Fury (Blur Trilogy Book 2)

by Steven James

  Avoiding the jagged teeth of glass that were still embedded at the bottom of the doorframe, Daniel stepped through it, raised the shovel, and started toward Hollister. “Drop the knife.”

  While the guy was distracted, Daniel’s dad made his move, springing at him.

  They struggled for a moment and Daniel dropped the shovel and went to help his father, but by the time he’d crossed the room, his dad had already torqued Hollister’s arm back, forcing him to drop the blade.

  “No!” Hollister struggled fiercely, but couldn’t get away. “You don’t understand!”

  “Quiet, Brandon.” Daniel’s dad kicked the knife across the floor toward the front door. “Dan, are you okay?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “I’m good.” But he was obviously in pain as he led Hollister, who was trying his best to break free, to a nearby room. “Come here, Dan, I need your help.”

  His dad maneuvered Hollister to a cot and had Daniel clamp the open handcuff around the man’s wrist, shackling him to the frame.

  Once he was restrained, his dad searched Hollister’s pockets and came up with the handcuff key. However, as he was stepping back, Hollister suddenly whipped a syringe out of a case on his belt with his free hand and stabbed it into Daniel’s dad’s leg, depressing the plunger as he did.

  “There,” he said. “Let’s see where that takes us.”

  Sheriff Byers yanked the empty syringe out of his leg and threw it across the room. “What was that?” he demanded. “What’d you give me?”

  Hollister just smirked. “You’re about to get very sleepy, Sheriff.”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-NINE

  Kyle turned onto Nicole’s street. At the edge of his headlights’ beams, he could see that neither of her parents’ cars was in the driveway.

  But Ty Bell’s SUV was.

  Daniel’s dad couldn’t get an answer from Hollister, so he went into the other room and began flipping through the empty syringes and medicine bottles on the counter, trying to identify what he might’ve been drugged with.

  “I called 911 a few minutes ago,” Daniel told him. “They’re on their way.”

  Nicole watched in alarm as the lock broke apart and the door flew open.

  Knocking over the dresser, Ty barreled toward her.

  When he was about to reach out and grab her, she brought her hand forward and emptied the pepper spray into his face.

  He cried out and threw his hands up, rubbing frantically at his eyes.

  “Dad, sit down,” Daniel said. “An ambulance is coming.”

  His father, who was looking weaker by the second, stumbled over to the couch. “Hollister said you had a bump on the head?”

  “I’m fine.” He didn’t mention the fire or the near-drowning. “Just rest until the paramedics get here.”

  The front door to Nicole’s house was unlocked and Kyle burst inside. “Nicole? Are you okay?”

  She shouted to him from the upstairs bedroom.

  Sprinting up the steps, he found Ty Bell drawing his fist back to punch her.

  Kyle grabbed him by the shoulders and manhandled him to the floor.

  His eyes were puffy and swollen.

  He was crying out in pain and anger.

  Nicole was still holding the can of pepper spray. “He has my phone,” she told Kyle.

  Despite Ty’s best efforts to fight him off, Kyle didn’t waste any time recovering it from his pocket.

  While Nicole put a call through to the police, Kyle said, “We need to make sure he doesn’t go anywhere.”

  “There’s some duct tape in the kitchen in the drawer beside the fridge.”

  “That’ll work.”

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY

  6:28 P.M.

  3 MINUTES LEFT

  As Daniel’s dad positioned himself on the couch, he cringed in pain.

  Keep him talking.

  “Dad, do you remember Grady Planisek?”

  “What?”

  “Grady Planisek. He was a kid who disappeared back when I was nine.”

  “Okay,” he answered, half out of it.

  “Listen: He has something to do with what’s going on here. Someone used Grady’s name today to . . .”

  Who did you hear calling from the stairs Saturday night right before you passed out?

  Mr. Bell?

  Ty?

  Grady Planisek?

  “Something’s not right here, Dad. Something doesn’t follow.”

  Daniel’s thoughts shot forward, circled back around. Looked for a place to land.

  In that blur, Betty warned you to be careful who you told your secrets to. “You have to stop him before it happens again,” she said. “You can’t let him get away with it.”

  Then there was the old man in the hospital. He’d warned Daniel, “You don’t have time. He’ll do it again.”

  Who was he talking about?

  Who’ll do it again?

  But you might have been imagining him. You don’t know if he was really there.

  “Did you see someone else on Saturday night?” Daniel asked his dad.

  “What?” By the way he spoke Daniel could tell he was fading fast.

  Dispatch said eight or ten minutes.

  That’s too long.

  Going into the other room, Daniel tried to get Hollister to tell him what the drug was, but the man just jangled his handcuffed wrist. “Let me go and I’ll tell you.”

  Daniel listened for sirens, but only heard the sound of the wind in the night. Snow was blowing in through the splintered glass of the French door, and even here on this side of the cabin, he could feel the gusts of cold air.

  “Well?” Hollister asked. “Are you going to save your father? You just have to uncuff me and I’ll help you. I promise.”

  “That’s not gonna happen.”

  Daniel returned to his dad. “We need to get you to the hospital.” He reached out a hand to help him to his feet. “Come on, I’ll drive you myself.”

  “We can’t just leave Hollister here.”

  “He’s cuffed. He’s not going anywhere. There are officers on their way.”

  “Just give me a moment.” His dad closed his eyes and didn’t take Daniel’s hand. “I need to catch my breath.”

  But as the seconds passed, his father didn’t move.

  “Dad?”

  Don’t let him fall asleep.

  “Dad!”

  Daniel shook his shoulder to keep him awake.

  He stirred. “Yeah. I’m good.”

  “We’re leaving. Now. C’mon. We need to go.”

  This time his dad didn’t object and he let Daniel help him to his feet; however, Daniel found that he needed to support most of his weight.

  As he wrapped his arm around his father’s side and carefully avoided putting pressure on the bandages, the blood on them made him think of the dream of seeing him in the kitchen, and also of his own hand getting ground up in the sink, when the blades of the garbage disposal chewed through his skin, his bones, his—

  Why did you block out what happened at the barn when you were a kid?

  Because it was too traumatic.

  Because your mind was trying to protect you.

  As Daniel started helping his dad toward the door, the blood made him remember.

  Not everything in your blurs is one hundred percent the same as things in real life.

  The hay baler was running.

  The garbage disposal ground up your—

  Then in a rush, it came back to him—images overlapping each other all in a matter of seconds, and the memory of that day flashed before him.

  Your grandma is sad most of the time so when you go over there with your parents you play by yourself a lot, sometimes up in the attic, someti
mes in the field or the woods near her house.

  Sometimes in the barn on the neighbor’s property.

  One day you find a wooden box in her attic. Your parents are talking with your grandma in the living room and it isn’t hard for you to slip out the back door unseen with the box.

  You cross the field to the barn to sit by yourself in the hayloft and look through what’s in it.

  There’s a lock and a key in there.

  That intrigues you.

  You sit on the bench up there and read through the journals, flip through the photos.

  It’s late afternoon and it has started to rain outside.

  Then you hear a man and a boy enter the barn. They’re talking, but it doesn’t sound like the boy wants to be here.

  You don’t want them to see what you’ve been doing up here in the loft, so you put everything back in the box and you lock it and hide it under the bench. You don’t want to get caught, so you slip behind a hay bale.

  The boy starts crying.

  At first it’s soft, but then it gets louder.

  You can hear the man tell him to stop, to be quiet, and then to shut up!

  The boy’s crying turns into terrified screaming, and then you hear the sound of the hay baler running. And when it stops, it’s quiet down there in the barn.

  No more crying.

  No more screaming.

  You’re scared.

  You want to leave, to run back to your grandma’s house, but then you hear someone coming up the ladder.

  Heavy footsteps.

  It’s the man.

  He knows you’re here. He’s coming for you!

  You slide farther behind the hay bale, but you can’t get completely hidden and you see him reach the top of the ladder.

  He takes out a jackknife and flicks out the blade.

  You freeze, too terrified to move.

  No, no, no.

  He walks to the wall of the barn and carves something into the wood.

  It takes awhile, but when he steps away you can see the words: Grady Planisek was here.

  Then he goes back down the ladder and you wait a long time to make sure he’s gone.

  At last you climb down from the hayloft and run through the rain to your grandma’s house. You leave the box in the loft so you won’t have to carry it, won’t have to explain anything when you get back to her house.

  You don’t tell anyone what happened. You keep it to yourself.

  The sound of the hay baler.

  The boy’s screams.

  The silence afterward.

  No, you don’t tell anyone what happened in the barn.

  You throw the key into the field and you never go back to that barn again.

  6:31 P.M.

  IT ALL COMES TOGETHER.

  That man in the barn, that man, that man—

  You didn’t know him back then, but you do now.

  Yes, you mentioned the property to him. He knows that you piece things together.

  That’s why he tried to kill you.

  Yes, there was a second person there on Saturday night.

  It was him.

  The one who drove Hollister to the house.

  The one with the jackknife that—

  Daniel could hardly believe who was actually behind all this, but he finally knew who it was.

  The sound of a car approaching the cabin caught his attention.

  Hollister must have heard the car too, because he called out to Daniel, “It’s too late.”

  “Your family bought the property, didn’t they?” Daniel yelled back to him. “Sometime in the last eight years?”

  “What?”

  “Out on County Highway N. It didn’t belong to you back then.”

  A tiny pause. “He’s not going to let you just walk out of here.”

  No. It wasn’t Ty Bell.

  He’s just letting Hollister use this place.

  Malcolm Zacharias called them blurs—when you first met him he mentioned your blurs.

  How did he know that you call them that? There are only a few people who know that you call them blurs.

  He said he had a source—

  It all fit.

  It’s what you said on Sunday, that’s why he wanted you dead.

  Not Mr. Zacharias.

  No.

  His source.

  And that’s why he kept asking you about what you saw when your dad was attacked.

  Yes.

  The car engine outside stopped. Daniel and his dad were almost to the door when his father passed out.

  “Dad, wake up!”

  But his body had gone limp.

  You’re not gonna get out in time.

  Daniel lowered him to the floor next to the knife Hollister had been holding earlier, then slid it under his leg.

  And waited for his psychiatrist, Dr. Fromke, to come in through the door.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-ONE

  The lock clicked, the door swung open, and he appeared, holding a gun that looked to Daniel like his dad’s Glock.

  Dr. Fromke stood there for a moment, the snow whipping and curling in around him, before coming inside and shutting the door.

  He wore black jeans, a dark blue winter jacket and running shoes.

  “I wondered if that was your car out there.” He aimed the gun at Daniel. “Let me see your hands.”

  Still kneeling, and being careful to shift his weight to keep the knife hidden beneath his leg, Daniel held up his hands, showing his psychiatrist that they were empty.

  “I’m in here,” Hollister shouted from the other room. “The kid called the cops. They’re on their way. I gave the sheriff Tribaxil. He’s not gonna last long, not with that much—”

  Hollister’s words hit Daniel like a fist in the gut. “What do you mean he’s not gonna last long?”

  Why would they want to kill him? Why, after keeping him alive since Saturday?

  They’re desperate, Daniel. They’re not going to let either you or your dad leave here alive.

  You need to go. You need to get to the hospital.

  He lowered his hands.

  Dr. Fromke evaluated things, then sighed and shook his head. “Daniel, why couldn’t you have just stayed in that root cellar? It would have made all this a lot easier.”

  “You were afraid I’d piece things together about the barn on County N. That’s why you tried to kill me.”

  The psychiatrist called for Brandon to come into the room.

  “They cuffed me to the cot.”

  Dr. Fromke asked Daniel. “Do you have the key?”

  “I’ll only let you have it if you let me leave with my dad.” He wasn’t sure how that would work—he was making this up as he went along. “We go to the car first. I’ll give it to you when—”

  “No. I’m afraid that’s not how things are going to play out here.”

  Hollister begged Dr. Fromke, “Don’t let them take me back to that institute. Remember, I know everything that’s gone down here.” He made it sound like a threat.

  “True,” Dr. Fromke said, then disappeared into the room where Hollister was. Daniel heard a gunshot and then the psychiatrist returned to the living room.

  “Now,” he said, “we can talk undisturbed. Just the two of us.”

  He killed him.

  He just killed Brandon Hollister.

  You need to get your dad out of here before he—

  “You have a special gift, Daniel. I—”

  “I know it was you. You’re the source.”

  “Source?”

  Find a way to get him close.

  Use the knife.

  “You’re the one who told Malcolm Zacharias that I was intuitive, that I have blurs.”
r />   “Malcolm Zacharias?”

  “The guy who helped me get out of the hospital.”

  Mr. Zacharias is at the institute right now waiting for you. It’s close. He can help you. Get your dad there and—

  “I was meaning to ask how you managed that.” Dr. Fromke approached Daniel and sat on the edge of the couch about eight feet away, aiming the Glock directly at him.

  Daniel didn’t stand, just stayed crouched beside his dad, making sure the knife was out of sight, calculating when and how he’d be able to use it. “So you followed us from Beldon to the lighthouse?”

  “Based on what I knew about you from our counseling sessions, I thought you might go to Nicole’s place. When I got word you’d disappeared from the hospital, I tried her house, then yours, but then I figured Kyle was the next best bet. As it turns out, third time’s a charm. Now let’s—”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Why did you contact Mr. Zacharias’s group? Why did you do any of this?”

  “You have a special gift, Daniel.” He pointed the gun toward Daniel’s head. “There’s something up there. You see things no one else sees, pull things together in a way no one else can. There are people who are very interested in finding out how you’re able to do that and let’s just say they pay very well for referrals.”

  “So. Money.”

  “There are only so many things that motivate people, Daniel.”

  “But how did you even hear about them?”

  “It’s amazing what you can find on the Internet.”

  “But then you turned your back on them to help Hollister?”

  “I accepted my payment and moved on.”

  “In your office on Friday I saw that certificate from the prison—ou helped as a counselor there. Is that where you met Hollister? Or did you just know him from selling the property to his family?”

  He looked impressed. “You really are a sharp boy. It’s too bad things have to end this way.”