by Adan Ramie
“Help is on the way?” he asked, and his own face broke into a smile. “We’re saved? That’s amazing! You’re amazing!”
He grabbed her, picked her up, and spun around like the male love interest in a romance movie. Then he realized what he was doing, so he put her down and stepped back.
“I’m sorry. I was overcome.” He cleared his throat and his face burst red with a shameful blush.
“It’s okay,” she said softly. Truth be told, once the initial shock of being lifted had worn off, she had liked the feel of his arms around her. It was a confusing emotion that she didn’t have the time to unpack. “We need to do something. Now.”
“Can you show me where you saw the light?” he asked.
“Sure.”
Riley led him to the side of the hotel she thought she had seen the light on and pointed to the building across from them. “I saw it on in that building, a few floors up. It doesn’t look like they’re at the window now.”
“Sounds like you guys had impossibly great timing,” he said.
Riley didn’t answer. She searched the darkness for the light but couldn’t find any sign of it. If she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes and participated in her limited capacity in sending a message back, she might not believe it had ever been there herself. But she did believe it, and if Nick didn’t, that was his problem.
“Maybe they’re not there because they’re somewhere else in the building, or even outside. Maybe they’re coming to try to get us,” Nick said.
Riley answered with an affirmative noise. She backed away from the window and walked to the front of the lobby. The carpet squeaked under her shoes and little drops of water jumped up onto the toe of her right shoe.
“This doesn’t bode well,” she said, and gestured to her shoe with one hand. Then she kept going forward.
At the front doors, she could see into the water. It was dark and dirty but wasn’t completely opaque. There was a sheen to its surface that made her worry about what all was mixed into the dirty rainwater, but she didn’t dare let her mind drift down that path.
The possibilities were too many, and she had more important things to worry about, like the figure she saw floating on the surface a few feet away. She ran to the window to see if she could identify it.
“Oh my god,” she said, then pulled back and walked backwards away from the glass.
“What is it?” Nick asked. He rushed to her, and she pointed at the body. He ran to the window through which he could still see the figure and pressed his face against the glass. “Damnit. Damnit, damnit, damnit!”
Bethany’s distinctive long-sleeved black dress and dark hair in a conservative, braided bun were easily distinguished, even in the darkness.
“How did she get out there?” Riley asked. “Do you think she jumped?” She considered if that was preferable to waiting to be murdered; she couldn’t decide which was the worst option.
“I don’t know. I guess through one of the windows,” Nick answered. He watched until she drifted out of their fields of vision, then turned to Riley. “When did you lose Sara?”
“A little before I got down to you. Why?”
“Minutes?”
“Yes. Why do you ask?”
He shook his head. “She couldn’t have gotten to Bethany that fast,” he said under his breath.
Riley scowled. “Why does everyone think Sara did this?”
“I didn’t say I thought that,” Nick answered, but his tone didn’t convince her.
“You were trying to figure out if Sara had enough time to cut you off from Bethany then throw her out the window into the storm. That doesn’t exactly sound like you have a lot of faith in her innocence.”
“What am I supposed to think?” Nick asked. “Of anyone, she’s the one most likely to hurt the others but leave you alive. You’re the only one who believed her story about her family. Everyone else thought she was lying or acting shady.”
Riley crossed her arms over her chest. She felt repulsed at having allowed herself to feel anything but disgusted in his arms earlier, and she determined never to let her guard down around him again.
“Veronica thought you were a pervert who wanted to manipulate and use all of us. Does that mean she was right?”
“No. I know she wasn’t right.”
“Okay. But if we’re basing our judgments of people on the way other people felt about them, what else am I supposed to think?”
“I see your point,” he said. He raised his hands in defeat. “I’m sorry. These kinds of situations tend to bring out the worst in people.”
“I know,” Riley said. She sneered. “I’ve seen it for years. There’s something about trauma that makes people want to get down and dirty and let out the claws.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice softer. He didn’t move toward her, which she considered a good sign. She still took a step away. “I shouldn’t have said that. Can we please work together?”
“What do you propose we do?”
Nick looked back out at the rushing water, then across at the building from which Riley had seen the helpful light. “I think we need to send another message. Maybe they don’t know where to find us.”
“Do you think the lobby is the best place for them to get to us?” she asked.
The water swirled down the street like a living thing and Riley thought of Bethany’s body. She wondered if Sara’s body had floated by when they weren’t looking, then closed her eyes and willed away the image in her mind of Sara’s petite frame being sucked up by the dark water.
When she opened her eyes, Nick was at one of the windows.
“If we can get one of these windows open, they’re big enough that we might both be able to get out.”
“What about Sara?” Riley asked. “What if she’s up there somewhere hurt?”
“Do you really want to take the risk? It’s highly probable that she is the one who did these things and left us the only two survivors,” he asked. His voice was gentle, but she could see from his profile that his face was stony, and his jaw was set.
Riley stepped back further away from him. He turned to face her full on, and his hands were clenched at his sides. Riley took another step back, and he smiled.
“Do you really think I’m the one who did these things?” he asked.
Riley’s skin was cold and prickly, her stomach lurched, and her heart fluttered in her chest as if it weren’t sure if it should keep beating or not. She could tell by the amount of room between them that she was closing in on the stairwell again, but she didn’t know exactly how many steps she had left.
“Riley, why would I bring you all here to kill you one by one?” he asked.
His voice was too low. Her ears tried to strain to hear him, but her brain recoiled from his words. His tone was too calm. She went back in her mind through all the disappearances and the slowly mounting body count. At no time could she account for his location – except for the first.
“Was Cindy’s death an accident?” she asked him. “And why was she outside your room?” She groped behind her for the doorknob but found she hadn’t quite gotten as far as she had hoped.
He stepped forward with one hand slightly outstretched. “Riley, I didn’t do that. I was with you when she died.”
“How do you know where you were when she died?” She found her voice had risen, but she was powerless to change it. “What do you know about Cindy’s death that you aren’t telling us?”
Nick shook his head. “I don’t know exactly, but none of us do. I know that I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill anyone. I couldn’t.”
“How can you say you couldn’t? Have you ever been in a position where you wanted to and had the opportunity?”
As soon as the words left her mouth, she wished she could take them back. She didn’t want the answer to the question any more than she wanted to be alone with him in the deserted lobby with a pile of dead bodies in their wake.
She looked across the lobby to the do
uble-paned glass doors and the water beyond. Even that seemed less dangerous than the man in front of her.
Nick’s shoulders slumped. He didn’t come for her, even as she kept moving back away from him.
“I have. We all have. In everyday life, there are always opportunities to do terrible things, but what sets us apart from the monsters who made you and all the others in this group who you are is what we do with those opportunities. We walk away. We talk ourselves down. Maybe we write stories. Maybe we make videos. Maybe we pray, do drugs, or lose ourselves in the bodies of other people.”
He shrugged. “We don’t kill people.”
Her hand grabbed for and finally touched the knob on the stairwell door behind her. She gripped it as if it were her only hope, a life preserver in a sea of uncertainty and fear. And she twisted.
It didn’t budge.
Her heart launched into her throat. Her skin broke out in sweat, and suddenly, the prickles of cold felt more like needles rammed in her pores. She bit back a strangled cry as he smiled at her.
“What’s wrong, Riley?”
She shook her head but didn’t say a word.
He took a step toward her.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said.
It echoed hollow in her ears. She had said those words before.
She had looked into a younger man’s eyes when she was little more than a child and said those words, and he had gone through with his murderous plan anyway. He had tried to kill her, and he had killed her whole family.
He had seen that she was alive still, choking on her own blood, struggling to pull oxygen into her lungs on the floor of her little brother’s bedroom only feet from the child who was already dead.
He had seen she was alive, and he had left her there to slowly drown. But she hadn’t drowned. She had lived. She had called upon whatever power keeps humans scratching for life as their eyes crowd over with darkness and their breathing slows, and she had lived.
“I’m not doing anything,” Nick said. “You have to believe me. This looks bad, maybe, if you think I could ever hurt another person. But you’re reading this situation wrong, Riley. I’m not that guy. I’m not like him.”
Him. Isaac Walker. The boy she had loved and trusted until she woke up in the hospital and found out what he had done.
Riley barked out a hysterical laugh and twisted at the knob again. Still, it wouldn’t budge.
“Let me go. Now.”
“I’m not the one keeping you here. I have been on your side the whole time. Haven’t you noticed that I gave you the best room? Don’t you realize I planned the menu based on the kinds of foods I knew you liked?”
He stretched his arms out in a sweeping gesture. “All of this was for you. The limited number of rooms so you wouldn’t feel crowded by too many people. I checked and double-checked that everything was up to your standards, Riley.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked and pulled at the knob again. “I never asked you for anything.”
Her arm was cramped from being stretched behind her at such an odd angle, but she refused to drop it. If at any point it came unstuck, she was going to whirl around and run up those stairs. She was going to get away from him if it was the last thing she did.
Nick began to chuckle and dropped his arms. He looked at her from across the lobby. “If you think I ever cared about any of the others, you’re wrong.”
“What?”
“When I first heard about your story, I was intrigued. I thought, like everyone else, that maybe you had been in on it. That you had asked Walker to kill your family for you. That your injuries were little more than a cover for being involved.”
“I would never have done that!” Riley said. Her voice was so loud it startled her, and her fingers slipped momentarily off the doorknob. “I loved my family,” she said more softly.
Nick nodded and stepped toward her like one would a startled animal. His voice was soft.
“I know that now. I watched your interviews and read your story everywhere you told it. I have seen all your videos and read all your blog posts. Every single time your name has been mentioned in the last thirteen years, I have read all about you. I felt like I knew you, but I hadn’t really met you.
That’s why I wanted to set this up. I know you so well, Riley. You wouldn’t have come if this had been all about you, so I made sure you didn’t feel like the center of attention. You used to like that, but I know you don’t anymore.”
She didn’t want to admit that he understood anything about her, but he nailed it. He was right.
When she was a young, impulsive cheerleader, she had loved to be the center of attention. She had craved attention like an addict craves a drug. She had done everything she could from the time she was a small child to get attention, and she had resented anyone who took that from her.
She had resented her brother when he was born. She had resented other classmates when they made better grades or did better in dance recitals. She had even resented her boyfriend when her popularity had helped him climb the social ladder.
But after what happened, she hadn’t wanted to feel those eyes on her anymore. After he saw her from her insides as her blood pooled around her, she didn’t want to be seen anymore.
Now, as she looked into the eyes of another man who had power over her, she felt exposed again.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” Riley whispered.
“And I would love to help you with that,” Nick said. He laughed. “I’m not the bad guy here, Riley. Someone else has done these horrible things. I wanted to be with you every step of the way, but I didn’t want to scare you, so I let you go with Sara even as I didn’t trust her.”
“Did you kill them?” she asked. Her hand on the doorknob was slippery when she twisted, and it slid along the metal.
“No, I didn’t kill anyone,” he answered. Then he chewed his lip and let a little smile play on his lips. “I can’t say I was sad to see them go, but I didn’t kill anyone.”
“When Veronica accused you-”
“I wasn’t anywhere near her, remember?” he said. “Sara was with her when she fell.”
“And Cindy-”
“You were in the same room with me the whole time.”
“Not when Veronica, Jolie, and I were in that room,” she countered.
He nodded. “True, but I had Sara and Bethany with me.”
“They’re not here to agree with that, are they?” she asked. She got a better grip on the doorknob and twisted it again. It gave a little, so she grabbed it harder. “No one is left but the two of us.”
“I know I didn’t kill anyone,” he said. “But I don’t know about you.”
“Me?” Riley asked, her voice jumping an octave. “I would never do something so deranged as kill another human being.”
“Tell me why I should believe you,” he asked, stepping forward. “Do you have proof or is the burden of proof only on me?”
She grabbed the doorknob tight, tested it to see that it still moved, then sucked in a deep breath. “You don’t have to prove anything, and you don’t have to believe me. I know the truth. I’m no killer.”
“And neither am I!” he said, then charged toward her.
She twisted open the doorknob, wrenched it toward her, and flung it open. It slammed open on the wall beside her. She launched herself into the stairwell and started climbing two and three steps at a time.
She didn’t turn around. She knew better. She leaned into the run and let her legs carry her as far and as fast as they could. She heard his panting and heavy footsteps behind her, but she refused to look back and lose ground.
She ran faster. She ran until her legs burned, and even when she stumbled, she kept running, ramming her shins against the hard steps until they were filled with dull ache.
When she got to the sixth floor, she almost tripped over the body lying prone in the middle of the floor. She j
umped over her, then stopped and whirled around.
It wasn’t Veronica.
It was Sara.
She was the one lying face-down on the stairwell floor where Veronica had been lying dead minutes before. Riley dropped to her knees and let out a panic-stricken scream.
CHAPTER
20
Behind her, Nick panted and walked slowly toward her. Riley turned and scrambled away from Nick and toward the door leading to the sixth floor. He held out his hands.
“Wait, Riley. I’m sorry I scared you. I love you, that’s all, but I would never hurt anyone. I’m a big softie,” he said with a hysterical giggle. Then he saw Sara and stopped. His voice dropped low. “Where’s Veronica?”
“I don’t know,” Riley said, then got to her feet. She held out a hand toward him to keep him at bay, and he stopped there for the moment. “Who would have moved her?”
“I don’t know!” Nick said. “I thought we were all alone here. The hotel got everyone else out, and I promised them I would get you all out before they left. I thought I had time.” His face fell. “But I was wrong, damnit. And now everyone is dead.” He looked at her and gave her one of his self-deprecating, puppy dog smiles. “Everyone but us.”
“Don’t come near me,” she said, her voice quiet but hard. “Don’t you dare come a step closer, or so help me, I will claw out your eyes.”
She looked down at Sara and stopped breathing as she saw Sara’s back rise just enough to let air in her lungs. “She’s alive!” she said.
She dropped back to her knees and rolled Sara over onto her stomach. Her face was ashen, and she had finger bruises on her neck, but she was breathing.
“Sara, wake up.” She pulled Sara up into her lap and wrapped her arms around her. “Sara, you need to wake up now.”
Sara lay in her arms but didn’t move. Nick stepped forward and crouched down onto one knee. He held out his hands.
“Let me help you with her. It’s the least I can do.”
She squeezed Sara in a hug, then let her down long enough for Nick to scoop Sara’s tiny frame up into his arms. Then she stood up and helped him to his feet. They stared at each other for a long, quiet pause, then Riley set her jaw and nodded to the stairwell door that would lead them back to the sixth floor.