by Jack Kilborn
Still, Tyrone didn’t want to get ventilated by a lucky shot, and having a gun pointed anywhere close to him was a sobering situation. Time was moving so slow that Tyrone felt like he could sense each blood cell inchworming through his veins. He desperately wanted to get his life back on track, to live up to his potential, to make his mama and grandmamma proud. Dying out in the woods because some loony kid was off his meds was not the way he wanted to go out.
“You ever shot a gun before, Tom?”
Tom sneered. “Plenty of times.”
He was lying. Tyrone was good at spotting lies, but with Tom it was easy. Every third thing out of that kid’s mouth was BS.
“I bet you a ten-spot you can’t hit that log Martin been sittin’ on.”
Tom glanced sideways. “I can hit that, no problem.”
Tyrone put his hands in his pockets, all cool and casual, and walked two steps closer. He was fifteen feet away from Tom. As soon as the boy gave him a chance, he was going to bum rush the fool. No use trying to talk down a head case.
“I give you three tries to nail it.”
“You really don’t think I can hit that log?”
Tyrone took another step. “I’m puttin’ my money on it.”
“Log’s too easy.” Tom grinned, his eyes glinting in the firelight, and then he switched his aim. “How about I try for Cindy instead?”
Georgia walked alongside Lester, through the woods, barely able to see because of the darkness. The tall man had his hand under her armpit, gripping her biceps, and his fingers were so long they completely encircled her arm. It wasn’t a powerful hold, and Georgia probably could have twisted away, but to what end? She had nowhere to run to.
“Where are we going?”
“Lester is taking the girl to his playroom.”
“It sounds fun.” Actually, it didn’t sound fun at all. Georgia felt her whole body shudder, conjuring up images of what horrible things this man had in his playroom.
“It is fun. For Lester.”
“Maybe I’ll have fun too.”
He stopped and looked down at her. The moon peeked through the trees, silhouetting his massive form.
“No, the girl won’t. No one ever does. The girl will beg to die, like all the others.”
Georgia didn’t hesitate. She reached up her free hand and put it behind Lester’s neck—it was like hanging onto a tree—and then she leaned up and kissed him.
She’d never kissed a boy before, let alone a man, let alone a maniac. But she knew everything in life was about control. So far, he’d been calling the shots. But maybe she could confuse him a little bit.
Lester did seem confused, and when her mouth locked on his he pulled slightly back, lifting her up off her feet, her body pressing into his.
Georgia held on for a moment, couldn’t sustain her own weight, then dropped to the ground.
The rejection was almost as painful as the thought of what this psycho was going to do to her. She knew she wasn’t attractive. And even though she was seventeen, a year past the age of consent in Michigan, she often wondered if she’d die a virgin. Georgia preferred to remain asexual, and her fantasies were more about hurting others than getting laid.
But, still, her first kiss, and the creep pulled away.
“Don’t you like me?” she asked, trying to keep the disappointment out of her voice.
Lester didn’t reply.
“I like you.” Georgia reached for his pants, her hand brushing against him. When she touched his fly she lit up. He was hard.
Were men really that easy to manipulate?
“You do like me. So why can’t you kiss me?”
Lester bent down again. “Lester can kiss. But he might chew on the girl’s lips and bite off the girl’s pretty little tongue.”
“The girl’s name is Georgia,” she said, tilting up her chin and kissing him again before she lost her nerve. At first, his mouth was closed, his lips cool and still. Then he opened his mouth, just a bit, and she probed inside with her tongue.
His teeth were sharp, sharp enough to draw blood if she pressed against them too hard. If he actually tried to bite he could probably tear off her lower jaw.
She forced her tongue in deeper, touching his, poking against it. Lester’s tongue was wet and slimy like raw liver, but not wholly unpleasant. Then his mouth closed a bit, the pointy teeth trapping her, exerting just enough pressure for it to just begin to hurt, for blood just to begin flowing.
Georgia didn’t pull away. Instead, she stuck her hand down the front of Lester’s pants.
Lester’s whole body went rigid, and Georgia thought she’d screwed up, that he was going to munch on her with those terrible teeth, gnaw every bit of flesh off of her face.
And then, unexpectedly, he moaned.
I actually made a man moan.
She felt almost giddy with power, kissing him even deeper, beginning to work her hand in a way she guessed a man would like.
Maybe it didn’t matter, and Lester would still take her back to his playroom and torture her to death. But at that moment, Georgia felt wonderfully normal, like those braindead cheerleaders she used to go to school with, or the old couple who lived in her mom’s apartment building that were always holding hands. She thought about returning to the campsite, and when those losers asked her where she’d been, she could them that she was in the woods, making out.
Georgia gripped him hard as she could, and then his huge hands were around her waist, making her feel dainty, and she might have even moaned a little too, and then she tasted something tangy and realized it was blood and that it was hers.
Sara jumped back so fast she fell onto her ass. The corpse of the man she’d killed flopped over onto its side. Then it was still.
Reflex action, Sara thought. Like a chicken still running around after its head has been cut off.
Sara had a pre-med roomie in college who told her all sorts of stories about dead bodies twitching, opening their eyes, even making sounds.
“I just had like fifteen heart attacks.” Laneesha had both hands clasped to her chest. “He really dead?”
Sara nodded. “Let’s go back, find Martin.”
“How many more of these crazies you think are in the woods?”
“I don’t know. That’s why we need to get back to the camp.”
They moved slowly, the flashlight so pathetically weak now that a match would have been brighter. Sara knew they hadn’t run far from Martin, and she felt they were going in the right direction, but the trees all looked the same and it was so easy to get disoriented. She considered calling out to him, but as badly as she wanted to find her husband she didn’t want to announce their presence to whatever else might be lurking in the woods.
Movement, to their left. Something was rustling a bush.
Sara aimed the beam in that direction, and that’s the moment the Maglight finally went dead.
She held her breath, Laneesha clinging to her arm so hard it hurt, listening to the rustling as it faded out. For a bad moment Sara felt like she was locked in that awful trunk again. The darkness was too big, too heavy, pressing on her from all sides and making it impossible to move.
“Sara?”
Martin.
“Are you and Laneesha okay?”
His voice broke the spell, and Sara tore away from Laneesha and ran to him, throwing her arms around his familiar form, Jack cooing and wiggling between them, the hug feeling so good and right that it made the desperation of their predicament fade just a little bit.
Then the relief was replaced by confusion, and anger. She took Jack and pushed Martin away, keeping him at arm’s length.
“Martin, what the hell is going on?”
Sara felt his shoulders slump. His voice was thick, pained, and he winced when he spoke. “I don’t know.”
“That whole campfire story. That civil war prison. You made that up. Right?”
“No. I mean…it’s just a story. A story that I remember from camp when I was
a kid in Boy Scouts. Scared the wits out of me and my little brother. But it’s not true. It can’t be true.”
“What happened back at the campsite? Were you dragged off?”
“That was supposed to be a joke. I was going to pop out and scare everyone. But before I could, some people grabbed me, strung me up.”
“So you don’t know what’s going on?”
His face sank, his red eyes looking desperate. “Honey, I swear, I’m just as freaked out as you are. I picked this island because I’ve been here before. I didn’t know there was anyone else here; Sara. Jesus, I would never do anything to hurt you or the kids. You know that.”
Sara did know that. Martin got moody sometimes, but he was one of the gentlest people she had ever met. This man would catch and release spiders he found in the house rather than kill them. Sara knew he’d gladly die to defend her.
“What about Plincer? You said this was Plincer’s island. That name sounds familiar.”
“That’s just what we’ve always called this island. Sara, we need to get out of here. When they grabbed me—I counted at least five of those people. Maybe more. We need to get back to the campsite. Do you have the flashlight?”
“It died.”
“Give it here.”
Sara handed the flashlight over. Her husband moaned when he took it.
“Help me, we need to open it.”
Her fingers grazed his swollen hands, then grasped them gently. Together they unscrewed the back off the Maglite. Martin dumped the batteries onto his palm.
“Do you have an emery board?”
“No. Laneesha? You have a nail file?”
“I don’ go nowhere without one. Y’all don’ allow no acrylics, so I gotta make do with what God gave me.”
“Let me borrow it,” Martin said.
Laneesha handed Sara the thin strip of cardboard, the size of a popsicle stick. Martin pressed the batteries between his palms.
“Sand the tops and bottoms. Really rough them up. And then dab the ends in the blood on my wrists. This’ll make them more conductive, suck a bit more energy out of them.”
Sara followed instructions, then popped the Ds back into the flashlight. Light trickled out, faint yellow but better than nothing. She swept it over the trees. If she just found a single orange ribbon, they could get their bearings and get back to the campsite. Then they could use the radio, call for help, and get off this crazy island.
Sara spotted orange, but it was dead leaves, not a ribbon. The strips were phosphorescent, and glowed like reflectors when light hit them. Why couldn’t they find any?
“Where the hell are those ribbons?”
Martin put a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll find them.”
She flicked the beam from one trunk, to another, to another. Nothing.
“We must have tied a few dozen.”
“We’ll find them.”
Sara spun around, tried the other direction. All the trees looked the same. Every damn tree looked the same. They just needed to find one, dammit. This island wasn’t that big. How hard could it be to find a single goddamn…
Then Sara heard something horrible.
“Oh, god, no…”
In the distance. Faint, but obvious.
Screaming.
“Can you hear that?”
“What, hon?”
“Someone screaming.”
Martin looked around. “That’s the wind.”
“It’s not the wind. It’s one of the kids. Do you hear it Laneesha?”
The teen cocked her head. “I don’ hear nothin’.”
Sara began to walk faster. “Which direction is it coming from? We have to help.”
“Sara…you need to calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down, Martin. That’s one of our kids out there.”
The screams seemed to get louder, more frantic. What was happening to that poor child? What could cause someone to scream like that? The thought of somebody hurting one of her kids was—
Sara felt herself get grabbed from behind. She went on automatic, widening her stance, shifting her body to flip the attacker. But he got his leg between hers, preventing her leverage, one hand snaking over her mouth and the other reaching for the flashlight.
Sara bared her teeth, ready to chew the bastard’s fingers off, when Martin’s voice whispered in her ear.
“Kill the light. They’ve found us.”
Sara tapped the Maglite button just as she noticed three…four…six…no, at least eight people—filthy and ragged and obviously insane—walk into the clearing just ten yards ahead of them.
Cindy watched Tom turn the gun on her, so clear and precise that it seemed like slow-motion. He aimed it at her chest. She could feel a cold spot where the bullet would enter, right next to her heart. It made her knees shake.
Growing up in northern Michigan, Cindy knew guns. Her dad had several, and when money was tight—and it usually was—he would supplement groceries with fresh rabbit, possum, and deer.
Knowing the damage guns could do, and the respect they demanded, made her understand the depths of Tom’s stupidity. Even at this distance she could see the pistol was cocked, which meant the slightest touch of the trigger, or even dropping the gun, could cause it to fire.
It made Cindy realize, with a combination of both fear and relief, that she didn’t want to die.
Being in rehab before, and being around other addicts, showed Cindy how deadly meth was. It killed you three times. First, it killed your will, making you a slave to another fix. Then it killed your looks, turning you into a toothless, underweight skeleton. Then it finally snuffed out your life, but by that point the end was welcome.
Cindy had begged, borrowed, and stolen to get high, giving up everything she cared about. She even had meth mouth, her teeth starting to rot in her head, losing three molars before being put into the Center. Her first few months at the Center, Cindy didn’t care if she lived or died. She thought she wanted to straighten out her life, but she was unsure if that was just the therapy talking.
But now she knew. Staring down the barrel of the gun, Cindy wanted to live.
“Tom. Don’t point that at me. It’s not funny.”
Tom stuck out his chest. “Who’s trying to be funny? I know what you—what all of you—think of me. You think I’m some kind of joke. You laughing at me now?”
Cindy cast a quick glance at Tyrone, his knees bent and his head slightly lowered, and figured he was getting ready to rush Tom. Tyrone was fast, but bullets were faster.
“I never thought you were a joke, Tom. I always liked you.”
“Is that why you were holding hands with Tyrone? You pretending he was me?”
Cindy forced a smile, tried her best to make it look genuine. “If you wanted to hold my hand, all you had to do was ask. But how much do you think pointing a gun at me will make me like you?”
“I don’t care who likes me.”
“Sure you do, Tom. Isn’t that why you stole that car? For attention? But there’s good attention and bad attention. This is just more bad attention.”
“Give me a break, Cindy. I’m not the loser here. How many guys you suck off to get a fix? Is that why you’re playing Tyrone? You think he’s got some ice?”
Cindy let the smile fall away, and anger replaced some of her fear.
“Do you like it here, Tom? Because if you shoot me, the place you’re going will be a lot worse, and for a much longer time. No juvee hall. You’ll be tried as an adult, stuck in general pop. Then we’ll see how many guys you suck off to stay alive.”
Tom lowered the gun, just a fraction. Then Tyrone lunged, crossing the distance between him and Tom in two steps, driving a shoulder into the kid’s chest while stiff-arming Tom’s gun hand up and away from Cindy.
Tom toppled like he was on hinges, the gun arcing out of his hand and plopping into the campfire with a puff of sparks.
Cindy’s automatic instinct was to reach for it, but she stopped. She’d
gotten burned before. Second degree on both hands. That’s why she didn’t roast a hotdog or marshmallows earlier. Fire scared the crap out of Cindy.
She often had nightmares about it. The meth lab, her friend cooking a batch, the flask of chemicals exploding and setting him ablaze. He ran at her, screaming, and she had to push him away to keep from dying herself, scorching her hands in the process. They healed, with minimal scarring, but the pain wasn’t anything she’d ever forget.
Badly as she wanted the gun, Cindy knew there was no way she’d reach into fire to get it.
Instead, she ran toward Tyrone and Tom. Tyrone was straddling him, one hand on Tom’s neck, the other raised to punch him in the face.
Cindy caught Tyrone’s fist, held it back.
“Don’t.”
“Fool needs to be taught.”
“He’s off his medicine, Tyrone. Beating him up won’t teach him anything.”
Tom looked small, terrified, a big difference from the swaggering macho dipshit he’d been seconds ago.
“Apologize to the lady,” Tyrone told him.
Tom wheezed out, “I’m sorry.”
“You ever gonna try that shit again?”
Tom shook his head, much as he could with his throat being squeezed.
“We’re all on the same side, fool. We gotta watch each other’s backs. And y’all are trippin’ on Clint Eastwood. Be cool.”
Tom nodded, and Tyrone got off him. Cindy still held Tyrone’s fist, which opened and then clasped her hand, and then he turned and looked at her, his face soft and his pupils wide. His free hand slid around her waist, pulling her a little closer, and Cindy felt her legs get weak again.
Tom had been wrong. She hadn’t ever done anything sexual for drugs. When she was so far gone she was willing to, the boys she hung out with her too far gone to want any. So her experience was limited to a few French kisses, and a freshman year groping session on a couch that felt more like wrestling than foreplay.
But looking up at Tyrone, she felt her knees start to shake for the second time in only a few minutes, and as his lips moved slightly closer she tilted her chin up and began to close her eyes.