Broken Storm Part One by May C. West

of her. One
with a torch in his hand, the other with a gun.
    It brought it back.
    Keiko had been kidnapped in plain sight, in the
middle of the day.
    Someone had shoved a gun to her head and injected
her in the neck.
    Shaking, shivering so violently she practically
caused the chair to fall over, she wanted to bring a hand up and clutch it just
below her ear, exactly where the man had shoved the needle.
    She had to be dreaming, right? This couldn’t be
happening to her. She was so ordinary, so unremarkable. She led a particularly
boring life. There would be no reason for anyone ever to go to the trouble of
kidnapping her. She wasn't worth anything, her family weren’t rich, and she had
no specialized knowledge or expertise.
    And yet Keiko was still tied to the chair, still
facing off against two men before her, the two men with scarred faces, large
muscled bodies, and expressions that made her shake with fright.
    'Get the camera,' one of them growled.
    The other one disappeared behind Keiko, his
footsteps echoing through the large room.
    There was a concrete floor below her, bare and
scratched, and around her was junk, stacked up against the walls, no furniture
to speak of, nothing but her rickety little chair.
    She stared with an open mouth at the man in front
of her. 'What do you want?' she forced the words out, though her voice was
little more than a silent, desperate whisper.
    He didn't answer, he did sneer though, then he
nodded at the other man as he came into view, snatching the camera from him.
'To take your picture, love,' the man finally replied.
    His words and the way he’d said them made Keiko
want to throw up. In fact she twitched forward in a dry retch, squeezing her
eyes closed as she did.
    'This won't hurt a bit,' he assured her as he
bought the camera up. Confusingly, it was a Polaroid. It wasn't a digital camera,
he wasn't even using his phone, and in a second he snapped his finger over the button,
the click of the camera taking the photo reverberating around the room.
    Then he brought his hand around and grabbed the
photo as it was processed.
    Shaking it in one hand, he grinned her way.
    'Why are you doing this?’ she asked, her voice wavering
so pathetically she really did sound like a frightened mouse.
    Except she had every reason to be scared.
    She was in some kind of abandoned room, full of
junk, tied to a chair, facing a man with a gun who had just taken a photo of
her.
    This was beyond serious. This was a level of danger
Keiko would be lucky to live through.
    As the man waited for the photo to develop, he
finally brought it up, and as he did, his unkind features crumpled into an even
unkinder smile.
    'We'll see what happens to this,' he said
cryptically.
    Keiko started to cry. The tears, hot and fast,
dribbled down her cheeks, collected over her chin, rushed down her neck, and
soaked through her collar.
    She shook forward as she did, sobbing, whimpering.
But no matter how much she cried, it didn't change the fact of what was
happening to her.
    After the man took the photo, he nodded her way one
final time, said he’d be back for her, and then the two of them left.
    She heard their footfall echo, then a door closed
somewhere from behind her.
    As they left, they turned the light off.
    Keiko screamed, and her voice echoed around the
room.
    The tears continued to fall, and she shook back and
forth in her chair, overcome.
    She did not know what would happen next. But they
would be back. And no doubt they would bring their guns with them.
    In the dark she sat there, tied to the chair, and Keiko
fell apart.

Chapter 12
    C hase Harlow
    No more stuffing around, no more keeping this to himself.
    It had turned ugly and serious fast, and though Chase
was a lot of things, he was not above the law.
    He called the police, specifically one of his
friends from high school.
    Hell, in the mood Chase was in right now, he could
have called the Army, called the President herself, a personal friend.
    Because he was ready