by Daniel Pyle
If there was a later.
Shoe back on the ground, mind already drifting again, Zach almost didn’t notice Davy dropping his hands to his thighs, patting at his bloodstained cargo pockets, and heading out from cover and across the manicured forest surrounding the house. For one second, Zach thought about turning the other way and running, but he’d already tried that. He had nowhere to go, nowhere but forward, into whatever nightmare this man led him.
They didn’t go straight toward the house, but circled around the side instead, following a route Davy seemed to have already mapped out in his head. A weathered picnic table sat among some cedar trees at the far edge of the property, and fifteen or twenty feet from that, a hammock spanned the space between two large oaks.
Comfy, Zach thought again while jogging to keep up with Davy’s long strides. How strange it was to be here, kidnapped and still able to rate the comfort levels of other people’s homes.
The sheers over the windows were drawn, but the drapes weren’t, and from this close Zach could see vague shadows inside the house, probably furniture and bookshelves, those kinds of things, but maybe people inside too, despite Zach’s previous impression that the place was empty. He had what might be a dangerous idea but went through with it anyway after a cursory glance at the man ahead. As Zach moved, he waved his hands at the windows and repeatedly mouthed the word help. If someone was inside and could see him, that person might think he was just some trespassing nut, but maybe he or she would understand the situation for what it was and help him. Just a chance, but he had to take it.
He continued waving his hands, feeling ridiculous, like he was doing jumping jacks, but not stopping until Davy turned the corner. He dropped his arms and turned away from the windows, trying to act as if he’d been following along normally the whole time.
They continued around to the front of the house, Zach huffing a little. A bluebird took flight from the porch railing just beneath an old wind chime. The bird’s sudden movement set the chime fluttering, and it tinkled. On another day, in other company, it might have sounded nice; but trailing behind his gore-streaked abductor, Zach thought it sounded ghostly and cold. Like Hell’s bells.
They reached the porch steps, and Davy stopped and stared at the front door for a long time. He touched his cargo pockets again, and Zach wondered what he had inside them. Davy turned to Zach and looked at him for the first time since stepping out of the untrimmed forest.
“—truck,” Davy whispered, shaking his head as if confused. “Should be here.”
Zach waited.
“You’re gonna knock on the door,” Davy said suddenly. “If they answer, get them out onto the porch.” He motioned for Zach to join him on the porch steps, and Zach reluctantly obeyed.
When Zach had planted his first foot on the riser, feeling like a caged animal even out in the open, Davy grabbed him by the shoulder and squeezed him tight.
“No funny stuff,” he said, and then let go.
The man dropped onto his hands and knees and pressed himself up against the side of the porch, still visible from Zach’s position on the steps but probably out of view from the door and the house.
This might be his chance to run. Once on the porch, Zach could sprint down the floorboards, vault the railing, and rush into the garage before the man with the little boy’s name knew anything was happening. But Zach worried about what might be in Davy’s pockets. The man might not catch him if Zach got a head start, but a bullet sure as heck could.
Zach walked across the porch feeling like a remote-controlled toy.
The door was solid wood. No window. No peephole. Zach couldn’t warn anyone coming to the door, couldn’t mouth help again or yell for them to stay back, or to grab their guns and come out firing. He couldn’t do anything.
Except….
Zach reached for the doorbell, actually let the pad of his thumb brush against the cool plastic, but didn’t push in. Instead, he waited for what he hoped was a good thirty seconds and said over his shoulder, “I guess there’s nobody home.”
“I didn’t hear you knock,” the man hissed.
“I rang the bell,” Zach lied. “Twice.”
“Knock,” Davy said simply, in a way that seemed both commanding and instructional.
So much for that. Zach knocked.
After another thirty seconds, no one had come to the door, and Zach turned around. “There’s—”
“Again,” Davy said coolly.
Zach turned back to the door and knocked again.
He’d been right. Nobody was home. He took a long breath, closed his eyes. He wasn’t sure what exactly he had just avoided, but he didn’t think it could have been anything good.
Davy stood now, looking perplexed, as if he hadn’t expected this at all.
In the distance, one of the dogs barked again. Davy tilted his head and smiled.
“Of course,” he said, though not to Zach. He straightened his head and walked back in the direction from which they’d come. When Zach didn’t follow, he stopped and turned to face him through the porch railings.
“Let’s go,” he said. “My timing was all wrong.”
Zach didn’t ask him to clarify, but Davy went on just the same.
“The dog,” he said. He looked at Zach expectantly. “Remember, Georgie?”
“Umm,” Zach said, not knowing whether a lie or the truth would put a quicker end the conversation.
“Come on, let’s go,” Davy said, relieving Zach of the need to decide. “I was all backwards.”
Before Zach left the porch, he noticed a small wooden plaque hanging from an angled nail beside the front door. He hadn’t spotted it earlier, though he must have been looking right at it.
PULLMAN, it read. Underneath, someone had shallowly carved an addition:
Trevor & Daddy
The porch steps groaned as Zach descended them. He hurried after Davy and had another idea, this one no less dangerous than his earlier attempt at flagging down someone inside. He went through with it anyway, not because he thought it had much chance of working out, but because two additional people had now become involved. Strangers, people he’d never met, but people all the same, and he had to do whatever he could to warn them.
Trailing Crazy Dave, Zach dragged the toe of his good shoe across the forest floor, letting his other shoe continue its now-familiar clappity clapping. The trench he made wasn’t deep, and it disappeared in a few places where he had to pick up his foot and run to catch up, but it was visible and obviously out of place. He wasn’t so stupid that he thought either of the Pullmans would understand the sign, would know from a simple track in the dirt that a psycho kidnapper had been stalking their home, but if they saw it (which was no guarantee), it might at least, as his mom often said, get their hackles up. He could hope, anyway. At least he would know he’d done something, hadn’t simply run away like before.
When they’d pushed back into the woods once more, Zach picked up his foot and resumed a normal trot. His scheme hadn’t drawn Davy’s attention. At least he had that.
Wondering who and where Trevor Pullman was, Zach hurried after Davy. Stay away, kid, he thought, dodging an especially wicked-looking briar. Stay far, far away.
PART II
DISMEMBER
THIRTEEN
DAVY HAD BEEN there for just over a week, and he’d almost gotten used to the little windowless room. The two-gallon bucket in the corner stank of his potty big and potty little. Sometimes, if he laid flat against the ground, the woodsy smell of the floorboards almost covered up the bad potty smell. Almost.
His bed was actually a pile of four blankets, the topmost a heavy bedspread he covered himself up with at night while he slept. It provided enough padding that he didn’t wake up too sore in the mornings, but it was so much worse than the race-car bed he had at home, which was marshmallow soft and covered with comfy pillows.
His pillow here was not much thicker than a folded-up t-shirt, and it had yellow and brown sta
ins and no pillowcase. Davy lay in the dark with his head on the pillow and tried not to think about it.
At home, he had a dozen different pairs of jammies to choose from. His favorites were the blue footsie pajamas with the button-up hatch in the back his mommy and daddy had gotten him the year before for Christmas.
He had no jammies here, had to sleep in his day clothes, or in his undies if it got too hot, which it did sometimes without air-conditioning or a fan or even a cool breeze from a window.
Davy missed his bedroom windows. They looked out onto the back yard where Manny liked to play, where his and Georgie’s swing set waited for them to use it again and again. He missed watching his daddy push the lawnmower all around back there, missed the scent of the cut grass and even the smell of his daddy’s sweaty armpits after he finally finished and came inside.
His daddy was dead now. They were all dead.
As dark as the room was, Davy’s eyes had still opened up wide enough to see a little. He stared at the ceiling overhead, which dripped sometimes when it rained real hard. In the light, the ceiling was white with little bumps, cottage cheesy, but right now it looked like nothing, just a big gray shadow that might have been eight feet away or a billion miles.
Sometimes he wished he were dead, too. It might be better that way. Maybe, wherever his family was, he could be with them. But dying was scary. What if he didn’t get to be with his family? What if he just died and everything was dark and cold and empty?
He heard boot-steps coming down the hall. The man who always wore flannel shirts also always wore boots. Big clunky boots caked with mud and rocks, boots that Davy could barely pick up with both hands, although he’d only tried once.
The boot-steps stopped outside Davy’s door. The knob rattled, and then—
clack click.
Davy rolled onto his side and shut his eyes tight. Sometimes, at home, he pretended to sleep when it was time for school or church, but whether Mommy or Daddy came to get him, they always knew if he was faking, always yanked off his blankets and tickled him on his sides and told him to Get up, silly goose.
Mr. Boots didn’t always know. Sometimes Davy faked him out. Except for with his mommy and daddy, Davy had always been good at pretending.
He lay very still, facing the wall, seeing only the insides of his eyelids and trying to breathe the way a sleeping boy would: slow, steady.
Mr. Boots’s real name was Simon, but Davy never called him that, never called him anything but Sir. Except in his head, where he was always Mr. Boots.
Davy sensed him standing there, smelled the stink of his sweat, which was the opposite of his daddy’s lawn-mowing sweat, and heard the sound of air coming in and going out of his nose, a sound that was a little bit like Darth Vader but a little bit more like a rodeo bull.
Davy didn’t know what time it was, didn’t know for sure if it was night or day. He hadn’t been in the room for the whole seven days, but he’d been there for most of it, and time had gotten funny, the way it did in school when they were learning about math and the teacher said it had been an hour but it seemed closer to a month and a half.
If it was daytime, Mr. Boots might think he was taking a nap. Davy continued his sleep-breathing and waited.
Mr. Boots stood there for a long time, stinking and breathing—maybe waiting for his eyes to adjust the way Davy’s had—the floorboards sometimes creaking beneath him. He stood there until Davy wanted to scream and finally took one heavy boot-step toward him.
Smack.
Davy stopped breathing now, knowing it was a mistake but unable to control himself.
Smack smack.
Davy tensed the way somebody must do when he’s about to get punched in the mouth or shot up by the firing squad, but what he got instead were a pair of slimy lips worse than two wet slugs on the very tip of his exposed ear.
The smack of the kiss was louder than an exploding bomb, or at least louder than the bombs on TV, and the moment Mr. Boots’s mouth was gone, Davy wanted to reach up with both hands and rub at the slime it had left behind until his skin came off.
Hardly moving, he forced himself to take a few more slow breaths, though less steadily than he might have hoped, and though the smell of Mr. Boots up close was even worse than the stink coming out of his bucket right after he went potty big.
Mr. Boots chuffed in a way that reminded Davy of Manny, a sound Davy had always thought sounded funny coming from the dog but was just a disgusting, hacking cough from Mr. Boots.
Breathe. Slow. Steady. Don’t gag.
Davy sensed the man backing away from his makeshift bed, his boots, for whatever reason, sounding much quieter in reverse. He remained tensed, his muscles almost quivering like he’d stayed out in the snow too long. But he didn’t feel a bit cold, was actually almost sweating.
Mr. Boots stood at the doorway again. After a minute, there came another loud smack, and Davy’s scream was so close that he actually felt it in his throat. But there was only that one step, and then finally Mr. Boots turned out of the room and closed the door behind him.
Davy’s hand shot up to his ear and rubbed until he thought he really had taken off a layer of skin. He waited for the clacking sound of the door’s lock, but it didn’t come. For a week, Davy had heard the same two sounds: click (the door latching) and clack (the lock). They always came paired together, like Bert and Ernie or ice cream and hot fudge. Click clack or clack click, depending on whether Mr. Boots was coming or going. Only this time there had been only the click, and that was wrong.
Davy rolled onto his other side, facing the door and still rubbing at his ear.
Maybe it was a trick. Maybe Mr. Boots was standing on the other side of the door with his doubled-up belt in his hand, ready to spank Davy’s bottom till it bled, grinning through those slug-like lips of his. Or maybe he really believed Davy was asleep and didn’t think it mattered if the door was locked or not, that Davy would never know the difference.
Davy pushed himself up on his hands and knees, listening. He heard only the blankets rustling beneath him and the thunderstorm that was his heartbeat.
He didn’t stand up but crawled to the door instead, a trickle of sweat running down his spine until the waistband of his shorts soaked it up, his hands and knees slapping softly against the hardwood. When he got to the door, he dropped flat and tried looking out through the slim space beneath.
It was dark in the room, a little brighter in the hall, and if someone had been standing outside the door, Davy thought he’d have seen him. Especially if his boots were as big and dirty as a dinosaur’s feet.
He watched for another minute or two anyway, as if Mr. Boots might suddenly appear from out of nowhere.
Pushed against the wall beside the door was a metal bowl that Davy had eaten tomato soup from earlier. Beside it, resting in a congealed puddle of that soup, was a giant metal spoon that had been too big for Davy’s mouth but that he’d finally managed to sip from the way a grown-up might have sipped from a shovel blade. The bowl didn’t look like any soup bowl Davy had ever seen. To Davy, it looked like the dish they used for dog food back home. It was heavy, its bottom weighted to keep it from tipping over. Davy picked it up, leaving the spoon where it was, and swung it through the air. It whooshed, and Davy smiled just a little.
If Mr. Boots was on the other side of the door, at least Davy would have something to use as a shield, or maybe even a weapon. He hefted the bowl and took a deep breath.
Davy reached for the doorknob still expecting a trick, a trap, half assuming he would be electrocuted when his fingers wrapped around the metal, but the doorknob felt cool in his hand. The room in general was hot, and the knob shouldn’t have been any different, but it was. Davy twisted it slowly, hearing the creaking from within, the click when the door unlatched from the frame and swung toward him.
The hinges creaked. Davy grimaced and waited for the pounding boot-steps to come down the hall, for Mr. Boots to discover and punish him.
No bo
ot-steps. No Mr. Boots.
He retightened his grip on the bowl and swung the door in fast, thinking one quick squeak was better than a whole bunch of little ones. He kept hold of the door so it wouldn’t slam into the bedroom wall and took his first quiet step into the hallway.
His bare feet padded across the floor. His sneakers were somewhere else in the house. Mr. Boots had allowed him to wear them once, when the two of them had gone into the back yard to chop firewood, which had seemed to a sweating Davy like the most unnecessary chore ever, but then he’d taken them away again and left Davy barefoot.
Davy padded farther into the hall, looking back over his shoulder, then forward, and then back again so fast he almost lost his balance and fell. The bathroom—the real bathroom with the running water and the toilet paper and the sink, which he had still not been allowed to use—was behind him. Mr. Boots’s bedroom was ahead on the right, his door closed and no light coming from underneath.
Davy almost tiptoed. He walked with his arms held up in the air at his sides the way he’d seen cat burglars do in the cartoons.
The bowl was too heavy to lift for long, and once Davy had passed the dark bedroom door, he lowered his arms and continued. The bowl brushed once against his knee and felt popsicle cold.
Now that he had left his room, he could tell it was night. The single hallway window, which had no curtains or shades or blinds or anything, might as well have been painted black. If Davy hadn’t known better, he’d have thought the whole house was buried way down deep in the ground, like one of those nuclear bunkers movie people sometimes used to hide away from whatever war they happened to be in. But it wasn’t totally dark. A light shone somewhere on the other side of the house, in the kitchen or the dining room maybe, and Davy could just make out the floor ahead of him and the few pictures hanging on the hallway walls to either side.
The place wasn’t huge. Besides the two bedrooms and the bathroom, there was only a small kitchen, a dining room (not much bigger than the breakfast nook they had back home and nowhere near the size of their dining room), and a living room with a sofa and a couple of stinky old armchairs that might have come from a dump or the side of the road.