by Tash, Red
If Dave wanted her, this could not be good. My mouth watered at the thought of combat with my cousin, and as far as this girl was concerned—well, all of a sudden I cared for her more than I thought possible.
Chapter Seven
Old Man Graber Had a Farm
Deb
The sun set quickly, and cool air filled the Mustang as Yoder broke speed limits all through town. In a few minutes, we were past the city limits sign, and deep in the heart of Country. The smell of cowshit and broken dreams filled the air. Aw, yeah. Or should I say “yee haw”?
“Who sent you?” I asked.
Yoder didn’t answer.
From Easter through Halloween, Graber’s was a busy tourist destination with a massive U-Pick operation and apple cider distillery. Graber’s Farm Market & Cidery occupied quite a few heavily-trafficked acres, but past the homemade caramels and the wine tasting booths, the original farm sprawled across a significant chunk of Laurents County.
It was said that the Graber family had once owned three counties in Indiana, before they started selling off land to other settlers. The Graber family was huge, and factioned. There were Amish Grabers, Mennonite Grabers, and those who’d cashed in on the agritourist biz, who were only costume Amish on the high-tourist weekends. Those were the Town Grabers.
The old-school Grabers were sort of a mystery, except for when Rumspringa was going on. They lived in a compound deep within Graber’s Farm. I’d never been there, but it always sounded like the movie The Village, to me.
Yoder turned the car down a gravel road about a mile from the Graber Family Eats and Bait Shack. The road was bumpy, and he drove the Mustang slowly through the dark woods with only the parking lamps on.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” I asked.
Silence.
I had no idea how deeply into the woods we had gone before we came to a clearing. Yoder parked next to a line of cars that I recognized from the school parking lot—though I hadn’t the foggiest idea who drove them.
I slipped my tennis shoes out of my backpack and traded them for my skates. We got out of the car, and by the light of the moon I could see a huge line of Amish buggies on the other side of the clearing. An old weathered barn hulked in the shadows beyond an enormous bonfire. Bales of straw ringed the fire and kids or adults (I couldn’t honestly tell) in street clothes and Amish dress were drinking cans of beer and laughing. A boombox up against the old barn blasted classic Metallica tunes.
“Now what?” I asked Yoder.
“Have a beer, I guess,” he said. “I done my job—I’m gonna make sure they know it, then I’m going to get my drink on and forget all about it, girl.”
The grass was high and wet, sticking to my jeans and seeping through my shoes. I couldn’t say I really wanted a beer—I hate them, actually—but once I sat down around the bonfire to warm up, I needed something to do besides wait in dread.
Despite his promise to leave me alone, Yoder and his girlfriend sat down next to me on the bale. Drunk and giggly, she sat on his lap, falling off every few seconds. Yoder handed me a beer.
“Word is, Dave is coming here to talk to you about your sister,” he said in a low voice.
“Is Gennifer coming to the party, that slut?” asked his charming girlfriend, before she fell on her rear again, her stringy blonde hair spread across the mud and muck.
Yoder ignored her.
“When’s he getting here?” I asked.
“Nobody ever knows,” Yoder said. He took a swig of beer and gulped it down hard, as if it hurt. For a moment he hesitated, and looked like he wanted to say more, but he tipped the beer fully upside down and finished it off, crushing the can and belching loudly before throwing it into the fire.
He didn’t look laid-back or cool or any of the other tags I was suddenly sure he was going for. Big Man on Campus, Redneck Edition? No way. This guy just looked sad and tired—and way older than seventeen.
I was tired, and moved down to sit on the ground where I could lean up against the straw bale. The fire danced before me, and little sprites of flame emerged, seeming to hold hands and skip. They were orange and gold, tinged with red. For some reason, they reminded me of the blue flames of the meth lab on fire, ten feet tall. I remembered the smoke bellowing up from Coach’s van earlier that day. Everywhere I looked, fire. The little fire sprites danced faster and faster, and I was just thinking to myself that they probably weren’t figments of my imagination at all, when I fell into a trance.
The forest was dark around me, and I was running—or skating—as fast as I could. A crowd rumbled behind me on the path. I could smell the pitch from the flames of their torches. Though I couldn’t see them in the dark, I knew they had pitchforks and they wanted to stick their tines into me, to hold my face to their torches and set me alight.
They were getting closer, closer—a hand reached out to grab me from behind. A hand in the darkness, without a face. I slipped and fell backward, my skates making it worse. Suddenly I was falling from a cliff in the dark of night, deeper and deeper into oblivion as terror enveloped me.
I awoke with a jerk, the word “No!” still stapled to my lips, the image of terrible dark wings in my mind.
“No, what?” a deep voice said, laughing.
I looked up, and across from me on the other side of the bonfire, stood Dave.
Chapter 7.5
Call Me
Harlow
I was waiting for her to say my name. It would cut through the fog, cut through the darkness and release me. Release me from what? Who did I need to find?
I knew the legends of the memory charms, but as soon as I began to recall them, I began to forget her. Roller Deb.
I could have lost my cool, could have lost my head, but that wasn’t my thing. Hadn’t been my dad’s thing, either. Wasn’t a Saarkenner trait—at least, not our branch of the family. My uncle Jag was kind of a wild card at times, but even he was a deep, slow burn. The coolest head wins, right? That’s what all the gunfighters said, in the paperback Westerns I’d read at the dump.
But all this thinking was pushing her out of my head. I had to remember her. She was the key. Emotions were unlocking inside me, memories leaving me. Find her. Roller Deb. Take her to Zelda.
I remembered the Wheelers—I didn’t know why. Marnie, so graceful on a pair of roller skates, at the Coach’s rink, in the early ‘80s. Pristine white skates with a big pink pom-pom on each toe. Skin-tight jeans and tight white tee shirt glamoured over her luxurious black fairy wings. Feathered Farrah Fawcett hair over a thin, boyish body, hips rocking as she boogie-skated. Rolling, bouncing. I must have been a very small child.
Roller Deb, Roller Deb, Roller Deb. The words repeated in my mind as each foot struck the pavement, the grass, sunk into the mud. No time for Marnie memories.
I hurried. I was sloppy. There were Bigfoot sightings in the news the following day, and one of my muddy footprints was the lead photo.
Then I was in the woods, the nocturnal animals frozen in fear or fleeing before me. The heavy scent of Dave’s lazy evil pervaded everything. Deb was here.
I would gain the tactical advantage by hiding, observing first, before I rushed in to rescue anyone. Just like those cowboys in the books. A cool head.
A fire blazed ahead of me in a clearing—Dave was throwing one of his famous teenager parties. I wondered who would die at this one.
Definitely not Deb. Definitely not me. Hopefully Dave. I’d see what I could do to make that happen.
Chapter Eight
Don’t You Want Me, Baby?
Deb
Dave has no redeeming qualities. He’s ugly, he smells horrible, he’s got a sick sense of humor, and he sells drugs to high school girls. So why did I suddenly have the urge to throw myself at him, kiss him hard on the lips, and be his baby mama?
He leered at me and beckoned with one hairy, warty finger. His fists were the size of small hams. Probably smelled like them, too.
The tiny figures I’d ima
gined dancing in the bonfire now leapt to his shoulders, one taking on a white glow and an angelic expression—the other burning deep red and stabbing him in the shoulder with a burning pitchfork.
“Should I, or shouldn’t I?” he whispered—but his voice was clear and carried across the meadow.
The party-goers paired up and drew away from the fire. Yoder carried his girlfriend away in his arms and threw her down in the tall weeds where she shrieked with joy. I heard a girl cackling out of control, and turned to see an Amish chick rubbing her body against an English kid in a way I’d only ever seen in music videos. (Hey, you probably already know this, but the Amish refer to all non-Amish as English. You got it?)
“What the hell is going on?” I asked. I didn’t like the way my voice sounded. Groggy. Slow.
Dave shook his head, laughing. “Thought I’d give you a taste of what you’ve been missing. Wanna little more?” He held out a can of beer to me.
“You drugged me!” I stumbled to my feet. “What was in this beer?”
“Little girl like you has no business drinking, anyway,” he said. “Didn’t your mama ever warn you about guys like me?”
“No one had to warn me about you, Dave. I saw what you did to Gennifer—where are you keeping my sister? I demand you give her back.”
He laughed, tusks peeking out from his lower lip. I’d been seeing a lot of those lately on folks, drugs or no drugs.
“What are you?”
“What do I look like, Little Miss Roller Deb?” He looked at me like he could see through my clothes.
The kids’ laughter had turned to moans of pleasure, and I was afraid to look around—afraid of what I’d see. The sprites from Dave’s shoulders were rolling together down his body, back into the fire, and the things they were doing were making me ill.
“What are you doing to these kids?”
“Nothing they don’t want to do already,” he said. He shotgunned a beer and gave a loud belch. “A little drink, a little smoke, and they’re free to enjoy themselves. They’re relaxing. Just being human.” He said it like it was a dirty word.
There was a small stifled scream, and I looked just in time to see the English kid bite the ear off of his Amish girlfriend. He chewed on it, munching loudly, and she pressed her hand against her head, laughing. The English kid smiled over at me, his own set of tusks showing as he grinned.
“Pay the toll to the troll, you know,” said Dave. He chuckled at his own joke and pulled a cell phone out of his pocket. It played La Cucaracha in his hand, and he held up one finger to me. “Just a sec, gotta take this.”
He walked away from me, into the barn. No one seemed to be watching me. I thought about making a break for it, but how far could I get through the woods of Graber’s farm before Dave caught up with me?
And if these guys are really trolls …
It was kind of freaking me out, thinking about what hidden talents they might have for tracking young girls through the dark woods.
I focused on feeling normal, on trying to see sanity through the cloud of drugs or whatever Dave had done to me. I had to get him to take me to Gennifer, or at least to tell me where she was.
He returned from the barn and shoved his cell phone into his pants pocket, staring hard at me.
“That was Gennifer. She’s just fine,” he said. He opened another can of beer.
“Did you tell her that I’m here with you?” I asked. I didn’t honestly believe he’d been talking to my sister—not by the way he’d seemed so respectful of whoever was on the other end of that phone.
“I did, I did,” he said. “Made her a little jealous, you know.” He winked at me, and his smell filled my head. I half-swooned, and sat down hard on the bale of straw.
Dave crossed to me, and sat down close—too close. “We can go to my car and talk about it, if you want,” he purred into my ear.
Part of me wanted to vomit. The other part of me—the part controlled by the drugs—could have actually done something illegal and immoral with Dave at that moment. I pressed my eyes shut, held my breath, and decided to play along. Maybe if I acted like I was into him, I could fool him long enough to slip away at some point—after he’d told me where Gennifer was.
Dave’s car was nice—too nice, like it just rolled off the showroom floor of Satan’s Cadillac dealership. It smelled brand new, and the seats were an unblemished, supple leather that I’d never seen before.
“This a custom job?” I asked, rubbing my hand across the bench seat in what I hoped was a sensuous manner.
“I could let you give me a custom job, sure,” he said. He started the car. “Oh, wait, you meant the upholstery. You could say it was a gift. Gift from the class of 2006.” He laughed and turned on the stereo.
A dozen kids went missing that year—our school had become infamous for it. Double the number from the previous year, at that. Their bodies were never found. Everyone said it was some kind of suicide pact, or commune-dwelling hippies who lived in the woods between Bedrock and Bloomington, but there was never any proof.
I remembered one of the missing girls from the trailer park. She used to babysit Gennifer and me sometimes when Mom was at Bingo. She showed up one night with a bandage on her arm, and when we begged her to take it off, she relented and showed us her brand new tat, a swastika.
There was a tattoo on the armrest of the passenger seat. A swastika tattoo.
The hair stood up on the back of my neck. Was there any chance Gennifer was still alive, or had she already been turned into some ghastly accessory for one of Dave’s pimped-out rides?
“Don’t be scared,” he said, patting my leg. “I’m not gonna hurt ya—tonight.” He sniggered and rolled my window down. Cold air blasted me hard in the face, and combined with fear for my sister, the effects of the drug were waning.
I didn’t want Dave to know that, though.
I giggled. I leaned my head back on the seat and arched my back, rolling as if in ecstasy. I wanted to throw up in my mouth a little, but I kept pretending—to save my own life.
He must have been fooled, because he pulled the car over into another wooded driveway, deeper into Graber’s Farm. He shut off the car, and through the open window, I could hear the sound of the highway, probably no more than a mile away. There were no lights, and seemingly no houses anywhere around us.
I didn’t know if Dave intended to rape me, kill me, or what—but I meant to get to that highway, one way or another.
Dave turned the music down low, and leaned in close. His lips were putrid and his breath smelled of things I didn’t have the stomach to imagine. When he kissed me, it took all my willpower not to jerk away.
“Aw, sweet little thing, never been kissed,” he said. “Probably a virgin, too.” He pressed into me, his torso pushing me into the car door. I could feel the door handle pressing hard into my back.
“Ooooh,” I moaned. I hoped that was a noise women made when they were excited.
It evidently was, because in a few seconds, Dave had unfastened his belt, and his ham-hock hands were fumbling with my button-flys. I arched my back, faking pleasure, and put my hand behind me to open the door softly. I had to think of a way to distract him, so I could make a run for the interstate. Something that would keep him occupied for a few moments.
His phone went off, and for a second I thought about bolting, as he dug it out of his pocket. I got a better idea.
“Yes, boss. Of course. Just—having a snack,” he said, winking hard at me. This time I did throw up in my mouth. It tasted like beer.
Dave finished his call and sat the phone on the dashboard, and crouched over me again. The shape I saw in the shadows between his body and mine did not fill me with lust whatsoever.
“Poor Gennifer,” I said aloud, before I realized what I was doing.
“Yeah?” Dave said, squinting at me in the darkness.
“Yeah,” I said, giggling. “Now you’re all mine,” I purred. At least I hoped I was purring. I still haven’t got
much of a handle on that whole sex kitten thing.
Dave buried his face in my neck, and I could feel the tusks pressing into my flesh. “You’re like a vampire,” I said, as if I liked it. “It’s so kinky.” My hand groped across the dashboard, until I found his cell phone.
He lifted his head, and I quickly moved my hand to my backpack.
“What’re ya doin’?”
“Just—trying to change the radio station,” I giggled, hoping to sound girly. “I always wanted to lose my virginity to Stevie Nicks, you know? I know it sounds silly, but …”
Dave grunted, only half-amused. “You want I should buy you roses, too?” he asked. He sat up and punched a few buttons on his stereo, and while he looked away I shoved his phone hard into my backpack, praying it wouldn’t ring before I could slip away.
A few clicks of the dial, and “Live and Let Die” poured from the speakers of Dave’s Cadillac. “It’s not Fleetwood Mac, but it’ll do,” he said, leaning back over me. “Now, let’s get this thing on.”
I tried to stall for time. “Is this song a remake?” I asked. How exactly would I wiggle out of this, with Dave’s phone and my backpack intact? Could I outrun Dave in these woods? I had to try.
“For God’s sake, less talk, more action!” Dave growled.
“It’s just that it doesn’t sound like Axl Rose,” I said. “Do you have some more to drink? I think I need more to drink.”
“I gotta cooler built into the trunk, sweets. I always have something to drink.” He sat up and ran his fingers through his naturally frizzy hair. “If I get you a beer, will you blow me, already? It’s McCartney, by the way. Wings. The original.” He got out of the car, grumbling something about stupid kids.
This is it. As soon as he’s fully inside the car, I’m making my run.