Skin and Bone

by T. L. Keary

  “Hello!” I scream as I scramble to my feet, bracing one hand against the wall.

  Dirt falls down through the holes drilled into the ceiling.

  “Hello!” I scream again. I slam my hands against the door, screaming as loud as I can.

  There’s another sound of metal scraping, louder and more intense. I feel the container being ground through dirt, moving, but only a foot or so.

  More and more dirt falls through the holes.

  “Help!” I scream, and my throat feels raw and bloody with the violent cries. I haven’t spoken in what feels like weeks. “Can you hear me? I’m trapped in here!”

  I still, listening close.

  It’s quiet now, no more grinding or scraping. I think I’d heard machinery a moment ago. But now it’s just still.

  “Help!” I scream. Panic and hope start a war of wills inside my bones. Over and over I slam my hand into the door, screaming and yelling. “Please, someone help me!”

  But no one opens the door.

  No one comes.

  I’m buried underground.

  When I realized that no one was coming, that whatever caused those sounds, whatever moved me, had stopped or moved on, I dropped to the floor and scooped up the soil that had fallen in through the ceiling.

  It’s the only thing that makes sense.

  It came from above, which has to mean I am down below the surface.

  The imposter has buried me alive. I’m already in my grave.

  I lay on the cot, staring up at the ceiling, wondering who has even noticed that I’m gone. Who has any kind of idea that I didn’t decide to just up and move.

  My friend Anita will wonder why I haven’t been texting every day. That guy, what was his name? Andy. We were supposed to go out on a date what is surely a week ago.

  But who knows what the imposter is doing since she has access to my phone.

  There’s a chance she will get away with this, all of it. Because she’s studied me extensively, done such a good job of becoming me.

  She could get away with it.

  I get up to grab the rest of my water, and my hand just closes around it when there’s the sound again. Angry and raging, it screams through the entire space. I’m knocked sideways as the entire thing shutters. Metal on metal screams, and I see the ceiling above the toilet dent.

  “Hello!” I scream once more, crossing to the door and slamming against it with my fists. “Help! Please, help!”

  More scraping, more grinding.

  Dirt falls in through the ceiling, streaming down in a steady flow.

  “I’m here!” I scream. My heart races, my pulse painfully strong in my ears. Hope climbs its way up my throat, threatening to choke me.

  “Help!” I scream so loud I taste blood in the back of my throat.

  Scraping, metal screaming. Again and again and again. The wall dents and I back away as it scrapes down the side, inching toward the door.

  Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

  More dirt falls in through the ceiling.

  Finally, something scrapes along the length of the door, creating a crease in it.

  I back up, my chest heaving painfully fast.

  “There’s someone in here!” I scream, feeling emotion pricking in my eyes. “Please, help!”

  One more long, exceptionally loud scrape sounds. And then I hear the machinery turn off. And it goes quiet.

  “Help!” I yell, as loud as my strained throat will allow.

  Just barely, I hear the sound of someone cursing. “Hello?”

  A smile breaks out over my face and my heart bursts into a million birds of hope. “I’m here! I’m here! Please help!”

  I hear more cursing and then the glorious sound of dirt and rock falling.

  One deep breath pulls in through my lungs as my eyes fix on the door. The knob wiggles just slightly as someone grabs it from the other side.

  I hear the sound of a lock being undone.

  And it twists.

  I take two steps forward as it pushes open.

  And I meet eye to eye with Davis Knox.

  “Holy shit,” he breathes, his eyes widening as he looks at me. Quickly, his eyes dart all around the container. He sees the toppled shelf with the food and water scattered across the floor. The composting toilet. The cot. My one blanket. The TV mounted on the far side with the wires running up out of the ceiling.

  “Sawyer,” he says, his eyes narrowing a little bit. It comes out as a little bit of a question.

  I’m breathing so fast, I can feel myself getting lightheaded. But I give a nod, fast and furious. “Get me out of here.”

  “Hold up,” he says, narrowing his eyes a little more and holding a hand up when I take a step forward. He takes a second, and I see the gears turning behind his eyes, thinking hard. “Why was Ezra late picking you up for prom your senior year?”

  I blink as I look at him, so thrown off, so out of sorts.

  But he knows.

  I know that look of suspicion in his eyes.

  “Because you got a flat and borrowed Ezra’s car without asking,” I say, recalling the night easily. “And your dad had just bought that new truck and wouldn’t let Ezra drive it. Your mom finally let him take her car, but not before chewing you out over the phone.”

  Davis’ eyes widen and his face washes pale. “Holy shit,” he breathes, shaking his head.

  I take two steps forward, fixing my eyes on his. “I tried to warn you,” I say, my stomach hardening. I can’t be mad at him for not taking more action, not really. How could he ever think something like this would happen? “I tried to tell you that she looks like me.”

  “She doesn’t just look like you, Sawyer,” Davis says. When I wobble, suddenly feeling weak and overwhelmed, he grabs my hand and my arm, steadying me. “She is you. It’s…it’s incredible. Same hair, same eyebrows, same lips. Who the hell is she?”

  I step through the door and find a pit of dirt and rocks leading up to the sky. The bucket of an excavator looms over our heads.

  “I have no idea.” I answer honestly, shaking my head. “I…”

  I climb out of the pit, and I drag in a deep breath of fresh air.

  I’d thought I was getting fresh air.

  But this air tastes so sweet.

  A sunset is stretching across the entire sky, and even though it’s dim, it still seems bright. After only having one bulb for light for, however long it’s been, the light of the sun is overwhelming.

  “How long has it been?” I say with emotion trying to push its way into my eyes.

  “What day was it when you went in?” Davis asks, coming to stand next to me.

  “I think…” I pause, trying to remember. “The tenth, maybe?”

  Davis’ lips thin out to a line for a moment and I can see in his eyes, he knows I won’t like the answer. “It’s the fifth.”

  Shit. Twenty-five days.

  I was buried in the ground for twenty-five days.

  “Sawyer, we need to call the police,” Davis says, reaching into his pocket and pulling out his cell phone.

  I snatch it out of his hands, shaking my head. “Wait,” I say. My mind feels like it’s spinning out, trying to sort through everything that’s going on. “Just wait a second. We need to think about this.”

  “You were kidnapped and I have a feeling, left to die,” Davis says, raising his eyebrows and holding his hand out toward the door of the underground bunker. “Some woman is walking around, wearing your face, sinking her claws into my brother. We need the police.”

  “We don’t know anything about this woman,” I say, turning and squaring off with Davis. “We don’t know if she’s violent, how far she’ll go. What if she hurts Ezra?”

  “Shit,” he swears, shaking his head. “They went camping. They’ll be out of service. No way to track exactly where they are.”

  I see in his eyes that he’s turning it all over. He doesn’t know what she might do. I don’t know. We have no idea what this woman is capable of
. Davis might be a hotheaded prick. But I know he loves his brother.

  “We need to take a minute to think this through,” I say, fixing him with my eyes. “We can always call the police later. But we won’t get this chance again to deal with this ourselves.”

  He still doesn’t say anything. He stares at me, and I can see the wheels turning in his head. Over and over, sorting out all the options.

  “Fine,” he finally agrees. “We can go back to my place and we’ll figure this out.”

  I nod once. “I’m going to need to borrow some clothes. And your shower.”

  “Yeah,” he says, and a tiny hint of a smile pulls on one side of his mouth. “And some food.”

  Where Ezra’s house is an inviting, homey looking farmhouse, Davis’ house is modern and a little intimidating. Set up on a bit of a hill, it overlooks a lot of the town. The design is modern with square angles. All the materials are gray and black and wood.

  It’s actually really beautiful. My mind is already drawing something similar out.

  He pulls his black truck into the garage and I follow him inside.

  The ceilings are incredibly high. That’s the first thing I notice. They stretch up, fifteen feet. There are high windows everywhere, letting in tons of light. The walls are a light gray and the floors are a rustic looking barn wood, though I can tell they’re brand new.

  The kitchen is incredible. Black cabinetry and butcher block counters with gold fixtures.

  It’s incredibly masculine, and there’s something…sexy about it.

  “Guest bathroom is back this way,” Davis says, nodding his head down the hall.

  Where Ezra’s house was built for a family, a large one, Davis’ house is kind of solitary feeling. While it’s large, there’s only a master bedroom and one other bedroom. And an office that’s well used.

  He flicks on the light for me, revealing a bedroom with dark, dark gray walls. A queen-sized bed sits in the middle of the room, covered in a white bedspread. He walks through the room and flips on another light, revealing the ensuite bathroom.

  “I’ll go grab you something to wear and leave it on the bed,” he says. “We can figure something else out later.”

  I nod, though I’m hardly hearing him. My eyes are fixed on the giant open air shower, the rain head calling my name.

  After twenty-five days with no shower, I feel disgusting and know how I must smell.

  I walk in and barely close the door before stripping my crusty clothes off and dropping them right into the garbage in the corner.

  I sigh in relief when I step into the hot water. I could stay in here for hours, lathering the soap over my dirty skin. I scrape my fingernails through my scalp, cleaning away dead skin.

  And then it hits.

  Raw, sharp tears rise into my eyes. I cover my face with my hands and my shoulders shake as silent sobs take control.

  I was going to die. I had a week left. I would have starved to death.

  I was going to die.

  I flutter my eyes open, looking up at the clean, white ceiling above me.

  I’m out. I’m out. Davis found me and now I’m not going to die.

  You’re alive, I say to myself, over and over.

  I feel raw and fresh by the time I turn the water off and grab a black towel from the rod. I wrap it around myself and poke my head out the door.

  Sure enough, there’s some black workout pants and a light gray cotton shirt lying on the bed.

  I hardly even care I don’t have underwear or a bra. I’m just grateful to be clean and breathing fresh air, and that I’m able to walk around more than a few hundred square feet.

  I’m free.

  Looking in the mirror, I comb my fingers through my hair, brushing it back and away from my face.

  Already, I can tell I’ve lost weight. I was rationing my food. Eating only the minimum to get by.

  I was determined to last as long as I could.

  I can see the difference in my face.

  Flipping the light off, I walk out, through the bedroom, and out into the main living area.

  I find Davis in the kitchen, cooking something.

  “You look like you could use a meal,” he says, looking up at me.

  “I will eat anything that doesn’t come from a can,” I say, my lips curling in disgust thinking about canned corn and canned beans and canned chicken.

  “And no gluten,” he says, and I wonder at the smile that starts pulling in the corner of his mouth.

  I tilt my head to the side, my brows furrowing. “Yeah, though I’m surprised you remember.”

  He huffs a laugh and goes back to the food he’s preparing. “This is…bizarre. I just had a meal with you on Sunday. We had a whole conversation. But, it wasn’t you.”

  He looks over his shoulder at me.

  “That’s actually what tipped me off,” he says, letting his eyes rove over me, studying the real me. “She messed up. She ate gluten, and didn’t even think about it. I knew something hadn’t seemed right about her, but when she did that…the way she was acting. I knew, even though it seemed impossible.”

  “You really thought it wasn’t me?” I question, narrowing my eyes.

  Davis holds my gaze, not answering for a long moment. “I guess I couldn’t actually know it. But…something just felt wrong. From you calling me a few weeks ago, the panic in your voice. I haven’t seen you in thirteen years, but I could tell something was wrong.”

  Little goosebumps flash over my arms. Never in a million years would I have guessed that my savior would be Davis Knox. That one short phone call would tip him off. That one mistake of eating gluten would be the warning bell.

  “She took me right when we were on the phone,” I say, my voice turning rough and quiet. “Earlier that day, she’d sent me an email from an account named I am Sawyer James.” Davis sets the food in front of me and stands with his hands braced on the countertop. I shake my head in disgust, though not over the thoughtful meal he’s prepared. “There was just this attachment. It was a video.”

  My eyes rise up to see Davis focusing very intensely on me. He holds on to my every word. I see the tense set of his shoulders, the whiteness of his knuckles.

  “In the video there was a woman who looked just like me,” I explain. “It took me a moment to realize the backdrop was Snohomish. And there, I could see Ezra having coffee at Peggy’s Morning Brew. She just…casually walked by, but Ezra noticed her. They had a quick conversation, just…catching up. And then she told him she was moving back here and she asked him to dinner that weekend. He’d hesitated, I’ll give him that. But he said yes.”

  “And there were no signs that he thought it might not be you?” Davis questions, his brows digging furrows closer and closer together.

  I shake my head. “Not at all. But why would he? Who would ever suspect something like this? You’ve seen her. She is me.”

  Davis makes a noise of disgust and shakes his head. “We need to figure out who the hell she is.”

  I nod, picking up the fork and scooping the hot food into my mouth. “I know. But first I need an easier answer. How did you even find me?”

  Davis lets out a long breath between his lips and bends at the waist, resting his elbows on the countertop. He scrubs his hands over his face.

  This was not the way he expected his evening to go.

  “You were still in Snohomish, just on the border,” he says, looking back up at me. “I bought a three acre parcel last fall and have been working on the permits and infrastructure since then to develop it into nine lots. We were supposed to break ground on the first four sites today. But of course when they started on the first one, just barely into the dig, the guys hit something. I get a call that there’s something big buried under the ground and they won’t dig anymore until I figure out what it is and get it removed.”

  I swallow, shaking my head. “They hit me alright. That explains why there was all the noise and then it stopped.”

  Davis nods. “I w
as in the middle of something earlier, but when I was done, I headed to the site. I didn’t have time to call in a study or surveyor. They’d left the keys in the excavator, so I jumped in and started digging. Next thing I know, I collapse a tunnel and then see a door, and then I swore I heard someone yelling.”

  I close my eyes and shake my head.

  I should have died down in that container. I would have died and no one should ever have found me.

  What were the odds?

  “Who did you buy the property from?” I ask, moving on, choosing to just be grateful that I was found and that I’m not dead.

  “The Walker family,” Davis says.

  “Couldn’t be one of them,” I say, shaking my head. “They had all boys, and they all moved away, like, forever ago, right?”

  Davis nods. “They all moved away before I even graduated high school. They don’t come back. Old man Walker has been selling off all his property for the past twenty years.”

  I nod.

  “I can get ahold of him and ask if he ever knew of an underground bunker on his property,” Davis says. “But I don’t see him as the type.”

  I shake my head. I don’t know the old man well, but… “I don’t either.”

  Davis looks up at me from beneath his lashes. “What are we going to do about Ezra? We can’t just leave him with her.”

  “Do you know where they went?” I ask. “Because he said he was going to let her choose the spot.”

  Davis’ brows furrow together. “How the hell do you even know they went camping?”

  My stomach sinks. I let my eyes close and I shake my head. “Did you not see the TV down there?” I ask. “She made me watch, just about everything. All their dates, their outings. All their…intimate time together at her place.”

  “They’re having sex,” Davis says with a clenched jaw. “She’s an identity-stealing psychopath. We have no idea who she is, and my brother is having sex with her.”

  “She never gave me any clues as to where they’re going,” I say, moving on, because I don’t want to think about it either. “But it’s just supposed to be for the weekend. They’ll be back Monday morning.”