My tongue finds the jagged molar where the tooth broke. It’s sensitive, but just the white tooth. The root isn’t exposed. The inside of my mouth has the texture of raw hamburger. I wonder what I look like. The gunk from hiding in the tube is drying on me. I haven’t showered in two days. Heck, I haven’t cleaned up from having sex by the beach. I am, in every possible way, a complete mess.
And if Mark or Allie don’t get here soon, I’ll be a dead mess.
I shuffle over to the phone and look down, wincing. My eyes are open just millimeters, the one Frenchie hit swelling closed anyhow.
I can’t look. If I broke the phone, my one lifeline, then—
I make myself look.
It’s broken.
I don’t even react. I am dead inside. El Brujo and Frenchie might as well finish the job and make it official. Make my exterior match my interior. What possible brutality inflicted on my body could be worse than what they’ve done to my mind?
I begin to pace. The storage room looks so weird with full light. Blood streaks the floor where Amy was. My own blood mottles my hands, my clothes, the backs of my hands. The stain from whoever was in the coffee bean bag makes a strange sort of smear on the unpainted concrete floor.
Boxes are on their sides, upended from my time shoving everything off the shelves to get to the hole in the wall. Papers scatter on the shelving, the floor, and litter the space.
It looks like someone’s ransacked the place. Normally, criminals do that. Not truth seekers.
Chase must be texting me. He has no idea why I’m not replying. Is Mark with him now? I close my eyes. It’s not hard with one of them so swollen. I imagine Mark. I conjure his face. I remember those muscled arms, dusted with light brown hair. How his eyes warmed when I talked to him about dogs at the shelter. The way he was so quick to comfort me.
How he waited three years for me.
“Carrie!” Allie’s voice is so faint I wonder if I’m dreaming it.
I pause. I hold my breath.
I wait.
“Carrie!” Her voice is more urgent. Slushy noises, like suction in a cup of pudding, come from the hole in the wall. “It’s raining outside and I need you to get here, now!”
I scurry over to the wall and look in. A thin line of water is drip drip dripping into the room, running down the cinderblock wall, making a dark, nasty stain.
Nothing as bad as the blood by the stairs, though.
Her face appears at the opening, shoulders tight in there. I slide my hands under her armpits. She looks up, her nose almost bumping mine.
“What happened to your face?” she gasps in horror.
I yank her. She spills out, slithering like a snake through molasses. Allie falls clumsily to the concrete floor.
She looks around and blinks, over and over.
“You found the light switch.”
“Not exactly,” I say, my words a little slurred. I can’t quite focus on her any more. My eyes aren’t able to work together.
She stands. A rope is around her waist. She looks at me, the whites of her eyes sticking out in a filthy face. “What happened?”
“Frenchie.”
All I have to say is his name. She grabs my shoulders and peers into my eyes. Well—my one eye that’s functional.
“Did he hurt you? I mean, other than your face?”
I know what she’s really asking.
“He didn’t rape me.” Mentioning the nipple grab and the groping won’t help right now. I can tell her later.
“Thank God.” She looks around, her eyes pausing on the broken phone. “He broke it?”
“No.” I hold up my bloody hands. “I fat fingered it.”
She frowns. “Okay. We need to go.”
“El Brujo was with him.”
As I say the words, the live rat that bit me earlier in the pipe, when I hid in there, begins to lick the blood stain where the coffee bean bag was.
Allie looks down and lets out a shriek.
I scream.
We both stand there, screaming as if we were being electrocuted.
A phone rings. It breaks through our freakout. Allie digs into her mud-covered ass and pulls out a phone I’ve never seen before.
“Yeah,” she says breathlessly. “In here. She’s fine. We’re—what? What? Oh, fuck.”
I’ve never heard Allie curse, so….
She looks at me with alarm. “Frenchie and Galt are here. Just pulled into the driveway on their bikes. They’re waiting in the parking lot. Drew’s watching. He was about to come in and get us, but he can’t now without creating a bloodbath, and we could get hit in the crossfire. Chase doesn’t know where Mark is.”
“Shit!”
“I know,” she snaps. She listens urgently to Chase, then adds, “We need to get out of here.”
“We can’t,” I point out. “If Frenchie comes back and sees only me, then it’s safer than if he finds us both.”
She shudders. “He’d love to get his hands on me.”
“He’d love to get his hands on anything with a vagina, Allie.”
We both grimace.
“Look. You hide in the pipe. I’ll put a box over you. Wait until they leave.”
“You don’t know what Galt and Frenchie are like, Carrie,” she says in a cold voice. “Galt wants Chase dead. He’d rather see his own son dead than have left the motorcycle club. If he gets his hands on me, Chase will come find me, and then…” Her voice trails off.
“So don’t. Don’t be here. Go in the pipe and crawl back to Chase.”
She puts the phone to her ear and says something quietly to Chase.
“NO FUCKING WAY!” the phone explodes. Chase can be definitive.
“Yes!” she yells back. “It’s the only way.”
“I AM COMING DOWN THAT PIPE!” he bellows through the phone.
“Only if you have a shrinking machine,” she says back, angry. “I am not leaving Carrie here.” Her auburn-dyed hair is filled with clumps of greasy mud. The trickle of water coming from the pipe has halted. I’m guessing that means it’s stopped raining.
I haven’t been outside in over a day. Who knew you could take fresh air for granted? A flash of my dad flies through my thoughts, of being cooped up in a prison cell for three years with one hour a day outside.
My heart squeezes.
I grab the phone out of her hand and say into it, “I’m telling her to hide in the pipe. Are Frenchie and your dad still outside?”
Chase goes silent. Three beats later he’s back. “Yes. Just sitting and waiting. Drew’s behind a car in the lot. He’s probably two hundred feet from you, damn it.”
“Where’s Mark?”
“No fucking clue.” Chase sounds like he’s chewing on rusty nails. “Look, I gotta get you two out of there. I’ll storm the fucking door if I have to.”
“That’s a death sentence. For you, then for me and Allie.” And, eventually, Mark, I think. But I don’t say it.
“Fuck,” he snaps. “Then get her to hide in the pipe. Face toward you, feet toward me. Tell her to tie the rope around her waist. She needs to have her gun out in case she’s surprised. You got that? Tell her I’ll start yanking if I have to. Shit.” He makes a sound of frustration. “Maybe you two should just start crawling. Now.”
“If Frenchie gets down here and finds the pipe, he’ll start shooting. Or if he carries hand grenades…” I can’t believe the words coming out of my mouth.
“No,” Chase grunts. “But he’ll have no problem unloading all his ammo into that pipe, and it’s a straight shot most of the way. Fuck.”
“Maybe I should take the gun?” I ask, tentative. “I could…”
“You ever shoot anything?”
“Other than in a video game? No.”
“Then hell no. Allie’s been to the shooting range with me most of this year. She’s got one hell of an aim and she knows how to use a gun. You’d be a liability.” His voice is rigid and firm, but not judgmental. He’s being smart and ration
al about this.
He’s right.
And he is so Mark’s brother.
“You shine on Frenchie and my dad. Try to stall. Drew’s out there and we’re working on reinforcements. Once Mark shows up, this’ll all go down fast. You hear me, Carrie?”
The room starts to waver, like air on a super-hot day. I can see ripples in the air.
“Carrie?” Chase asks.
Allie carefully pries the phone from my fingers and speaks into it softly. I hear some assurances. A few I Love Yous. Mostly the sound of Chase fighting against himself to let Allie do what he knows she needs to do.
We’re cornered. She should just scramble up that pipe and leave me to my fate. I make my decision.
“Allie, just go. You can crawl up and—”
“Like hell I will.” She’s off the phone with Chase and staring at the scars on her arm. Her other hand reaches up to stroke her hairline.
Ah. I see.
I’m not the only one out for revenge. She can’t let the dean—El Brujo—win.
All the swirling bits of myself that can’t stop turning in a cyclone inside my body come together. With an energy I haven’t felt since being trapped down here, I stand tall.
I look at her.
And I say, “You’re right. Let’s make this fucker pay.”
The grin spreads across her face like pure, hard-core goodness.
Attagirl.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
I help her tie the rope properly around her waist and lift her so she can put her feet in the pipe. I have to use a lot of force to get her in there. It’s a different problem tucking someone in backwards. Plus, this pipe isn’t as big as the one on the other side of the room that I crawled in.
SNAP!
I jump and scream at the sudden sound from the corner. Scrabbling sounds fill my ears. They’re louder and more ferocious than before.
Something just got caught in a mouse trap.
And it’s not a mouse.
“What is that?” Allie asks in a hysterical voice. A flash of shiny metal in her hand catches my eye. The gun. She’s holding it, her shoulders pressed against the pipe but the gun is in her hand. She points it toward the sound.
“Rat,” I say tersely. I hold my hand up to the side of my face to block any peripheral view of the creature. “Caught in a mousetrap.”
“Ewwwww. Gross.”
“Yeah.” I can tell by the lack of emotion in my voice that she’s freaked out for me. Allie gives me the side eye and her brow lowers.
“We’re getting you out of here, you know,” she says. Her voice is commanding. Deep.
Determined.
“Right.” The effort it takes to talk feels like running a marathon.
The rat’s sounds of struggles are slowing down. It’s losing energy. It’s losing its will to live. My ears attune to the little shuffles and crackles, the weird sounds of hearing life fade away.
And then I hear my own breath, so clear and simple, like it’s the only sound in the world.
It’s getting fainter and fainter.
“CARRIE!” Allie shouts from her hole in the wall. Her body starts to wiggle, like she’s coming back into the storage space, like a worm seeking sunlight.
She looks like she’s in oppositeland, like every part of her that should be white is black, and black is white. The room changes into a million shades of brown. I don’t hear my breath any more.
And I don’t hear the rat.
The word What? is queued in my brain. I know I’m supposed to answer Allie. But I can’t.
It takes too much effort.
“If I have to go out there and tell Mark you died in here, Carrie, because you gave up, I’ll never forgive myself. Or you,” she says. The words are there, and I struggle to understand them. My knees buckle and I fall against the wall, my elbow brushing against her nose.
I can’t weep.
I can’t move.
I am that rat.
We’re not so different after all.
Right before Allie crawled in the tube, she handed me Chase’s phone. I had shoved it into the waistband of my pants. I feel it hum against my belly. The heat makes me feel something. Anything. There isn’t much left to feel, is there?
I’m winding down.
“Carrie!” she hisses. “I hear a buzz. Did Chase text you?”
I can’t answer. All my effort goes into remembering to inhale. My body is shutting down. It pauses. It halts. Sheer force of will is all that is keeping me going.
Allie is tucked entirely into the pipe, her elbow bent under her, gun in hand. She tries to move her arm out and fails. She needs my help.
“Check the text, damn it!” Allie barks.
Her words break through my haze and I reach down. I’m sweating now. The glass cover of the phone is wavering.
New guy in parking lot, the text says. Get out now.
New guy? What new guy? El Brujo, Frenchie, and Galt are out there. Who’s the new guy?
A new text appears.
Don’t shoot Galt.
What? What? “Don’t shoot Galt?” I read aloud.
“Galt?” Allie gasps. “Did Chase actually say that? I’m not supposed to shoot him?”
I shrug. “That’s what it says.”
Her eyes are so wide I can see the ring of white around her irises the entire way around.
“Okay,” she says slowly, shaking her head slightly. “If Chase says so.”
The hatch opens. I shove the phone back in my waistband and stand.
“They’re here,” I whisper to Allie, shoving a box in front of her face.
And then I turn toward the sickening sound of boots click-clacking down the steps.
“Where is she?” Frenchie calls out in a sing-songy voice. He sounds like a creepy molester in a van by the playground, luring kids with promises of candy.
I stay silent and move as close to the stairs as I can.
He appears, El Brujo behind him, then a huge guy in a leather vest, bald and looking just enough like Mark in the face for me to guess he’s Galt. Some other man comes up from behind. A biker. He’s big and bald, with a tuft of hair at the neckline of his shirt. My vision blurs from panic and fear, so I can’t quite make out his face.
“Cat got your tongue?” Frenchie taunts me.
“Who got her face?” Galt asks with a low whistle.
“She tripped and fell,” Frenchie replies.
“Into the back of your hand?” Galt says with a huff of disapproval. His eyes trace a long line down my face. I reach up and touch the crusting scratch left by Frenchie’s ring.
“Girlie Girl here is clumsy like that.” Frenchie moves aside to let the other three men find room.
The dean—El Brujo—looks around. His eyes spot something far behind me.
“Cruelty to animals? Oh, my, Carrie. First the pit bull, and now this?” His voice is a teasing ribbon of bile.
I follow his eyes to the mousetrap. The rat’s head is stuck, its tongue poking out, body twisted in agony.
Yet it is still breathing. The rise and fall of its chest makes my eyeballs pound in rhythm to its breath.
A normal person would argue with El Brujo. A normal person would say she never hurt Wizard the pit bull. A normal person would faint right now. A normal person would scream or beg for help from Galt and the new man.
But normal went out the window a long, long time ago.
All I can do is hope they take me out of here and that Allie can escape. Maybe Drew can save me in the parking lot.
Maybe becomes my only hope.
Galt looks at me with eyes shaped like Mark and Chase’s but a stone cold black. “Where’s the girl?”
I freeze. Does he know Allie’s here?
“Who?” I croak out.
“The one who’s missing. The cops got the big shipment, but she wasn’t in there.”
He’s talking about Amy.
“Who?” I ask again, playing dumb.
“Girlie Girl
here turned into a fucking owl,” Frenchie declares. In two steps he’s across the room and his hand’s across my face again. It all happens so fast I can’t flinch. Can’t move. Can’t defend. I fall to the ground and the back of my head hits the wall.
It feels like a gong of pain being struck by a mallet.
None of the men reacts. It’s like Frenchie swatted a fly.
“Carrie. Carrie, Carrie, Carrie,” El Brujo says. “You think you can trifle with me? I’ve spent years building my empire. And yes, it is an empire. I started with my father’s farm in Mexico and turned it into an international operation. I made my way through the finest schools in the United States and Europe, all the while fooling so many imbeciles with degrees and pedigrees and overinflated egos so eager to be stroked.”
“I want Girlie Girl here to do some stroking,” Frenchie jokes. Except it’s not funny.
“You think,” El Brujo says, his sophisticated accent gone. He’s stripped down to pure evil. For the rest of my life, however short, the sound of the devil whispering his truth will etch itself in my soul.
He clears his throat. “You think you can sit here and pretend you do not know where your friend is? I took her. I shaped her. I made her. She is a diamond in the rough and my perfect Nora will be made.” He sniffs, giving me a glare. “You think you can stall? Save her? You’re a pawn in a game of chess. I am the god who built the game. Give in now, Carrie. Look at what your fighting has brought you.”
He nods toward me. My ears ring with the receding shock of Frenchie’s blow.
“If only you’d stayed away. This is all your fault,” he murmurs. “Just like your father. If only he’d been smart enough to keep himself out of business that was not his. You’re both too stupid to live.”
I have no response. The sounds of a thousand years all rush through my head at once.
El Brujo looks at Galt. “Take a look around,” he orders. He’s wearing the same suit he wore earlier. His cologne is strong. He must have freshened up. The scent of urine and mildew and blood and cloves combines in the air. I try not to gag.
Galt’s boots thump against the concrete. He walks right through a dark red splotch of blood on the ground. He gets closer to Allie.
My heart races. I need to pee suddenly. I think I might throw up.
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