Sky Like Bone: a serial killer thriller

by V. J. Chambers

  But what was the point of thinking that?

  It wasn’t as if she could do anything about it.

  It was definitely out of the question to turn back and go looking for the phone now. However, she didn’t really have any hope that a car was going to come down this road.

  Maybe if this road intersected with another road, a paved road, maybe then she could get help. And maybe she would come to that paved road soon.

  Or maybe not.

  Maybe it was ten miles of dirt road back to Love Over Want, and when she arrived there, the place would be entirely closed up and empty, and she would have no way of getting help unless she somehow hitchhiked back to town, and she didn’t even think that anyone drove out into the vicinity of Love Over Want in the middle of the night like this.

  What time was it?

  She looked up at the sky, at the position of the moon.

  She had no idea.

  Think positive thoughts, Wren, she urged herself.

  But what was the point, really? Even if she convinced herself that there was a paved road up here somewhere close by, it wouldn’t make it so.

  She had no idea what came next. She had to keep walking and hope for the best.

  So, walk she did, trying not to think too much, trying not to look up at the position of the moon and speculate on how long off dawn might be.

  Once or twice, she got frightened again of animals, but she didn’t see anything else besides a deer and its fawn, both of whom scrambled out of the woods and across the road in her path. They startled her, but they moved too quickly for her to even truly react.

  And then she heard music up ahead.

  Her first thought was that she was losing her mind, but who ever heard of auditory hallucinations? Besides, even visual hallucinations wouldn’t start happening until she was in much worse shape than she was now.

  No, it must be real.

  Someone was listening to Pink Floyd out here. She followed the strains of “Echoes” as she picked her way through the woods and remembered one time, when she was a girl, watching some documentary in the compound. It had been on in the background, on one of the TVs, while she was playing with one of the other kids, and there was Roger Waters, glaring at the camera and saying, “It probably is actionable. Fucking Andrew Lloyd Webber,” or something like that.

  It did sound like Phantom of the Opera.

  The rhythm of the song seemed to give her feet rhythm as well. Her feet moved up and down in time in her too-big shoes, and she walked down the path, heading toward the music, toward someone who would help her.

  As she walked, the music got louder.

  She walked toward the sound, veering off the road.

  She was rewarded by seeing the bright flames of a campfire, smoking just ahead. There was a tent set up in a clearing and there were two people sitting in front of the fire.

  “Echoes” was louder still. These people were obviously responsible for the music.

  Wren picked up the pace, but she still felt she was walking in time to the music. She felt a little dreamlike, here in the twilight, running through the woods to the sound of guitars, as if the music had become some strange soundtrack to her life.

  This was the climax of the movie, where the girl is saved, and all is well.

  “Hello!” she called.

  The two figures at the campfire straightened.

  She thought they turned to her, but it was hard to see because it was dark and they were only shadows against the fire.

  “Did you hear that?” came the slow drawl of a voice.

  “It’s not real, dude,” responded the other voice.

  She pressed forward. “Hello?”

  Now, she was close enough to see that the two figures were teenage boys. They were both wearing t-shirts and jeans, and they gaped at her with wide, wide eyes and big black holes of pupils.

  Wren hadn’t grown up on a hippie commune without knowing what people looked like when they were tripping. She let out a helpless laugh. “Great. The only two people in the woods I find and they’re both on drugs.”

  “Whoa,” said one of the guys, pointing at her. “She knows, man.”

  “I’m telling you, she’s not real,” said the other guy.

  “I’m real,” said Wren.

  “Yeah, but you would say that anyway,” said the second guy. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “What is real, anyway, man?” said the first guy.

  “True,” said the second guy.

  “I’m not a hallucination,” she said. She laughed. “It’s funny, I was just thinking about this, but auditory hallucinations? Not a thing.”

  The two boys lifted their chins, both considering this.

  “I need your help,” said Wren.

  In the background, “Echoes” was starting to break apart and get stranger, the guitar solos overtaken by an odd howling effect. It was eerie, and the boys were obviously affected by it. They eyed her with their too-wide pupils, and now she could see them taking in her lack of clothing and the blood all over her.

  “Go away, man,” said the first guy. “You’re creeping me out.”

  “Fine,” said Wren. “I just need a phone, so I can call the police.”

  “No, we got rid of those,” said the second guy.

  “Got rid of your phones?” said Wren. “Are you teenagers?”

  “The screens were too bright,” said the second guy.

  “Way too bright,” said the first guy.

  “We put them with the car keys,” said the second guy.

  “Well, great,” said Wren. “Because I actually work for the FBI, and I’m going to need to commandeer your car. So, where are your phones and keys?”

  “The FBI?” The guys exchanged a glance.

  “Fuck, man, I didn’t think mushrooms were supposed to make you paranoid.”

  “Dude, you just admitted to the FBI that we were on mushrooms!”

  Wren broke in. “I don’t care, okay? The FBI doesn’t even investigate drugs. That would be the DEA. Why I’m telling you this, I don’t know. You’re on hallucinogens and you can’t understand. Phones. Keys. Now.”

  “Uh… well, we don’t know where they are,” said the first guy.

  “Yeah, that was the point,” said the second guy. “We hid them from ourselves. Because we knew that we couldn’t drive, because we were too fucked up.”

  “Yeah,” said the first guy. “And the light from the phones…”

  “It was bad,” said the second guy, making a face.

  “You can’t hide things from yourselves,” said Wren. “I’ve interacted with a lot of people on hallucinogens, okay, and if you just focus, you’ll be fine. Just think, and you’ll remember.”

  “No, we forced ourselves not to do that,” said the first guy.

  “Fine,” said Wren. “I’ll look.” She pushed past them into their camping area. “Maybe you put them in your tent.”

  “Dude, stop her from going in there,” said the first guy.

  Wren got down on her knees and began unzipping the tent.

  A hand closed around her arm.

  “Don’t touch me!” she hissed.

  “Sorry,” said the second guy, but he didn’t let go. He pulled her away from the tent. “It’s just, I don’t think you can go into our tent without a warrant.”

  “My partner is back there, bleeding to death,” said Wren. “Please. I need your help.”

  “Well, FBI agents don’t have partners,” said the first guy.

  “We… we used to be part of a task force, and he was a police detective, and I was just a consultant—”

  “You’re not FBI,” said the first guy, barking out a labored laugh. “This is some joke. I bet it’s Max. I bet he put her up to this to mess with us.”

  “No,” said Wren. “No, this isn’t a joke. This is serious.”

  “If you’re FBI, do you have a badge?” said the second guy. He was still holding her arm. “You don’t even have pants.”
/>
  “Well, I was infiltrating an occult outreach shelter and they were having a ritual, and we all had to take off our…” She trailed off. “Never mind. That’s not important. The fact I look like this should convince you that I am in trouble. I need your help. You’re not going to be in trouble. You’ll be heroes.”

  The first guy was staring at Wren’s bare legs. “Why aren’t you wearing pants again?”

  Oh, God, what was that look in his eyes? She bared her teeth at him, ripping her arm out of the grasp of the other guy. “If you even think about touching me, I will destroy you.”

  The first guy backed up, hands in front of his face, uttering strange little high-pitched cries.

  “Get away from us! Get away from us!” The second guy waved his arms at her to ward her off.

  Wren took several steps back.

  They cowered from her.

  She squared her shoulders, glaring at them. “You want me to get away? Then you find your damned cell phones.”

  “But we can’t,” wailed the first guy. “Don’t hurt us. Please.”

  “Let me into your tent to look, then.”

  “No, there’s stuff in there,” said the second guy, who sounded on the verge of tears. “There’s paraphernalia in there. And if you’re really FBI—”

  “I don’t care about your fucking paraphernalia,” said Wren. “Oh, my Lord.”

  The guys stepped close to each other, both whimpering.

  Wren rolled her eyes. “I promise not to hurt you. Now open the tent.”

  “Promise?” said the second guy. His eyes were wide and shining.

  “Swear to God,” said Wren.

  “Well, okay,” said the second guy. He knelt down and unzipped the tent.

  Wren approached and they shied away from her. She knelt down and peered inside.

  The tent was full of bricks of cocaine. At least twenty. Her eyes widened. She looked up at the guys. “What are you two really doing out here?”

  The second guy had started to sob. “Don’t tell my mom about this, okay? She would be so disappointed in me.”

  Wren crawled into the tent and began looking under the sleeping bags for phones. She couldn’t find anything, but she did find a set of keys.

  She scooped those up and climbed back out, careful to keep her shirt pulled tight to cover herself.

  The second guy was wiping his red eyes, but he was holding something out to her.

  “Your phone?” said Wren. “You found it?”

  “It was in my pocket,” said the guy. “You swear you don’t care about drugs?”

  Wren dialed. She held the phone to her ear. “You two probably are going to want to clear out before this woods is swarming with law enforcement.”

  “But we can’t drive!” said the first guy. “We’re tripping balls.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “WREN Delacroix?” called a voice.

  All Wren could see were headlights. She was out by the dirt road, waiting for the arrival of the local police department. She shielded her eyes, squinting.

  “I’m Detective Alexis Liddel,” continued the voice. A woman was taking shape, approaching from the headlights. She wrapped a blanket around Wren’s shoulders. “Are you Agent Delacroix?”

  “That’s me,” said Wren. “We have to go back this road.”

  “Got it,” said Liddel. “You sit shotgun with me, and you’ll navigate. I’m leading the pack here.”

  “You got here quick,” said Wren walking with her towards the headlights.

  “We did our best,” said Liddel. “No one likes that weird Love Over Want place, anyway.”

  Wren climbed into the passenger seat of an SUV with a siren on the top and the words Redville Police Department painted on the side. She was alone out here. She wasn’t sure what had happened to the tripping teenagers exactly, but they’d thrown their tent and all their cocaine into the back of their car and driven off.

  It was probably going to haunt her to her dying day trying to figure out what the hell they’d been doing out there in the first place. Sure, it was probably just some boys out on a camping trip taking mushrooms, nothing that weird about that, but why had they had so much cocaine?

  It seemed to take no time at all for Liddel to drive up the road to the place where Doug had gone off-roading into the woods. “We turn here?” she asked Wren.

  “We do,” said Wren.

  They careened through the woods, zooming around the trees, scraping against the branches and underbrush until they saw the headlights of the van up ahead.

  “There,” said Wren. “Right there!”

  “I see it,” said Liddel. She seized the walkie-talkie in her vehicle. “Make sure we got medical ready right now. Copy that?”

  “Copy,” crackled the walkie.

  REILLY was still struggling with Terence Freeman, trying to rip the man apart, to destroy him bone by bone.

  Suddenly, a door opened across the room, and a bright flash of light came out of it.

  The light touched Freeman and everywhere it touched him he exploded into bright bits of confetti.

  Someone was in the doorway.

  “Wren?” he whispered.

  “It’s me, baby,” said a familiar voice.

  “Mom,” he breathed. He sank down to the floor. His stomach hurt. He could feel it here, wherever here was.

  His mother shut the door behind her and the light went away. “Don’t you worry none, little man,” she said affectionately. “It’s not your time yet.”

  “Right,” said Reilly. “I said that I didn’t die.”

  “Not yet,” said his mother. She wasn’t a corpse now, but beautiful and young, like she had been when he was a little boy, when he was small enough to crawl into her lap and twine his tiny arms around her neck. He smiled up at her, feeling relaxed and pleased and grateful. His wound didn’t hurt.

  “Well, none of that,” she said. She touched his forehead.

  The pain was back. He groaned.

  “Sorry, but that’s part of it,” she said.

  He clutched his midsection. Was he falling apart? Were his intestines going to slither out if he didn’t hold himself together?

  “I always did want another grandbaby,” she said.

  He looked up at her sharply. “What are you saying?”

  “Get your ass up, little man,” she said. “You can’t come this way with me.” She gestured behind her at the door she’d come from. “You need to go out that door.” She pointed.

  He turned and the other door was so very far away. He shook his head and turned back to her. “Carry me, Mommy.”

  “Can’t,” she said. “You’re too big for that, Caius. You know better. On your feet.”

  He shook his head. “Please? Just pick me up this one time?”

  “I would if I could, little man.” She knelt in front of him, cupping his cheek. “I love you.”

  “Hurts,” he said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “Can you give me a hand?” he said, gazing at her smooth, dark skin.

  “Maybe I can manage that.” She smiled at him. “Look at you, Caius. Just look at you. I’m so proud of you, do you know that?”

  “Can’t I stay here with you, Mommy?”

  “No, baby,” she said. “This isn’t your place. Your place is that way.” She pointed to the door again.

  Maybe the door seemed a little closer this time. How could that be?

  She got to her feet and offered him one of her hands.

  He grasped it, and she was strong—so strong, so young, so beautiful.

  She tugged him upright, and then he was on his feet, wavering. She gave him a nudge. “There you go. Off with you, now, little man.”

  He squeezed her hand. “I miss you, Mom. Every day.”

  “I miss you, too, little man.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. And then she shoved him at the other door and he went wavering and stumbling and staggering until he burst through it.

 
His eyes opened.

  “Cai?” It was Wren, her face looming large above him.

  “Hey,” he said. “Did you get help?”

  “I did,” she said, smiling. “And you’re going to be just fine.”

  “Of course I am,” he said, forcing himself to laugh. “There was never any doubt of that.” He looked around. “Are we moving?”

  “Yeah, we’re in the back of an ambulance,” she said. “We’re on our way to the hospital. You were unconscious when I got to you, but they put you on a stretcher and they loaded you up, and they checked for your pulse, and…” She wiped at one of her eyes with with heel of her hand.

  “Hey, hey,” he said. “Don’t cry. There’s no reason to cry.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “YOU need anything?” Alexis Liddel was saying.

  “Uh, more coffee?” said Wren, holding up her empty cup. It was morning now. The sun was up. Wren knew she should be tired, but she wasn’t. Maybe it was the coffee, or maybe she was still in shock. Probably still in shock.

  She was in a conference room at the local police station, and she’d been going over everything she knew with Liddel. She lay her hands flat on the surface of the table, which was cluttered with coffee cups and paperwork. The recorder was there too.

  Alexis was getting up from her seat on the other side of the table. “Okay, I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Wren nodded.

  She got up to stretch her legs. She wandered over to the two-way mirror and made a face at it, in case anyone was on the other side watching. She didn’t know why anyone would be there, secretly observing this interview, but there was no accounting for paranoia amongst law enforcement, as she well knew. A cop who took everything at face value missed a lot.

  Wren wasn’t concerned. She hadn’t done anything wrong, and she didn’t have anything to hide. Also, Liddel had left the door wide open, so she definitely wasn’t being detained. She did want to leave soon, though, and get back to the hospital to check on Reilly. He’d been admitted into surgery, Wren understood. They’d be stitching his insides back together. Afterward, he’d be sedated. So, it was okay that she wasn’t there. Still, that was where she wanted to be. Sitting at his side when he woke up.