by S. D. Perry
She thought for one terrible second that she might have pushed too hard; he only stared at her, but he decided to forget what she was saying, to not even hear it. She could feel him do it. He was so firmly committed to his version of things that nothing else was going to edge in.
“You have to get away from those fuckers,” he said. “Come with me. We’ll get out of here, just go.”
How old was he, ten? “Go where? You have a car, a destination…?”
“I don’t know. Down the coast, somewhere nice. Wherever you want. California. Mexico. Just get away from all this bullshit, someplace we can be together. We can take my father’s car.”
He closed the small distance she’d managed between them. He leaned forward, slipping the gun behind him, leaving it on the bedspread. She felt her heart hold for a beat. He wasn’t touching the gun. His arms went around her, pulled her close, and he wrapped a hand beneath her ass, bringing her up and into his lap.
“I love you,” he said again. “I want you so bad.”
She closed her eyes, let herself be kissed. There was no siren, but she thought she heard an engine out on the street. The front door was still open; Eric hadn’t closed it before following her, she was sure. They’d find Bob first, get him help, and come upstairs with weapons drawn.
“Get rid of the gun first,” she said.
He leaned back, cupping her breasts through her shirt, keeping up the eye contact, which was getting ludicrous and creepy. “You don’t trust me yet. You’re holding back. I want you to feel what I’m feeling. I want you to know what you’re doing to me, right now.”
“You’re…” She focused on his face, let the sensations come…and felt her stomach knot, her defenses slamming down. Beyond a height of arousal she’d never personally felt, disorienting all on its own, his thoughts were desperate, screaming billboards proclaiming his love. Beneath that, everything was dark and sexual, threaded with feelings of brokenness and a driving desire to have what he wanted, to persevere until she gave up and was sorry and they lived happily ever after. There was nothing resembling reality in his thoughts, not even a little. Maybe most frightening of all, he’d already forgotten that he’d just shot someone. Bob was nowhere in his mind.
“Eric, listen to me,” she said, grasping for reasons that he might believe, stilling his hands with hers. “I saw you getting killed by the police, that’s why I freaked out, that’s why I took off, you are holding a gun and they shoot you down. It’s going to happen here, tonight, now. Hide it under the bed, put it in a drawer, just get rid of it. Please.”
Eric looked into her eyes. “Then will you come with me?”
She had to resist an urge to scream. “Yes. Hurry.”
He smiled, and in spite of her fear, her disgust, she felt like crying suddenly, he looked so much younger, like a little kid. Tears welled in his eyes.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said. He shifted her onto the bed and picked up the gun. He ejected the magazine, a clumsy, unpracticed move, and pulled the top part back, popping a bullet out. He tossed the gun and the magazine and the bullet onto the floor, and she felt a huge surge of relief. He was fucked-up and a selfish dick, and he’d hurt Bob, but he didn’t deserve to die.
He surged forward like a wave, was all over her, his hands on her breasts, his tongue in her mouth. She thought of Bob and heard the creak of the stairs, and Eric was pulling her comfy pants down and off, and her underwear, and she was going to endure the sex, she didn’t see that she could get out of it, except he was still fumbling at his belt, kneeling between her legs when the door was kicked open.
It was that fuck-knob Kyle Leary, posing like a cop in an action flick, holding a gun much bigger than Eric’s, something heavy and black. He took in the scene, saw the gun on the floor, shot a look over his shoulder. He turned back to where Eric and Amanda had frozen.
“Drop your weapon!” he shouted.
Amanda looked at Eric. They both looked at the empty handgun on the floor.
She looked at Leary again, sweating, his face red—and felt the poisonous immensity of his presence, the poison defining itself to her in a surge of sick realization. Leary was going to shoot Eric. He wanted to kill someone, he wanted to shoot a bad guy, a rapist. What she felt was wasn’t heat and excitement, it was deliberate murder.
“Stop!” Amanda screamed, and no wonder she hadn’t recognized her voice, it was shrill and mad, she was fucking Cassandra, doomed to tell people the truth and have it make no fucking difference.
Eric instantly held his hands up, still holding his belt. It fell from his hand, landed on the bed, slid to the floor.
“Freeze! I’m gonna shoot if you don’t drop it now, drop it now! Don’t do it, buddy!”
Leary still sounded frantic, his voice high and strained, but he took a second to aim carefully for Eric’s stunned expression, his own fixed with a sudden wide grin. Amanda could hear footsteps crashing up the stairs behind him, but they weren’t going to be there in time—
Leary fired three times in a row, the gun bouncing in his hand, and Eric was blown back and over to the side, crumpling over her left leg, trapping it, she had the briefest sense of jetting blood and that the shape of his face had changed, that it was crooked where his right eye had been, and then she was screaming, kicking desperately to get away from him, her naked legs spattered with his hot blood.
She screamed and screamed and when she ran out of breath, she stopped. Leary pointed his gun at the floor, his lips moving but she couldn’t hear him, her ears were ringing so badly. Another cop, a pinch-faced red-headed woman, Cam Trent’s mother, came in behind Leary. Leary said something she couldn’t hear; Trent looked at the gun on the floor, nodded, said something back.
“What the fuck,” Amanda gasped, looking at the fat-faced cop, Leary; she wouldn’t look at Eric, she couldn’t. She could barely hear her voice. “You killed him.”
He leaned forward slightly and spoke, his lips outlining his words as much as his voice. “You’re safe now.” The mask of compassion he wore couldn’t entirely cover his excitement. Blew him away, he thought, again and again. He was going to rape her and he had a gun, armed and dangerous, he shot that guy and I blew him away, blew him AWAY, honest-to-God 10-55 right here!
“Motherfucker,” Amanda whispered, and rolled on her side and curled into a ball.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Everything was cool, at first. The walk had been hilarious, and by the time they got to the turnoff to the fairgrounds, it was almost full dark. They passed a group of older kids, a couple of girls and a guy, and Tommy heard someone laugh farther ahead and felt a real excitement, shuffling along with Jeff and smelling the trees and seeing a gibbous moon in the dark-blue sky; this was the best night of his life.
They lurched their way over a ditch, and then they were in the woods, the shadows thickening to night. Walking through the fringe of trees, they could see lights flickering off and on through the screen of branches and as they got closer, a couple of trailers strung with Christmas lights and a bunch of massive, shadowed heaps of folded metal, and buildings shading off into darkness. There were some people moving around, putting up lights, moving things; there was a radio on, and some ancient arena-rock ballad was playing, the sound far across the wide field. They stopped in the trees, hanging back.
Tommy looked around. He had to pee. “Where is everybody?”
Jeff shrugged. “They’ll be here.’s early. Or they might come up tomorrow. It’s not an everyday thing.”
Tommy blinked, trying to think of why that might be important. No good. He returned to something he knew.
“I gotta piss. Where can I take a piss?”
Jeff looked around. “Uh, not here. Back of the park. Come on.”
They skirted the open fairgrounds, staying to the trees. Tommy could see a parking lot off to their left, empty but for a handful of cars and a lone figure walking toward them, toward the trail to the fairgrounds.
They went anothe
r half dozen stumbling steps on the near-black trail before Jeff said, “Ah, shit, I forgot about the flashlight.”
“Dumbshit,” Tommy said, although he’d forgotten about it too, and they both laughed, the sound too loud in the still of the trees. There was no one around. The carnies were mostly on the other side of the field, and the low-hanging branches made everything seem very quiet.
Jeff fumbled around, and a beam snapped on, throwing the woods all around into deeper night as it illuminated the beaten dirt of the trail they were on, the brown and green washed out by the flat, yellowing light. Something small crashed through the underbrush ahead, and the light swooped toward the movement, back and forth through a wall of dark, layered washes, the night stretching out behind the many trees.
Tommy noted the possibility of nausea, but his need to urinate outweighed all other sensory considerations. “Come on, I gotta go.”
“Little further.”
Tommy thought he was going to piss his pants, but then Jeff stopped near a kind of tall hedge that ran across the path and shone the light down its length, and Tommy saw they were at the back of the massive field, the rough, rounded hedge separating the woods from the open grounds.
“Anywhere behind the bushesh,” Jeff said, and laughed, but Tommy was already hurrying around the far end, forgetting he couldn’t see without the flashlight, tripping over something the second he stepped out of the beam.
He fell down, hit knees hitting the dirt, hard, but it didn’t hurt at all. His body felt startled, like he’d been hit with a giant pillow. Jeff caught up as he was crawling back to a standing position.
“You OK?”
“Fuck, no, I’m seriously going to pee my pants,” Tommy said, and that set them both off, and Tommy turned away and whipped it out of his shorts before he really did, his stream of piss shaking because he was laughing so hard. He almost fell over again, and that made him laugh harder.
Jeff dropped the flashlight and joined him, the light illuminating nothing as he turned the other way, also laughing and pissing. As their laughter tapered off, Tommy realized that the music had changed, more rock but something heavy and driving. He heard a grown man laugh and shout out something incomprehensible in a coarse, rough voice. The sound made Tommy remember that they were out here alone, drunk and alone, and he had a sudden sincere urge to be back at Jeff’s, watching more dumb movies on his computer. With food and water and a place to lie down.
Safe.
Tommy finished first and bent down to pick up the flashlight, almost falling again in his effort to keep his balance. He turned the light back toward the carnival. The bigger building attractions were back here, a fun house, an arcade; he couldn’t tell what was past that. There was no one in sight.
“Shine the light over here,” Jeff said. “’S fuckin’ dark.”
Tommy turned, the light turning with him, and out of the dark was a face suddenly, a man’s face only a few steps away, blinking at the bright beam.
Tommy stepped back. “Hey,” he said, in a high, strangled voice.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” the man said, and he sounded friendly, but his face was made indistinct by the brightness of the light. Tommy couldn’t tell if he looked friendly. “You guys OK out here?”
“What the fuck,” Jeff said. “Who the fuck’re you?” He sounded scared.
Tommy lowered the light slightly, the better to see the friendly stranger’s face. Rounded, full cheeks and a double chin, sunburned; thinning, light hair—
He didn’t want to realize who it was, standing there in the dark woods with them, but the realization came anyway, a slow burn of mounting terror that threatened to freeze him solid. It was the fisherman from the pier. He hadn’t been able to describe him that well to the police, but he could see him perfectly in his mind’s eye, remembered the way his tongue had stuck out a little, when he’d, when he’d—
“You guys like to drink?” the man said. He sounded casual and nice, a favorite uncle, maybe, a likable coach. He was big, too. Tommy’s father was six two and this guy was that tall and much broader. “I’ve got some beers in my car.”
Tommy started to back up, running into Jeff, the light bobbing across the stranger’s face. He felt supremely unprepared for this to be happening; even understanding it was taking too much effort, too much time.
Tommy grabbed Jeff’s arm and turned the light back toward the fairgrounds, toward life and people, but the man was in their way; they’d have to run past him.
Fuck that. Tommy wheeled Jeff around. They’d go through the woods, cut back across the hedge farther along. Jeff seemed to understand that they were in trouble; he didn’t ask any questions, just fell in right behind Tommy. They crashed through the litter of brush behind the tall hedge, Tommy fighting the drink, trying to make himself think better, be more coordinated.
He heard the man on the other side of the thick bushes, a few feet away. “Why are you running?” The voice wasn’t friendly anymore, but mocking, and it occurred to Tommy that the stranger wasn’t having to break trail, he was just walking along the fairgrounds side of the hedge, waiting for them to come out. “Are you afraid?”
“We’ll kick your fuckin’ ass,” Jeff said loudly, but the man didn’t answer, and Tommy couldn’t imagine that he’d been scared away. He crashed forward again, shining the distinctly dying flashlight at the hedge, looking for breaks, looking to see if there was something, anything they could use.
There, a gap in the thick bush, past that a wall, the back wall of something taller than the hedge. The arcade or the fun house. He couldn’t hear the guy on the other side; he’d probably stopped at the corner of the building. We’ll run around to the front, someone’ll be there—
“Here,” he said to Jeff, his voice low, as if the man didn’t know where they were, as if he couldn’t just look over and see the flashlight’s beam. No time to mourn his stupidity; Tommy snapped the light off, took a shaking breath, and then tore through the dark-green leaves, sharpened twigs poking his bare arms and legs, and then he was clear, between the wall and the bushes. He didn’t wait for Jeff; he turned away from the direction they’d come and booked, steadying himself against the wall, painted wood whipping beneath his hand.
“Wait!”
The man’s voice was way closer than Tommy had expected, and he ran faster, his legs carrying him over the black, pitted ground. He grabbed the corner of the building as he reached it, letting it pull his body in a different direction, not sure if Jeff was behind him, too afraid to look back.
He didn’t see anyone, saw nothing but the building itself, edged in moonlight, and the building next to it, both dark and still. He reached the next corner and took it as he’d taken the first, letting himself pivot to the front of the structure, the fun house, he could see the giant clown face even in the dark.
He heard running steps from where he’d just been and didn’t know who was coming. He saw the opening at the front of the ride, up two steps, and there was a padlock on the gate, but it was hanging open, and he jumped the second step and was inside, dizzy with terror and the beat of a dawning headache, his mouth as dry as a desert, his eyes wide and unseeing in the pitch black of the fun house.
Cameron Trent was at the fairgrounds with her best girlfriend, Brittany, and they were high, high, high, passing the pipe with this kid from school, Clay Russel, a little rocker shithead, but he had awesome shit, and any port in a storm; they’d seen a couple of little kids go by but no one else was around, it was positively dead, and when Clay had run into them coming off Bayside and asked if they wanted to smoke out, the girls had exchanged a shrug and then followed. Clay was trying to get something going with Britt, it was obvious, but talk about nonstarter. Brittany had said that these guys from Port Angeles might be up at the carnival tonight, and they’d dressed accordingly, but so far it was barely worth the trip; smoking out with Clay Russel was only saved by the quality of his pot.
“Those jeans are way too tigh
t,” she said, interrupting whatever Clay was talking about, which was probably his car or death metal or something. God, he was short.
“Shut up,” Britt said, her eyes round. “Whattup, whore?”
Cam smiled. “Slut. You’d totally blow Clay here for his pot, wouldn’t you?”
Brittany laughed, her mouth hanging open. “Shut up. I would not.”
Clay looked back and forth between them, his eyes shining, a look Cam had come to know and expect from the boys she met.
“You would if I dared you,” Cam said.
“I have a full fucking eighth at my house,” he said, his voice so sincere that Cam couldn’t hold a straight face. She and Britt both laughed, and Clay joined in after a minute, his sounding forced and embarrassed. Poor Clay.
There were running footsteps, coming from behind them. As one they rose and turned toward the sound, Clay grabbing the pipe from Brittany and stuffing it in his pants pocket. He stepped forward a little, his stance wide, his shoulders back.
It was too dark to see anything, and the footsteps were getting close fast, coming at them out of the shadows and moonlit alleys that ran between the trailers and platforms at the back of the carnival, coming at them from out of the woods. Cam’s hand rose to her throat, and she felt a chill of sincere dread that her best friend obviously wasn’t feeling.
“Maybe it’s your mom,” she said, and Clay started laughing, and Cam didn’t have time to be offended before a kid came running at them out of the dark. Cam recognized him. Seana Halliway’s little brother, Jeff. He looked terrified.
He saw them and shifted course. The way he ran made Cam think that he’d been drinking, the way his head bobbed up and down, but what the fuck did she know, she was totally high. He stopped in front of Clay and gasped something, swallowed, said it again.
“Help.”
“What the fuck, little man?” Clay said, not unkindly.
“There’s a sex pervert up here,” the kid gasped, and he was piss drunk, the way he blinked all slow and slurred his words, but he also looked awful, like he’d seen a fucking ghost.