Trapped (A Novel of Terror)

by Jack Kilborn

  The smell was an assault, so overpowering and fetid that Sara dropped it immediately, violently turning away and retching onto the ground.

  “Was that a leg?” Laneesha moved closer to Sara. The girl was clutching the Maglite she’d obviously found.

  Sara wiped her mouth with her sleeve, her throat feeling raw, her tongue foul with stomach acid.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Looked like a dude’s leg.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why is there a dude’s leg on the ground? Where the rest of him?”

  Laneesha played the light across the ground. Sara followed the beam as it washed over twigs, dead leaves, chunks of dirt, coming to rest on a single, brown shoe.

  “Holy shit! There a foot in that shoe?”

  The shoe looked old. Leather decayed and laces gone, flattened by time.

  “The light.”

  Laneesha didn’t move.

  “Laneesha. Give me the light.”

  Sara reached for it, and the girl complied. Still on her knees, she hobbled over to the shoe. Using a stick, Sara poked at the tongue, peering inside.

  Empty.

  “Maybe the cannibals ate the foot,” Laneesha said.

  Sara spit—the foul taste in her mouth wouldn’t go away—then got to her feet. “The shoe is old. That bone still had meat on it.”

  “How you know the shoe is old?”

  “The laces have rotted away. So has some of the leather.”

  “How long does that take?”

  “I don’t know, Laneesha. A long time.”

  “Maybe it takes a long time for meat to rot off the bone, too.”

  Sara rubbed the hand that grabbed the bone onto her jeans. “We don’t even know that was a human bone. Could have been from a deer. Or a pig.”

  “Be a big freakin’ pig.”

  Sara considered looking for the bone again, to prove to Laneesha wrong. And to prove herself wrong, that she didn’t really see cloth clinging to the bone along with strips of skin. But she decided not to. Some things were better not knowing.

  “Maybe the cannibals…”

  “Laneesha!” Sara knew she was raising her voice, and silently cursed herself for her tone even as she continued. “There are no cannibals. Got it?”

  Laneesha wasn’t so easily chided. “Martin said…”

  “Martin was trying to scare us. That’s all. We’re the only people on this island right now.”

  “So who grabbed Martin?”

  “No one grabbed him. He was playing a prank, took it too far, and is now lost in the woods.”

  “Like us,” Laneesha whispered.

  Sara opened her mouth to dispute it, but stopped herself. Were they actually lost? She resisted the urge to shine the flashlight in all directions, hoping to find the path back to the campfire. But there was no path, and every direction looked exactly the same. She silently cursed Martin for his stupid tricks, and for bringing them all here.

  “Camping,” Martin had said, a big grin on his face.

  “You want to take a bunch of inner city kids out into the woods?”

  “It’ll be good for them. We roast some hot dogs, sing some songs. I know the perfect place. My brother and I have been there. It’s beautiful Sara. You and the kids will love it.”

  “You know I’m not good at night time, Martin. And in the woods, in the dark…”

  Martin had patted her knee, looked at her like he used to, with love in his eyes. “You’re a psychologist. This is the perfect way to get over that fear, don’t you think? And besides, I’ll be there to protect you. What could possibly go wrong?”

  So against her best instincts, Sara agreed. She did it, she knew, out of a need to appease him, make him happy. It had been a while since she’d seen Martin happy. They’d been growing distant for a long time. Sara could even remember the exact moment it began. The inciting incident was when Joe disappeared. But then Cheerese took off, and Martin retreated into himself.

  It was more than six years ago. Cheerese Graves was just another confused teenager from a broken family, thrust into their care by the courts. Troubled in the same way dozens or others had been, before and since. And like others, Cheerese preferred to run away rather than deal with Sara and Martin’s rules and regulations.

  Runaways weren’t uncommon. While the Center didn’t have the security of even a minimum security prison, it was still a form of incarceration. The windows were shatterproof and didn’t open, the doors all had heavy duty locks. But the kids always found a way. Cheerese had apparently stolen a set of keys, left after lights out.

  Martin took it personally. Like he’d failed her. That was ridiculous, of course. Martin had a way of reaching kids, of actually being able to rehabilitate them. The recidivism stats for Center graduates were more than seventy percent lower than kids who went to juvee. They were actually helping kids turn their lives around, and part of that meant trusting them to do the right thing, to serve their time, to better themselves.

  Of course, that meant greater opportunities to break the rules. While the Center had a greater success rate than any other state-run program, it also had the highest number of runaways.

  But Sara didn’t want to think about any of that right now. She took the Center’s closing as hard as Martin did. It had been his idea, but she’d been there from the beginning, and she felt the loss. Sara hadn’t even begun interviewing for another job. She knew she’d be able to find work, either through the state or in the private sector. But even though she’d been headhunted, practically offered other positions, she chose to remain loyal to the Center until the very day it closed.

  Now, possibly lost in the woods and growing increasingly frightened, Sara wondered if she shouldn’t have detached herself much earlier.

  “We’re not lost.” Sara regained control over her emotions, assuming the role of responsible adult. “This island is only two thousand acres. That’s about three square miles. If we walk in one direction, we’ll eventually reach the shore. We can follow the shore to where we landed, then follow the orange ribbons back to camp. It might take all night, but we’ll find the others.”

  Laneesha seemed to relax a notch. “Which way we goin’?”

  Sara wished she had a compass. Martin had been carrying it earlier, and for all she knew he still had it on him. That would make going in a straight line more difficult, but not impossible.

  “You pick.”

  Laneesha put her hands on her hips, craning her head to and fro, then finally pointed to her right.

  “This way. I got a feeling.”

  Sara nodded, walking next to the teen. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “What about Martin?

  Sara cupped a smelly hand to her face and yelled, “Maaaar-tin!”

  They both waited for an answer. Every muscle in Sara’s body clenched, hoping she wouldn’t hear a reply, hoping Martin had the decency to quit this stupid game.

  A few seconds passed. Sara unbunched her shoulders, relaxed her jaw. She was just about ready to release the breath she’d been holding when they heard the scream.

  High-pitched. Primal. Definitely not Martin. It was one of the girls, and she sounded like she was in excruciating pain. Cindy, or Georgia.

  And she sounded less than twenty yards away.

  When Meadow was a little boy, he wanted to be part of a family. He never knew his dad, and his mama did drugs and kept making him live with cousins and second cousins and neighbors and sometimes complete strangers. She didn’t want him, and neither did they. He craved love even more than his little tummy craved food, and he got very little of either.

  So when he was thirteen years old, he stood in a circle of Street Disciples—a Folks Nation alliance on Detroit’s East Side—and let eight of the biggest members beat on him for twenty full seconds without fighting back.

  Meadow had been scared. Of the pain, of course, even though he’d gotten beat on for most of his life. But mostly he’d been afraid of his own
reaction. If he tried to defend himself, even in the slightest way, the initiation wouldn’t count, and he’d have to do it again later in order to be accepted into the gang.

  So he put his hands in his pockets, closed his eyes, and let his homies have at him while he concentrated hard as he could not to follow his instinct and cover up, run away, throw a return punch.

  They blooded him in good, breaking his nose and two ribs, kicking him in the kidneys so many times he pissed blood for a week afterward. But Meadow took it all, denying every impulse to save himself, staying on his feet for most of it because he knew if went down the stomping was even worse than the kicks and punches. And it was.

  When it was over he was given a forty of malt liquor and a blunt the size of a corn cob and he lay on a sofa for ten straight hours, drunk and stoned and bleeding and happy, while his new gang family partied around him all night long.

  Meadow clown-walked into the trees, strutting with a perfect gangsta limp and lean, head bobbing, fists clenched, feeling that same uncertainty he did two years ago when joining the SDs. He knew something was about to happen, and every cell in his body told him it was a bad idea confronting whatever was staring at them, that he should turn around and run away as fast as he could. But he kept denying his instinct, kept moving forward.

  Ain’t no such thing as having no fear. Best a brother could do was to not project any. Then perception became reality. Act tough, and you were tough. That’s what being street was all about.

  However, this wasn’t the street. And that figure he was heading for wasn’t no mark, no rival bopper. Meadow had a really bad feeling he was heading toward some crazy cannibal mutha like Martin was talking about.

  But he maintained direction, pimping out his c-walk like he was bangin’ in the hood, heading straight for the silhouette. When the bushes were only fifteen feet away he heard that skank Cindy yell, “Meadow, don’t!”

  But Meadow wasn’t going to back down. He hadn’t backed down since he was five years old, jumping on a cousin who stole his hot dog, a cousin who was twice as big and mean as spit. You had to fight for everything in life, and standing around waiting for things to happen to you was a sure bet things would happen to you.

  Better to be the man doin’ than the man gettin’ done.

  “You wanna roll with this?” he challenged the shadow, spreading out his palms in welcome. “Let’s roll.”

  The figure ducked and disappeared.

  Meadow braced himself, waiting for the attack. He watched for movement, listened for any sound, still feeling that skin-prickly sensation of being watched but now unsure where it was coming from.

  “That how it is?” Meadow opened and closed his fists like he was squeezing tennis balls. “You ‘fraid to come out and face me, muthafucka? Then I be bringin’ it to you.”

  “Meadow,” Tyrone warned.

  Meadow didn’t pay his friend no mind, and stepped through the bushes, into the woods.

  Sara shook the Maglite, the sickly yellow beam barely reaching the trees ten feet in front of her. When the light finally burned out—and it was going to very soon—Sara wasn’t sure what she’d do. Panic, probably. Even though she had to maintain composure for Laneesha, who stood so close she was practically in Sara’s pocket, Sara knew that when the darkness came, she would lose it.

  Darkness and Sara were old enemies, going back almost twenty years. Sara had been eleven years old, happy and well-adjusted, smarter than most of her classmates, already curvy in a way that made her girlfriends jealous. Her shape, her C-cup breasts in particular, brought her a lot of attention from older boys. At first it was exciting. She liked how they looked at her when they thought she didn’t notice, and convinced her parents that she was mature enough to wear clothes that she wasn’t mature enough to wear. With make-up, she could pass for sixteen, and though her parents drew the line there and refused, it was easy work to snag some lipstick and blush away from Mom’s supply.

  Like most tweens, the mall was the place du jour to hang out. Sara was allowed to go without parental supervision if she went with friends. On that fateful Saturday, Sara was with her friend Louise. They’d smuggled in clothes from Louise’s older sister and dressed in the washroom, Madonna pointy bras and Paula Abdul heels, lips painted so red they could stop traffic.

  Years of therapy almost had convinced Sara the abduction wasn’t her fault. It didn’t matter how she was dressed. She wasn’t looking for unwanted male atention, and she definitely wasn’t looking to get kidnapped.

  It happened in the parking lot. Sara hadn’t even been aware of the man following them, and barely had time to scream when he scooped her and Louise up and shoved them into the trunk of his car.

  They drove for what seemed like hours, crying and clinging to each other in the dark, terrified to hysterics. Sara knew about crazy people, and what maniacs did to young women. She didn’t want to die. Almost as scary was the thought of being raped, that her very first time would be with some psycho who wanted to use her and hurt her and discard her.

  And then the car finally stopped. The girls held their breaths, straining to hear what was happening.

  When it did happen, it was sudden. The trunk popped open, the sunlight blinding them. Then the man reached in. He had eyes Sara would never forget. Pea green, smiling eyes, set into a face as cruel as a wolf’s. He grabbed Louise, and yanked her out, and slammed the hood.

  Leaving Sara alone in the dark.

  Once again, she held her breath, trying to hear what he was doing to her friend.

  First, she heard begging.

  Then she heard screaming.

  Then laughing. Laughing from the man.

  He took his time with Louise. Did all the things Sara was afraid of. All the things, and so much more.

  Sara knew, because he described what he was doing as he did it, seemingly for Sara’s benefit. He talked a lot about the knife he used. A hunting knife, with a long, sharp blade, and a serrated edge on the spine.

  He used that knife a lot. He used other instruments as well.

  After ten minutes, Sara clamped her hands over her ears.

  After an hour, Louise finally stopped screaming.

  And then, nothing. No sounds at all.

  Sara waited. She waited for the man to do to her what he’d done to her friend. She waited in the dark, half-crazy with fear.

  The man didn’t come.

  Sara had no idea how long she was in that trunk. So long she’d wet her pants twice. So long she became tired enough to go to sleep, if the fear would have allowed it. But the fear didn’t leave. It kept building, and building, each passing minute worse than the last. And in the silence, the darkness whispered to her. Taunted her. Made promises of the pain to come.

  When the trunk finally did open, it was almost a blessing. Sara wanted out of the dark so badly, wanted it all to be over with. She was almost giddy to die, just as long as she could see the light again.

  But it wasn’t the abductor. It was the police. They’d caught the man, a known sex offender named Paulie Gunther Spence. Spence had a prior arrest for the rape of a 16-year-old girl. With Louise, he graduated from rape to torture and murder, and was caught disposing of her mutilated corpse in a vacant lot.

  Sara was spared the horrors inflicted on her dead friend, only to suffer with different types of horrors. Fear of strangers, and of public places, and of enclosed spaces, and of falling asleep. Fear of knives. Fear of car trunks. Fear of green eyes.

  But the biggest fear of all was of the dark.

  It took Sara ten years of therapy before she would wear lipstick again. She still couldn’t put on anything but the dowdiest of clothes; even her bathing suits were the one-piece cover-ups with the high necklines and faux-skirts that covered her butt, though Martin repeatedly told her she’d look great in a bikini.

  Sara did eventually manage to sleep well, on occasion, but it was always with a nightlight. The thought that the flashlight would go out soon, leaving Sara vulnerable
to the smothering darkness, it was too much too—

  “help…”

  The word jolted Sara, making her spin around and hip-bump Laneesha off her feet. Martin. And he was close.

  Her encroaching dread was overtaken by a sense of hope. Martin, for all his faults, helped Sara through many a fearsome night, holding her close and stroking her hair until she could fall asleep. Finding him would give her a much-needed boost of strength.

  “Martin!” she called into the dark. “Where are you?”

  “ara…”

  The voice came from her right, weak but near. Sara grabbed Laneesha elbow, helping the girl back to her feet, then tugged her toward the pleas.

  “Martin. Keep talking.”

  The sliver of light swept across the trees ahead, seeking out a human shape. Sara stormed forward, underbrush digging at her legs, ducking under a low-hanging bough.

  “elp me ara…”

  He was so close now Sara felt like she could reach out and touch him. She turned in a complete circle, aiming the beam every which way, but her husband still wasn’t to be found.

  “Martin?”

  “ara…”

  Sara tilted the Maglite, trailing the light up a tree trunk, across the branches, over to…

  “Holy shit!” Laneesha’s voice was barely above a whisper.

  Sara realized that this wasn’t some campfire prank, some joke gone wrong. They were all in danger. Very real danger. Because someone had hung Martin by his wrists and hoisted him up a tree, where he twisted slowly like a giant, bloody piñata.

  A twig snapped on Meadow’s left. He spun, fist clenched and raised, and then caught the smell. An awful, rancid smell, like body odor and sweaty feet and sour milk.

  “Welcome to our island,” a soft voice said.

  Then someone tackled Meadow from behind. Meadow twisted, trying to grab his attacker, but he was forced onto the ground face-first, a knee pinning his back. And then his arms were stretched out, followed by his legs.