Hurricane Heart

Hurricane

The second the bald Soulless, whose name I didn’t yet know, wandered off with a phone in his hand, I prepared to attack the one that was called George. I would hurt him if I needed to.

But he was too good. Despite looking a little dim, he was surprisingly sharp. Without even missing a beat, he stepped forward to where I stood and grabbed me, turning me around and shoving me by the shoulders towards the front of the van. It was parked right at the edge of the car park, so in front of it was a low wall, only a little above waist height, and then there was an opening at least as tall as me, right up to the ceiling, running the whole way round the car park.

My heart which was already pounding far too fast began to hammer in double time. I could barely breathe. He was going to push me out, wasn’t he? Despite what Scarrus said, I certainly didn’t believe that killing me would be, in their words ‘inconvenient.’ They wanted Arjan. Not me. Oh God. Why had I left him? Was he in any danger?

I began to fight against George's iron grip. I didn’t care that my hands were tied; I had to get away from him. I struggled and writhed and screamed, but he was too strong, and I was too powerless, and he shoved me forward so that I fell into the low wall.

But he didn’t push me over it. Not yet.

‘Sit down,’ he grunted. For once, I complied, noticing how my legs shook with every step. I was ashamed of my cowardice and of the emotional wreck I was becoming, but now, sitting defenceless on the ledge of a window five storeys up and with nothing to stop me from falling, was not a time for bravery.

For a moment, George did nothing but study me. I studied him back, looking him in the eye every time he glanced up.

‘What do you want with me?’ I asked. I made it sound very reasonable. I didn’t shout or scream or cry. I didn’t threaten. But if what I had intended had come across at all, my tone was so dark and my words full of so much danger that I actually saw him shudder.

‘You’re really not as important as you think you are,’ George chuckled. ‘No, what we need is not you personally, but the knowledge and power that you can provide for us. Combined with the Secret, we could bring down the Dreamers for good.’

I narrowed my eyes, tilting my head to the side. He had kidnapped me; he was going to pay for it. Sure, dying tonight would be pretty damn irritating, but anything else, surely I could manage.

‘That’s not it though, is it?’ I challenged.

‘Of course it’s not everything, Hurricane, but it’s actually very useful that you don’t know it all,’ he said, smirking still, looking at me through dark eyes. ‘Where’s Olaf got to anyway?’

I assumed that Olaf was the bald one, and I watched with hatred, my mind whirring as I tried to plot an escape, as George moved a little further away and peered round the side of the van, out into the otherwise almost empty car park. Seeing another two or three cars parked around, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if an innocent person happened to wander in and see all of this taking place.

Within moments of George wandering off to look for Olaf, the two of them returned, Olaf’s long, leather trench coat sweeping out behind him like a storm.

‘Get in the van,’ he ordered.

‘What?’ George began, this being news to him as much as it was to me.

‘I said—‘ Olaf rounded on him, the taller by far, and evidently the leader of the two.

George moved towards me and heaved me up from where I sat. Still I resisted, fighting against him every step of the way. I wasn't planning on going down without a battle. I pulled against him as he shoved me towards the back of the van, its doors now open, but I was weak and defenceless, and he got me towards it with one hard push. I staggered forwards towards the step up, unable to put my hands out to protect myself, and before I could even look round George and Olaf were together lifting me up, throwing me face-first onto the hard floor of the back of the van. The doors shut and locked before I could get myself up, no matter how many times I screamed and threw myself against the wall. Although the hatch that allowed the people in the front to look through to the back was closed, I could hear them getting in, and the engine began rumbling.

I continued to kick the walls, hoping to create as much damage as possible. Olaf pulled out of the space at ridiculous speed, however, so that I fell clumsily into the opposite wall, all of my weight landing on my right shoulder, slumping down onto the ground. Through the twists and turns of the ramps, which he sped down all of, I couldn’t get to my feet. I was shaken and rocked from side to side, in the back of the van, my hands bound, fighting to even sit up.

I had to get out of here. I had to find Arjan. This was about so much more than me, or him, right now. For the very sake of the Dreamers, I had to find him and we had to get out of here.

But they would follow us. If we went underground, they would follow us. If we drove out of the city, even if we went halfway across Europe, they would still follow us. We couldn’t just outrun them.

And until that changed, no matter what I did for Arjan, he was ultimately staring death in the face. They wouldn’t stop pursuing him, and there were so many of them—me and him against the entire force of the Soulless. The other Dreamers wouldn’t care. They’d get all the knowledge they could and then kill him without remorse. It wasn’t heartless, it was just safety. His life; or all of ours. One life; or hundreds. The choice was already made.

I looked wildly around the van. We seemed to be out of the car park by now, speeding along roads and swerving round what I assumed to be bends so that I flew into the sides every single time. I had no idea where we were going, but I had to act fast.

These two men were evidently Soulless, but they seemed to only be soldiers. They did the dirty work—kidnapping, assassinations, even driving, so that high up men like Scarrus and Erik and Kovar could keep their hands clean. And, because they were only in these low positions, they were big and strong and threatening, but not overly intelligent.

They had thrown me in the back of the van.

The back of the van, which contained all of their weapons.

Hope surged through me, but all the guns in the world were useless if I couldn’t actually fire them. I had to get my wrists untied first.

Most things were contained in thick, black boxes, but they were unlocked, so, with unnecessarily awkward manoeuvre, I managed to open each box one by one. The first two contained guns, although I didn’t have time to look at what type. The next contained drugs, and the one after that a chilling looking syringe. The fifth box, however, had what I was looking for. Scarrus was far from being the only Soulless who liked to give in to his theatrical side, and in this next box; a long, thin one, were two swords. One must have been nearly three feet long, but the other was more like a knife.

That was what I needed. Craning my neck over my shoulder so that it hurt, I painstakingly moved the knife into a sort of upright position, only for it to fall over the second we rounded a corner. Biting my bottom lip, I tried again, propping it up against the side of the box, only for it to tip over again as soon as I put any pressure on it. Cursing quietly, I glanced around frantically for another source of inspiration.

One of the boxes had a loop-like handle on it. Clumsily picking up the knife, I tried to slot it into the gap between the loop and the side of the box, and realised that I could wedge it in perfectly between the two, almost stabbing myself in the back a couple of times in the process. The knife now stood almost upright, finally held rigid, so that I could very carefully place the rope between my wrists against the sharp side of the blade and push against it to cut the bonds.

We rounded a bend and I slipped, the knife missing cutting deep into my arm by millimetres. My breathing even faster than before, I tried again, failed, and again. I bit into my lip so hard that I could taste hot beads of blood, but this was a desperate situation.

The van seemed to be slowing a little; whether it was lights or traffic or the fact that we’d reached our final destination I did not know, but I seized the opportunity. I rubbed the rope against the taut blade, feeling it scratch against my skin on more than one occasion, prickling with pain, but far from being anything I couldn’t handle.

The van started up again—we weren’t there yet—and I continued to press against it, rubbing and rubbing and rubbing, biting deeper into my lip, my muscles tensed, wanting to scream. But I had made a groove in the rope now and was using the knife like a saw, slowly cutting through the thick material. I could feel it getting thinner, and I gasped and cursed as the van swerved and the knife jabbed into my arm, hopefully not drawing blood, but I was unable to tell for sure.

I was so close, and we were slowing down again, and this time I could hear voices—excited voices coming from the front, and I knew we were nearly there, and the engine stopped for good. The voices went on but I could hear a door ominously opening, and my heart rate trebled, and I couldn’t breathe, and I kept pushing against the knife—something that was unbelievably hard to do whilst in this position. And then someone got out of the car, and the door shut, and then so did the other one, and I wasn’t going to make it, I wasn’t going to make it—

And I felt the blunt side of the knife fall through the space in between my wrists and against my back. I shook my arms violently, pulling them apart, and letting the ropes fall off. I had done it! I had freed myself.

There was just time to reach into one of the boxes and pull out a gun—a bullet gun; not a stun gun, before the key turned in the lock on the back.

Arjan

‘Well?’ Bruno demanded, characteristically impatient. The sadistic smile never left Erik’s face, and Elize was close to me once again, moving slowly round the chair so that she was behind me. I couldn’t see her, and I had no idea what she was up to. I heard her whisper and felt a hand on my shoulder, shivers running down my spine. Jeroen got up and left the room wordlessly, his phone out, most likely going to meet some more Soulless and intimidate Hurricane. Where the hell was she? Was she alright? Was she even still here?

‘I’m not telling you anything,’ I spat, trying to keep my tone cool and emotionless, despite how I was burning up inside from fear and frustration.

Erik took a step towards me, holding out his knife.

‘Are you sure about that?’ he asked.

What could I say? What could I do? I wouldn’t betray Hurricane or the Dreamers—whatever I thought of them, they weren’t the ones threatening me with pain and possibly even death—but I wanted to get out of here alive. I had fought all night, and I wasn’t going to give up now.

‘You tell us, and you’ll be rewarded,’ Elize whispered in my ear. ‘We’ll let you go.’

‘No we won’t!’ Bruno snapped, jumping up and storming over to stand beside Erik. If I wasn’t so scared, the situation would almost be comical—the tiny, stocky, pink-faced man next to his tall, skinny, collected leader.

Erik gave him a stony glare. ‘Yes we will. You can take your rage out on the girl.’

‘Don’t you dare touch her!’ I roared, giving it everything I could.

‘I’ve told you, Arjan,’ said Elize, moving so that I could see her in front of me once again. ‘She doesn’t love you. It’s all a lie. And you won’t care about her for much longer.’

Once again, her words stung, because they were so plausible, but I couldn’t allow myself to believe that even for a second.

‘Well, what’s it going to be then?’ asked Erik. He was inches away from me now. He rolled up my sleeve and placed the icy edge of the dagger against my bare flesh.