Story code: ST-000302
Part 2: Enemy Combatants
I forced myself to step closer to the glass coffee table, my stomach twisting into a tight, sickening knot. Lined up with military precision were four battered cell phones, none of which belonged to my father. Beside them sat a neat stack of laminated Texas identification cards and two worn Mexican passports. I reached out with a trembling hand and flipped the top passport open. A young Hispanic woman stared back at me. Directly below the IDs lay a coiled length of heavy nylon rope, three pairs of heavy-duty steel handcuffs, and a yellow legal pad. The pad was covered in my father’s erratic, heavily underlined block handwriting. I read the visible page, my blood running absolutely cold. It was a crude surveillance log tracking the movements of a local agricultural crew, ending with a circled, capitalized heading that read: *ENEMY COMBATANTS DETAINED – CELL 1*.
He hadn’t just lost his mind to the internet; he had started hunting people.
I backed away from the table, my heart hammering violently against my ribs. The political commentator on the television was still screaming about border security, the deafening volume vibrating right through my chest. I had to find the woman from the voicemail before my father returned. I spun around and bolted toward the kitchen. The room was a disaster of stockpiled canned goods and towering stacks of water filters, but my eyes locked onto the wall-mounted landline. The receiver was off the hook, dangling by its stretched, curly cord just inches above the linoleum floor. A tipped-over mug of coffee was slowly dripping off the counter, pooling around a single, mud-caked canvas shoe that was far too small to be my father’s.
A smeared trail of muddy footprints led away from the shoe, dragging frantically toward the dark hallway that housed the bedrooms. I stepped over the spilled coffee, my breathing shallow and fast. “Hello?” I whispered, though I knew the blaring television swallowed the sound instantly. I followed the muddy scuffs down the hall. My old bedroom door was wide open, entirely gutted and filled to the ceiling with stacked buckets of emergency rations. Across the hall, my father’s bedroom door was entirely altered. The wooden frame had been reinforced with steel plates, and it was padlocked from the outside with a heavy steel hasp. He had turned his own master suite into a makeshift prison cell.
The mud trail bypassed the padlocked door, ending abruptly at the cracked door of the small guest bathroom. I pushed it open slowly. The room was pitch black, the small window completely covered by a thick sheet of nailed plywood. I fumbled for the light switch and flipped it.
A woman screamed, a raw, terrified sound that briefly cut through the oppressive noise of the house. She was wedged into the narrow space between the vanity and the bathtub, her arms thrown over her head to shield her face. It was the woman from the passport photo on the coffee table. She looked to be in her early twenties, her clothes torn and heavily stained with grease. Her wrists were wrapped in raw, bleeding friction burns, as if she had just slipped out of a pair of heavy zip ties.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said, dropping to my knees and raising my empty hands to show I wasn’t a threat. “I’m not him. I heard your message on the phone. I’m here to help.”
She stared at me, her chest heaving, dark eyes wide with unadulterated panic. She pressed herself harder against the porcelain tub, her gaze locking onto my face. “Tú eres la hija,” she whispered, her voice trembling uncontrollably. *You are the daughter.* She pointed a shaking, bloodied finger toward the hallway. “He has pictures of you on the wall in there. He says you are… you are part of the deep state. That you betrayed him.”
I felt a paralyzing chill wash over me, freezing the blood in my veins. My father’s explosive delusions had always been directed at the government, the news anchors, the invisible coastal elites-never at me. I had simply been an annoyance he ignored when I finally walked away.
“We need to get out of here right now,” I said, ignoring the rising panic in my throat and reaching out to help her up. She flinched, but finally let me grab her forearm. “Where is he?”
“He went to check the perimeter,” she choked out in broken English, stumbling as she leaned her weight heavily against my shoulder. “He said he caught the others. He went to bring them to the cell.”
I dragged her out of the bathroom, practically carrying her down the hallway and back into the stifling heat of the living room. “The front door is open,” I told her, my eyes darting toward the entryway. We scrambled past the horrifying grid on the coffee table, reaching the front foyer. I grabbed the handle of the massive steel security screen I had passed through just minutes ago. I shoved my weight against it, expecting it to swing outward into the humid afternoon air.
It didn’t budge.
I rattled the heavy metal frame, sheer terror finally taking over. The cinderblock that had been propping it open was gone. The double-cylinder deadbolt had been locked from the outside. While I had been searching the interior of the house, my father had quietly returned, noticed my car idling at the curb, and sealed us in.
We were trapped in his fortress. I spun around, frantically scanning the dim, cluttered living room for a set of keys, but the sudden, deafening roar of a heavy diesel engine cut through the noise of the television. The floorboards vibrated under my feet as my father’s massive pickup truck pulled up the gravel driveway, stopping directly on the front lawn. A moment later, the heavy slam of a truck door echoed through the exterior walls, followed by the distinct, terrifying metallic clatter of a pump-action shotgun racking a shell into the chamber.