by Sam Sisavath
It was all surreal and confusing, but maybe that had a little something to do with her inability to catch her breath. The man’s fingers were around her throat, choking her inch by inch, and all she could manage were desperate wheezing sounds.
She gave up trying to fight the Raggedy Man’s monstrous strength and momentarily forced herself to forget that every finger on her right hand was probably broken. She pushed all of that away—far, far into the back of her mind—and reached for the handle of the knife in her left jacket sleeve.
There. There!
The Raggedy Man’s eyes shifted from her face and went downward at the very moment that she stabbed at his neck.
Go for the neck! Always go for the neck!
He threw her.
What?
She didn’t know how he did it, but he flung her as if she were little more than a bug just as she was about to push the point of the knife into the side of his throat.
No! her mind screamed even as she sailed through the air and crashed into another student desk. The furniture broke underneath her as Ana spilled back to the floor, clutching the knife as if her life depended on it.
Get up! Get up now, or you’re going to die!
She scrambled to her knees, her vision blurring the entire time even as the pain that was rampaging through every joint and appendage reached the unbearable stage. She turned her head—slowly, way too slowly—when she heard him coming. He was loud and devoid of grace, like a bull caught in a stampede. Or leading it.
He’s coming! Get up! Get the hell up!
She was pushing up with one hand, straightening and turning around to confront him. Every motion seemed to take a lot (Too much. Too much!) out of her, and she hadn’t even fully turned when he got there first and rammed his shoulder into her chest and she flew backward again.
This time she hit the wall and ricocheted off it, landing chest-first into an already overturned chair. More excruciating pain exploded across every inch of her, and she might have let out a scream, but she couldn’t be sure. There was too much going on, and every one of her senses was overloaded.
Somehow, somehow she was able to pick herself back up again. Slowly, like she was stuck in molasses. It was her only speed at the moment. Thank God her legs were still working, even if every bone felt like jelly and her skull pounded and threatened to cave in on her.
The knife. Where’s…
There. The knife was exactly where it should be—in her right hand, her numbed fingers tightening around the plastic handle. She had held onto it through all of that somehow. Somehow.
And as long as she had the knife…
He was smiling at her. Or she thought he was, anyway. There was a slight curved indentation where his mouth was hidden behind that homemade balaclava. Wisps of loose pink thread swayed back and forth under his chin, but they were nothing compared to the severed sections of his coat, as if someone had put scissors to them. The absurd sight helped to momentarily calm her down and allowed her to temporarily shove aside the mountain of pain coursing through her.
Emily’s waiting for you. You can’t die here.
You can’t die here!
She continued straightening up—How long had she been doing that? A few minutes now?—as moonlight poured through the high windows behind her and hit the Raggedy Man just right, revealing the unnatural lines around his eyes and the dark skin between them.
“What happened to you?” she wanted to ask him. “What did you do to yourself? What made you this way?”
Ana tightened her grip around the knife. Or she thought she did, anyway. The truth was, she suddenly couldn’t be sure of anything anymore, including the ability to do something as simple as make her fingers obey. Did she actually have strength left down there? Hell, did she even still have the knife, or had she dropped it, but only fooled herself into thinking she hadn’t?
She wanted to glance down to be sure. All it would have taken was a second. Just one second.
But she didn’t, because she couldn’t risk it. One second was all it would take for the Raggedy Man to pounce.
One second was all it would take for her to lose this fight, along with her life.
And if that happened, who was going to save Chris? Who was going to take Emily back home? Who was going to rescue Wash?
You? a voice asked from somewhere in the back of her mind. It may or may not have been followed—or preceded—by a laugh. You can’t even save yourself!
“Oh, shut up,” Ana said out loud.
Or did she? She couldn’t be certain of that, either. Her ears were ringing, her heart sledgehammering against her chest, and the parts of her that had been bruised and battered and probably broken were screaming, screaming for her attention.
But maybe she had said it out loud after all, because the Raggedy Man seemed to cock his head slightly to one side, as if to say, “Did you say something?” Not that he actually did say anything. He hadn’t said a word. None of them had. Not the two in the alleyway and not the four that had followed them to the school. The only sounds had come from her and Chris.
Chris, screaming, as one of them took her away…
She looked past the Raggedy Man and at the door. She had to get to it. She had to go through it and save Chris. The teenager wasn’t Emily, but that didn’t matter now. Because, sometimes, it wasn’t always about Emily…
The Raggedy Man began moving toward her. Slowly, as if he had all the time in the world. As if he were playing games with her.
She lifted the knife (Yes, it’s still there. I wasn’t imagining it. Oh, thank God.) in front of her and got ready. He was going to charge and go right past her, just like the one back at the alley had. Just like they always did.
Men. They looked at her and all they saw was a small, skinny redheaded girl. They barely even saw the knife—if they saw it at all. It was a weakness of theirs, one that she had exploited more than once without shame.
Shame? What was there to be ashamed of? Survival was all that mattered.
The Raggedy Man took another step, but before he could take a second one, a hole appeared as if by magic in the spot where his forehead would have been underneath his rags. Ana flinched as something wet splashed her face, but before she turned her head reflexively, she saw the Raggedy Man falling and slamming into the floor in front of her.
Ana opened her eyes back up, the knife still gripped in her hand, and looked through a sticky film of what might have been milky substances at a man standing in the open door on the other side of the desk. At first she thought it was another Raggedy Man, but he was too skinny and average height and he was holding a gun in his hand.
A gun. The man had fired a gun that had killed the Raggedy Man. But how was that possible when she hadn’t heard a gunshot?
The man stepped into the room. Moonlight flooded over him, revealing short blond hair and blue eyes. The butt of a shotgun jutted from behind one shoulder and Ana thought, He’s not one of them. They don’t use guns. I don’t know why, but the Raggedy Men don’t use guns.
The newcomer stared at her, then down at the bodies between them. He spent a second or two on the Raggedy Men that she had killed before looking back at her.
“Goddamn, woman,” the man said. “Goddamn.”
She stared back at him, not quite sure how to respond, or if she could even open her mouth to make a sound.
Instead of saying anything, she reached up and wiped at the bloody sludge dripping from her face. It wasn’t sticky milk, even though it felt like it against her fingers. It took a few seconds before the smell and reality of what she was touching finally hit her.
Ana gagged, bent over, and threw up brown chunks of pecan on the classroom floor.
Nineteen
“Raggedy Men? That’s what you call them?”
“That’s what they look like. What do you call them?”
The man shrugged. “Assholes?”
Ana managed a smile, even if doing so caused a ripple of pain around her jawli
ne, her cheeks, and pretty much everywhere else on her from the neck up.
“That works, too, I guess,” she said.
Her savior hadn’t introduced himself, but he had led her to where he’d been hiding from the Raggedy Men. It was a small room above the janitor’s closet near the back of the school. An attic of some sort, and just as cramped. There were holes in the ceiling that allowed moonlight to filter in, giving her just enough light to see just how limited the spaces around them were. The contained space also meant she could smell everything, including her own sweat-stained clothes and that of the man’s sitting across from her. It didn’t help that she could still taste some of the vomit in her mouth.
“You’re lucky I decided to pop down to see what all the commotion was about,” her savior said as soon as they were safely back in the attic. “That was a bad idea, by the way. The gunshots. I mean, the screaming was bad, too, but you could have brought a whole lot more of them over with the shooting. You’re lucky the four down there were all there was, or we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”
“I didn’t have any choice,” Ana said. “Did you see her? The girl?”
“Yeah, they took her. Walked right past me in the hallway. Lucky I’m good at hiding.”
“Was she…?”
“Alive?” He nodded. “Yeah, fighting the whole way, not that the monster carrying her noticed. I’m guessing she’s going to stay that way. Alive.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why go through the effort of carrying her off if they weren’t going to keep her alive? If they’d wanted to kill her, they’d just do it in that classroom like they were going to do with you. Like they’ve done with everyone else.”
Ana had nodded solemnly, but she wasn’t quite sure how to feel about what he was saying. If he was right—and God, she hoped he was—then Chris still being alive was the best she could have hoped for.
But there was the other part, the realization that if they wanted her alive, then for what reason? What did men who barely still resembled men want with a teenage girl? And did she really want to find out the answer?
You have to. If she’s alive… Then you have to.
“And the answer is yes,” her savior said now.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, I know where they’re taking her. The girl.”
“Where are they taking her?”
Her savior didn’t answer right away. He was too busy using the lights from above him to redress his right thigh where blood seeped through a white T-shirt he had been using as a bandage. He had been limping the entire time they walked back to the janitor’s closet, and from the way he grimaced as he climbed up the ladder to the attic above it, he was hurting almost as much as she was. Maybe more, because although she was bruised and battered, at least there wasn’t a part of her bleeding. Or, at least, she didn’t think there was. Her savior, on the other hand, was nursing a nasty wound that hadn’t been treated properly.
“You don’t happen to have a first aid kit or something to eat on you, would you?” was the next thing out of his mouth after, “Goddamn, woman. Goddamn,” back in the classroom.
The question made it crystal clear that he hadn’t left his hiding spot out of some need to save a stranger, but because he’d needed something from her. He’d taken a risk and came up empty, and she could see the regret on his face right away after she answered, “No.”
Ana watched the man toss away the bloodied cloth he’d been using to dab at the blood around the edges of his “bandage” before sitting back against the wall and sighing. He looked somewhere in his early thirties, and she might have even called him handsome if not for the unkempt facial hair and an old fading scar on one cheek. And there was something about his eyes that she didn’t like.
Be careful with him, she had told herself almost right away. Be very careful.
“Well?” Ana said when he still hadn’t replied. “Where are they taking her?”
“What are you gonna do, go get her back from those brutes?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Why? You told me you didn’t even know her until earlier today.”
“I know her well enough. Where did they take her?”
He shrugged, as if to say, It’s your funeral. “There’s a warehouse near the center of town. Next to a strip mall with some phone stores, a Subway, and a pawn shop. Warehouse is the biggest thing in the area; two stories, steel all around. You can’t miss it.”
“How do you know this?”
“Saw them going into the place, then later coming out. Figured that’s where they hang those ugly wardrobes of theirs.”
“You tracked them there?”
“What do I look like, suicidal? It was purely by accident. I was looking for a place to fix this”—he nodded at his wounded leg—“and ended up right next to the devil himself. I guess that’s how my luck’s running these days. Shit and fucked.”
“You saw them taking people inside?”
He shook his head. “No. Just coming and going.”
“So you could be wrong. They could have taken Chris somewhere else.”
“Hey, anything’s possible. Not that I care. I’m not gonna run around out there looking for them. It’s hard enough staying out of their way.” Then, “You sure you don’t have any food on you?”
Ana shook her head.
He grunted. “Like I said. That seems to be how my luck’s running these days. Shit and shit, and more shit.”
“Yours and mine, and everyone else in this world,” she wanted to reply to his little pity party, but decided it wasn’t going to help her get into his good graces. Right now, she needed this man on her side, even if she was getting bad vibes off him. But she couldn’t act on those instincts right now, not while hiding in a school with (monsters) men in ragged clothing hunting for them.
Besides, how did your instincts work out with Gabriel? that annoying voice in the back of her mind asked.
Ana looked around her. They had accessed the attic by using an old beat-up metal ladder that now lay on the floor next to the trapdoor between them. She remembered seeing just how much difficulty he had climbing the rungs.
He would have let me die down there if he didn’t think I might have had something he needed, Ana thought now, looking across at the man. He’s desperate. Maybe even more desperate than me.
There were two used condoms in a corner behind her, along with old soda cans and bags of chips. Everything in the small space had sat undisturbed for years until they showed up. Some kind of secret rendezvous used by the Talico High School’s more adventurous students, maybe. Right now, it was their salvation.
The man had taken out the handgun he’d used to shoot one of the Raggedy Men earlier and was unscrewing the silencer attached to the barrel. That was the reason why she hadn’t heard the gunshot. She wished she had something like that. Why couldn’t Chuck have given her a gun with a silencer?
“Do you have any more bullets?” Ana asked, taking the SIG out of her jacket pocket. Finding it again in one of the classroom’s dark corners had been a minor miracle. The fact that its magazine was mostly empty, though, wasn’t.
Her savior leaned over and took the weapon from her. “Nice little toy.” He ejected the magazine and thumbed out the last round. “.380. I don’t have that on me.”
“You know where I can find some?”
“Good luck with that. I scoured every building I could find after my run-in with those Incredible Ugly Hulks. Sports stores, pawn shops…” He shook his head. “Nothing useful. Like someone cleaned out all the good stuff before we got here.”
He tossed the gun back to her, and Ana almost didn’t catch it. Then again, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered if she hadn’t, because there was only one round left anyway. In many ways, it was a reminder of why she preferred to rely on the knife. Knives didn’t run out of bullets.
“So you know guns?” Ana asked.
“Don’t you?”
“You pull the tr
igger and it goes bang. What else do you need to know?”
He chuckled. “Spoken like every woman I’ve ever met.” He snatched up a shotgun leaning against the wall next to him. “A girl like you, out in a dangerous world like this, needs something with more firepower for protection than that little peashooter. Like one of these, for example.”
“A shotgun.”
“Not just any shotgun, little missy. It’s a Remington 11-87 model. Semi-automatic.”
“What does that mean?”
“That means it preps the shells for you after every shot. No need to work the forend.”
Ana nodded, even though she had no idea what a “forend” was. “So I can just keep shooting until I run out of ammo?”
“That’s the idea. God bless the Remington Arms Company.” He laid the shotgun down next to him. “The only downside is I only got four shells left for it.”
“What are the chances you’ll give that thing to me? I could probably use it more than you.”
“That’s like saying water is wet. But as to whether I’ll let you have it, the better question is: What are the chances you’ll do something for me, for it?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I bet we could come up with lots of positions.”
She fought back the sneer and pushed the smile through instead. His response was so typical it was almost amusing. Even now, with some of the Raggedy Man’s dry blood still clinging to parts of her face and obvious red marks along her temple, cheeks, and jaw—not to mention all the bruises under her clothes that he couldn’t glimpse but had to know existed—all her savior could see was a woman and everything she could do for him as one.
Men. They’re as predictable as the sun rising in the east every morning.
“Maybe we can work something out,” Ana said.
“Maybe we can,” he said with a grin.
She nodded at the gun in his lap. “What about that?”
“What about it?”