Dead and Gone

by Tina Glasneck

  But she didn’t pass out.

  She wasn’t so lucky.

  Through the pounding red pain she watched her torturer do his gruesome work. He completed his second pass with the knife, finishing the second tiny runway right next to the first, and examined his handiwork with a critical eye. He was breathing heavily, sweat dotting his skin just above his upper lip.

  He glanced at her face and smiled when he noticed her watching him. “Looks good,” he said, as though they were discussing tomorrow’s weather forecast or the chances of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers reaching the playoffs.

  And then he spoke and sent a chill through Cait’s overtaxed brain. She hadn’t thought things could get any worse. Surely this was it. Surely he was done. Surely he would get up and walk away and leave her alone now.

  But this wasn’t it. He wasn’t done. He didn’t get up and walk away.

  Instead he smiled that devil’s smile and said, “What do you say we work on the other arm now?”

  Cait began screaming anew as he reached up and pulled off the strip of tape anchoring her left arm to the back of the couch. He held her arm firmly with both hands as she tried to yank it away, anticipating her actions. He was incredibly strong, or maybe she was just so weakened by now that it wasn’t a fair fight. Either way, her struggle was short and it was over quickly and within seconds he had secured her arm—a fresh new canvas for his sick sculpture-work—over his lap.

  Cait felt the knife blade sink into her flesh once again as the telephone began to ring in the background and someone cranked the volume of the buzzing in her ears to the max and the pain increased exponentially and Cait screamed into her gag and it felt like her head was going to blast right off her body and—

  —and finally, mercifully, Cait Connelly lost consciousness.

  51

  Milo had known the telephone would ring again and had likewise suspected it would happen at precisely the wrong time. After all, how long did it take to order a couple of fucking pizzas? On the bright side, his little torture toy had just passed out—he must be losing his touch; normally he could keep girls conscious for much longer—so it wasn’t like he was being forced to stop in the middle of his fun to answer the damned thing.

  “What is it?” he barked into the phone, not bothering with the silly gamesmanship of the last call.

  “Hello, Milo, this is Bob. Remember me?”

  “Of course I remember you, Bob, we just spoke a few minutes ago, for chrissakes. Is there a point to this call? We’re all pretty busy in here enjoying ourselves and I’d like to get back to the party.”

  “Of course, I understand. I just thought you might like to know the pizzas are on their way and will be here in the next few minutes. Is there anything else you think you might need?”

  Jesus, Milo thought. Just my luck to get stuck with some fucking Martha Stewart party-planner-in-training. “No,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “The pizza will be plenty.”

  “Okay, fine. Maybe now would be a good time to discuss how we’re going to get it into the house. I can have one of my men deliver it to the door, but I’ll need your assurance that you won’t take any action to harm him when he does. It would be a real career-ender for me to have a man killed delivering pizza, you know what I mean?”

  Milo shook his head. Was this guy for real? “Don’t worry,” he said. “I promise I won’t hurt your precious police officer. I certainly don’t want to be responsible for ending your car—”

  BOOM!

  The entire house shook on its decades-old foundation as the front door was blown off its hinges. Instantly Milo knew he had been played for a sucker. There was no pizza, there was never going to be any pizza, the pig cops had been playing him just as he thought he had been playing them. Goddammit!

  He rushed from the kitchen back into the living room, vaguely aware as he crossed the end of the hallway of the ruined door lying flat on the floor and a cluster of SWAT team members, suited up and armed for bear, gathered on the small front landing in the process of storming the house.

  This sucked. He was not going to get to finish skinning the little bitch alive, but if he was going down, he would make good and goddamned sure he took her with him. Undoubtedly the rescue pigs would exercise at least a modicum of caution; hopefully that would give him the few seconds he would need to finish the girl.

  She wouldn’t go in the way he wanted, slowly and in excruciating pain, but at least he would still have the opportunity to end her miserable life. With any luck, perhaps they would meet up again in hell and he could properly finish what he had started.

  Milo rushed into the living room, knife clutched securely in his right hand. The little bitch lay half on the couch and half off it, her feet still securely taped to the armrest, her body flopped off the cushions, her bare shoulders, arms, and head lying on the floor. She was still unconscious, which represented another disappointment because Milo had hoped that he would at least get the satisfaction of knowing the bitch had seen it coming: terrifying a sweet, innocent little thing beyond her endurance as he pulled the knife blade across her throat from ear to ear, severing the jugular, would have been the perfect way to spend his last few seconds on earth.

  No matter. It was time to get to it. He could hear the heavy clomp clomp clomp of SWAT Team boots on the bloodstained hardwood floor as they came to get him. He smiled. They would be too late. Maybe he could even finish off the little bitch and then leap across the room and dispatch Dear Old Mom before they came around the corner with guns blazing.

  Mr. Midnight skidded to a stop in front of the prone body of his greatest conquest. She still hadn’t moved. Her head rested on her mutilated right arm, her left hand curled under her chest. A strip of bloody skin lay on the floor surrounded by tiny flecks of the bitch’s blood, apparently the result of her falling off the couch. It served the annoying pain-in-the-ass right.

  He leaned over the motionless body and lowered his knife. It would take just a fraction of a second to draw the blade across her throat and end her life. He couldn’t wait.

  52

  There it was again, that relentless push, the feeling of a Flicker trying to force its way into her head, the very same sensation she had fought off time after time over the course of the last couple of hours.

  Cait’s eyes fluttered open and she tried desperately to focus, but she just couldn’t manage it, and then her eyes closed again of their own accord. She felt groggy and woozy and somehow oddly disconnected from her body. From somewhere far away came the sensation of millions of pins and needles being shot into her arm at the same time out of some hellish weapon.

  Or maybe her arm was on fire. Yes, that was it, her arm was on fire. She was so very tired and all she wanted to do was sleep but she couldn’t because her arm was on fire, it was burning and blistering and the extreme unrelenting pain was keeping her awake.

  And now came that infernal push and at first she tried to repel it one more time. But why? Why bother trying to resist it? What would be the point? Why had she tried to keep it out in the first place? There must have been a reason, maybe even a good one, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember now what it might have been.

  So her eyes fluttered and her vision wavered and her arm burned horribly and finally she relented. She stopped trying to resist the push. She was too exhausted to concentrate that hard, anyway.

  The moment she gave in, the Flicker flooded her brain, filling her senses with the sights and sounds and smells of a confrontation. It felt hyper-real. She could smell the stale pungent odor of sweat and adrenaline and fear; especially fear. Cait was inside Virginia’s body, she was inside her long-lost mother’s body, and her mother was trying to escape from…she was trying to escape from…oh, God, she was trying to escape from Milo!

  She was on the floor, she was flat on her back on the floor and she began scrabbling backward down the hallway in an attempt to buy some time, she needed to buy enough time to reach into the pocket of her sweater an
d pull out her gun, the one she had hidden away in her pocket. It was a little Smith & Wesson Model 40 handgun that she had owned for decades and had never used but had kept for protection because sometimes Everett could get a little dangerous and you could never tell when you might need to defend yourself.

  She scuttled backward, trying to open up a little room between herself and this young man who had barged into her home with bad intent written all over his face. He wanted to hurt her, she could tell he wanted to hurt her and somehow she knew he wanted more than that. He wanted to hurt the daughter she had just met for the first time in thirty years, she knew that, too, and she was not going to allow it to happen. She would crab-walk away from him and then she would pull the gun out of her pocket and hold it on him, she would hold it on him to stop him from doing whatever he was planning on doing and then she would call the police and—

  —and she slammed into the hallway wall with her back. She slammed into the wall because after all it had been half a century since she had crab-walked and what had seemed natural and easy when she was ten years old wasn’t quite so natural or easy anymore. She slammed into the wall and the impact jarred the little S&W out of her pocket and the intruder saw it on the floor and his eyes widened in surprise.

  She reached down and grabbed the gun and flicked off the safety and prepared to blast him to hell, but he wound up and kicked it before she had a chance to pull the trigger. He kicked it and it skittered away across the floor and into the living room where it disappeared under…it disappeared under…it disappeared under…

  And then Cait understood.

  Despite her near-unconsciousness and her wooziness and the fire burning in her arm and her fear of Milo and what he was doing to her, despite all of it, she finally understood. The Flicker disappeared, vanishing from her head like the popping of a soap bubble in bathwater.

  She understood it all with a clarity that bordered on mystical. It wasn’t a typical Flicker she had been fighting off all afternoon. Typical Flickers were random and held absolutely no meaning most of the time. They were pointless snippets of people’s lives.

  This had been different. Cait realized now that this Flicker had come from Virginia purposely, it was something she had been trying desperately to force into her daughter’s brain because it was something she needed her to see, but in Cait’s determination to concentrate fully on fighting off the monster that was her brother Milo, she had forced it away, time after time.

  But now she understood. She understood Virginia’s desperation. Because when the monster had seen the gun fall out of Virginia’s sweater pocket and had kicked it away, it had sailed down the hallway and skittered into the living room, eventually coming to rest under the couch.

  This couch.

  The couch currently serving as Cait Connelly’s combination prison/torture chamber.

  And Virginia had remembered.

  Far off in the distance, Cait heard an explosion and felt the house shake. She wondered if it had been hit by lightning, or whether perhaps an airplane bound for nearby Logan International Airport had fallen out of the sky and crash-landed on it. She waited for her life to be snuffed out like some insignificant bug’s from the airplane explosion but when nothing happened, she snaked her left hand underneath the couch, feeling around on the floor with the back of her hand for the gun, for the little Smith & Wesson revolver waiting patiently to be found.

  And against all odds she found it. Her knuckles brushed the cold steel plating of the gun and pushed it a little farther away on the varnished floor and Cait, incredibly, chuckled. It would be the very definition of irony, she thought, to find the gun, the object of her salvation, only to push it out of reach before being able to use it.

  But it wasn’t out of reach. She strained and stretched, doing her best to ignore the horrible fiery pain in her right arm, the arm Milo had skinned from wrist to elbow, and when her hand brushed that cold steel plating again she wrapped her long, delicate fingers around it like a drowning swimmer grasping a life vest.

  She secured the gun in her hand and then, with the advancing form of her attacker approaching rapidly in her peripheral vision, pulled it out from under the couch and curled her hand under her breast and closed her eyes just as he skidded to a stop in front of her. She hoped the pistol was hidden from his view by the angle of her body but could not be sure.

  There was noise and what sounded like an approaching army and Cait realized the crash that had jarred her awake moments ago was not an airplane falling from the sky onto Virginia’s house, it was the police breaching the door and coming, finally coming, to rescue her and Virginia and Kevin.

  But they were too late, despite the fact that they were in the house, or at least about to be in the house. She risked opening an eye and when she did, she saw Milo, the man who had begun torturing her and was going to continue torturing her until she was dead—it was all true, everything her mother had told her this morning about Flickers and her bloody family history of twin murdering twin was all true—standing right above her, not two feet away.

  In his hand he held the knife he had used to peel her skin from her bones, only this time he was not going to use it merely to torture her and cause intense pain. This time he was going to use it to slit her throat. He leaned down, thinking she was unconscious, and swiveled his wrist and brought the knife blade forward and—

  —and Cait swiveled her own hand, her left hand, the hand holding her mother’s snub-nosed Smith & Wesson revolver. She pulled the weapon out from under her body and she pointed it at Milo’s face and suddenly everything ground to a halt. The sounds of the police forcing their way into the house faded away to nothing and somehow Cait’s fear did the same. She was no longer a helpless victim, no longer cowering in fear against an attacker with intentions she could not comprehend.

  Milo froze, the lethal knife poised inches away from the delicate, tender skin of Cait’s throat. And for seconds that seemed to stretch into hours, nothing happened and nobody moved. This nightmare day had come down to a deadly standoff.

  Cait spoke, her voice somehow strong and steady despite the pain hammering her right arm and the adrenaline coursing through her body. “It doesn’t have to end like this. It doesn’t have to end at all,” she said, and for an instant she saw regret and longing share space with the madness in her twin’s eyes.

  But only for an instant. Then it was gone, replaced by a cold hard calculating shrewdness, and Cait knew it was over.

  He opened his mouth as if to speak but no words came out. And then he half-smiled and lunged with the knife and Cait felt the tip of the blade gash the side of her neck just under her ear, and she expected more white-hot pain, but there was no pain, there was nothing at all, just an emptiness she knew she would never be able to fill.

  And she pulled the trigger.

  The Smith & Wesson roared in her hand and she watched with a kind of numb, horrified fascination as a gaping wound opened on the side of her brother’s head. A red mist appeared like a halo around his skull and she wanted to close her eyes but could not.

  Mr. Midnight wavered over her, swaying like a skyscraper in a hurricane, his hand still grasping the knife he had used to carve and slice her flesh. His eyes were absurdly large and he furrowed his brow as if he could not quite comprehend what had just happened.

  He lifted the knife again in his now-trembling hand and began to lunge forward and she pulled the trigger a second time. More blood spurted from her brother’s head and this time he fell. The knife clattered to the floor and her brother’s eyes glazed over and then he dropped straight down and lay still.

  Cait dropped the gun like it had given her an electric shock and it thudded to the floor next to her injured arm.

  And of course at that moment the police rescue team flew around the corner, four men dressed in fatigues and body armor, guns drawn, entering the room prepared to do battle. The men skidded to a stop directly in front of the murdered police officer’s prone body. Their weapons swe
pt side to side as they covered the room, alert for any threat.

  Cait’s eyes began to blur, either from pain or shock or the tears welling up in her eyes as a result of the horrible knowledge she had just killed a man. And not just any man, a blood relative. And not just any blood relative, her own brother. Her own twin.

  Her vision wavered and she fought to stay awake.

  Her arm burned and she fought to stay awake.

  The law-enforcement team stood motionless in the doorway, taking in the scene, seemingly shocked into inaction by the devastation in the room. One of the officers spied Cait’s mangled arm, a strip of skin stretching outward from her elbow across the floor, and retched. He clapped a hand to his mouth and looked away.

  Cait tried to tell them to get help for Kevin, that he was gravely injured and needed medical attention immediately, and all that came out was a pathetic little croak. She swallowed. Tried unsuccessfully to force some saliva into her throat. Opened her mouth to try again.

  At that moment the men in the fatigues and body armor sprang into action, one of them moving quickly to secure the Smith & Wesson, another stepping over the dead cop to assess the condition of Kevin and Virginia, and a third to check Milo’s unmoving body for a pulse. Cait wondered why he would do that; she couldn’t imagine anyone being alive with two bullets fired from almost point-blank range into his head.

  The officer who had picked up the gun bent over her. It was the same man who had nearly thrown up at the sight of her arm, and he trained his eyes on hers, steadfastly avoiding looking at the oozing red mess that used to be her forearm.

  Cait opened her mouth to say something to him and without warning he disappeared. Everything disappeared. She fell away into a warm, dark hole where it was safe and comfortable and no one tried to peel the skin from her bones with a knife.