Cristina

by Jake Parent

  “You’ll break your wrists before you break that pipe.”

  It took a moment, but the sound of the voice brought with it a memory of smelling something toxic. Feeling rough cloth on her face. Dropping her phone. And then blacking out in her kitchen.

  “Jack?”

  “I know. I know.” He stepped out from the edge of the shadows so his face was half-illuminated, like someone telling a scary story around a campfire. “Sorry to disappoint you. I’d so been hoping you wouldn’t figure things out, even if I knew that somehow you would. You’re a pretty sharp cookie, just like Amanda was.” He shook his head thoughtfully at the mention of his former neighbor. He added, “I thought I did a great job, too. I even hit myself over the head with a rock. Talk about method acting!” He chuckled at his own joke and then sighed. “Not that any of it matters now. We’re almost done. Almost done.”

  “Where’s Anise, Jack?” She was raging inside. If she got out of the handcuffs, even for a second, she was going to make her best attempt to kill him. And with that thought, she rubbed her backside against the cold, concrete wall, surprised to feel the lump of her pocket knife still there.

  “Oh, she’s upstairs,” he said. “All ready to go.”

  “Go where?”

  “A new world, of course. One without so much pain.” He smiled. “And not only will she go. But the sacrifice of her innocence will bring a whole new start to life as we know it.”

  “What are you talking about, Jack?”

  “Her blood will allow us all to finally travel toward a new horizon. One of light and joy. Peace and prosperity. A brotherhood of mankind. It will be her gift to you, and to the world.”

  “You’re fucking crazy.”

  “Yes, indeed,” he agreed. “Of course, they said the same thing about Jesus Christ before they put him on the crucifix. And about Lincoln before they shot him. And Gandhi. And Martin Luther King. And John Lennon. And–”

  “–Those men didn’t kill little innocent children.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised. I mean, Gandhi was reported to have slept naked with little girls.”

  That image made Cristina again struggle to free herself.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not that kind of monster. No, in fact, that’s part of the beauty of Anise’s gift to us. Once she gives her life, child molesters and their ilk will disappear from the earth forever. Along with all the other evil people: murderers, rapists, lawyers.”

  He laughed his hearty belly-laugh.

  “You really believe that shit, Jack? You really think killing my baby is going to make all the bad people of the world disappear?”

  His face turned thoughtful for a moment.

  “Yes. Yes, I do. I know it didn’t quite work with Annie. A pity really. And a waste. She was such a beautiful child. But I think the problem was location. I should have given her to the sea, so that the essence of her innocence could spread across the whole world. Yes, I’m certain that was the problem.”

  “So you killed Annie?”

  “Oh yes. And her stepfather. Her poor mother, too, when she figured it out. You women are really much smarter than us men. I had to make it look like a suicide. And I wanted to do the same with you, the hanging that is. What a good story it would have been. But there just wasn’t any time. So, here we are.”

  He held up a small bag that looked like a shaving kit. From it, he removed a glass syringe filled with an amber liquid, which Cristina instantly recognized as enough heroin to kill someone ten times her size.

  He tossed the bag aside and added, “That’s why we’re going to make it look like a mother’s grief drove you back to your old ways.”

  He stepped toward her and she kicked her bound legs into the air.

  “Now, now, Cristina. I thought we were friends.”

  “You’re a fucking lunatic.”

  “No,” he told her sternly. “I’m your friend. And, you know what? I can prove it to you.”

  He lowered the needle. His face distorted into a kind of cartoon evil that didn’t look human. Using his free hand, he rotated the light.

  Without the heat of the lamp, the coolness of the room washed over Cristina’s face and body.

  The focused beam came to rest on the far corner. It took her a moment to blink her eyes into focus and make sense of what she saw. Then she knew where the smell of cinnamon had come from.

  A badly decomposed body.

  The face of this person – by the size of the corpse she guessed it had to be a man – was twisted and literally falling apart. Small pieces of blackened flesh had separated and peeled away from the rest of the skin, curling up like hangnails. There didn’t appear to be any hair on the head.

  Cristina’s stomach turned and she dry heaved, causing a fresh stir of laughter from the darkness.

  “You know who that is?” Jack asked, sounding excited. “Do you? Do you?”

  “No, Jack. Please, I don’t want to look at it.”

  “You won’t guess?”

  “No. I’m not playing any fucking games.”

  “Oh, you’re no fun. And after what I did for you? Well, I’ll tell you who it is anyway. That is our friendly neighbor, Rick. Or, as you like to call him, Mr. Psycho. I love that name, by the way. It fits him perfectly. Needless to say, I certainly didn’t appreciate at all how he treated you. To be honest, I never liked the guy much in the first place. Funny story, I actually tried to set him up to take the fall for Annie. But he was a slick talker I guess, and the cops didn’t fall for it. That’s why I had to pin it on the stepfather.”

  She screamed, “You’re a fucking psycho! Let me go!”

  He turned the light back toward her face and then stepped forward, close enough that she could smell his stale breath. His face flared red with anger.

  “I’m getting a little sick of your attitude.”

  Realizing he was close enough for her to kick out at him, he stepped back.

  He added more calmly, “I don’t understand why you’re so upset, Cristina. I invite you to my nice little getaway in the woods. I make you feel at home.” He raised the needle into the air and squirted a short stream of liquid from the tip. “And you treat me like, well, quite frankly, like a bitch.”

  Cristina heard a noise in the distance, she assumed from the main floor of the red cabin, which she figured had to be where they were.

  It sounded like Anise crying.

  “The baby is awake,” Jack said. “Almost time to go then.”

  “Mamma!?” Anise yelled, sounding dazed. Maybe drugged.

  “Chica! Baby! It’s me! Everything’s OK! I’m going to get you out of here!”

  “Tsk, tsk, Cristina. You shouldn’t lie to your child. What kind of example is that setting for her?”

  More crying from Anise.

  “Well,” Jack continued. “I must go save the world. Sorry we couldn’t spend more time being friends. The revolution won’t be the same without you.”

  He moved toward her.

  Her eyes focused on the needle, but it was his sizable gut she was aiming for. When he was close enough, she wrapped her hands around the pipe and swung her feet into the air. Both heels slammed into his stomach, sending him reeling with a thick exhale of air.

  The needle flew from his hands and disappeared into the darkness, followed by the sound of shattering glass.

  She’d hoped he would fall close enough to her so she could stomp his skull in, but he managed to roll backward.

  “You fucking bitch!” he said, again losing his composure. He regained it quickly, however, as he stood and laughed. “Oh, I’m going to make you pay for that, Cristina. Yes, I am.”

  His eyes were blank and deadly. Psychotic. Evil. Reminding Cristina of the way Anthony had looked as he dangled her off the balcony.

  Jack continued, “I tried to make it easy on you. But now I’m going to make this last for days.”

  She spat toward him.

  He clenched his fist, looking as though he wante
d to make a charge at her.

  Then he snarled like an injured dog and limped away, flicking a switch as he left, sending the entire room into pitch-blackness.

  Again, she heard the shuffling of his footsteps. The clang of metal. Not knowing if she could still be heard or not, she yelled out, “Anise, mommy is going to get you. Don’t be scared, baby!”

  The sound of her voice echoed flatly, dying without an answer.

  She was left alone in the dark.

  Well, almost alone.

  From the corner, where she knew the dead body of her former neighbor was slumped over itself, she heard the sound of tiny claws scratching along the concrete floor.

  71

  At some point, Cristina either passed out or fell asleep

  She was dreaming.

  This time, there was no waking up in her own bed. No walking toward the closet door. No trip through a tunnel of light. The force that had been with her, dragging her wherever it wanted, was strangely absent.

  She found herself alone on a lifeless beach.

  To her left was nothing but endless sand, stretching for what seemed like a thousand miles. To her right, the same.

  No people. No animals. Not even a single seagull.

  Behind her, the sand continued into the distance, without as much as a single dry bush. Only sand. Forever.

  In front of her was the ocean. Though, if it weren’t for the salty scent, Cristina might have thought it to be the shore of a lake. The water lay eerily flat. Not one wave crashed onto the beach. Nor did any whitecaps ripple in the dead, windless air.

  Even the sun felt cold.

  Some instinctive part of her realized that it wasn’t just the beach that was dead, but the entire world. It existed, but without love or hate, happiness or joy.

  It was just . . . empty.

  Cristina felt a small hand grasp her own.

  Annie.

  This time she was smiling, like the happy little girl Cristina was sure she was before Jack robbed her of life.

  Together, the two walked toward the water.

  They looked into its black and bottomless depths.

  Cristina stared at her own reflection. She didn’t look anything like herself. The woman peering back at her was older. Worn out. Sad. Her skin and body still lived, but only as a shell. Inside, she was as empty as the world Cristina now stood in.

  Beyond this image, with some sense beyond sight, she could see an outline of herself, held unconscious by pain in the dark basement of Jack’s mountain cabin.

  “Wake up, Cristina!” she shouted toward the water, surprised to find that her voice even worked.

  “WAKE UP, CRISTINA!” she repeated with every bit of energy she could muster.

  Annie squeezed her hand.

  Cristina saw the little girl smiling again.

  Annie released her hand and began to wave.

  The dead world flickered.

  Annie’s hand continued moving back and forth in the air as she and her polka dots and her hippo faded.

  Cristina returned to the basement, where she heard the same metal clang as when Jack had departed. She waited for the bright light to reappear in front of her, readying her strength for another attack.

  Footsteps. Yet, she swore it sounded like more than one set.

  An intense beam from a flashlight cut through the dark. It moved along the wall and came to a stop on Rick Atkin’s rotting corpse.

  And then a familiar voice.

  “Jesus Christ. What the fuck is that?”

  “Casey!” she shouted.

  The beam jumped toward her, blinding her for a moment before falling to her feet.

  “Cristina?!” he said. And then, in the other direction, “I found her!”

  More footsteps and another flashlight.

  The beams danced together.

  “Are you OK?” Casey asked.

  Someone grabbed her wrist. She heard the click of a key turning in the handcuffs. Felt the stinging pain of blood rushing back into her fingers. Then again on the other hand.

  Meanwhile, Casey struggled to untie the rope from her ankles.

  “In my pocket,” she said to him. “My knife.”

  He reached behind her and pulled out the blade.

  “Get me out of here,” she said as he freed her.

  They moved through the basement, out a thick metal door.

  From there, an iron staircase spiraled up through an opening in the floor. Detective Tony ducked to avoid hitting his head.

  The trapdoor came out into a small, sparse bedroom, not much bigger than a closet. Just large enough to fit a twin bed with an ominous set of leather straps.

  A single bulb burned above.

  “He took her, Casey,” she said as they walked through a hallway, into the fireplace room.

  She noticed through the window that it was already dark, the moonlight reflecting off the top of the old car in the front yard.

  “Jack took her,” she repeated.

  “I know,” he said.

  “You do?”

  “Yes,” a voice said from behind. Cristina thought it sounded familiar, but when she turned to see who it belonged to, she didn’t recognize the fit, grey-haired man in the navy suit.

  “Special Agent Jim Canfield,” he said, extending his hand. “Cristina, as soon as it was clear Anthony wasn’t the guy, I was almost certain it had to be Jack.”

  “You knew?” Her voice was heated and confused. “And you didn’t tell us?”

  “We didn’t know, exactly. As I told you before, we always had another suspect in the original case, but we’ve also been trying to pin down Jack as the founder of New Horizon for going on three decades now. We were never sure of anything until today. Until right now, actually.”

  “What? Stop lying to me.”

  Canfield held up his hands. “I promise you, I’ll give you all the details later. But the short of it is, until your boyfriend discovered you missing and called us, we weren’t able to pin anything but suspicion on Jack. Casey told me about the red house in the mountains, which we knew about. But it’s too secluded for us to monitor. So it wasn’t until I walked into that room and saw the kid’s bed with the straps that I really knew for certain.”

  Cristina was overwhelmed with emotion.

  She wanted to be mad, but there was no time for it.

  “OK, fine,” she said instead. “But we have to find him before he hurts Anise. He’s crazy. He thinks killing her is going to begin some new world of peace and prosperity.”

  “Right,” Canfield said. “Do you have any idea where he might have taken her?

  “I think I know,” she realized. “How far is it to my house?”

  “About fifteen minutes or so by road,” Tony said. “Why? Is it close to there?”

  “Very close. I just hope we can get there first.”

  72

  “Now they’re saying backup is delayed,” Detective Tony told the others, visibly frustrated as they pulled the car up the gravel driveway. “So we’re on our own for at least another fifteen or twenty minutes. Maybe more.”

  “If Jack’s walking, it’ll take him hours to get here, right?” Cristina asked.

  Tony checked the clip of his pistol and answered, “I don’t think he’s walking. There were fresh tire tracks leading from that cabin. Looked like an ATV to me. So he could be here any minute now. Honestly, I don’t think we have time to wait. We need to be ready to get Anise safe. And we need to be careful about how we approach him. I’m afraid if he sees cops he’ll hurt her.”

  Cristina said, “OK, well what are we going to do?”

  They spent about five minutes discussing it, with Agent Canfield doing most of the talking.

  Afterward, he asked, “Everyone clear?”

  They all nodded their heads while listening to the crescendoing buzz of an ATV coming from the woods.

  “OK, there’s our target,” Canfield said. “Everyone into place.”

  ***

  As
Cristina descended the wooden steps, she watched the incoming fog clutch at the moon with its wispy fingers. In the last bit of light, she could just make out Jack approaching the rocky pathway from the beach side, the same way the two of them had come on their hike together. He seemed rushed and didn’t look up. She doubted he would have seen her anyway against the dark rock.

  Tucked under his arm was Anise.

  Cristina fought the urge to yell out to her.

  Waves crashed against the path’s protective rock outcropping, each sounding angrier and more vengeful than the last.

  A hundred yards away was the circular platform of tide pools she and Jack had stood on together. That’s where Cristina wanted to be, certain it was his destination as well.

  All she had to do was get there.

  It had been hard enough when she first traversed the path in clear daylight. Now, in the dead of night, racing against time, and with a rapidly thickening fog all around her, she was more frightened than she’d ever been in her entire life.

  Mostly she was afraid that she wouldn’t be fast enough, strong enough, good enough, to do her part. Afraid that Anise would pay for her shortcomings. She inhaled a deep breath of wet, salty air and tried to clear her head, which still throbbed in pain along with the rest of her body.

  None of that mattered.

  The love she had for her daughter put her beyond pain.

  Beyond fear.

  Beyond stopping.

  That sense of confidence was tested immediately, however, when, with her first step onto the wet rock, she slipped. Her hand instinctively reached toward the cliff wall to steady herself. Instead of rock, her outstretched fingers found the hard shell of a crab. She nearly screamed, but managed to pull back the sound, knowing it could cost Anise her life. But she went down hard, badly bruising her shoulder and already sore ribs.

  For a brief moment, she lay there wanting to cry.

  She quickly replaced that thought with an image of Anise’s sweet face traveling in circles around the carousel atop her pink horse. It gave her the strength she needed to push herself back up.

  Continuing on, she gently stepped from jagged rock to jagged rock, reminding herself as she did to stay slow and steady.