operation black widow
SATURDAY, APRIL 14
(EIGHT DAYS INTO PETER’S CAPTIVITY)
(ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-TWO DAYS BEFORE HE IS RESCUED)
Peter and Cassie have been planning nonstop since Operation Falcon went south.
Peter keeps her up and running in the cell by playing ‘Red Light, Green Light.’ They don’t play too much, afraid of losing the precious few calories they’re given, but it keeps the girl’s hopes up, which is worth more now than a couple hundred calories. “Green light,” he whispers, and Cassie dashes to the toilet, patting the wall when she reaches it. “Red light!” She pauses like a deer in headlights, smiling.
It’s so good to see her smile.
Peter has never thought too much about kids, given that his childhood was so scattered, but having Cassie around makes him think about it way more. He always thought he’d be a scientist or an engineer when he grew up, but… He wouldn’t mind being a teacher now. Elementary school or middle school or something. He likes being around her—her infectious laughter and naive humor and infinite curiosity.
Lunch comes late, around three o’clock. Two happy meals alongside a gift from one of their kinder captors, a woman named Ava. Cassie squeals when she sees it—a brown paper bag stapled shut—and looks up at Peter for permission. It smells like food. “Can I open it?” she asks, face eager with hunger.
Peter’s own stomach gnaws on itself; he’s so hungry he’s been biting his fingernails to the quick for the extra couple calories. He saw it on Survivor once: a fingernail is two calories. “Sure thing,” he says, and the girl squeals.
Seven-year-olds shouldn’t be so excited about getting a meal that’s barely enough to keep them alive.
She tears open the bag: apples. They are apples. There are six of them inside, and Peter’s never loved anything more.
Saliva pools in his mouth; one-handed, Cassie’s already sinking her teeth into a reddish gala with a crunch, making little joyful sounds as she does.
They separate the apples between them: two for Cassie, four for Peter, and they eat them whole—all the way to the core, seeds and stems and all. “Daddy says apple seeds are poisonous,” she says, sucking on one like a mint. “But you have to eat, like, a hundred apples.”
“Your dad’s a smart guy,” says Peter.
“I want a hundred apples,” she says. “Two hundred. A thousand.”
Cassie always says stuff like this now, her sentences tainted by hunger.
“I want apple pie,” she says. “Jim makes apple pie. He always lets me eat some apples before we put it in the oven.”
Jim, her stepdad. Right. She’s always talking about her parents: Scott, the one stuck down the hall who’s slowly losing his mind; her mom, who works part-time at the retirement home; and Jim, her stepfather who’s also a police officer.
“And applesauce!” she says, with her mouth full. “With cinnamon.”
Peter can play this game: “Ooh, yes, apple jelly on toast.”
“Apple pancakes!”
“Caramel apples.”
“Apple cake.”
“Apple strudel.”
“What’s strudel?”
Peter blinks. “Uh,” he says, and he reaches automatically for his phone in his pocket. Fuck. He keeps forgetting that they took it. His hand still drifts to his pocket every time he wants to know the time or text his friends or know some random fact about apples. “I don’t remember. Some kind of pastry-bread thing, I think.”
“Like toast?”
“Toast isn’t a pastry, Cass.”
“But toast is bread and you said bread is paste-ry.”
“Pastry.”
She tries, “Paste-ry.”
“Pastry, Cass.”
“That’s what I said!”
They eat the rest of the apples quickly.
Today’s the day, then. They have to escape today. With the apples, they’ll have enough calories to sustain the run, any fighting they have to do, and the way out. Sure, Peter’s leg is completely fucked, but if they don’t go now, then they never will. His body is adapting to the sedative, He has to get out of here before Charlie comes after his knee again. It’s healed halfway, but shattered—he can feel the shards of bone beneath the skin, trapped in limbo between muscles and fat.
Which, by the way, he’s losing by the second. He’s already lost probably five pounds, and he’s been here barely two weeks, his mind on a constant overdrive for food. He’s still thinking about that imaginary apple pie. “Cassie,” whispers Peter as they eat. “you remember the plan?”
Crunching on a french fry from her Happy Meal, she nods furiously.
“Good. Let’s go over it again.”
There’s a code on the door. Peter knows because he hears the beeping every time they move in and out of the cell. It’s a series of numbers, eight of them, probably a zero to nine code. Numbers. Peter’s smart—he’s in multivariable calculus. So how difficult could it be to figure out a door code? He’s listened so many times that he knows the pitches by heart, like a song. There’s always eight differently pitched numbers followed by a long affirmative beeeep. An eight letter combination with eight numbers. If the same pitch equals the same number and higher pitch equals higher number….
He listens to those eight beeps over and over and over again. They don’t have any pen or paper, so he dips his fingers in sink-water and writes on the concrete wall like he used to do at the public pool—drawing pictures in the sun-dried concrete with water and pretending he was a painter until the sun evaporated his works.
Cassie will draw as he does it. They’ll play Guess-The-Thing, a game Cassie came up with, to pass the time: someone draws a picture of an object and someone else guesses. Peter knows there’s a real title for the game, but he honestly can’t remember it.
There’s only a few possible number codes that Peter comes up with: one, if the highest pitch equals the highest number; two, if the highest pitch equals the lower number; and three, if the highest pitch equals proximity to the keypad’s motherboard.
Three possible options.
He memorizes each code, and then he memorizes it again. Cassie tests him on it, too, just to make sure he won’t forget.
This escape plan should give him enough time to insert all three codes. One of them has to be right.
Peter hates seven o’clock. Even without a clock in his cell, he can tell that the time is coming like it’s a blade at his throat. He can feel it in his gut—it’s only been eight days of this shit, and he can feel it coming as though he’s already cuffed to that cold vibranium chair. “Cassie?” he whispers, once they’re only minutes away.
She looks at him, her little brows forming a determined glare—God, she’s such a good kid. “I’m ready,” she whispers back.
“Get the cord,” he says. She crawls over to the Treasure Chest, that bucket in the corner, and pulls it out—a cotton cord made from braided strips of their bedsheets. Cassie gives it to him, and he ties the cord around his waist so it won’t fall.
Then Cassie loops his arms around his neck and her legs around his ribcage, clinging to him like a monkey; painstakingly, he crawls up the wall and to the ceiling above the door. He sticks his hands firmly to the ceiling and his legs as well, although his left one hurts so badly that his vision goes blurry for a moment.
He can do this.
He can do this.
He’s Spider-Man. He’s Spider-Man. He can do this.
She lays on his chest, clinging tightly to him; Cassie’s not a fan of heights. Just a few minutes more. They stick to the ceiling, quiet and hidden, the only evidence of their hiding spot a slight shadow on the floor. When one of the addicts finally staggers in, shouting, “Come on, Parker! Time for our favorite show!”
Operation Black Widow is a go.
The man enters, scanning the room for the two kids. “What the hell?” he mutters to himself. He checks in the corners and then stares pointedly to the bed. “Ah. Playing this game, are we, Parker?” It’s Mason, the one with the hammer.
Mason kneels by the bed and thrusts his arm beneath it, waving it around to try to get ahold of a kid who wasn’t there.
While the guy’s distracted, Peter silently lowers Cassie to the ground and then crawls above him on the ceiling, unraveling the cord from his waist and extending from the ceiling by his good leg, throwing the cord down and—yes!—looping it around the man’s neck with one flick of his sore wrist.
Before his captor even realizes what’s happening, Peter has twined the cord around his neck and he pulls, wrenching it up with enough force that he pulls Mason off the ground, toes grazing the floor, gargling and scrabbling at his throat, scraping his nails over Peter’s knuckles in an attempt to pry him off—but the plan is working.
Just like they practiced, Cassie grabs the gun from the man’s belt before he can reach for it, running to the wall, far enough from the wall that she’s safe from any of Mason’s flailing.
The man chokes quietly, the only noise in the room Peter’s heavy breathing and the man’s strangled coughs.
It only takes a minute or two before he passes out, arms and legs going lax; Peter lowers him with a pained groan, loosing the cord gradually to the floor so as to make no noise. Mason’s out cold.
Just like they practiced. Just like they practiced.
The door’s open—they’ve gotta go now. Cassie hands him the gun and grabs the man’s phone from his pocket, dialing 911 as Peter scoops her up, limping quickly through the cell door.
They’re out. They’re out.
It’s working! God, Peter’s gonna give Mr. Stark so much grief about this when he gets out. He’ll make Mr. Stark stock the pantry with pizza rolls and mini powdered donuts and all that shit he loves. Netted bags of oranges—god, he misses oranges—and bowls of miso soup. Scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese.
The door is at the end of the hallway—only a couple hundred feet away—and Peter runs. But his leg, his fucked up knee, shattered joint… On the fourth step, the pain in his leg is so much that he gags, tripping over himself and falling—no, God, no!—so they both sprawl over the concrete floor, Cassie groaning in pain.
On Mason’s phone, the emergency operator is saying: Hello? Hello?
The noise alerts some of the addicts down the hallway, and a female voice says: “They’re getting away!”
No, no, no, they’re so close. He has to get out—he has to find May, he has to tell Mr. Stark that everything’s okay. He has to—
“Cassie,” Peter groans, pushing himself off the ground with weak, shaking forearms, “the phone!”
She picks it back up as Peter climbs back to his feet, dragging his leg forward with his hands, each pull wrenching a scream from deep in him. By the time he reaches the door, Cassie’s crying into the phone, her words barely intelligible. “And we need… We need help…”
All the while, a crowd of their captors rush towards them; “I’ll shoot!” screams Peter, near-hysterical as he tries to remember the number combination through a haze of sedation and pain. “I’ll shoot, I will!”
He punches in the numbers with one hand (What was it? One-four-eight-nine something?) and with the other hand points the gun above Cassie’s head and towards the crowd of drug addicts. “Don’t come any closer!”
Cassie’s crying, the addicts are shouting, and the pain in his knee is making his whole body tremble. “Get behind me, Cass.”
Bvvvp. A negative beep from the keypad. His combination was wrong. Fuck, fuck— He tries another one, glancing back between the oncoming addicts and the numbers, frantically pointing the gun from one person to another, and he hits the wrong key—
“Put the gun down, Parker!”
He doesn’t have the combination. The pitch of each number is all wrong; it’s the same with every combination.
“Somebody get him!”
The changes in pitch are the same with every combination. That means all of his calculating, all of his guessing and his listening and his writing on the wall—it was all for nothing.
He’s so fucking stupid.
“I’m not getting shot by a kid—”
He’s got nothing. No combination ideas, no numbers, no calculations. The number to set them free could be one out of a hundred million possible permutations. He’s only guessed, too.
“She’s got a phone!”
They’re fucked. Peter shoves Cassie behind him, flattening them both against the door, and starts pressing random buttons in a desperate hope for a correct code. She’s still talking on the phone; the operator’s saying, “Honey, slow down. Just tell me where you are…” to which Cassie sobs that she doesn’t know.
Peter doesn’t even know what state they’re in. What country they’re in. Nothing. He hopes it’s the US still, because that’s easier to find help, but he’s not completely sure. The star on the door is the Winter Soldier’s, so they could be in Russia—but all their captors seem American. An American base in Russia, maybe? He has no clue.
Peter waves his gun at the hallway. “Parker,” says one, dark-haired guy. “There’s only eight bullets in there. Even if you had the aim of a sniper—you’re not getting out of this one, man.”
“Get back!” he shouts, and he waves the gun again. “All of you, get back! I’m not going back in there!”
Beside him, he can hear the 911 operator: “We’re having trouble tracking your location, so just stay where you are—”
They’re not going anywhere. They’re not going anywhere.
They’re trapped.
They’re never getting out of here.
There’s a sob in Peter’s chest, and he raises the gun. If they’re not getting out now, then he’s at least gonna take some of these guys down with him. He aims at the red-haired woman and pulls the trigger—
The gun just clicks.
He stares at it, horrified. He pulls the trigger again and again, that disappointing clicking sound his only outcome, and the rest of the addicts take that as their cue to rush him, all of them coming forth in a wave of dirty hands and bloody weapons.
A freezing wave of panic—Peter thrusts the gun forward and pulls the trigger at the oncoming crowd—click, click, click.
Peter’s never shot a gun before.
Peter’s never shot a gun before.
“I’m not going back in there!” he yells, his voice so high and frightened that he can’t recognize as it leaves his mouth. He shoved Cassie behind him, blocking her with his bad leg. “You’re not putting me back in there!”
But then they’re grabbing them and pulling them apart, and the gun’s ripped from his hands, and Cassie is screaming like she’s hurting—
Peter hates this fucking room.
It reeks like blood. His blood.
Two addicts have him pinned to a wall, his hands cuffed and held above his head. He bucks against them, thrashing, and one hits him in the stomach so hard he swears he feels his organs shift. “I’m sorry,” he chokes out. “Please, please, just don't hurt Cassie… I made her do it... She didn't... ”
Charlie paces in front of him, yanking anxiously on his beard. “Don't hurt her?” he says, eyes bugged. “Don't hurt her? You two betrayed me! Trying to run from our plan to save the world? You’re gonna pay, Parker. You’re gonna pay. You and Stark have to learn that there are consequences to your actions. You don't. Run away. From me.”
The addicts are adjusting the Chair, flattening out each arm and pushing the backrest into a horizontal position. It’s like a table now, flat metal with cuffs attached.
He didn’t know the Chair could do that.
“You know what my dad used to do when I fucked up?” says Charlie, fiddling with his pants buckle. “And you’ve fucked up, Parker. Royally.”
Rattled with fear, Peter shakes, deep in his chest. For a man to turn out like Charlie, he must have endured unimaginable things. May always used to say: people aren’t born bad; someone or something makes them that way. “I don't know,” he manages.
The bearded man pulls his belt through the loops of his jeans—a quick thwip, thwip, thwip—as the tail hits each loop, and then folds it in half. “Alright, Jon—strap him in.”
It falls into place: the flattened chair, the folded belt, his dad— “Charlie,” he blurts out, trying to get the man’s attention as the two addicts holding him shove him facedown on the table. His shirt’s gone—he and Cassie tore it to pieces for bandages already. “Charlie, please—” He saw on TV once that if you appeal to your perpetrator’s humanity that they’ll be less likely to hurt you. “I'm sorry that happened to you, I really am. You didn’t deserve that.” They get one wrist cuffed in, then the other, then both of his ankles. “Parents aren’t supposed to do that.”
This only seems to make the man angrier because he bristles, “Shut your mouth, Parker!” shouts Charlie and he says. “Say one more thing about my family, Parker, and I’ll cut your goddamn tongue out!” He slaps the folded belt against the side of the chair-table.
Peter flinches but he doesn’t stop talking. “Parents are supposed to protect their kids,” he says quickly, cheek against vibranium, “not hurt them.” He sees the black girl in the corner make a face. “But that doesn’t mean you have to do it to me, right? I… I had someone hurt me, someone who’s was supposed to take care of me, so I know what it’s like—”
The whistle of leather through air—
The first hit burns like a lick of gasoline down his back. “Charlie,” he begs, as soon as he hears his arm go back again, “Charlie, please, you don’t have to—”
Another hit, and pain streams down his naked back. His knees tremble; he really has to pee. It’s just a belt, he thinks. How bad could it be? It can’t kill him. It can’t kill him.
Hit after hit after hit, and his whole back is on fire.
Peter remembers it later, when the cloud of panic has washed away from his brain, filled instead with the feverish lucidity that comes with pain: guns have safeties.
He forgot to turn off the safety.
They lay on the bed in utter silence when they finally drag him back to their cell.
Both Peter and Cassie in so much pain that they don't even speak for an hour. Her face is swelling—they hit her. “Did they hurt you?” he whispers, finally. He has to know. He has to know exactly what they did.
Whatever they did to her—it was his fault.
Cassie nods tearily. “The needle,” she croaks.
Fuck.
“Did they touch you?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says.
Oh, God. “Where?”
She’s too tired to speak, so she gestures, imitating their hands on herself. Hand around her bad wrist—that must’ve hurt—then her swollen cheek, then stomach, then her other arm, and the crook of it, where Peter can see a reddening needle mark.
Good. She's safe. She's okay.
Well, as okay as they can be.
“What happened to the sheets?” he asks, wincing as his chest moves.
“They took them away,” she explains, squeezing her eyes into wrinkled lines.
Probably because they’d used them to strangle their captor.
Cassie starts crying then, and Peter doesn’t know what to do. This kid has cried so much in the past couple weeks that he’s surprised she has anything left in her system. If Peter were Mr. Stark, and Cassie were Peter, he would just hold Peter until he stopped crying. Offer him food. A movie night. Another hug.
So he does what Mr. Stark would do.
Peter holds Cassie until her crying stops, until it’s just the occasional hiccup. He holds her and rubs her back, letting her sob and sniffle into his shoulder. Goddamn it, Mr. Stark, he thinks. Please. Find us. Help us. They’re hurting a kid.
She’s so fucking quiet. Even when she cries, she’s quiet. Compared to the talkative little girl that he first met, she’s a mouse. Cassie says after an entire lifetime of silence, “I wish they used the needle on you.”
She’s missing a couple words: instead of me. Peter knows what she means, but it still hurts. “We just gotta keep trying,” he says, tired.
She presses her tear-wet cheek into his shoulder. “I don't want to,” she whimpers.
Peter’s done the math. Even if they escaped once a day, every day, able to attempt five codes with every escape for the foreseeable future—it would take them over fifty thousand years to get through every possible permutation.
They’re never getting out.