Left for Dead: A gripping psychological thriller

by Deborah Rogers

  Something catches my eye. Hanging from the rearview is a small Kermit the Frog. Like you would get on a key chain, made of cloth, with matchstick-thin gangly legs and splayed out feet. I watch Kermit dangle there, lobbing from side to side, and begin to think I must be trapped in some crazy dream, that I’ve been slipped acid in a club, or had some type of seizure.

  The cogs of my mind turn slowly, straining to put things together. The man looks familiar. I have seen him before. But it’s so hard to think. Then it comes to me. The gas station. The moonboot. The flat tire. I nearly laugh out loud because this must be some kind of joke. A prank of epic proportions. He was so nice, so ordinary, there can be no other explanation.

  But what’s that on my lips? Blood? And what else, Amelia? The ties and the mask? It comes back in a rush, being rendered unconscious and thrown into the trunk of his car.

  “What do you want? Why are you doing this?” I say, surprised by the fact that I’m slurring. “You have to let me go.”

  He shoots a look over his shoulder, lifts his brass-rimmed aviators, then pulls sharply to the side of the road. Somewhere in my fogged up head I know I’ve screwed up.

  He opens the door and gets out and I hear the slow, steady crunch of his boots as he circles the car. He’s watching me, I can feel it. He’s outside the left rear window, his body blocking the light.

  A car passes and after it’s gone, he opens the door and pauses again. He reaches inside and touches the top of my head. His whole hand settles there, like a human skull cap, and I do my best not to scream.

  I think that maybe I should say something—If you let me go now, I won’t tell anybody. I don’t know who you are so I’ll never be able to identify you. My father is a law enforcement officer (he isn’t) and he’ll be out looking for me as we speak so give this up before you make matters worse for yourself.

  “I have money,” I say.

  “Do you?”

  “You can have all of it if you let me go.”

  But it doesn’t matter because here he comes with a rag and the chloroform or whatever it is, leaning in, unhurried, putting his knee on the seat, holding the rag over the gash where my mouth is, and before I know it I’m gone again.

  5

  It’s dark when I wake. My head is pounding. And the thirst, the thirst is unbearable. The car’s not moving and I’m alone inside it. I angle my head and find a strip of light, unnatural and fluorescent. The smell and noise of gasoline shuddering into the tank.

  Outside, voices. Faraway and indistinct. I lift my head. Through the tiny squares of cloth, I see him, hands on his hips, talking, unhurried, to the guy at the adjoining pump. The gasoline stops chugging and he removes the fuel dispenser, shuts the flap with a snap, and goes inside to pay.

  Even in my groggy, drugged up state, I know I should do something, that this may be my one and only chance. Then it dawns on me that he has made a mistake. Despite Moonboot’s plan to incapacitate me with zip ties and blindfolds, he’s forgotten the gag. So I shout. I shout as loud as I can.

  “Help! Somebody help!” I kick the door with my feet. I’m overjoyed because it’s thunderous—the banging, my voice. Someone will hear for sure. “Help! I’m in here! My name is Amelia Kellaway and I’ve been kidnapped! Call the police!”

  The door flies open. Oh, thank God.

  “I’ve been kidnapped,” I say breathlessly, “from a gas station on the Oregon-California border. You’ve got to help me.”

  I try to sit up but am shoved back down again. My head is pinned to the seat.

  “Well, would you look at that—a fighter.”

  It can’t be. There are people here. They have to come. They have to see what’s happening to me.

  Before I can yell again, something is forced into my mouth, and a blanket, heavy with the fresh scent of Ultra Tide, is pulled up over my head. I struggle against my bindings, try to make noise, but it’s no use. Moonboot simply shuts the door and drives away.

  *

  The next time I stir I’ve wet myself. I can smell it. Not strong but there. My shorts and underwear stick to my skin. It’s pitch black and I can’t see a thing through the tiny squares. It’s impossibly still and I wonder if I’ve been moved someplace else, a basement, an attic, a shed in the woods.

  I listen hard for clues. Night crickets. The lone hoot of an owl. The swish of tall grass. A faint, cool breeze through an open window. I deduce I’m still in the backseat of the car. Moonboot is sleeping. I can hear the curl of his breath. He’s reclined his seat all the way back and it’s pushing against my lower legs.

  He mutters something and shifts his body, projecting wet snores in my direction. For a moment, I think he might be fake-sleeping and watching me instead.

  I start to cry. I don’t want to. I don’t want him to win. But everything hurts—my head, my wrists, my arms, even the mere act of blinking in this stupid mask. I tell myself, don’t give up, you can’t give up, you will get out of this nightmare.

  *

  “You messed yourself.”

  His voice shatters my blissful void of sleep.

  “My bad,” he continues. “Next time let me know and we’ll work something out.”

  It’s the first time he’s spoken a full sentence since he took me. The way he talks, he could be your next door neighbor or the guy on the bus.

  We are driving again. And it’s light. The morning kind. The quality of the air has changed, too. There are shadows of buildings, small-town noises, a lawn mower, a jackhammer, cars, the sluggish forge of a train. I wonder how many miles I am from Del Norte.

  “We got to make a stop, fighter. So I’m going to ask you to behave for a bit, if that’s okay with you.”

  Keeping the engine idling, he pulls over, reaches into the backseat, pushes a rag in my mouth, and covers me with that blanket again. He drives a few more feet, takes a sharp right. A disembodied voice crackles through a drive-thru speaker.

  “Welcome to Wicked Joe’s Burgers, what can I get you?”

  Moonboot gives his order and collects his food. He drives for ten minutes and parks up somewhere quiet.

  He dislodges my gag, removes the blanket, and settles down to eat. I can see him through the gauze of my mask, staring out the windshield as he chews and sucks on his straw. I watch his jaw rotate and begin to salivate from the smell of bacon and sausage and cheese and ketchup.

  Abruptly, he leans and pokes the straw into my mouth. “Wet your whistle with that.”

  I nearly vomit at the thought this straw has also touched his lips but I drink and the tepid orange juice is wonderful and the glucose floods my bloodstream and I feel instantly giddy. Next he pushes an egg-soaked corner of a bun into my mouth, followed by a wedge of sausage patty and more juice.

  He smashes the trash into a ball and lobs it in the garbage bin outside. I listen to the metal flap swing back and forth and think DNA. Our DNA. Mixed together on that straw and how no one will ever know this important piece of evidence is there.

  I’m expecting the chloroform again, but it doesn’t come. Instead, he says—

  “Settle in, fighter. There’s a long drive ahead.”

  6

  Matthew and I never actually talked about when we would go. I was content enough to live off the fantasy, the two of us out there in the windswept wilderness, sharing aluminum pouches of freeze-dried food, making love under the stars. It was like oxygen to me.

  The dream kept me going through the long days and nights at the firm when I would sit in those torturous marathon meetings and imagine the sun on my shoulders. I started buying items for him from my little supply shop on Lafayette Street. Soon I had two of everything. Pocket lights and compasses and mini binoculars and waterproof ponchos. I splurged and bought a double sleeping bag for couples.

  One day I suggested we set a date and work toward it and he didn’t object. I chose late August. The tail end of summer. The days would be bright but not too hot. Ideal conditions for daytime trekking and nighttime snuggles.r />
  Then “The Deal” happened. It was all he could talk about. The Cooper Deal. It was worth eighty million dollars and a huge bonus for him. He and the partners and sycophants would disappear into the war room for days. Matthew slept under his suit jacket at the office, lived on coffee and bagels. He started to tent his fingers and stroke his tie and slap backs and use expressions like “synergy” and “value-add” and “sea change.”

  “It’s such a rush, Amelia, to be part of something this big. These guys, man, I can smell the money coming out their pores.”

  I told myself it was the lack of sleep, the adrenaline, the poor nutritional choices talking, not my free-spirited, anti-capitalist Matthew.

  But it only got worse. He was always wired, talking a million miles an hour, tense like a coiled spring. Sometimes he looked right through me. Even the way he made love changed. It was like he was engaging in some sort of sport, grunting and grinding. Ejaculating was scoring a touchdown. Everything had become a game.

  The Cooper Deal was followed by the Sampson Deal and the Carter Deal and the Heller Van Asch Deal and Matthew seemed to slip further and further out of my reach until one day I walked in on him screwing Melissa, the shiny new intern, on the sofa in the breakout room on a Friday night. I stood there, momentarily transfixed by the two glinting nipple piercings on Melissa’s swinging breasts, then simply walked away.

  I didn’t wish Matthew any malice or bear him any grudge. I knew it was the machine, chewing him up, spitting him out, affecting his brain, the way he thought. It was like a disease.

  I only hoped he would survive it. Because one day there would be a crash, whether it was him or the corporate scheming, and he would face the ledge of despair, or the noose, or the taste of a gun, because that’s what happens to good men. Good men fall while bad men thrive.

  7

  On the floorboard I can make out a dog collar with tags, the green leather tip worn and split. I wonder what the dog’s name is, whether it’s friendly or vicious, where it is now. I like dogs and have always thought highly of the people who owned them. Clearly I would need to change that assessment.

  The effects of the stupefying solvent were lessening and my thinking was getting clearer. I tell myself that I must log details, for later, for when I escape. Ten things. Just focus on ten things.

  First my surroundings. The car. Mint-colored Capri. Wood-beaded driver’s seat cover. Kermit the Frog on the rearview. In the center dash, reusable coffee cup encased in a purple rubber rim with a Hawkins oil refinery logo on it. Squeaky spring under my left hip. Striped mocha-colored upholstery. Everything shiny and pungent from Armor All. No trash, apart from a single fluttering receipt on the floorboard next to the dog collar.

  I wonder if Moonboot is one of those guys who vacuums and waxes his car every Sunday, if he has a house without a thing out of place, if he likes everything just so and flies into a rage at the slightest sign of dust. Strangely, it’s more worrying that he isn’t a slob. You’d expect someone who abducts a woman from a parking lot in broad daylight to be a rambling, disorganized nut job. Moonboot is none of these things. He is different. Confident. Together. Maybe even smart.

  I glance at the receipt and I’m thinking it would be a big help down the road to show what he bought, the time he bought it, the store he bought it from. Maybe it would lead to a name on a credit card or a face on a camera. But if I reach for it now he will undoubtedly see, so I bide my time and decide to wait until later when I get a chance.

  Then there’s him. I tilt my head and squint through the mask to study his profile. He has a good nose, not too large or small, but perfectly proportioned. Strong jaw line, brown hair graying at the temples, so he is probably older than I initially thought. Early fifties, skin the color of nutmeg. Muscular, as if he works the land, healthy, except for his mind, there’s nothing healthy about that. His movements convey a casual self-assurance, like he is in control, like he knows he will not get caught, like he’s done this before.

  I shut my eyes and test myself. Like the game I used to play as a kid with my brother, when Mom would put a selection of items on a tray and we had to memorize as many as we could before Mom finished counting to five and covered the objects back up again. Then my brother and I would scribble furiously for twenty seconds writing down everything we could remember. I always won, which would infuriate my brother and send him stomping off to his room.

  In law school I honed my technique and used a trick to help me recall the hundreds of cases I needed to know for exams. I would make up little stories. Marbury v Maloney was Maloney on his owny. Doyle v Ohio was Doyle shot Mike Loyal. The trick was to picture an actual scene like a movie. Maloney on his own in a playground as a kid because his mother had abandoned him. Doyle at home drinking with his friends before an altercation with his irate, meth-addicted friend, Mike Loyal. It worked like a charm. Even now, ten years later, I can still recall the mailbox rules off the top of my head. And there’s a story here, for sure, a vivid nightmare of a story that I won’t forget soon. This time the lead character isn’t Maloney or Doyle, it’s me.

  *

  It feels like we are heading north. It’s difficult to tell because we’ve been driving for what seems like days, in different directions. But north is my best guess, north into Oregon, maybe even as far as Washington State.

  There’s a change in the air. It gets fresher. Goosebumps strike along my bare thighs. The sun seems further away. The sounds are different too, closer. No longer the open spaces of fields but something else. I angle my head back. Trees—tall, substantial, the smell of pine.

  We leave the sealed road and I feel roughness beneath the tires. The suspension screeches and gravel pings.

  Moonboot clatters inside the glove box. A few moments later the stereo bursts into life. Neil Young. Jimi Hendrix. Johnny Cash.

  It looks like Moonboot is stuck in the dark ages and hasn’t heard of an iPod or Bluetooth because the music is on a cassette tape and being played on what is probably the original Capri car stereo. A homemade mix tape, spliced together. The songs have been recorded directly off the radio. I can tell because of the awkward transitions, the accidental clunk of the pause button before the song has ended properly, the clumsy manner the DJ has been edited out.

  There are eight songs on side one, and seven and a half on side two. As we circle the rough terrain, Moonboot lets the tape play over and over. He is apparently a Johnny Cash fan because there are four Johnny songs in total, more than any of the others. I think of Joaquin Phoenix thumbing that band saw and Reese Witherspoon in her June Carter dress and the day I was shocked to see the real Johnny Cash on MTV, bloated and pockmarked and ancient, singing a cover of a Nine Inch Nails song, “Hurt.” I think about how I wept because by that time June Carter was dead and Johnny looked like he was very near the end himself. It was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen—this once great, diabetes-riddled old man singing about how hurt he was, the saddest thing, perhaps, other than being kidnapped from a gas station and tied up for days in the backseat of a car by a lunatic who had a liking for classic rock and Kermit the Frog.

  8

  I need the bathroom again. But I don’t want to ask. I don’t want his pity. I don’t want his favors. So I just go. Warm fluid seeps between my thighs and I experience a tiny burst of satisfaction that I am peeing all over his precious, mocha-colored upholstery. Then I think that maybe if I can make myself as filthy as I can he won’t touch me. But that would mean number twos, and I can’t bring myself to do that. Not yet, anyway.

  My body is feeling the effects of being stationary for so long. The tendons in my shoulders are screaming. My arms ache from being tied behind my back. Both legs are in permanent cramp. The cloth mask has become like a second face and, perversely, I’m beginning to find comfort in it. Like a child in a living room tent made out of bed sheets. It gives me a sense of privacy, a distance between him and me.

  We snake around the road. I feel the pull of gravity as we
go uphill. Loose items roll inside the trunk. A hazy memory comes to me. He put me there originally, that first day at the Chevron, into the trunk. Then I get worried because I don’t remember how I got from the trunk to the backseat. Whole snatches of time are blank. Did he do something to me that I don’t know about?

  The thought of him touching me when I was unconscious makes me sick, but there’s no way to tell because my clothes are intact. Then I start thinking that eventually we’re going to stop and eventually he’s going to want something from me—sex, violence, my life. But before I go further down that road, I stop myself. For now I’m alive and uninjured and lucid. Like my mother used to say—one raisin at a time, Amelia Jane.

  *

  He turns on the headlights. I know this because there’s an audible hum, like an old tube TV warming up. I can also see the blue glow of the dash. The Capri corkscrews up the mountain, because that’s what it is by now, a mountain, and my body rolls hard against the backseat and my ears pop and I feel oh so carsick. Just when I think I might throw up, the terrain flattens out and we are circling back down the other side.

  About halfway Led Zeppelin begins to slur. Moonboot jabs a button and tries to remove the cassette tape but the ribbon is caught and he tugs and the tape unspools and the car swerves, then swerves back as he corrects the steering, and he finally gets it all out and tosses the empty cassette on the empty passenger seat in a cloud of ribbon. I think that this might make him angry, especially if it’s a favorite mix tape, but he doesn’t seem bothered.

  Instead he declares, “That’s it, fighter, we’re here.”

  And the car rolls to a stop.

  9

  I used to think my father was the smartest man in the world. When I was little I would find him in his attic study, glasses perched on his nose, pouring over rolls of technical drawings. He was an engineer. He designed bridges and was known for inventing a new kind of strut called the Beverly Strut (named after my mother) which helped bridges avoid collapsing during earthquakes. He had this little model of the Golden Gate Bridge on his side table. He’d frown whenever I touched it.