Hope

“My baby, where is my baby?” Maddie’s voice cracked with horror.

The first time mother opened the little pink blanket and saw a stack of money, where her baby should have been. Underneath the twenty thousand dollars? A note with an all too familiar address. It’s her first day home from the hospital. She must have just dozed off for a little while, long enough for a break-in, apparently.

With shaking hands, Maddie dials her husband, Mark. To her surprise, a woman’s voice on the other end of the line whispers, “Hello, Clara. It’s been a long time. I’m assuming you got the cash and address. I’ll see you soon, daughter.” Vomit spews from her quivering lips. She tries to stay calm as she looks for the Glock 45 she hid in the floorboards years ago. Her minivan won’t help her in this situation; she opts for her husband’s motorcycle and speeds off.

A long-forgotten red brick home, buried deep in Maddie’s mind, is now her only hope of trying to see her baby again. The baby she carried for 9 months. The baby she hadn’t yet named. Vanished.

Walking inside the grim house, gun in hand, “Mother! Where are you?”, her sarcastic voice filled with a deep loathing disgust, “I should have known it was you, you think you can just steal my child and pay me off?”.

Cautiously, tip-toeing down the long dim hallway, Maddie is keeping an ear out for anything that would give away where her baby could be tucked away.

“Maddie?” a male voice says, catching her off guard.

She turns on the living room light. Mark appears roughed up and is tied to a radiator with cuffs. She starts to head toward him when she feels an arm reach around her neck, trying to choke her. Maddie uses both of her hands, steps forward, twists, and breaks free from her mother’s hold. Facing her mother, she grabs the back of her hair and, with all her might, pulls down onto her mother’s heads and sends a powerful knee to the face. Her mother falls back. She bought herself some time—enough time to find the gun that slipped out of her hand a moment prior.

A baby screams from upstairs, Maddie loses her attention to the fight, and she was taught to never lose her focus.

A gun cocks from behind her head; it’s her mother. She found the gun first.

“Tsk Tsk Tsk… You never really had a chance, did you?”, the mother said with a cocky tone, “sit down next to handsome over there”.

Maddie complies as her mother grabs the second pair of cuffs and locks them tightly around her wrists.

“Let me tell you a story about your so-called precious Maddie” mother says, “I run a little business”.

Maddie interrupts sternly, “Don’t say another word”.

“Either you tell the story, or I will” mother states.

“Let me tell it then”, she turns toward Mark with a nervous smile, “Legally, my name was Clara. I changed it two years before we met. Around the same time, I stopped working for my mom and”.

Mother intercedes, “Speed it up, dear. You always could drag on a story.”

“My mother started a so-called business years before I was born, and she dragged me into it when I turned 18. My mother set up a small empire by adopting stolen babies. The families who wanted the babies never knew they were stolen but the families who…”.

Before she could find the words, mother says proudly, “I have men working for me, that steal babies out of their homes. As you call her, Maddie makes me seem a lot crueler than I am. I could just steal the newborns and leave the parents with nothing, but instead, I am kind enough to leave behind some money for the families.”

Mark is shocked, “people actually accepted money in exchange for their baby?”.

“Some of them, handsome”, mother says. “But some of them who wanted to run to the police, well I had my hitman take care of them. Or should I say, hit woman?”, the mother has a devious smile and points toward her daughter.

“It’s not something I’m proud of, but one day the guilt became too much. I ran away from home, changed my name, and tried to start over with you.”

Mark can’t even look away from Maddie. He doesn’t recognize the woman in front of him.

“I’m kind enough to give you three options since you are family after all”, mother says. “Option one, you take the money I gave you, and in a few days, I’ll have one of my men drop off the rest. Option two, come back to work for me. Option three, and this one would make me really sad, but option three is you, and Mark dies, and I raise my grandbaby to be my next protégé”.

Unbeknownst to her mother, Maddie came prepared and has a bobby pin tucked away right beside a small knife in her back pocket. While her mother has been blabbering on, she has already taken off the cuffs behind her. She waits for her mother to look away again, giving her a split second to make her next move. Maddie now gets the upper hand with a quick lunge and a sharp stab to the abdomen.

She runs over to Mark to undo his cuffs while mother tending to her wound, trying to apply enough pressure to slow the bleeding.

“Well played, sweetie”, mother grunts.

Mark is now freed and frantically runs upstairs to find two men standing guard in front of the crib. He screams for Maddie.

She grew up in this house. She can use the fire escape to enter from behind the men with the element of surprise. Her mother is now unconscious; she has lost a lot of blood. Maddie grabs the knife from her mother’s body and begins running to the home’s side and up the fire escape. Before she steps into the room, she slowly takes off her shoes, an attempt to lower the noise of her climbing through the window. Luckily, it’s shattered enough for her to fit through. Her husband sees her behind them and makes a clever effort to distract them.

Mark screams, “What kind of people are you, huh? You just go around stealing babies”?

Her husband made just enough noise to cover up her sneaking up to slit the throat of one of the men. He collapses, and the second guard tackles Maddie to the ground and begins punching her face relentlessly. Mark remembers seeing old blinds lying in the run-down hallway as he made his way up the steps. He quickly runs to grab them, while Maddie is now unconscious, herself. Taking the old blinds’ string and wrapping it around the man’s neck, pulling as hard as Mark can. The guard falls off Maddie, gasping for air. He grabs behind him to find Mark’s face. Bingo, the brutish man, using his fingernails to dig into Mark’s eyeballs, causing Mark to release his hold. Maddie quickly comes to, grabs the knife, and stabs the man, repeatedly. She is having a mental breakdown. Now Mark knows who she really is, her mother found her, everything has come crashing down around her.

Mark hugs Maddie, “Its done, Maddie. That’s enough.”

Maddie instructs Mark to take their baby out of the house to safety, so she can check to see what has become of her mother. She’s not on the couch. A blood trail leads Maddie to the backyard where her mother is hiding in a shed, waiting for the backup she just called in.

“You’re too late. My men are on their way. If they find me dead, I have someone ready to take over. You and your family won’t be safe anywhere.”

Maddie crouches down beside her mother, her face swollen twice the size, badly bruised already. She is still able to get out her final words to her mother.

“I still see the faces of the parents I murdered, that’s something I live with every day. I’m not going to stab you again, mother. You see, I stabbed a few minutes ago in your abdominal aorta. When I took out the knife, there was no more pressure to keep your wound from hemorrhaging profusely. Your body is bleeding out at an alarming rate. You’ll be dead before they get here.” This is the first time Maddie has ever seen her mother look scared. Her mother puts out her hand and reaches for Maddies grasp”

“She looks like you, you know that?”, Mother mutters weakly.

Maddie grabs her hand in return, and whispers “I’m going kill them all” as she watches the life drain from her mother’s pale face.

She kisses her mother’s forehead and takes the keys off the dead body’s pocket. The three of them get in the mother’s blacked-out SUV and speed off quickly, trying to avoid a run-in with the men on their way to the house.

“There are men coming for me. My mother always had contingency plans. These savages work for her depending on the organization for their income. They won’t stop until they make sure the threat is gone. Once we get home, I need you to grab the essentials. I have a cabin in a remote location I purchased when I was a teenager, first hiding from my mother. I need you to take our baby there. No stops along the way. It is close to an 11-hour drive, so take all the canned goods with you. I have an untraceable cell phone that you can use, I have the number, and I’ll call you once this is all over”.

Mark, “What are you going to do, Maddie? Kill a bunch more people? This is insane, just come with us, please, I still love you, this is too dangerous, we can hide out together.

Maddie doesn’t have time to convince Mark, they’re two minutes from their house, “we never named her”.

Mark has tears in his eyes. He knows that if this thing goes sideways, he may never see Maddie again, “How about Hope”.

“Hope”, Maddie says, “I love it”.

Maddie says her goodbyes to her husband and beautiful baby girl. She goes to the floorboard where she got out the gun earlier and rips up all of the surrounding hardwood floors. Underneath lies guns, money, and most importantly, a little black book. She was smart enough to write down the names of all the people working for her before she left the family business. One by one, she’ll cross off every person’s name in that book. She will protect her family at all costs, even if it means killing hundreds of more people.

Maddie light a cigarette deeply, inhales, and chuckles, “Let’s do this shit”.