The Last Victim

by L. T. Vargus

  They drive for what feels like a long while. She lets her eyes drift to the rocky terrain and speed limit signs along the roadside, but mostly she stays locked onto him.

  Afraid to look away, maybe.

  Watching. Waiting.

  The whole time she expects that head to swivel around on the meaty neck. Some smirking face locking eyes with her. Revealing that he’s watching her. Was always watching her.

  But it doesn’t. He barely moves at all. Posture rigid. Shoulders stiff.

  One of his hands retreats from the wheel. Descending out of view.

  A moment later, the click of the blinker taps at the silence.

  And they drift out of their lane, and she lifts a little out of her seat. Floating. Floating. Made weightless by the car’s movement.

  The sedan veers into a Shell station parking lot. Sidles up next to pump number three. Stops.

  A lightness flutters at the walls of her chest like the wings of a giant moth.

  Blood beats in her eyelids. Hard enough that pink splotches pulse in her field of vision.

  She dares a longer glance away from the back of his skull, gazes out the window, eyes scanning the empty lot and tracing a pole up to the white metal canopy hanging above them.

  Empty in all directions. She can’t even see a clerk manning the counter inside.

  Still, this might be something, right? An opening. A chance. She’s not certain.

  The car’s engine cuts out, and she closes her eyes. Hears the jingle of keys. A soft tinkling in the silence.

  And then she feels him turn to look upon her. She doesn’t know how she knows at first — does she hear him? Smell him? — but his breathing confirms her instinct.

  Air whistles out of his nostrils. Heavy exhales right on top of her. Almost annoyed sounding.

  And she smells it then. Alcohol. Bourbon, she thinks.

  He must be pretty drunk based on the strength of the odor on his breath, even if there are no outward signs of intoxication in his demeanor or driving ability.

  She doesn’t move, mind blank though somehow hyper-conscious of the slack flesh of her cheeks as though she might break into some nervous facial twitch if this standoff goes on too long.

  The seat squeaks a little when he turns, and then the door opens and slams.

  And she can feel his absence. Can feel that his dark presence no longer resides in the car with her.

  A bit of the night air swirls over her. A breeze manufactured by the door’s swing. It’s cooler and fresher. Almost taunting her.

  There’s a click and some scraping noises, and then she hears the sound of the gasoline gurgling into the tank. A wet sound babbling under her.

  He must be right there. Standing just on the other side of the glass.

  Maybe his fingers drum at the nozzle of the gas pump the same way they did at the steering wheel. Maybe he cups the other hand at the glass to cut the glare enough to look on her. On both of them.

  Maybe.

  When she really tries to picture him, she can only see him standing with his back to her even now. The dark peach fuzz on the back of his head. The loose shoulders of that green sweater.

  Faceless, still. A blank slate.

  There’s a thump, and the liquid sound cuts out as the flow of gasoline ends. He bursts out a few more squeezes, a jerky back and forth of sloshing and thudding, perhaps trying to even things up to a whole dollar.

  And then it’s quiet.

  If he pays at the pump, he’ll be back in the car within seconds, though most of the gas stations around here don’t have that option yet. The Marathon next to campus does, but… She’s not sure about this one.

  Wait. Wait. Just play dead a moment longer.

  At last she stirs a little, shaking some as she betrays that urge to hold still.

  He’s halfway across the lot, headed inside. Good.

  It’s now or never.

  Fingers from both hands wrap around the meatiest part of Tammy’s arm, and the subsequent jerks make her friend bob up and down, face smearing the back of the seat.

  She pauses. Waits.

  Tammy doesn’t move, so she shakes her again. Harder.

  Her whisper hisses between her teeth.

  “Tammy. Wake up.”

  Her lips pop on the plosive at the end of “up,” and the rest comes out shrill and harsh.

  OK. OK. Think.

  She leans over Tammy to grapple at the door handle, fingers scrabbling like spider legs until they find their grip.

  She can shove Tammy out onto the pavement, she thinks, and hopefully get someone’s notice, even if the lot remains empty.

  Would he attack them? Maybe. But she thinks he’d be more likely to speed off while he has the chance.

  She hesitates for the briefest of moments as the possible risk runs through her mind, the cold metal stinging the palm of her hand. But there’s no debate.

  If they get out of the car, they might have a chance. If they stay, they die.

  She yanks. Yanks again.

  Nothing.

  And then she realizes.

  Child safety locks. The rear doors can’t be opened from the inside.

  Fuck.

  A new wave of panic rolls over her. Disbelief mixed with a cramping nausea in the middle of her torso.

  There’s no way to get Tammy out of the car. Not in time.

  She leans back. Eyelids blinking rapid fire. Chest hitching and lurching to take in stuttering breaths. She thinks she might be crying, but she doesn’t know for sure.

  Tammy remains motionless. Crumpled in slumber. Shoulders hunched like a sleeping baby’s.

  Claire whirls to look out the window. Gazing past the lot. Scanning the yellow lit place beyond the glass.

  The dark figure stands in front of the cash register. Again, she can see the shape of his jaw, the square chin. He looks so normal. A face in the crowd. Why is he doing this? Why would anyone do this?

  The clerk appears on the other side of the counter, and that snaps her back to reality.

  She scrambles for the front seat, her bound limbs not climbing over the barrier so much as wriggling and then rolling her into the passenger seat — a headfirst somersault that lands her on her back.

  She flounders there until she can swing her legs around to the driver’s seat, and then she flips onto her belly.

  In one motion, she hooks her fingers in the door handle, opens it, and her front half spills out onto the asphalt.

  Chapter 4

  September 1991

  Claire had always been the quiet type. People often mistook her for being shy, but that wasn’t it. She just didn’t see a point to speaking unless she had something important to say. She preferred observation and analysis to blurting out an on-the-spot opinion. Besides that, being in the spotlight made her feel awkward.

  In short, she was the exact opposite of Tammy, who was a constant chatterbox. Tammy could gab away at anyone who would listen about whatever topic happened to strike her, her arms and hands fluttering all the while. A grand sweeping gesture here. A flap of the wrist there. And a sprinkle of spirit fingers on top.

  Some might have thought their friendship odd or unlikely. Even Claire did, sometimes. Other times she wondered if their paradoxical personalities were what made them such a good pair. Tammy would joke that they were like peanut butter and jelly. “Good in our own right, but when you put us together, the magic happens.”

  They met during their high school’s production of Little Shop of Horrors. Tammy’s bombastic temperament made her a natural stage actress, and she’d been cast as Crystal, one of the three Doo-Wop Girls. Claire was part of the costume department, and her crew chief had assigned her with finding, making, and altering all of the Doo-Wop costumes.

  For most of the seemingly endless weeks of rehearsals, Tammy talked and Claire listened, rarely uttering more than a few syllables.

  “This morning when I was leaving for school, the woman across the street was on her roof with the le
af-blower.”

  “Can you turn to the side?” Claire asked, her mouth full of pins.

  Tammy swiveled to her left.

  “There were no leaves on her roof. There was nothing on her roof,” Tammy was saying.

  One of the other Doo-Wops piped up. "Maybe she'd already blown all the leaves off."

  "Nicole, you weren't there. She was leaf-blowing nothing!"

  Tammy gazed at her reflection in the mirror and tightened her ponytail.

  “My neighbors are all crazy. I think there’s something in the water. That’s why I won’t drink from the tap.”

  It was a few weeks later — as Claire adjusted a pair of pants Tammy wore in the second act — that they first bonded. She was pinning the crotch seam with Tammy in the midst of one of her sagas.

  “So we started picking these little crabapples off the tree, and we noticed that something was sort of raining down on us from the branches over our heads. It took a few seconds before we realized what it was.”

  Here she paused for suspense.

  “Well what was it?” someone asked.

  “Spiders. Hundreds, probably thousands, of tiny spiders. Everywhere.”

  Almost everyone listening recoiled in horror.

  Tammy continued, “All three of us just lost it at that point, screaming our heads off, swatting at our arms and faces and hair. My mom came bursting out into the yard, thinking we were being dragged away by coyotes or something.”

  She flung her arms out to the sides, jostling Claire and coming dangerously close to impaling herself on one of the sharp dressmaker’s pins in Claire’s hand.

  “Hold still for a minute,” Claire said. “Or I’m going to stab you in the vagina.”

  Tammy froze, wide-eyed, staring down at Claire kneeling beside her. Claire didn’t know what to make of the reaction at first. Had she offended her with the word vagina? Or maybe Tammy had misunderstood, thought Claire meant it as some kind of threat when all she’d been trying to say was that if Tammy kept carrying on, she was liable to get a pin poked in her netherbits. Accidentally, of course.

  Tammy was still gawking at her, and Claire thought to herself, That must be it. She thinks I’m a total wacko now. Great.

  And then Tammy threw back her head and laughed. A big guffaw, straight from her belly.

  “What the hell? You haven’t uttered word one in — what’s it been? — six weeks of rehearsals? And then out pops, ‘Don’t move, or I’ll stab you in the vagina!’”

  Relieved, Claire laughed, too. Tammy actually punched it up a bit, but Claire didn’t mind.

  Tammy placed her hand on Claire’s head.

  “You’re hilarious!”

  Every person that entered the costume room that day got an instant replay from Tammy, and for once, Claire felt like she was really part of the group instead of an outsider watching from a distance.

  Chapter 5

  November 1993

  She sucks in lungfuls of that chilly night air, feels the cold touch her insides, suddenly aware that she’s been holding her breath for some time.

  And her hands reach out, reach out, reach out and touch the rough surface of the blacktop. One hand manages to land flat — the other held sideways by the restraint — and the cool of the ground is immediately absorbed by the meat of each palm.

  She balances there and listens a moment, not sure what she expects to hear. Maybe the chime as the glass door swings open somewhere behind her. Regardless, there is no sound but the distant traffic, and even that is sparse. The whoosh of a single car speeding by.

  Part of her mind screams for her to hurry now, sure somehow that this will all go wrong.

  She lifts her head and the lights catch in the tears in her eyes, smearing everything in refractions, strange geometric patterns.

  Her hands crawl forward on the asphalt, carrying her weight, and her legs drag over the seats behind, knees pistoning the best they can to try to help the cause.

  The muscles in her legs feel tired. Dead. For the first time it occurs to her that he might have drugged them. Date rape drugs. Roofies. GHB. Something like that. Yes, he must have drugged them, but it’s a passing thought as she hurries along.

  And she is out of the car. Onto the ground.

  The night air envelops her, its chill swirling around her, touching the sweat-soaked places. The cold saturates her to the bone.

  She rocks up onto her knees and closes the door behind her. Stumbles into a crawl toward Tammy’s door.

  Half of her expects it to be locked somehow — like this is some horror movie — but it comes free right away.

  She almost can’t believe it. This is actually working.

  Tammy remains unconscious, even after one more quick shake.

  Again she is struck by how much her friend looks like a sleeping infant, all curled up in a position somehow increasingly fetal.

  She goes to loop her hands under Tammy’s armpits, but she can’t. The zip tie won’t allow it.

  Instead she grabs a wrist.

  If she hurries, she can drag Tammy out of the car, and once they’re both onto the ground, she can scream bloody fucking murder. There’s no one around to actually help — no one but the clerk, at least — so the screaming is more a bluff than anything. Her hope is that he will panic and bolt.

  But that also means she can’t do it until Tammy is out. Otherwise the panicking and bolting takes her friend away as well.

  Claire adjusts her grip, leans back, tries to use her weight to dislodge Tammy, but it’s not working. With her hands stuck together, she can’t get the leverage she needs.

  She feels like she has tiny Tyrannosaurus arms or something. Little useless chicken wings.

  And she sees him now. A shadow in the distance. Pushing the door open. Stepping away from the building.

  She yanks again, but it’s no good. Tammy’s bulk doesn’t even shift. The limp arm just flops around.

  And some part of her brain seems to click on. Some hyper-aware part meant to record memories in a crisis like this. Some part that knows she’s doomed.

  Again the tears smear her vision. What feels like sheets of water flushing her eyes and rolling down her cheeks.

  She needs to move Tammy, but she can’t.

  She can’t.

  She can’t.

  She can’t.

  And she has no choice. No options. She won’t leave Tammy here.

  She climbs over her friend to reclaim her spot in the backseat, closing the door behind her.

  Chapter 6

  October 1991

  It was during a Friday rehearsal for Little Shop that Tammy cornered Claire backstage during a costume change.

  “What are you doing after this?” she asked.

  Without waiting for a response, Tammy continued. “Because a bunch of us are going to Big Boy, and you should come.”

  “Oh,” Claire said, somewhat baffled.

  Tammy was so loud and vivacious. The kind of person that it seemed like exciting things must always be happening to. She was one of those girls that had friends in every faction of their school, equally at home among the achievers on the yearbook committee, the stoners that snuck joints in the bathrooms, the band geeks, the Homecoming Court.

  For this reason, Claire’s first thought was, Me? Why? Is she confusing me with someone else?

  It wouldn’t have been the first time. Claire was such a wallflower that some people took no notice of her at all. The previous year, for example, Brad Nichols had turned to her in their 4th period English Lit class and said, “So you’re the new girl, right?”

  “No,” she’d answered.

  She and Brad had gone to the same school and been in the same grade for five years now, and her bafflement prevented her from pointing that fact out immediately.

  His face scrunched up, like maybe he thought she was lying to him for some reason.

  There was probably a new girl in school that looked a little like her, she thought. That was all.

&nb
sp; “Your name is Claire, isn’t it?”

  She nodded, more befuddled than ever.

  “And you didn’t just move here?”

  Now all she could do was shake her head.

  Brad shrugged.

  “OK, then.”

  Like maybe he still didn’t believe her.

  The year that had passed since that incident brought her no more clarity on the subject. There was no new girl at school that she found. And definitely no new girls named Claire.

  Tammy was watching her expectantly. That was when Claire remembered the vagina incident, and the interaction suddenly made some amount of sense.

  Instead of saying Yes or No or asking for more details like she supposed a normal person might, Claire said, “I don’t have a car.”

  Tammy ignored the awkwardness of the response, waving it away with a smile.

  “You can ride with me.”

  “OK,” Claire said.

  And then she floated through the rest of the rehearsal in an almost dream-like state, wondering at how Tammy Podolak had ever noticed her in the first place.

  When they arrived at Big Boy, Claire eyed the statue clad in the checkerboard overalls and thought of the few times she’d been here with her family. They didn’t eat out very often. They were too cheap. Or rather, her stepdad was.

  On the rare occasion that they did eat out, Keith ordered for everyone, having predetermined what he was willing to spend on the extravagance. For himself, that usually meant a burger platter. Her mother could have the same or the soup and salad bar. Claire always got stuck with the hot dog meal off the kids menu. And she didn’t even like hot dogs.

  Claire didn’t understand what the point of eating out was if they ate the same thing every time. The same thing they could have eaten at home. She longed for just the tiniest sense of novelty.

  Every time they were seated and the waitress asked what they’d like to drink, the first thing that popped into Claire’s head was, “A Shirley Temple.”

  Her aunt had ordered one for her once, when they visited her in San Diego. Claire thought she’d died and gone to heaven when the drink arrived in all its bubbly pink glory, with the miniature plastic sword speared through a twist of orange and two maraschino cherries. This fancy-looking drink was for her?