A florescent strip light flickers overhead, emitting a high-pitched buzz, as the five of us move in quick, silent efficiency down the corridor. There are rooms off to the left and the right. We pass open doors that give way to empty, bare concrete boxes beyond. No office furniture. No admin workers. Just the occasional smashed-up cardboard box and in one room a broken wooden stool with only three legs instead of the four it obviously started out with.
Lowell proceeds with military precision, turning left and then right as the corridor snakes out in front of us, until we hit another heavy metal security door. Another code goes into another keypad. Another alarm. This time there are people on the other side of the door. Hastily thrown-together work spaces, photo-fit images taped to walls, ringing telephones and curious glances welcome us as we head toward an office with an open door at the far end of the vast room.
Lowell goes inside, as do I. Dad follows behind, but the nameless men peel off to various workstations, dismissed with a perfunctory glare from Lowell.
“Why don’t you have a seat?” Lowell nods her head at a chair facing what I assume is her desk. When Dad shimmies around the unnecessarily large desk and sits down on the same side as her, I almost vomit again, right there on the floor. This is fucking crazy.
“Now, since you don’t care about my photos just now, I’m hesitant to try and show you any more,” Lowell says. “Your father has other ideas, however. He feels you ought to see why it’s important for us to find your sister. Are you willing to listen to what we have to say this time? To let us show you what you’ve gotten yourself into?”
I glance at Dad; he doesn’t look away, though I get the impression he wants to. “I’m kind of a captive audience right now,” I snap. “Let’s just get this over with.”
“Good.” Lowell opens up a laptop that’s sitting on her desk and frowns, concentrating on the screen for a moment. She clicks a couple of times, apparently finds whatever she’s looking for, and then spins the thing around so I can see the display. It’s footage from a security camera of some description, dark and blurry. It’s hard to make much out at first, but it looks like there’s snow on the ground. Lowell reaches over and hits the play button, and the still image comes to life. There’s no sound. I see a dark figure walking quickly down an abandoned street, alone, and my heart feels like it’s swelling in my chest. It’s Lexi. I can tell by the huge, sloppily knitted scarf she has wound around her neck—she spent three months trying to finish that thing before winter arrived, and then refused to leave it at home once it was done.
I suddenly know what I’m watching. I know what I’m being shown, and I do not want to see it. I lean forward in my seat, reaching for the laptop, to turn it away, to close the damn thing, to just make it stop, but then Alexis freezes on the screen. She just stops dead in the middle of the sidewalk, her focus fixed on something or someone I can’t see. A second later, I do see what she’s looking at: a long stream of motorcycles burn down the road—three, five, eight—I don’t know how many of them. Half the actual road is cut off on the screen, so it could be thirty for all I know. Alexis stands and watches them pass, the strange sight of so many men on their bikes, ripping through the center of Seattle obviously enough to stop her in her tracks.
“What the hell is this?” I whisper.
Dad just shakes his head. “Keep watching, sweetheart.”
The bikers disappear. Alexis remains still a moment longer, dark hair flying about her face, being teased at by a silent wind. She steps up to the side of the curb looks up and down, as though she’s going to cross over. However, before she can take another step, a dark figure, a man, runs out of the side street behind her and falls to his knees, reaching out a hand to my sister. He clearly frightens her; she visibly jumps, and skitters backward away from the person.
Alexis pauses, as though trying to decide what to do, and then she rushes forward, bending toward the man on the ground, unwinding that hideous scarf from around her neck.
“She was helping someone?” I ask. I don’t take my eyes off the screen, and neither Lowell nor my father respond. I’m supposed to see for myself. I’m scared though. I’m a coward. I don’t want to see her get hurt, no matter how badly she’s hurt me.
The two people on the screen are talking, that much is clear, and it’s incredibly frustrating that I don’t know what’s being said. I squint at the laptop, even though there’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to lip read what’s coming out of their mouths. The quality of the image is so poor and pixelated that I can’t make out their actual facial features. Alexis offers out a hand, but the man on the ground recoils backward. Confusing. He was reaching for her only a second ago, but now he seems scared. He starts scrambling away from her, arms and legs working against the snow on the ground, trying to put some space between them. And then his fear suddenly makes more sense. He’s not trying to get away from Alexis. He’s trying to get away from the group of men that are approaching her from behind.
I count eight of them.
“Oh my god.” I cover my mouth with my hands, half considering covering my eyes, too. Alexis never turns around. She never knows the men are behind her. The tallest of all of them, broad in the shoulders with a pronounced limp, is the first to reach my sister. He clamps a hand over her mouth and physically lifts her off the ground. Her legs kick out desperately, but the guy doesn’t put her down. Another one of the men grabs hold of the person still lying in the snow and tries to wrestle him up, but he doesn’t succeed. Instead, he takes him by the arm and then drags him back into the same alleyway he appeared from. The other men follow. My sister is carried out of shot and into the darkness by the tall guy with a limp.