by Cesare, Adam
Fuck ’em, Silverfish said and Claire nodded along with her. Maybe the gross, bloody sheets left in the hallway would convince some guests to cut their stays short.
Although she would have liked to walk out of The Brant wearing her civilian clothes, Claire decided that she wasn’t going to risk going back to her room to change.
She had her phone, her cigarettes and her baton, what more did she need?
Before descending the last flight of stairs into the lobby, Claire took the baton out of her pocket. She squeezed the padding, feeling the coolness of the steel underneath. Part of her wanted to be given a reason to use it. At least a reason to flick open the release button and extend it, just so she could hear that satisfying sound and be made braver by it.
She hadn’t been given one, though. The front desk was unmanned: no Daisy or Brant.
Silverfish gave a sigh of disappointment, but Claire speedwalked through the front door and didn’t look back.
With her hand that was not full of concealed baton, she woke up the screen of her phone. Five fifty. She was ten minutes early for her pick up.
She crossed Main Street and waited in front of the general store for Tobin to arrive.
To preserve both the battery on her phone and an ounce of sanity, she counted a hundred Mississippis before checking the time on her phone again. Five fifty-two.
She scrunched down low against the general store window, trying to make herself small so she wouldn’t be noticed by Pat Dwyer if he looked outside.
It was twenty-five Mississippis before Dwyer poked his head out the door. She heard the jingle of sleigh bells and looked over at him.
“Waiting for your fellah?” he asked. It was hard not to like him. Even after Davey had told her about the town’s connection to Brant, she couldn’t believe it when she looked at Pat.
Despite his age, his puppy-dog innocence and his white coat combined to create the image of a little boy playing dress up. One day I’ll be a real pharmacist. Then I’ll help people feel better.
Claire didn’t respond, but noticed that she still had the baton in a kung fu grip and slipped it back into her pocket. The blood rushed back into her hand, she looked down to see that her fingertips were white.
“Why don’t you come inside and have a Coke?” Pat said. “You never know how long a man’s going to take. Believe me, I am one.”
Claire smiled. “No thanks, Mr. Dwyer.”
Pat just nodded and made an aw’ go-on wave of his hand.
She looked back at the phone. Five fifty-six, less than twenty percent battery remaining. The calming presence of Patrick Dwyer did nothing to soothe the bubbles of anxiety popping and churning in her stomach.
The sleigh bells sounded again. Dwyer had stepped out in front of the store with her. He squinted into the orange of the setting sun. “Think we’ll be lucky enough to have another nice one tomorrow?” he asked.
Claire watched the tops of the trees. They were a darkness that was reaching up to snuff out the sun.
“Yeah,” she said, “seems like it’ll be warm enough.”
Dwyer took one small step towards her and then leaned against the window himself.
This close, she could smell him. His wasn’t the smoky earth scent of Tobin or Davey, but the harsh chemical smell of a hospital, softened only by the gravy smell of country cooking. The smell made her uncomfortable.
She went back to counting Mississippis as he lapsed into silence and watched the sunset.
Claire tried to count as Silverfish observed and watched Main Street for Tobin’s truck. There were only ever two or three people on Main Street at a time, all of them guests of The Brant stretching their legs after a day of striking out to the rest of the Berkshires.
Pat was close to her, eyes on the trees and the sunset.
He’s not watching the sunset, silly. He’s watching you.
It was the first thing her inner teenager said that she believed immediately.
They both waited for twenty more minutes and three cigarettes in silence. Dwyer only left twice to ring up a customer, coming back outside after each time.
When the clock on her phone read six thirty, she began walking down Main Street towards Tobin’s shack.
She turned back only once. Pat Dwyer was still leaning against the storefront, watching her as she walked away down the road.
He gave her a quick wave.
She started walking faster, until she could no longer see the gas station. Then she broke into a run.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Not being able to change before leaving the hotel turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The white running shoes of Claire’s uniform were much easier on her feet.
Easier, not perfect. They were still doing some damage to her feet as they smacked against the uneven ground.
She ran for a couple of minutes at a time, taking frequent breaks walking the side of the road in order to catch her breath.
Neither Claire nor Silverfish had been much for exercise, it was one of the few things they still had in common.
In Tobin’s truck, the shack was only a ten-minute drive up the street and down a dirt road. On foot—in the quickly darkening summer night—it was a journey and a half.
She reached the turnoff of the dirt road while the sky above her was still purple. No sun, but enough twilight to see by. Instead of sticking to one side, she walked down the middle of the trail where it was at its flattest. She had no desire to twist an ankle tripping over a root or stone.
By the time she reached the shack, it was almost completely dark. The world took on that weird two-dimensional feel it does when you’re outside for the day-to-night transition. Grabbing for the knob to the front door, Claire missed the first time she went to grip on to it.
She got it on her second attempt, but the door was locked. Claire went to her tiptoes and took the spare key from above the doorframe.
The shack was small enough and well-insulated enough that a few hours of body heat was enough to keep the temperature warm for the rest of the day.
Tonight the shack was cold inside.
She flipped the light switch and the two low-wattage bulbs coughed to life.
The one feature of the room, the bed, was askew, as if someone had tossed the mattress over looking for something and made a halfhearted attempt to return it to its original position. Nothing else seemed out of place, but somehow that made the slightly off bed even worse.
Claire used her knees and shins to press the mattress back into place, moving it flush to the corner of the room.
Sitting down on the bed, she checked her phone for a text message or missed call. Tobin didn’t have a phone, so this was beyond wishful thinking. Checking for texts seemed like an artifact of her life back in Boston, that magical time when she could send messages through the air to her boyfriend.
He’s your boyfriend now? Silverfish asked. It was a valid question, but not one to try and answer at this exact moment.
The clock on the phone read quarter past seven.
She untied the white sneakers and pulled them off. Removing the pressure of the laces opened them up like a wound. First a chill washed over each toe, then pain replaced the numbness as blood pumped back into her chaffed, sweaty feet.
If she wanted to check how bad the blisters were going to be, she could have peeled off her socks, but she kept them on to preserve the mystery.
Instead of her mangled feet, she focused on where Tobin could be and where he wasn’t. It would have been impossible to miss his truck between the shack and the gas station, so that explanation didn’t work. There was the possibility that he would be coming to pick her up from the south. She’d never seen him use that route to pick her up before, but she still didn’t know how he spent most of his days. He could have, but he probably didn’t.
They got him, Silverfish said.
Or he was caught up somewhere, Claire shot back, trying to push images of hooded cultists out of her mind. It was barely over a
n hour since he was meant to pick her up.
“I should have stayed at the station,” she said to no one.
I’m acting crazy.
No, you’re acting like a survivor, Silverfish said. You got out of there because you knew it was no good, wasn’t safe. You stayed visible and made it hard for them to do anything to you without another visitor of Mission seeing you.
Her inner sixteen-year-old had a point. Maybe she had played it smart. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she considered her options.
Now that she was at the shack, it was about a ten-minute hike to camp. That was if she didn’t get lost. Without Tobin to guide her through the darkness, that seemed unlikely.
She wasn’t going back to the hotel. Besides Davey’s claim that the town was home to a secret satanic society seeming more compelling with each passing second, it was now full dark. A two-mile trek in total darkness did not appeal to her.
The only smart option was to play the waiting game.
She laid her head back on Tobin’s pillow and the motion cemented her decision. It took considerable effort to heft her legs up onto the mattress, but as she set them down she was hit with a blast of exhaustion.
I’ll never be able to sleep, was her last thought before dipping into semiconsciousness.
It may have been a minute or an hour, but she was awoken by the crackling of underbrush outside the shack. At first, she thought the sounds could have been a deer, but after a moment it became clear that it was a human, their footfalls slow and deliberate, but still too heavy to be considered stealthy.
He’s back! Was her first thought accompanied by white-hot warmth that bloomed in her chest and made her smile.
Or it’s Roy, Silverfish offered. She tossed the idea out casually, an underhanded lob, but with the knowledge that what she was throwing was a live grenade.
Claire’s hand went to the light switch, but paused before turning out the lights. Whoever was out there, they might not know that she was in here, but if she hit the lights, they sure would.
With the lights on, there was no use taking a look out the window. She’d be completely night-blind and on display for whoever was out there.
In some ways, this was the scenario that she’d been looking forward to the whole night. Pushing herself into the corner of the room behind the door, she took the baton out of her pocket. With a quick thrust of her forearm down to her side, the weapon extended.
The click felt great.
The footsteps got closer, stopping at the back of the shack and then working their way around to the front window. There was a soft knock, a knuckle on glass and a moment later the doorknob began to turn.
Claire cursed herself for not locking it.
“Claire?” the voice crossing the threshold asked. Not Roy, but not Tobin either.
It was Davey, his bearded face peeking behind the door, as if he had known where she was the entire time. His eyes darted down to the baton and then back to her face.
“It’s okay, you can put that away,” he said. His voice had the quiet calm of a hostage negotiator.
He showed her his hands, one filled with a large flashlight, and closed the door behind himself.
“Where’s Tobin?” she asked.
“You may want to sit down,” Davey said, “the situation has escalated, as I bet you’ve guessed.”
He looked down at her feet and so did she. Her white socks were mottled with red and yellow spots where the blood and pus had seeped through.
“Are you okay?” Davey asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. He knelt and brought a plastic container out from under Tobin’s bed. He handed her a thicker pair of socks and she put them on without taking off her old ones.
“Thanks,” she said. “Now tell me.”
“He’s been taken.”
What he said didn’t surprise Claire, Silverfish even less so.
“Where? By who?” she asked.
“Roy. That would be my first guess. Tobin’s a strong guy, but if Roy got the drop on him, Roy’s going to win. I mean, it’s clearly not Roy pulling the strings, but to answer your question literally, Roy took him.”
Davey was shaken, if she couldn’t tell from the sweat and dirt on his cheeks, she’d be able to pick up on the fact that his speech was rambling and inarticulate. It was the opposite of what she’d come to expect from him and it scared her worse than anything else she’d seen so far this night.
“And to answer my question figuratively?” Claire asked. “You mean that Brant had him taken?”
Davey nodded, using his free hand to pat down his long hair, clicking the flashlight on and off with his other. “People like her…they don’t get their hands bloody. Not when they’ve got a staff, followers.”
Seeing a Davey who was no longer cool and collected was like watching while a magician pulls a dead rabbit out of his hat. The trick was not only ruined, it was so ruined that it would soon accrue therapy bills.
“There’s something else, but I don’t know if I should show it to you,” Davey said.
“What? I can handle it,” she said, but she wasn’t so sure.
“We’d have to walk to it, are you able to?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
“Not after you see this you won’t be,” he said.
She stuffed her oversized socks into her shoes and they went on a walk through the woods.
Chapter Thirty
Davey had offered to carry her, but she’d declined. That was something she and Tobin did together. She would walk.
Her white stockings were beginning to rip around her shins, small holes started by the occasional prick from burrs and thorns expanded with each step. In the areas where flesh wasn’t visible through the fabric yet, pinpoints of blood were.
She couldn’t tell if her legs felt better or worse when the light wasn’t pointed towards them.
In the radiance of the flashlight and the moon, Claire could see that Davey had a pistol tucked into his pants. It was wedge in the space below his spine and above his ass crack. The weight of it changed his gait, adding to the overall impression that this was the least comfortable Davey had ever allowed himself to be.
It seemed an awkward place to hide a gun and told Claire that Davey didn’t wear one often.
“We’re here,” Davey said, casting the flashlight over the dark green fiberglass of a car. What make and model Claire couldn’t tell, she could only see part of the fender and a bit of one door. The rest was covered in broken branches and dead leaves, buried the way a toddler might hide his Tyco trucks in the backyard.
They walked a few yards beyond the car mound until they came to a hill of upturned dirt.
Davey covered the beam of the flashlight with his hand and looked over at her. His hand glowed orange and she imagined him holding a ball of fire.
“You’re sure you want to look?” he asked. “It’s gruesome.”
“Yes,” Claire said before thinking about it.
The hole was rectangular, taller than it was wide, and not deep enough to be an effective grave.
“I found this on my way out here to find you,” Davey said. “I didn’t hear anyone working on the hole or leaving as I approached, so I think they were left like this for us to find. Are these the women you told us about?”
Claire looked away to be sick. She couldn’t control herself and was splattering her hands and knees because she felt dizzy, the act of gagging the only thing that kept her from fainting.
When she was done she kept retching until the taste of blood had removed some of the acid sting of the vomit.
Davey placed a hand flat on her back, but she tried to dive away from it and shake it off, his touch worse than isolation.
She’d only looked into the hole for a second, but that had been long enough.
Christine’s bare back stuck in her mind. It was the last part of the woman Claire had seen when she was alive. There had been something intimate about that glimpse of skin she’d been allowed in the ho
tel room, but now the same skin was pointed up in the night sky for anyone to see.
Jane and her wife were naked except for the clear plastic bags pulled down over their heads and zip-tied around their necks. Each bag had a dime-sized hole in the back of it. Blood pooled at the bottom of each bag, making it impossible to see their faces.
Claire sat against a tree, her back to the hole. They stayed quiet for a long time. They would have stayed like that longer, but Claire broke the silence.
“Give me that gun you’ve got,” she said and placed her hand out flat. She then wiggled her fingers for emphasis.
Davey stood gawking at her for a moment before reaching around his back, his long arms made the motion almost comical.
“What do you need it for?” he asked. He looked at the chamber of the gun, not at Claire.
“You think that they’ve got him down in the basement? In the room that I told you about?”
“I don’t know. It’s been a long time since I’ve been welcome at the hotel, and I’ve never been invited down there.”
“But if you had to take a best guess,” Claire said. It felt strange to be the more in control party here. Davey was cracking.
“I’d say you’re right.”
“Then give me the gun and I’ll go get him back.”
“How? That’s reckless,” Davey said.
“He’s going to be dead soon. Give me the gun,” she said. “Since you shouldn’t do it, they hate you.”
Hate must have been the magic word, because he handed it over.
She was used to the weight of the baton so it wasn’t the heaviness of the pistol that surprised her, but the lightness.
“What kind of gun did that?” Claire asked, motioning at Christine and Jane but not looking at them. If she saw them again she’d lose all resolve.
“Nine millimeter, I’d guess,” he said. “I’m not an expert in these things.”
“No but your followers are, right?” Claire said. She leveled the gun at him. That one movement of her arm seemed to flip a switch and turn the world into unreality. She’d never held a gun in her life, but hoped that every movie and video game she’d ever played was lending some credibility to her grip and stance.