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It's Dolly's Birthday
Chapter 13.
Dolly wakes up...
Gabrielle came back to awareness gradually, but quickly. There was no sudden, rude awakening, but she didn't remember any particular duration to the experience.
Her head throbbed from the repeated blows dealt her by her captors. The crude methods the Meqs had used ought to have given her a clue, but she couldn't hear past the pounding inside her skull to think of it.
She lay where she was and wallowed in her pain for a very long time. The agony came at her like the surf on a rocky shore, bringing with it a swelling nauseous feeling that didn't just sit in her stomach like a bad flour dumpling, but somehow fired of every nerve ending in her body. But gradually, the insistence of it faded and after a time she could sense more than the infernal pounding.
She was lying on her side, most of her body weight supported by her right shoulder and hip, on a gritty concrete surface. Fighting the glue of dried tears, she forced her eyes open. A lock of her hair had fallen across them. She tossed her head to get clear of it and instantly regretted her rash action.
She moaned softly and let her head sink back down to the cool floor as a fresh wave of pain and nausea swept over her. She could not contain herself and retched a small pool of bile onto the floor. Gasping, she squirmed away from the stench of it, afraid that she might not be able to keep her head up and would end up with her face in the stuff.
"Hey! The princess is awake!" came a male voice from above. She tried to twist her body to see, but could not. The effort exhausted her and she slumped back down on the floor, panting from her exertion.
"Good afternoon, princess." Another -- different -- male voice. "How are you this fine day?"
This voice Dolly recognized. He was the one who'd taken her from her home. He'd mauled her while he'd had his hands on her. He'd smashed his hand against the side of her head until she lost consciousness. Before she'd gone under, she'd made a promise to feed him his own arm. She intended to make good on the promise.
"Fuck off!" she instructed him without feeling. He laughed.
"You really should be more polite. The powers that be are interested in your case. I hear that they are quite persnickety when it comes to protocol. Telling them to fuck off just will not do."
Dolly said nothing. Presently, she could hear the sounds of two bodies moving away from her prison. From the nature of the sounds, she guessed she was in a depression... a pit of some sort.
She began to take a further inventory of her situation. Her head hurt. That was point one. Point two... her shoulders were killing her and she couldn't seem to get the leverage to roll over.
Ah!
Her hands were bound together behind her back. She porpoised her body and discovered that her legs were also bound together. Bound as she was at wrist and ankle, she was held stiff in a posture she shouldn't have been able to get out of.
She couldn't get upright because she couldn't use her legs separately as a counterbalance and support when they were bound together. She couldn't roll onto her back, because with her arms bound behind her, she would have to rise too far off the ground and be both off-balance and in incredible pain.
Or so, she surmised, would her captors have reasoned. Otherwise her bonds made no sense. But they had reckoned without her essential nature. She was both stronger and more determined than anyone these individuals were likely to have met.
She had a surprise for them.
Stifling her grunts of effort and groans of agony, she worked her way across the floor until she was near a wall. Panting again from the exertion, she rested for a moment, her knees bent and her feet pressed up against the wall.
She noticed in passing that there was a rusty stain about three and a half feet over her head that ran in a line around the whole... what was this place? A room? A tank? Too small to be a swimming pool. A big bathtub?
There was a water tap and a drain. The wall on three sides was higher than the fourth and, although she could not see very far in that direction, she got the impression that there was a window on that side. She wondered what it was that the window faced. And was it for looking out or looking in?
Gathering her strength for further effort, she levered herself up onto her shoulders, ignoring the roaring, throbbing pain in her head with an indomitable force of will. Then she forced her elbows apart. A sudden stabbing pain in her wrists made her gasp, but she bit back any audible exclamation.
Gradually, slowly, with much pain, she passed her body through the loop of her arms, sliding her bound hands under her butt, lifting her feet through the loop until her arms, still bound, were in front of her. Her shoulders felt like they'd been ripped from their sockets and she had nasty cramps in her leg muscles, but she feel a surge of triumph at her accomplishment.
Once she could see what she was bound with -- plastic cable ties, one each around wrists and ankles -- it was child's play for her to free herself. She held her arms up before her and bit down on the release of the cable tie, slipping the ratchet until the white plastic strip fell on the floor. With her hands free, albeit shaking, she had the tie off her ankles in even less time.
Moving with exaggerated care, both for stealth and for the sake of her aching head, she crouched against the low place in the wall around her prison and looked out.
Having only been in a church once in her short life, and then never having seen one from her position or in the state of repair of this one, she might be forgiven for not realizing at once where she was. For her part, she saw that she was in a chamber... an empty pool... at one end of a long space.
Directly in front of her was a stepped platform with several symmetrical levels that dropped to a floor level perhaps four or five feet below her eye level. Out in the middle of the larger open space beyond, there was a pile of debris. Its nature was not readily apparent to the little doll, although Drummond would have recognized pews and other church furniture.
Seated on a couple of pieces of the pile were two indistinct figures in gray coveralls. One of them looked to be dealing cards. The other had a deadly-looking rifle in his hand. Both of them were smoking cigarettes. The smoke filled the room with a distance-fogging haze.
Dolly looked at the side and back walls of the place and the ceiling. The ceiling was high, of dark wood, tongue and groove boards laid close and nailed to the rafters. The window openings, now covered with plywood, had peaked arches of white stone at the top and white stone sills at the bottom. The window hole in the back wall -- it would be the front wall of the building, but it was in the rear of the sanctuary -- was quite large.
Slowly, she began to recognize the common elements between this place and her one experience in an operating church, although the differences between this former Baptist church and a Catholic church might seem to outweigh the similarities, there was the same essential churchness about both of them that Dolly, with her simpler, more elemental perceptions, untainted by a lifetime of being subjected to sectarian rivalries, could sense where a more sophisticated person might not.
So she was in a church. She remembered vaguely hearing that churches were sometimes abandoned or sold when their congregations could no longer support their upkeep or chose to move to better quarters.
When she thought about it, she was puzzled by the odd disparity between that concept and the idea that there were churches in the world five hundred or a thousand years old, in continuous use for all that time. But it was irrelevant to her current situation, so she thrust it aside with characteristic impatience.
Her guards were talking quietly to one another, but she could not make out more than the sounds and rhythms of their speech. She thought to get closer and try to gather some intelligence, but the openness of the sanctuary dissuaded her and she decided that she would have to concentrate on escape. And that would involve, she predicted, finding the back door and doing so before her captors realized that she was no longer bound and helpless in the baptismal font.
She ducked behind a side wall and stretched to her full height with her arms extended against the wall, testing her strength and flexibility. She found herself wanting, but her standards were improbably high. She was in good enough shape to outperform any average specimen of humanity. Or, she amended, of Mequilla.
Moving in slow-motion, she levered herself out of the tank and snuck across the platform to a side door. Praying that the floors wouldn't creak under her light weight, she let herself out and slipped down the stairs to the lower level.
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