by Rod Kackley
“What? And you didn’t tell me?”
“I figured why worry? Nobody cared what he said.”
“We should have taken care of him years ago.”
“Yeah,” Paul agreed, “years ago.”
“Now we have to do it tonight. Fuck”
“Don’t worry,” Paul said. “I can do this.”
“Fuck.You?”
“Yeah. Fuck. Me.”
“Where are you now?”
“Going to your house, the house.”
“And you can take care of all of them?”
“Yeah,” Paul sounded a little exasperated and spoke very slowly and carefully so there could be no misunderstanding.
“I will take care of all of them,” Paul said.
“The girls too?”
Paul had paused for a second before he said, “Yes. The girls, too.”
It was that little bit of hesitation, that split second of indecision and lack of commitment that worried Tim more than a cop and two reporters going to his house.
Tim leaned over and opened his car’s glove compartment door.
The Glock was right where it should be. Thank God for the St. Isidore concealed weapon permit law that gave just about anybody who was alive and breathing without a felony on their record the right to bear arms.
“Okay,” Tim said. “You can do it.”
Paul clicked off. Tim did the same.
Then Tim started his car and began driving home.
He would meet Paul there.
“I’ll make sure we take care of all of them,” Tim muttered to his dashboard, “maybe even Paul.”
Twenty Two
It had been a long night. No, that would be inaccurate. It had been a dreadful night, Janice thought.
Both of the bastards had been in the basement all night long tormenting her and the other girl, Allie was her name, Janice had learned last night.
The smaller man had primarily stayed with Allie. The bigger man, the one who had kidnapped Janice, the one she was sure she knew somehow, stayed with her.
Janice shivered when she remembered the way Allie had screamed. More than once the agony had been too much for the woman, who Janice didn't think was much older than a teenage girl.
Janice felt like she knew her too. But that wasn't hard to believe. She must have served burritos at Fred’s and coffee at the Reading Room to just about everybody in St. Isidore at one time or another.
Janice felt guilty. The man who had taken her had whispered last night that because she was his, now he would get for free, what he had been paying for on her website.
Maybe she had egged him on. Maybe she was responsible for the other guy, too. And that would mean she was the one who had actually hurt Allie.
Janice didn’t care much about herself anymore. But she felt for Allie. Janice had seen her naked dirty body laying on the basement floor, trying to sleep and forget during the day time what had happened the night before.
They had crawled naked together to the food and water dishes and closed their eyes when the other was using the toilet bucket.
Before Allie had been dumped in the basement, Janice had not given up. She had been playing for time. She waited and watched for an opportunity. She gathered weapons. Janice had a stack of rocks, bricks and even a hammer squirreled away under an old oily tarp. And she had the screwdriver.
Janice had everything she needed. There was no need to wait any longer. Janice knew she could take another day or two, but she wasn’t sure that Allie would survive.
It was time to act. It was time to escape. It was time to live again, or die trying.
Allie had been moaning and whimpering. Janice knew she was hurting. But Janice also knew that if Allie got any louder, the man upstairs would get angry. She had felt his wrath. Janice did not want to feel it again. And more than that, Janice did not want to have to sit still while Allie felt his anger.
Janice crawled over to Allie. She held the young woman’s hand, stroked her dirty hair and noticed some patches of hair had either fallen out or had been ripped out of her scalp.
Janice’s inclination was to whisper words of reassurance, of her plan, even of her love for the woman who shared her dungeon.
But she didn’t dare make a sound.
All Janice did was put her lips on Allie’s ear and whisper, “We can’t make a sound. You need to be quiet.”
Allie tried to stop her whimpering. Janice hugged her tight, and they sat together, naked, beaten, but not defeated on the basement’s dirt floor.
Janice was listening for the sounds that gave her new hope every day. She was waiting for the screen door to open and close, the car door outside to slam shut and then the sound of the man who Janice hated more than she thought possible, driving away.
Every morning when she heard that succession of noises, Janice would think, maybe this is the day he is going to die.
So far, that day had not come.
But the day that had come, this morning, was the day that Janice would finally be free. And she was taking Allie with her.
“I am getting us out of here, today,” Janice whispered again.
Allie turned her tear-stained face to Janice with unbelieving eyes.
“Really,” Janice said. “Just wait. Be patient. We are going to be free today.”
Now, freedom didn’t necessarily mean both women would set their bare feet on the green lawn outside, or in this case, the snow left by a late winter, early spring storm, and run away to their homes.
In this case, Janice knew, that freedom might mean death. She was not sure if the other man stayed upstairs when the car pulled away. Janice thought she might have heard a dog one day, and she couldn’t be sure there were no booby traps.
What if he’s set up a trip shotgun to the basement door, Janice thought one night.
Well, so what? She decided that if there was another man upstairs, a dog waiting to attack her, or even a shotgun waiting to blow off her head; at least it would be over.
Janice waited beside Allie. The young woman was quiet now. They were both still. Both were holding their breath, waiting for the sounds of freedom.
And then they came.
The screen door opened and closed. The man muttered a curse. He probably had slipped in the new snow and ice. Janice heard him open and close the car door and start the auto’s engine. But then he got out again to scrape his windshield.
This is taking too long, Janice thought. She and Allie were trembling.
Finally, the scraping stopped, and they heard the man get back into the car and drive away.
Janice and Allie waited. The house was quiet. The refrigerator clicked on, ran and then clicked off. The foundation creaked and groaned the way any century-old house would complain on a cold spring morning.
However, everything else was quiet. It was empty, except for Janice and Allie.
It is time, Janice thought as she rose from the floor and helped Allie to her feet.
“Let’s get the fuck out of her,” Janice said, not whispering any longer.
Allie nodded her head, no longer trying to cover herself. She too was all in.
It was now, or never. Nothing could be worse than this basement dungeon, Allie decided, not even death.
And Allie knew she didn’t have to say that to Janice. It was understood.
Twenty Three
Janice led the way. She stood and took Allie by the hand and only said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Allie smiled, nodded, and stood. Together they walked to the stairs. It might be assumed Janice and Allie would run. Allie might have if she had had the energy. But she was totally wasted from last night. The men had not only raped her, but they had also filled her with drugs to make her submit.
Janice was not wasted, but she was very methodical. She went to the work bench and retrieved the screwdriver. Because no one was upstairs, Janice didn’t see any need to take the bricks. But she did stack them against the wall under her name that s
he had scratched into one of the bricks.
If they didn’t make it out the first time, Janice decided she and Allie would fight for their lives the next time the men came downstairs. They would not submit again, ever.
With the screwdriver in her right hand, and her left holding Allie’s hand, Janice marched to the stairs, and then up the twenty-three steps that led to the landing of her freedom.
Janice chewed on her lip as she studied the door knob. This had to be possible. Someone had to have put it together, right? All Janice had to do was to figure out how to take it apart.
Allie was shuddering behind her, again trying to cover her nakedness with her hands and arms. Janice pulled her hand away from Allie’s. She needed to focus.
Janice decided to start by taking the four screws out of a metal plate that surrounded the knob.
“Rightee tightee, leftee loosee,” Janice whispered, repeating the chant her mother had taught her about the basics of using a screwdriver or a wrench to thread a nut on a bolt.
Allie was starting to whimper. Janice understood why she was scared. Janice was scared too, but she had to push that to the back of her mind.
“Maybe we should just go back and sit down,” Allie said. She was deathly afraid of the punishment they might suffer if the man and his friend came back early.
“We are going to get out of here,” Janice said, holding the screwdriver in her right hand almost as a weapon against Allie’s fear.
“No, you can’t,” Allie said. “We can’t. What if they come back?”
“See those bricks over there?” Janice said. “The bricks against that wall. Go down and bring back two of them.”
Allie submitted. She hesitated, but she brought back the bricks.
Janice set one brick down and put the other in Allie’s hand.
“If they come back before we get out of this house,” Janice said, “I want you to smash their faces as hard as you can.”
Allie stuck the tip of her tongue out and smiled shyly at Janice as she hefted the brick in her hand, and then tapped it with her knuckles.
“Good weapon, right?” Janice said.
Allie nodded, and whispered, “Yes.”
“Good girl,” said Janice. “And what do we do if they come home early?
“We fucking kill them!”
Wow. Janice was a bit taken aback by Allie’s fury. Given what she had gone through, what they had known, it should not have been a shock; but Allie had come back to life with such a fury, Janice almost hoped those two motherfuckers did show up.
“Okay. Now you’re talking,” Janice said.
She took out the screws holding the plate around the knob, pulled the plate off, and yanked the knob off.
Allie clapped her hands quietly behind her.
There was still a knob on the other side of the door that had to go. Janice did the only thing she could think of; she pushed it with the screwdriver.
The knob on the other side of the door crashed to the floor and seemed to bounce and rattle on the linoleum forever.
Allie had her hands over her ears, and her eyes squeezed shut, seemingly looking for a place to hide until the noise stopped.
Janice started breathing again when the door knob stopped sounding an alarm that the prisoners were escaping.
“Fuck,” she whispered, and looked back at Allie to show her everything was okay.
But there was another problem. There was a bar or something that ran through the hole in the door left by the knobs, and it went right into the wall.
Janice bent down and examined it. She had to get that bar out of the door, or at least out of the latch. Janice could see know how a door knob worked.
"When you turned the knob, it must pull the end of whatever this thing is,” she said to Allie, "out of the latch."
“Put the screwdriver in that spindle, or whatever it is, and pull back hard,” Allie said. “If that doesn’t work we will have to take the door off the hinges.”
“Oh my, listen to little Miss Fix It,” Janice said, and she did as Allie instructed.
She put the screwdriver into the opening of the spindle and pulled. Hard. The door opened right into Janice and Allie.
It almost knocked them back down the stairs, which would have been tragic. But Janice and Allie who could only see the freedom ahead of them, laughed, stifled a cheer and walked into the kitchen.
Confident no one was in the house — if there had been anyone home or a dog, they certainly would have responded to all the noise — Janice did what she had been dreaming of; she turned on the cold water in the kitchen sink and drank.
“Clean, cold water. My God, I never knew it could taste so good,” Janice said, laughing as she threw a handful of it at Allie.
When Allie took her turn, she put her mouth under the faucet as Janice turned the cold water on.
“Enough,” Janice said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“How about some clothes?”
“Good idea. Let’s find a bedroom.”
Janice and Allie did find clothes in a bedroom wardrobe, men’s clothes, but neither woman cared about fashion at this point. They just wanted to be dressed.
They found jeans, t-shirts, underwear, everything they needed.
Janice and Allie had enough. They had seen enough. The women were ready to run.
They only missed one thing.
Neither woman had seen the electric eye beam running across the open bedroom door, about two inches above the floor.
Twenty Four
Driving home from school where he’d spent another day dealing with the hell of trying to convince twenty-five teenagers at a time not to kill him or each other, Tim was thinking about all of the girls he had known and how Janice was so different from any of them.
I was so sure she was the one who finally understood, but I know that I was wrong. Damn, Tim thought, Janice was the one who was going to last. She was the one who would love me. And I think I could have loved her. I do.
Neither of them had fallen in love at first sight. Lust at first click? Tim laughed. That was possible. But that was all. Tim wasn't even sure he was in love with Janice now.
It was too early for that.
Or maybe it was a crush, the best you could hope for from an internet love affair.
“Who am I kidding,” he asked his dashboard. “It was pay to play. I paid. She played. As simple as fucking that!”
Tim slammed the dashboard as a traffic light turned red.
Janice might have tried to reject him like the others had online, but Tim had seen through that game. And look at her now; chained up in his homemade dungeon in the basement.
What was it that made her stand out?
It was that knowing look. She just knew. I could feel it. The other girls were just kids.
"Yeah, she's only in high school, but Janice knows," Tim had said to Paul, the friend who has been beside him through all of this, for all of these years.
"Whatever it is, it feels right for the first time."
"The others felt good didn’t they?"
"Yeah, but something always went wrong. They just weren’t right."
"You killed them."
"No, I did not."
"Yes, you did. You killed them. You will kill more. You might even kill me.”
The light turned green. Tim said nothing for a few blocks. He just drove, thinking about this, mulling it over in his head, chewing on his tongue. Watching boys and girls, all ages, playing in their yards, hanging out on street corners. Kids everywhere he looked. Tim just couldn’t get away from the kids.
“I didn’t mean to kill them,” Tim finally admitted to Paul.
Paul understood. He always did.
"I never even meant to hurt them, but they always fucked up and things just started to go wrong,” Tim said.
He drove faster, rocking back and forth behind the wheel, forgetting where he was, forgetting where he was going, seeing nothing on the road, rolling faster and faster, driving
faster and faster.
Only seeing their faces. Cheryl, Samantha, Evelyn, Janice, Kathy, Dawn, Tommy, all of them, their faces, when they were alive, when they fucked up. And their faces when they were dead.
Tim never remembered how they died, to be perfectly honest. But they always wound up dead. One minute they were alive. The next minute they were dead. That is how he tried to explain it to Paul.
"What are you going to do if Janice fucks up?” Paul had asked. “What will you do then?"
"She won’t. She wouldn’t. She understands."
"Are you really sure?"
Tim took a moment to think, remembering that conversation with Paul, think gin about how pissed he was at his best friend for even raising the possibility that Janice might go rogue.
Tim’s body was practically wrapped around the steering wheel, when he stopped at a red light again, chewing on his tongue and sweating.
"Yes, I am sure," Tim said as the light changed and the car moved forward.
He felt like Paul’s left hand was holding his right hand, just like the night they had this conversation, sitting in Tim’s car, parked under some trees. Tim had one hand on the wheel, one hand in Paul’s hand.
"Yes, I am sure she understands. Janice is different. Janice is good."
"If you are wrong about this one, you know what you have to do.”
"Janice is right for me."
"Are you ready?"
"Janice is the one."
Tim was nearly home. He felt good. Janice was waiting.
Tim was feeling better now. Paul always did that for him. Tim always relaxed when he thought about Paul sitting beside him.
We’ve been best friends for more than forty years.
He’s always been the one for me, and I’m always been the one for Paul.
But now there’s Janice.
Paul doesn’t like her.
He liked Allie though, that’s why I told Paul to bring her home, and not to kill her, not yet.
“Janice is perfect for us,” Tim told Paul as they relaxed while the two girls whimpered in a corner of the basement. “You will see.”
Tim was calm now. He could feel himself breathing. That was always a good sign. Paul had gone home last night. But that was okay. He’ll be back, Tim told himself. Paul’s always there when I need him.