by Jack Jordan
She sat up and forced herself to stand, stumbling as she got to her feet and landed against a workbench, her hair moving with her frantic breaths. Her ankle. She looked down and lifted the hem of the jean leg. The ankle had swollen to twice its usual size. She closed her eyes, waited for her legs to stop shaking. When she opened them again, she saw it.
The shotgun resting in the corner of the barn.
She slipped into her T-shirt again and took the gun in both hands, resting her weight on her one good leg. Rob had taught her the basics, but to say she could use this because she had used another was like saying she could fly a plane because she had driven a BMW. She thought back to how he unlocked the nose, loaded the cartridges, clicked it back into place. There were two triggers, one for each barrel. Rob had used one in front of her, pulled both at the same time and blown a gaping hole in the target. She inspected the gun and unclipped the barrels on the third try. There were two cartridges inside. She put the weapon on top of the workbench and frantically searched the drawers for spare cartridges.
The first drawer was filled with nuts, bolts, rusted tools, industrial tape. She opened the second and froze.
Mobile phones of different brands, sizes, ages. She knew immediately whom they belonged to. Montgomery had confiscated their phones, but not hers. Perhaps he had forgotten her phone because she took him by surprise. Or maybe she was the only one he buried alive. She checked each phone but the batteries had been removed and the sim cards were missing.
She closed the drawer and opened the third.
Amongst the mess were some shotgun cartridges, two full, the others empty. She pocketed the full ones inside her mud-caked jeans, picked up the shotgun again, and faced the entrance to the barn.
The door opened and shut in violent shivers as the whole barn creaked with the storm. She tested her ankle by taking a step. Pain shot up her leg to her hip and tears filled her eyes in a second, but she didn’t buckle.
I can do it, she thought, and limped towards the door with the gun pressing into the ground like a crutch. She stood on her strong leg for support and eased open the door with the barrel of the gun. A flash of lightning lit up the sky.
The house looked smaller against the darkness. Had it not been for the lightning or the lit window on the ground floor, she might not have seen the house at all.
If the light was on, there was a chance he was still awake.
When she had entered the house earlier that day, she had seen a house phone on a small table in the entrance hall, coated in a thick layer of dust. Or she could have been imagining things, seeing what she wanted to see. But she had to know for sure. She could slip inside and call the police and return to the barn or hide on the outskirts of the woodland until they arrived. They would see the mobiles in the open drawer and the grave he had dug for her. They would dig further and bring up the bodies of the first two victims and find Finn; then they would know she had been telling the truth all along.
She stared up at the house again, her eyes honing in on the lit window.
Every fibre in her body told her not to go back to the house, but her ankle was barely able to take her weight, and the only way to get away was on foot. The farm was at least ten miles from the town centre, and even further from home, and she hadn’t seen a single neighbouring house on her trek to the farm. It would take twice as long to get back in her condition, perhaps longer, and if Montgomery checked the barn and saw she was gone, it would take half the time for him to catch up. If she followed the road, he could stop her just by jumping in the car. If she headed through the woods, he would know the only direction in which to go. All of her energy had been spent escaping the coffin, and now she could barely stand. The only way she would survive the night was if she went back inside Montgomery’s house and used the phone.
She raised the shotgun and limped out into the rain, never once lowering the gun.
Slowly, she made her way up towards the house, squinting as her hair thrashed against her face with the wind, biting her lip against the pain in her ankle, which worsened with every step. Rain ran from the tip of the gun, the end of her nose, stalked down her face in muddy brown streaks. She spotted a puddle and fell to her knees, cupping the muddy rainwater in her hand and gulping it down. He had turned her into an animal, a wild, feral thing. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand, raised the gun again, and headed towards the house.
Her eyes scanned each of the windows, looking for his silhouette in the dark, but they always returned to the kitchen window, which shed a beam of light across the lawn. She got close enough to see the grime coated on the windows, the flies buzzing around the room. She stopped and peered inside.
Montgomery was sitting at the table with his back to her. She limped round the side of the house and stood at a distance to look through the second window.
He was asleep. His head was down, his chin on his chest. A half-empty bottle of Scotch was on the table, with no sign of a glass. A handgun was resting beside it. She wondered if he had planned to end his life, or whether he was getting ready in case she returned.
There was no way she could enter the house with him so close. One wrong move and she might wake him. Yes, she had the gun, but she didn’t want to use it. Hell, she wasn’t even sure if she could.
Her heart raced in odd, frantic beats. Her palms moistened around the gun. She looked over her shoulder at the miles of woodland in the distance, the rain pouring down. She would have pneumonia by sunrise, or collapse with exhaustion, or be unable to travel any further when the pain in her ankle grew too great. There were so many ways she might die.
It’s the only way.
She walked around to the window facing the barn again and moved towards the back door, peering through the glass panel and down the hallway to where she could see the phone in its dock.
It would only take a minute.
But if she slipped up, even for a second, she was dead.
She stood outside the house shivering in the rain, trying to talk herself into it while also trying to think of any other way to get out of this alive.
Reaching out for the handle, both her hand and the metal dripping with rain, she pressed it downwards as quietly as possible.
The door opened.
The wind pushed against it, whistling through the gap. She slipped inside, taking almost a minute to return the handle to its upright position so it didn’t screech in her grasp. Raindrops fell from her and patted on the floor, sounding like a ream of gunshots in the silence.
She turned and eyed the back of him in the chair, watched his shoulders move with sleeping breaths.
Her heart was in her throat. Her breaths whistled in and out of her nose. Her whole body shook violently. She almost couldn’t feel the pain in her ankle any more, only the pounding of her heart, the rush of adrenaline surging through her. A clock ticked from another room. The wind howled on the far side of the glass.
She took a step forward. Her shoe squeaked.
She froze on the spot and held her breath, waiting for him to move in his sleep, jolt awake with the slightest sound.
Nothing.
In the corner of her eye, she saw someone’s reflection in the window. She flinched at the sight and stared at the monster across the room, until it dawned on her: the reflection was hers. She was covered in mud from head to toe. All she could see were beady white eyes staring back at her, flashes of skin where the rain had caused it to run.
She considered untying her shoes to pad across the floor on bare feet, but couldn’t shift her weight onto her bad ankle to remove them.
Cautiously she took a step, and then another. Her shoes squeaked from the rain, drops of it pattered on the tiled floor.
As she reached the doorway to the hall, a phone rang behind her. She pressed herself against the wall, covering her mouth with one hand and holding the gun to her chest in the other.
Montgomery jolted awake, banging his knees against the table.
‘Montgomery,’ he
said gruffly into the phone.
She clamped her eyes shut, bit her lip.
‘Her dad’s not talking? Then make him. Threaten him with any charge you can think of.’
Dad.
‘Keep him awake all night. If he doesn’t tell us where she is by morning, let him go. We can follow him; hopefully he’ll lead us right to her. . . and Seb –’ he paused – ‘don’t call me again. Only get in touch if he talks.’
He ended the call and dropped the phone to the table. She listened to him sigh heavily and clear his throat. Scotch moved up and down the bottle as he gulped from the neck.
She had to move.
The living-room door was shut, and she had no idea if it made a sound when it opened. If she went for the front door, he would hear the storm. She could creep upstairs, find a place to hide until she was able to call the police.
She moved along the wall and held out her hand for the banister.
A floorboard creaked.
A shot blasted. She fell with a scream and landed on her back, then scrambled frantically for the shotgun and pulled the left trigger. The gun jolted in her grasp and blew away a chunk of the kitchen door frame.
Incessant ringing pierced her ears. A mist of plaster and wood drifted to the floor. The noise settled until all she could hear was the shrill ring of the shot in her ears.
‘Rose?’ he said.
She strengthened her grip on the gun and trained her finger on the right trigger. If he turned the corner, she would shoot again.
‘Is that you, Rose?’
‘Don’t. . . don’t come any closer.’
‘Okay, okay,’ he said.
She watched the door, waiting for him to appear.
‘Put down your gun,’ she said.
‘Only if you put down yours.’
‘No way.’
‘Then we’re in a bit of a pickle, aren’t we?’
She heard movement, the shuffle of shoes.
‘I said don’t come any closer!’
He fell silent again. She lay there on her back, looking down the barrel of the gun as it quivered in her grasp. Her breaths rattled with her. She couldn’t move.
‘How confident are you with that thing?’ he asked. ‘I’ve known how to shoot a gun since I was seven years old. I’ve fired every model you can think of. I know them well enough to know when they will perform and when they won’t. Like that shotgun you’re holding. You took that shot with the left barrel, didn’t you? I know that because the right barrel sticks.’
He could be lying, trying to psyche her out. Would he know which barrel she’d shot, just by the sound? She looked down at the gun for a brief second and he shot round the corner, gun raised. A bullet blasted splinters of wood an inch from her face. She instinctively pulled the second trigger, blowing a chunk of plaster from the ceiling until it rained down on them both. She squinted through the dust and saw him covering his head from the debris, and launched her good foot into his groin, which sent him to his knees. She scrambled to her own and reached for the phone. It was an old one, with a ring cord connecting the phone to the base. Her hand had just clasped the cord when she was yanked back by her hair. She slammed to the ground with a scream, bringing the phone with her, and scrambled beneath his grasp as he wrestled his way on top of her and pinned her down.
It all happened so fast. In an instant, the gun was out of her hand and clasped in his, the barrel pressing into her neck. She watched his face turn red and a vein swell in his forehead as he put all of his weight into it, crushing her windpipe. She could feel it splitting, the skin bruising. She clawed at his hands on the gun, dug her nails into the backs of them until she broke the skin, but he wouldn’t stop. The pressure of the barrels reached all the way to the bones of her spine, forcing tears down her temples. She reached for his face, scratching at his eyes where he leaned into the gun, but he clenched them shut. She thrashed and clawed, the cord still in her grasp and the phone knocking against her arm. She had just seconds of consciousness left; her lungs were ready to rupture. She snatched the phone cord in both hands and wrapped it around his neck. His eyes widened as she pulled down, tightening the noose. His hands rose to his neck.
She gasped for air as the gun tilted, but still, she couldn’t breathe. He had broken her. She pulled tighter on the cord. He grabbed at her hands. She pulled tighter. He was panicking. His eyes looked bigger, as though they were bulging from the sockets. She let go and snatched the gun, swung it as hard as she could as he drew a desperate breath. The butt met his temple with a violent crack. All of the colour left his face. His jaw fell slack as he slumped against the wall. She dropped the shotgun and scurried away, pressing her back against the opposite wall and trying to draw breath, but couldn’t. Her hand met with something cool on the floor beside her.
Montgomery’s handgun.
She snatched it up. The safety would be off. A bullet would have shifted into the cylinder automatically, ready to be shot. She trained her sight line on the centre of his face.
His eyes looked lost inside his skull, drifting but never settling. He was trying to speak but only formed mumbles. But the second his eyes trained in on hers, she saw the realisation seep in. She had won. He took his phone from his pocket and slammed it against the wall again and again until the screen cracked. She looked down at the house phone and saw how it had broken in the struggle. He was destroying her last chance to call for help. She tried to protest but pain exploded in her throat. He banged it into the wall one last time before letting it fall to the ground.
His strength was returning. Soon he would have enough clarity to fight her again.
If she wanted to live, she had to pull the trigger.
But she couldn’t. She wasn’t the killer, he was.
And then he said the one word that would seal his fate.
‘Jay. . .’
The gun stopped shaking.
‘All I ever wanted was Jay.’
She pulled the trigger.
FORTY-FIVE
Rose sat with the gun in her lap and the sound of the shot ringing in her ears. She’d watched Montgomery’s brains spray up the wall, his body slide down to the floor, all with his eyes open, the shock seared into them.
She had to leave, but her whole body felt broken. She had jumped from a window, been buried beneath the earth and dug her way out, and killed a man before he could kill her, and now she had no way to call the police for help. She eyed his mobile and reached for it as quietly as she could, as though Montgomery would jolt back to life and grab her. But the phone was as dead as he was. She chucked it aside and looked at the landline. The buttons on the phone had been forced into the plastic base, and the cord had split until wires were exposed within.
She struggled to her feet and stumbled into the door frame. When she tried to draw a deep breath, she coughed it up and into her palm. She opened her eyes and saw the blood speckled on her hand.
Through the windows, the sun was rising in the distance, its rays bleeding into the clouds.
She looked up and scanned the room until her eyes fell on the ring of keys on the table where Montgomery had sat with his bottle and his gun.
Car keys.
Immediately she heard the girls’ screams, the twisting metal as the car crashed through the barrier of the bridge.
She hadn’t driven since the day of the accident. She stood in the kitchen and eyed them for so long that the sun rose higher in the sky and started to leak through the windows in warm golden beams.
Before she could stop herself, she snatched them from the table and stumbled out of the house.
The morning air was ice cold and sliced at her throat when she breathed, like salt in a wound. She limped around the house to the driveway and stopped before the car.
She couldn’t do it. But she didn’t have a choice. There was no way of contacting the outside world from the farm. Either she drove, or she walked, both too difficult to fathom. She unlocked the car, slipped inside, and shut the door beh
ind her.
Her hands shook as they hovered over the steering wheel.
She stayed there, sobbing behind the wheel, as the memories seeped into her, the way the river water had filled the car to the brim. She heard their screams, felt Lily’s nails dragging along her skin, tasted the water on her lips and tongue. Violet’s eyes, looking up from the tooth in her palm, just before the windscreen caved in and the current ripped them apart. She clenched her eyes shut and shook her head until the memories broke away.
Taking a deep breath, she turned the key in the ignition until the engine grumbled to life. She found the pedals with her muddied feet and pulled the chair closer to the steering wheel. When she pressed down on the clutch with her bad foot, fresh tears formed and fell from her eyes. Her hands wrapped around the wheel, gripped so tightly that the leather squeaked beneath them.
She moved the stick to first gear and lowered the handbrake, allowing the car to roll forwards before she found the courage to press down lightly on the accelerator, and drove to the gate before turning off down the lane.
It had been so long since she’d sat behind the wheel that she fumbled with the gears, the biting point of the clutch and the accelerator, braked so sharply on the bends that the car jolted, all while trying to block out the memory of water filling the car, leaving Violet behind.
She drove for miles, too frightened to go above second gear, until she remembered: the old phone box by the bridge. It had to still be there. She put her foot down, biting her lip against the agony of her ankle, and changed up the gears, taking the corners too wide, staying in too high a gear so the car felt on the verge of tipping. She drove on autopilot, attempting to block out the memory of the gun firing in her hands, the sight of Montgomery’s brains splashing up the wall, Violet’s ghostly face on the bank.
When the bridge came into view, she slammed on the brakes.