Sky Like Bone: a serial killer thriller

by V. J. Chambers

  “Probably shock,” she muttered.

  There was a sharp little stone embedded between the balls of her feet. She pulled it out, and that hurt really bad, and blood gushed and she thought that maybe she should have left it in? Whatever, too late.

  Doug was staring at her with glassy, dead eyes.

  She stared back at him, lifting her chin. Dead bodies had always called to her, and this was her dead body. She felt something rise in her, pleasant and heady.

  If it weren’t for Reilly, she’d stay here longer with him, just looking at him.

  Doug belonged to her now, in death, and the possession of it—the power of it—his life in her hands…

  She shuddered.

  “Okay, this is creepy, Wren. You’re supposed to be freaked out after killing someone.” She sank her hands into her hair, turning in a circle.

  There were no damned keys anywhere, nor was there a phone. Of course, a phone would be handy right now, because she could use a flashlight. Maybe there was a flashlight in the glove compartment in the van.

  She trooped back to the car and climbed in the back, careful to avoid stepping on either Reilly or Krieger’s body. She tumbled over the seat and squeezed between the two front seats and sat down in the passenger seat.

  She opened the glove compartment.

  Registration. Insurance. Owner’s manual. Actual gloves.

  No fucking flashlight.

  She slammed it closed, and then realized that maybe the keys were in the ignition.

  No such luck.

  She clenched her hands into fists.

  She began searching all over. She looked on both seats and in the compartment between them. She looked in the cup holders and in the compartments on the doors.

  No keys!

  She looked on the floor, ass in the air, head underneath the steering wheel, palms flat against the carpet, feeling for them.

  “Think, think, think,” said Wren to herself.

  Doug had the keys in order to drive the car. He had to have them.

  She sat up and that was when she noticed a piece of tape over one of the buttons on the door. The hatch door.

  Shit.

  She pushed open the driver’s side door and got out.

  If Doug couldn’t pop the hatch from the door, he would have needed the keys to open it. She went around to the back of the van and pulled the hatch down.

  “Jackpot,” she said, grinning, plucking them out of the key slot where they were dangling.

  Now, if only she had a phone.

  “Doug, I don’t believe you drove out here without your phone,” she called in the direction of the woods, picturing his dead eyes and enjoying the idea of taunting him. “How were you playing Madonna, huh?”

  She checked the pockets of his pants again, but there was nothing there.

  Okay, well, a phone would be nice, but that wasn’t in the cards, so she needed to drive.

  She caressed Reilly’s face again.

  His eyes fluttered open.

  “Cai?” she said, surprised.

  “Wren,” he managed, his voice threaded with pain.

  “Can you get up?” she said. “You can stretch out on the back seat if you want instead of being back here. You don’t have to lay here with… with Krieger, because he’s…”

  Reilly laboriously turned his head to look at Krieger. “Where are we?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Doug drove us out here.”

  “Where’s Doug?”

  “He’s dead,” she said. “He’s dead. Don’t worry.”

  Where was the gun?

  She blinked, looking around. Had she brought it back with her to the van? She held up a finger. “One minute, Cai. I’ll be right back.”

  “Wren?” he said in his ravaged voice.

  She scampered back into the woods on her ruined feet, wincing the whole way.

  The gun was there, lying on the ground next to Doug. His shoes were there too. She’d taken them off him to get his pants off. She picked them up, even though they were too big for her. She picked up the gun.

  She went back to the van.

  Reilly was sitting up, though he wasn’t holding himself up. He was leaning against the side of the van, his feet dangling over the tailgate.

  She smiled at him. “Hey. Do you want to climb into the back seat?”

  He shook his head. “No, I can’t.”

  “I’ll help you,” she said.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I need to lie back down. Can you help me… lie down?” His voice lost strength the longer he spoke.

  “Of course,” she said, setting down the gun and the shoes to support him. She lay him down as gently as possible, and she looked at his wound. It was bad.

  “Don’t worry,” he muttered, but he was slurring his words. “I’ll stay alive. It’d be really shitty of me not to pull out and then die.”

  What?

  What was he even talking about?

  “Of course you’re not going to die,” she snapped. “Don’t even talk about that. You’re fine. I need you to be fine, so you’re fine.”

  “I am,” he mumbled. “Fine.”

  She tucked his feet inside the back of the van and shut the hatch.

  Then she climbed into the front of the van and started it.

  Wow. She wasn’t used to driving something this big. She put it in reverse and backed up to turn around. She was going to have to make a K turn.

  Except it turned out to be something more like a octagon turn. A tridecagon turn.

  She giggled. How did she even remember tridecagons? It had been mentioned once in some high school geometry class by her geeky geometry teacher, a woman whose curly hair had stuck out from her head in all directions while she gesticulated wildly. She’d been very excited about angles, Wren remembered.

  Reilly made a noise from the back.

  She shouldn’t giggle.

  This wasn’t time for giggling.

  She needed to concentrate, anyway, because there was no road. There was a path she could follow, where the van had driven between trees, flattening the underbrush to come out this way, and Wren assumed eventually they were going to get to a road.

  And then the car stopped.

  It sputtered and died.

  She shrieked, slamming on the brakes, because the wheels were still rolling even though the engine had turned off. She put the car in park and looked at the dashboard. There were no lights on to indicate that anything had gone wrong.

  She climbed out of the car and walked along the side and that was when she noticed the bullet hole in the side of the car.

  She did remember that Doug had gotten off a shot that had hit the car. She’d been worried he would hit Reilly again.

  But no.

  What were the odds he’d hit the damned gas tank?

  She put a finger against it.

  She could smell gasoline. She figured the bullet had gone through and made an exit hole on the other side of the tank and that gas had been merrily pouring out of the car this whole time.

  Great.

  For it to have already been drained, there must not have been much in there in the first place.

  Why hadn’t she looked at the gas gauge in the car?

  She went back up to look at the dash.

  Yup, it was empty all right.

  She backed away from the car, shaking her head. No, this couldn’t be. She couldn’t have run out of gas.

  Despair gripped her.

  Tears started to form in her eyes.

  No. I can’t cry.

  She kicked one of the tires instead. It hurt, especially because her feet were all fucked up, but she kicked it again.

  Then she was motionless, hugging herself through the thin t-shirt that she was wearing. Everything hurt. Her feet hurt. The gunshot graze wound hurt. Her muscles ached. And the woods was eerily quiet and still, so very still.

  The darkness sank into her bones, heavy and cold and penetrating.

&nb
sp; She snatched the keys from the ignition and opened the hatch.

  “Cai?” she whispered.

  “I don’t want to,” Reilly replied. “Five more minutes.”

  “Cai, I need you to wake up,” she said. “We have to walk.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  REILLY was dreaming. He was in high school, and his mother was shaking him, trying to get him up for school in the morning, and he didn’t want to get up. He wanted to sleep, because it was cold if he woke up, and it was warmer under the covers.

  But then he remembered his mother was dead, and he sat up straight in bed.

  Except he didn’t.

  All he did was open his eyes and remember that he was in his thirties and that he’d been shot in the gut and that he was in the back of a van with Krieger, who was dead. Just like his mother.

  He felt a stab of regret, wishing he’s stayed asleep and talked to her a little bit. He missed her.

  Wren was gripping one of his hands. “Doug shot the gas tank and all the gas drained out, and now we have to walk.”

  He furrowed his brow. “Didn’t Doug have a phone?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But I couldn’t find it.”

  “Go back and look for it.” He closed his eyes, trying to summon his mother’s voice again.

  “Cai,” she said.

  “Mmmph,” he said. The gunshot hurt. He was in so much pain, and sleeping was the only way to escape it. He wanted to sleep. He knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he wasn’t really sleeping, not exactly, that he’d lost a lot of blood, and that he was slipping in and out of consciousness, and that this was a bad thing.

  But he was determined to stay alive, because he’d probably knocked Wren up, and he wasn’t leaving her to deal with that mess on her own. He grunted.

  “I don’t want to waste time going back there and looking for the phone,” she said. “I drove for a while. We’ve got to be close to the road. You get up and we’ll go sit by the road and wait for someone to come by. We’ll wave them down and then we’ll be okay. Come on, you got to get up.”

  He groaned. “Why don’t you go to the road without me, and then get help?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  He forced himself to open his eyes.

  She was chewing on her bottom lip. “I guess I could do that,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s the best thing to do. I hate to leave you, though.”

  “You have to,” he said, convinced of this. “I can’t walk.”

  “You’re not even trying.”

  He shut his eyes. “I can’t, sweetheart. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry.” Her voice cracked. “I’ll go, then. I’ll go get help. Um, I’ll leave you the gun?”

  “Okay,” he said, but he said this to his mother, not to Wren. He was lying on his bed in his old room, and she was standing over him in her nightgown, her hair wrapped in a scarf as she peered down on him with her hands on her hips.

  “Okay, what, young man?” she said.

  “Okay, I’m getting up,” said Reilly. “I’m getting up for school.”

  “What?” But that was Wren’s voice, not his mother’s. “Cai, you are scaring me.”

  He blinked away the image of his high school bedroom and tried to focus on Wren. “Me too. I’m scaring myself.”

  “Are you…? Were you seeing your mom?” Her voice was threaded with fear.

  “It’s just a dream,” he said to her.

  She nodded, letting out a noisy breath.

  “I’m sleeping, so I’m dreaming,” he said.

  “About dead people,” she said in a low voice.

  “I promise you, I’m not dying. We’re Wren and Reilly, come on. I don’t die. Go for help, and stop being stupid.”

  She squared her shoulders. “You think calling me names is going to help?”

  He just grunted.

  “Well, it is,” she said. “I’ll go.”

  “Good.” He shut his eyes again. “Don’t interrupt my dream again. Hurry back.”

  Immediately, he was drawn into another dream, and his mother was there, but she was lying on the slab in the morgue, just like the last time he’d seen her.

  Reilly hadn’t made his father identify the body. He’d done it. He was a homicide detective. He was used to seeing dead bodies. He thought he’d be fine.

  But seeing her like that…

  Abruptly, the corpse on the slab moved. Its eyes opened. A voice came from its throat, a throaty voice like damp earth. “The Crimson Ram wants in.”

  Reilly flailed back from the corpse.

  Someone caught him.

  He turned and found himself in the arms of Terence Freeman. He smiled at him. “You’re a very beautiful man.”

  But that was what Brock had said to Reilly. Warren Brock.

  Suddenly, that was where they were, in the kitchen in the house where they’d caught Brock, but it was Terence Freeman instead. He was dead, and his nose had rotted off and his eyes were pale and sunken and his skin was gray.

  He kissed Reilly, forcing his gray, fetid tongue into the other man’s mouth.

  Reilly put his hands on Freeman’s shoulders and pushed.

  But instead, Freeman’s skin just gave way, flaking off in chunks, so that Reilly was gripping bone.

  And the other man pressed into him with inexorable force.

  The Crimson Ram wants in. Let him in.

  “Let me in,” murmured Freeman against his mouth. “You’ll like it here, Caius. We’re all here waiting for you…”

  WREN put on Doug’s shoes, which were laughably huge.

  She gave Reilly the gun.

  Well, she set the gun near him. Not so near that he might roll over on it and accidentally make it go off, but near enough that he could reach it. He was asleep, but he was moaning in his sleep, and she could see his eyes moving under his eyelids. She tried to wake him, and she couldn’t. So, she tried to soothe him, and that didn’t work either.

  Unable to help herself, she doubled over and sobbed.

  For only a minute.

  Then she forced herself to straighten, and she wiped at her eyes.

  She debated whether she should leave the headlights on, and she decided it would make it easier to find the van, so she did. She hoped she’d be back before the battery ran out.

  Then she took off in the path that the van had made on the way in.

  She walked in the ruts the tires had made, and she told herself that the road would be around the next bend, the next tree trunk.

  But it was never the road. It was always more woods.

  How long could Doug have driven them in the woods? Why hadn’t she paid attention? Why hadn’t she noticed the scrape of branches against the windows, the rough terrain, the bouncing of the tires?

  The truth was, when she tried to think of the journey out there, she wasn’t summoning anything other than terror. She’d been so focused on Reilly, on helping him, on not being discovered, on planning how she would get the better of Doug…

  “It’s trauma,” she said out loud to herself. “Trauma messes with your memory. It’s one of the reasons that eyewitnesses can have such varying accounts of crimes.”

  Something rustled in the brush nearby.

  She stopped.

  Maybe she shouldn’t be talking out loud. The woods of northern California, didn’t they have predatory animals, like… like bears?

  She was pretty sure there were grizzly bears in Northern California. If she had a phone, she could google it. But she didn’t have a phone.

  Maybe she should have gone back to look for Doug’s phone, but now, she’d been walking for so long, and she couldn’t waste time going all the way back.

  The road had to be close.

  And if the road was close, there were no grizzly bears. Grizzly bears wouldn’t come near the road.

  Right, she responded. That’s why you hear all those stories about bears attacking campers, becaus
e there are no roads to get to campsites.

  Well, but those bears were attracted to the smell of food, and she didn’t have any food on her.

  Just blood. Lots of blood.

  She stifled a whimper.

  Well, anyway, whatever it was, it wasn’t making any more noise. It was probably the wind.

  She squared her shoulders and started to walk again.

  The rustling noise came again, closer.

  Damn it.

  Why did I leave Cai the gun? He’s not even conscious. How am I going to help him if I get mauled by a grizzly?

  She looked around for somewhere to hide. Spying a tree trunk, she darted behind it.

  The rustling came again, and she caught sight of a flash of dark fur.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  IT was a fox. A tiny fox.

  It was actually kind of cute, and it didn’t even seem interested in her. It ran right past her in her hiding place and leaped over some brambles and disappeared into the night.

  She let out a shaky laugh and then stepped back onto the path.

  Ahead of her, she rounded a bend, and there—finally—was the road. She walked out of the woods and onto the road, which seemed to start right here, at the edge of the woods.

  It wasn’t a paved road, admittedly. It was just really two rutted lines of dirt with grass growing in the middle of them, but the grass showed signs of having been mowed somewhat recently, and it was civilization.

  Tears came to her eyes again, but she wiped them away, because she couldn’t afford to cry in celebration either.

  She started down the road.

  The road seemed entirely abandoned, and she began to question everything.

  How long did this dirt road go on? She’d already established that she couldn’t trust her memory of the drive out here. She had no idea—not truly—how long it had lasted, but even if it had been relatively short, it would still take exponentially longer to cover the distance on foot.

  Love Over Want was located outside a town, and there wasn’t a lot of anything around it. So, assuming that Doug had driven the car further into the wilderness—which was what he must have done—then she could have a long trek on foot ahead of her until she reached any kind of civilization.

  And Reilly might bleed to death before she got there.