Chapter Text
20 miles outside Medellin, Colombia
Kate can feel the sweat on the back of her neck, beading up and rolling down beneath neckline of her shirt. She's all in black, and her hair has been slicked back and secured in a braid. She's regulating her breathing. 1-2-3-4, Reeeeelaaaaax.
She stares at the rafters above her head. She's been in the attic for over 12 hours, sucking down water, sleeping when she can, trying not to let the spiders bite her, waiting for the man downstairs to go to his workshop in the backyard.
There's a bucket nearby. When she's needed to piss, she's fitted an empty water bottle between her legs, then poured the contents as quietly as she can into the bucket. It's not perfect, and it stinks, but one does what one can.
It's starting to get dark out, she can see the sky through a small gap of the eave of the house. She hears a click downstairs. A light coming on. She can never hear the man walk. The shuffling, plodding gait she's observed two years ago, it must have been an act. Maybe it's something in the air here, but he's lean and catlike, pacing like a jaguar across the marketplace cobblestones, his wet, blood red tongue tasting the air whenever he opens his mouth to speak.
She hears a door downstairs open, and crawls to press her face to the gap in the eave. She watches Alejandro walk to a disconnected garage, and after a brief glance over his shoulder, shut the door carefully behind him.
Kate sighs. She keeps her eye trained on the door. She waits. Five minutes. Ten. Twenty. Satisfied that he was not going to leave, she scrambles over to the attic door. She pulls it gently open, and drops easily into the hallway below.
She considers a moment, then walks into the hallway bathroom, and keeping her weapon trained on the open doorway, takes a piss in the toilet of the man she's followed for the past eighteen months. She doesn't flush, and she doesn't wash her hands, just jerks up her fly and rebuttons her pants before padding lightly down the stairs.
She crosses the yard, the grass so green she wonders if there are bodies planted here, her weapon drawn. She reaches the door, which she sees isn't closed but instead left slightly ajar.
"Come in, Kate." His voice calls.
She hesitates for only a fraction of a second, before shouldering the door open and stepping, crossways, into the room.
Alejandro's back is to her. He's sitting at a table, cans of house paint on the floor around him, heaps of plastic sheeting. His hands are busy with a small wood and paper model. Kate almost laughs out loud when she sees that it's the U.S. Capitol Building.
"Are you here to kill me?" And his voice is infuriatingly calm, with a slight, sing-song lilt at the end of the sentence.
"Maybe," she whispers, and curses the tremor in her hand.
He turns and looks at her, his dark eyes serious and somewhat chiding. She instinctively lowers her gun. Never point a gun at me again.
"There are some questions that only have two possible answers, 'yes' and 'no.' That was one of them," he drags his gaze over her. "Your answer leads me to believe that what you really meant to say was no."
He turns back to the model. "Sit down, Kate."
She takes a seat behind his right elbow, his gun hand.
"No," He says. "Over here, across from me, where I can see you." A pause. "Holster your weapon."
She stands up, and crosses to the other side of the table, her eyes locked on his bent head. Her gun stays out.
"You're always looking in the wrong places, Kate. You can't see what's going on in here." Alejandro sits up, tapping his temple with the first two fingers of his left hand. Kate watches him reach under the table, and the nose of her gun leaps up, but she's too late to stop the bullet ripping through her leg.
She collapses into the chair behind her, and the gun slips out of her nerveless fingers. It misfires as it hits the ground, and Kate hears the tortured ping and gush of a punctured can of house paint.
Alejandro walks around the table, picking up Kate's weapon from off the floor. He takes out the clip, and empties it leaving a single round in the chamber. He drops the remaining bullets, and Kate hears them skip across the floor, the bright high notes of brass on concrete scraping against her ringing eardrums.
She tries to stand up, but a vicious kick to her wounded leg sends her into a harsh scream of agony. As she sucks desperate pockets of air through her teeth -- RELAXRELAXRELAXRELAX R-E-L-A-X, R-E-L-A-X -- she watches Alejandro pick up a plastic bag.
"No," she mutters, as he walks over to her, shaking the bag open, his eyes sorrowful.
She scrambles out of the chair, reaching for the gun, but Alejandro is already on her. He grabs her by the hair, dragging her to the floor where he uses his superior weight to pin her in place, on her stomach, between his legs.
She's screaming. She's shaking her head back and forth, scraping her cheek against the floor. There are tears in her eyes as she feels the bag slip over her head. The world becomes a mass of shadows, the white plastic diaphanous enough to allow for light, but too opaque for her to make out more than shapes. Moisture from her breath condensates on the inside of the bag, and it wets her face, colder than her tears. She desperately tries to calm her breathing but it's no use. Her vision is going black.
She feels her muscles begin to jerk and spasm involuntarily in a last desperate bid for freedom. She feels Alejandro's weight, becoming somehow heavier. She feels his fingers at her neck, so warm, and weirdly comforting. Over the roaring in her ears, she hears what sounds like a soothing shushing sound, and her name, over and over again.
Then everything goes black.