by L. T. Vargus
She listens. It’s hard to place the sound of the door relative to the room she’s in. She has no feel for how big the cabin is.
Silence rings out for a long time. Too long. It reminds her of listening to someone sleep when she was a kid — that extended pause between breaths that sometimes made her wonder if the person sleeping next to her just died, growing more and more certain that the pause would turn endless, that the next breath would never come.
The key rattles at the deadbolt. Scrapes a little before it finds the hole and slides home.
Her heart flails in her chest, thrashes against her ribcage.
Hatred sloshes its heat all through her body. She is ready to pounce. Ready to kill.
The key retreats, and the door jerks free of its frame. Swings into the room in slow motion.
She holds her breath. Stares into the wedge of empty space that separates this room from the next.
Nothing.
There’s no one there.
She hesitates. Should she run for it now? Dash free of her cell while she can? Take her chances from there?
Yes.
She rips the leg out from under the desk. Brings it to her shoulder like a baseball bat.
The tabletop wobbles, but it stays upright. Balanced on the remaining three legs. Good.
She strides for the open doorway. Soundless. Stalking forward like a cat.
The other side of the doorway slides into view a little more with every step. An empty hallway. She can’t believe it.
He unlocked the door, pushed it open, and left? Was he testing her? Laying a trap of his own?
But then it occurs to her. He is going to retrieve his cargo now. The second girl. Tied up. Possibly unconscious. He’d unlocked the door ahead of time to avoid having to fumble with it while transporting her. To clear his path.
Something about this notion shoots a fresh round of ice water through her veins. The chilly adrenaline rush turns the palms of her hands frigid. Makes her pulse pound in her ears. Spurs her forward.
She hurries her pace as she nears the door itself, feet skittering from tile to tile, hell-bent on crossing the threshold as quickly as possible.
The doorway frames her for a fraction of a second. Boxing her into a tighter rectangle of white wood. Somehow claustrophobic.
And then she’s through. Into the open. Into the hall.
Carpeted floor touches the soles of her feet now. Tightly woven. Warm compared to the ceramic.
The walls out here are plain and white. No rough wooden beams like her room.
Overhead fixtures spill light everywhere. LED bulbs. It must be night.
The hallway widens to her left. Forms a little cranny there with a potted plant resting on an end table, tucked into the corner. The sight of this stops her in her tracks.
A plant. English ivy from the looks of it. In good shape.
The idea that this man would cultivate a plant is somehow difficult for her to absorb. He cuts throats. Makes people watch him do it. And in his downtime, he cares for houseplants. Nurtures them. She tries to picture him carrying a watering can. Tilting it here.
But she can’t dwell on it. Can’t linger. She presses on.
She shuffles past the plant. Moves to the place where the hallway opens up into a real room.
It’s a modern kitchen. Clean. Attractive.
Stainless steel appliances huddle in strategic locations around the perimeter of the room. Fridge. Oven. Dishwasher. All top of the line from what she can tell.
In the middle of the room, gas burners and a cast iron griddle jut out of the granite countertop of the island.
What the hell? None of this is right. This is not the ramshackle cabin she had anticipated. No rustic details. No dated decor. No signs of neglect or disrepair.
A car door slams somewhere off to her right, and she ducks out of instinct. Huddles behind the cover of the kitchen island.
Her grip tightens on the metal bar until it quivers in her hands.
She looks down at herself. No. It’s not the bar shaking, she realizes. Her whole body trembles. Knees. Elbows. Even her head and neck seem to have taken on a palsy for the moment.
She holds her breath. Listens.
Footsteps pound toward her, the gait choppy and heavy-footed. Strained, she thinks. He must be carrying the new girl, perhaps struggling to finagle her through doorways and around corners.
Emily sidles along the island. Reaches the corner. Peaks her head around the side where movement catches her eye.
Looking through the dining room into the hallway beyond, a shadow dances on the far wall. A darkness that undulates like something underwater, something that usually remains in the black depths of the sea.
She knows she should tuck her head back behind cover, but she can’t do it. Can’t look away. Wants only to see it. To know for certain what stalks the hall.
But the shadow is shrinking, not growing. Moving away. The footsteps confirm this, going ever so slightly softer.
He must be rounding the corner now. Heading for the room. The cell. The wooden beams on the walls. The empty desk where she’s supposed to be.
The footsteps cut off, stopping with an abrupt final thump, thicker than the rest.
Her whole body tingles. Skin alive with an abundance of prickles.
An angry grunt that sounds more animal than man rings out over the silence.
He knows.
Now he’s running. Thudding back toward her.
She scrambles to her feet. Rounds the island. Jukes to avoid hip-checking the dinette set.
She hits the hallway going so fast that she skids into the wall attempting the sharp left, shoulder banging into the drywall, jostling a couple of hung paintings of abstract art, but the collision is OK, maybe. It keeps her upright.
The volume of his steps increases, battering the floorboards like croquet mallets. Close.
Fuck. He’s behind her. Right behind her.
She weaves to the right. Into a foyer. The floor switching back to tile underfoot. Another potted plant manning the far wall. Some type of fern.
And she can see the door. Can see the narrow window running along the side of it, revealing a tiny strip of the night outside. A circle of light interrupts the blackness out there. The moon.
She grabs the handle. Turns. Peels the door open part of the way.
And freedom is just there in that opening. So close.
A sliver of the night spills into this awful place. Touches her skin.
But she knows it’s too late.
And he’s on her. Crashing into her. Their collective weight bashing the door closed.
He bounces off. Both of them stumbling.
She wheels. Swings the desk leg like a baseball bat. Catches him in the shoulder.
He dives for her. He’s off balance, and the force bashes him into the wall, but his forward momentum is too much to overcome. He caroms off the drywall still rocketing ahead, falling toward her.
She lowers her shoulder. Tries to push off into the oncoming human missile, to deliver the blow rather than absorb it. Some distant part of her mind remembers overhearing middle school football players repeat this adage: be the hammer, not the nail.
She coils up and unloads, launches herself. Everything goes into slow motion.
The bodies collide in the air. The crown of her head spears him under the chin with a crack like shattering concrete, and she stands him straight up. Kills all of his momentum.
The two of them seem to float in empty space. Speeding bodies that have pummeled each other into inertia.
His head flings back on his neck like some floppy child’s toy. She seeks out his eyes and finds them glazed and distant.
She has dazed him, though she is only vaguely aware of this through the fog of her own stupor. Her mass isn’t quite enough to put his lights out, even if she got close.
The bodies crash back to the floor like satellites re-entering the Earth’s orbit.
On impact, the desk leg
is torn from her grip, and she bites her tongue. The metallic taste of blood flooding her mouth again. It takes a second for the pain to hit, but when it does, it kills. An ice pick stab of agony so huge and raw that she feels the pain deep in her eye sockets.
The second phase of her landing jars her arms. The force sends a jolt through the heels of her hands and all the way up into her back, wrenching her shoulder blades, the muscles there straining like rope about to break.
His fall is more of a belly flop. He bashes an elbow into the potted plant on his way down. Fern leaves and black potting soil flung everywhere, still raining down like confetti long after everything else has settled. The hiss of it bleeding all over the would-be silence.
They both struggle to their feet. Clumsy. Woozy. Her hands pat around for the desk leg as she goes to rise, but it has skittered across the tile of the foyer. Out of sight and out of reach.
And Stump changes before her eyes. Transforms. Morphs.
He becomes something new.
She sees it in his posture first. A change in the carriage of his back and shoulders, in the way his arms splay at his sides. Something powerful in his core that wasn’t there before. Something menacing. Threatening.
It reminds her of those mutation set pieces in werewolf movies. The claws busting through the fingertips. The teeth lengthening into fangs. Musculature stretching out into something lupine in the legs and along the abdomen.
She backpedals. Wanting to scramble after her weapon but unable to turn her back on him. Her legs wobble beneath her, and she veers until her shoulder grazes along the wall, the vertical surface once more offering its support.
He stalks closer. His face hovering just next to hers. He growls at her.
“You want to do it your way, we’ll do it your way.”
All of that wry intelligence she could read in his face before has vanished. All of those thoughtful expressions and mannerisms replaced by animal aggression. Hostility. For the first time he wholly and fully seems capable of the things she knows he’s done, the things he’s talked about as though they were intellectual constructs.
He grins as he pulls back from her. Tongue flicking out to glide over his teeth.
She swings at him with her chained fists, but there’s no strength behind it.
He bobs his head, dodges.
She doesn’t see the counterpunch coming until it snaps her head back. Drizzles drool and blood out of the corners of her mouth. Shuffles her a few stutter-steps to the left.
That thock noise fills her skull again, reverberating, all other sounds now strangely distant.
Something cranks the dimmer switch in her head down a quarter of a turn, too — the dark somehow growing closer, encroaching.
She grabs at him, struggling to stay upright, no longer thinking about anything but surviving until the next second.
His hands clasp around her shoulders, incredible strength in his grip, thumbs and fingers digging into her flesh like it’s as soft as Velveeta.
He lifts and flings her to the ground in one motion. A vicious heave like she’s nothing.
The floor smacks her hard. Her little stick arms are unable to shield her, unable to soften the blow.
Everything goes black for a second, and then she’s back. His weight presses into her back. Both hands grinding her face into the carpet.
She tries to scuttle forward, to jostle free from his grip.
He rocks up into something closer to a seated position, pulls her up with him by her hair, bending her backward as far as she’ll go.
And now he unloads. Driving her head first into the seam where the wall and carpet meet.
Her skull cracks into the corner, glancing off and pounding the floor.
The pain flashes in her head, and then everything is far away again. Cold and quiet and distant. Darker still.
And the strength flees from her body. Her arms all limp. Any tautness that had once occupied her core now easing, softening. She is not unconscious, but she is not really here, either. Not all the way.
She is nowhere. That’s what she thinks. She is nowhere.
Still he writhes against her. His body twisting and jerking against hers. Relishing the control he has over her.
Their struggle stimulates him. Arouses him. She can feel it like a wave in the air. Some infrared shimmer forming a cloud that surrounds both of them in animal heat.
And she retreats further into the nowhere. Into the nonsense mess of dream images, memories and creations flitting in her skull, bits of those memories of her children in the backyard, the waves crashing on the beach.
Her mind tries to spare her from the worst of the trauma, tries to save her the only way it knows how. It takes her to another place and time. Transports her to dreams of somewhere else. Anywhere else.
But she can’t. She can’t run away from it.
She blinks a few times. Tries to concentrate. Tries to pull herself into the here and now, out of the mindscape and into the concrete world.
His body no longer thrashes against her, his bulk removed from her back.
Everything hurts, and at first that’s the only thing that cuts through the grogginess.
She is alone. Still crumpled on the floor. Time has passed. Minutes? Hours?
She tries to sit up, but the ache of moving feels like it splits her brain down the middle. Worse than before, as impossible as that seemed back then.
Did she take another blow to the head while she was out? She’s not sure.
She blinks a few more times. Tries to take in her surroundings. To focus.
Shadows spread around this place. Black shrouds all color here, blocks it out. It’s darker than before — darker, even, than her cell had been.
And yes. The room has changed. Grown. Even if she can’t make out much detail in the dark, she can see that the walls spread farther and wider here. A great expanse of a room compared to the tiny foyer.
No more door and window nearby. No more remnants of a potted plant explosion strewn about.
He moved her while she was out. Of course.
Her fingers dab at the floor, half expecting to find the familiar ceramic tiles but finding carpet instead.
That cements it. Not the foyer. Not the cell. It’s a new room altogether.
Chapter 44
Loshak chewed on an aspirin, waiting at another red light. He caught his expression in the rearview, nose and brow all wrinkled up from the bitterness. Nasty shit.
He’d managed to dig the headache medicine out of the first aid kit in the glove compartment, little paper sleeves of the stuff to be torn open. Bright yellow and glossy. Travel packages, he supposed. They made him think about fun size candy bars on Halloween.
He finished one tablet and popped the next into his mouth. It tasted even worse than usual. The normal bitter flavor was accented with a vinegar note — almost a booziness. They were probably past date. Oh well. Too late to worry about it now. This over the counter crap almost never worked for him, but what the hell? His head hurt like it was coming apart. Anything was worth a shot.
The traffic lurched into motion again, all of those impatient machines jostling about, their antsy little movements giving way to real forward momentum. Tension relieved. Loshak barely noticed these things. His eyes watched them automatically, and he adjusted his driving as necessary, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
Claire’s house was only a few blocks off now, and he had no idea what to expect. He’d tried calling her back en route, but she didn’t answer. Something about all of it felt off. Wrong in a way he could find no words for.
He needed to wake himself up, needed to get his head straight before going into a situation like this. An unknown.
Without taking his eyes off the road, he reached for his thermos in the passenger seat, placed it between his knees and screwed the lid off with the fumbling fingers of his left hand. Vapor puffed out of the thing as soon as it was open, and the coffee smelled tired — a little acrid — but it wasn’t all
the way cold at least.
He didn’t dick around with the little mug, bringing the metal lip of the thermos itself straight to his face. His mouth and throat opened up. Welcomed the sludgy fluid. He sucked down a long slug of lukewarm coffee. Not terrible. Tasted better than it smelled. But the bitter aspirin flavor rose to the surface of the aftertaste, still lingering on his tongue, coating the roof of his mouth, and that sullied the experience some.
Stupid aspirin.
The caffeine soaked into him quickly, and he could feel the tiredness relent a little within a few seconds, mostly in his eyes. The sting didn’t leave them, but it receded a notch or two. Better than nothing.
Dirty buildings slid by on the sides of the street now, aluminum and cinder block structures all smeared with black streaks. He was in an industrial neighborhood, and he could smell the soot and chemical stench of it.
The factory windows burned bright, and thick black smoke climbed the stacks of bricks and spiraled into the heavens. He could see it twirling past the streetlights, partially blocking out the stars.
Claire lived not far from this grungy part of town. This didn’t seem right to Loshak — didn’t seem good enough for her — but who was he to judge?
Over the final two blocks, he seemed to gain focus. His thoughts tightening themselves, finding greater clarity and purpose after wandering at random — daydreaming most of the day — as he killed hour after hour waiting in the car. He was thankful for the renewed efficiency, for the sense that his actions had meaning.
Claire was what mattered here. She needed his help, one way or another, and he would deliver for her.
The factories faded away, and small houses emerged in their place. He gazed at the rows of tightly packed brown boxes that sat close to the street, knowing he had to try to remember which one belonged to Claire. With everything rendered in shades of brown, it was a little like looking into a mouth full of bad teeth and trying to pick one of ‘em to pull. The lucky winner.
He slowed when he got onto her street. Craned his neck to get a closer look, to scan the faces of these homes. It was damn near impossible to tell the difference. All stucco boxy things in beige, umber, and khaki.