obscurity.

“Beg for your life,” says the third assailant, with the same breathy hiss as the other masked kidnapper.

“I don’t beg,” announces Starkey, and his posturing is met with silence. As his arms are tied behind his back, he has to squirm up to a sitting position. “But I’m sure we can work this out.”

“We know who you are,” says the enforcer. “There’s a reward on your head—dead or alive. I prefer dead.”

Now he thinks he knows their play. They intend to turn him in for the reward—but they could have just kept him unconscious until they handed him over. They want him to make a better offer, and with the clapper movement behind him, he has the resources to do it.

“Name your price,” Starkey says. “I pay better than the Juvenile Authority.”

The enforcer seethes. “You think this is about money? We’re not interested in yours, or the Juvies’ money either.”

Starkey wasn’t expecting that.

The enforcer looks to the second assailant as if for permission. Number two, who is clearly in charge, nods. Starkey suspects that it’s a woman, but the shadows are still too thick to be sure.