I couldn’t tell if my savaged neck was healing or if it had gotten worse. It still hurt like hell.
I heard a soft plinking on the truck’s roof. It was raining. Not hard, but a steady shower. A thousand tiny drums serenading me. A soundtrack to my imprisonment. How depressing.
I listened for other noises, anything identifiable, but heard nothing. If anyone was in the back of the truck with me, they weren’t making a sound.
If I was so important, why would they leave me alone? What was going on?
While I knew this might be my only chance to make a break for it, just thinking about trying to work my hands and feet free from the restraints was exhausting. Who was I kidding? I was no hero. And whatever these people thought I could do, they were mistaken. What would happen when they figured that out? I was supposed to be a gift for a king, but what would he do when he discovered I was nothing more than a booby prize? Kill me in a fit of rage? Something even worse?
What had Boras suggested I do? Heal myself? With a spell? Sheer madness. I couldn’t get a handle on this cannibal cult at all. Bizarre didn’t even begin to sum it up.
Something moved on the back of my neck.
I howled and threw my head back. Sharp splinters of pain shot down my arms and spine as if Harck had torn out a lot more flesh than he had. My scream reverberated, loud and shrill, but no one came to investigate. Maybe they really had left me alone and I would starve here, if I didn’t die of infection first, that is. Breathe, I told myself. They wouldn’t have gone through all this trouble to leave you stranded in the back of an eighteen-wheeler.
The squirming sensation on my neck resumed and I resisted the urge to swing my head from side to side until whatever was back there dislodged itself. If I did that I’d likely rip the wound wide open again – and die even faster.
Other than the occasional bit of wriggling, which made me want to flail and gag in equal measure, the pain masked any sensation that would have revealed the shape and form of what was tormenting me.
My mind drifted to another wound, no less painful: the cabin, Fredrick’s death. Would anyone have found his body yet? I had no idea how much time had passed. That was the thing about being in a dark space and falling in and out of consciousness, it was easy to lose track of the hours, the days.
Perhaps the noise of the cabin’s late-night demolition had drawn the curious. I hoped so. Fredrick deserved a proper burial. He’d been a good man, a good dad. I didn’t want to think of his bones picked clean by opportunistic scavengers. He should be laid to rest with a funeral service, teary-eyed speeches, flowers, an overflowing room of mourners – all that.
My sorrow solidified into a raw hollowness, a hunger of the soul to replace my non-existent appetite. Tears cascaded down my face.
The wriggling at the back of my neck intensified and a crackling sob spilled from my lips.
I’d never been a “why me?” kind of girl, but holy hell, why me? I wanted to believe someone would rescue me. But who? Not Estella, she had Mikey to protect. Not any of my friends, they would mourn me and eventually move on, because sometimes people died, right?
My birth father then? I tried to imagine him storming in and whisking me away to safety, but if that plan was as flawed as his last one, I didn’t have a lot of optimism.
I wished I did know spells or even believed magic was real – the crazy blood-drinking cultists could profess it all they wanted, but it just made them crazier. I felt that little tweak in my head again, the one that kept telling me something wasn’t adding up. But the places it wanted to take me, I wasn’t willing to go. It’s the infection, I reassured myself. There has to be a rational explanation for all of this.
Still, if I allowed myself to look past the natural into the supernatural, a whole world of frightening new possibilities opened up. An impossibly fast, brutally strong, unnaturally tall, blood-drinking cult that reeked of festering disease and could see in the dark? It was all right there. I just had to reach out and lay claim to it. But even in my feverish state, I couldn’t. That admission would unleash a terror greater than any I’d felt yet. Humans were one thing, but monsters?
There are no such things as monsters.
There are no such things as monsters.
There are no such things as monsters. I chanted it to myself like a mantra, but still the thought wouldn’t leave me.
Am I going crazy too? Maybe my blood had turned septic and I was succumbing to delusions.
But that wasn’t it. And that wasn’t why my brain kept dancing around the word I refused to take ownership of. It was doing that because it fit. Better than mobsters, cultists or cannibals.
Vampires.
Oh, how I wanted them to be wannabes, a bunch of messed-up humans who had taken to drinking blood. But that didn’t speak to their speed, strength, height or night vision. Drugs might account for the first two, but only the V-word explained all four.
And now that I’d gone down that path, I couldn’t turn around.
The bright flash of light back at the cabin – supernatural? If so, what did that mean about my birth father Humbolt Sarker? My stomach did an uncomfortable somersault.
This next leap of logic was even more difficult to swallow, but it too provided a tidy explanation. These vampires – I cringed at how that word assaulted everything I thought I knew about the universe – believed my father was supernatural, which is why they thought I was too.
But that’s where it all fell apart because I wasn’t.
I wracked my brain for any instance in my life where I might have shown an aptitude for the extraordinary. But I was no Harry Potter. I’d never made glass vanish, spoken to snakes or inflated any evil relatives. I’d done nothing of note at all. If my father was supernatural, any hereditary powers had skipped a generation.
I flinched against my shackles when I heard the rear doors of the truck being unlocked. After spending who knows how long psyching myself out, giving honest consideration to the idea that I’d been kidnapped by monsters, it was no surprise that the thought of being alone with one or more of them suddenly terrified me.
But they’ve let you live this long, I reminded myself.
But vampires! my brain screamed. And one of them already bit you!
The doors swung open. It was dusk. Chalk up another one for my bloodsucker theory: vampires slept during the day, or at least they did in movies. Funny how once you opened your mind to the crazy, it was easy to keep running with it.
“You’re awake,” Boras said as he closed the doors and approached the table.
“Water,” I rasped at him, and he fed me another bottle. As before, the first few swallows were like choking down gravel.
“What’s on my neck?” I asked as soon as he pulled the beverage away.
“Maggots,” Boras said, as casually as he might have said bandage or heat pack.
I shrieked and shook my head. A trickle of acidic bile rushed up my throat and splattered onto the table. “Get ’em off, get ’em off, get ’em off!” I screamed. The only thing worse than discovering what had been wiggling against my raw flesh was the knowledge they had been doing it all day.
Boras placed his cold, rough hands against my bare shoulders and held me down. “Can’t do that,” he told me. “Unless, of course, you will heal yourself.”
“I don’t know how!” I shouted as I tried to dislodge his grip, but it was preternaturally strong.
“Then it has to be this. They’ll eat away any decay, keep the wound clean.”
“Please, please, please get them off,” I pleaded, silently cursing the tears streaming down my face. I couldn’t stop imagining the little white worms tunnelling ever deeper into my body until they found a nice warm place to call home – and multiply.
“You need to calm down. This is for your own good.”
“Like kidnapping me?”
“No. That was for the king’s good.”
As much as the maggots feasting on my flesh repulsed me – I was going t
o have nightmares for years – I had to concede it seemed to be working. I wasn’t as feverish and bone weary as I’d been during my previous bouts of wakefulness.
“How long have we been travelling?” I asked. If my strength was returning, I needed to think about escaping and the best place to begin was to figure out where we were.
“None of your business,” said Boras. I loathed how everything was on a need-to-know basis these days and everyone thought I shouldn’t know anything.
“How can you see in the dark?” If he wouldn’t answer questions about our destination, perhaps he’d answer some about himself.
“Just can,” he said. I was hoping he would have copped to wearing infrared goggles or something.
“What are you?” My fear was electric but I was no less determined to face it head on.
“You honestly don’t know?” he said, with a honey-laced laugh. His voice was something else. It was wrong for it to belong to a monster.
“I honestly don’t know.”
“Amazing,” he said as if he were studying some rare specimen in a lab. He must have decided I was done struggling because he let go of my shoulders.
“What’s amazing?”
“That you are so completely innocent, so completely unaware. The king spent so much money and power and influence capturing you and none of it was necessary, was it?”
“What are you?” I repeated. It was better than admitting he was right.
“I’ll leave that for the king to explain. I suspect he’ll be quite pleased with this new development.”
I didn’t know why the king would be happy to discover he’d kidnapped a powerless teenage girl. Perhaps if nothing else, I’d still be good for ransom, and he could get back some of the money he’d wasted on this initiative.
“Are you vampires?” I refused to give up.
“You want to know what I am?” Boras said; an implied threat dangled off of every word. “I am done answering questions, that is what I am.”
“Wait,” I said, afraid he would leave again. I didn’t want to hang out, but I also didn’t want him disappearing until I found a way to convince him to remove the maggots. “Are you ever going to feed me?”
This got his attention. “Your appetite is returning? This is a good sign.”
“Not really,” I admitted, “but don’t you think I should eat something?”
“I’ll be right back,” he said. When he opened the truck doors to exit, I caught a brief glimpse of a lone maggot gyrating on the table about an inch from my nose. It must have fallen from my neck when I was shaking my head. I shivered, sucked in a deep breath and blew it off the table.
Boras was gone not more than five or six minutes. When he returned, he fed me a nonsensical sequence of foods: two sticks of beef jerky, more water, a chocolate bar, some salty little pretzels – until I complained they were abrading my throat – and a stale honey cruller, more cardboard than pastry. I got the impression my meal was just the remnants of whatever he could find lying around. I hoped he hadn’t fished any of it out of the garbage. That donut had been pretty dodgy.
He plied me with more water when he ran out of gas-station snacks to stuff in my mouth.
I was hoping for the opportunity to ask more questions, but as soon as I tried, Boras shut me down. “Karn doesn’t think it’s a good idea to talk to you. Harck made that mistake, and look what happened.”
“Harck bit me. That’s got nothing to do with talking,” I argued, impressed by how good I was getting at swallowing my fear.
“No, but it’s got everything to do with following orders. And I follow orders,” Boras said. “If the others cannot, then I must remove the element of risk. Too much has gone wrong already.”
I was about to complain about being strapped to a table in the dark with nothing to do but lose myself in the squirming ministrations of my maggot passengers when Boras pressed a moist cloth over my nose and mouth. It smelled of sweetness and antiseptic; wooziness set in almost immediately.
He was drugging me.
I tried to turn away, but he held my head firm.
“No, please,” I begged into the fabric, “don’t do th–”
Then my mind went as dark as my metal prison.
FOLLOWING MARLA
John R. Little
“I just wanted you to know,” Marla said. “It’s not too late for you to change your mind.”
We were in the back room of the church, just having finished the rehearsal. Most of the wedding party was hanging out in the foyer, waiting for us, but Marla had whispered something to the priest and then pulled me down the hallway to the back room.
“I just don’t understand,” I said. “You . . . it doesn’t make sense.”
“I know.”
She had those big brown puppy-dog eyes staring at me as she pursed her lips. She took a deep breath and said again, “I faked my own death.”
“You’re not kidding?”
Of course she wasn’t. I could see that as clear as the candles surrounding us. She lowered her head a bit, and pushed her hair back. Tomorrow, she’d have some new hair style for the wedding, but I liked it just hanging long and straight, like she always wore it.
“It was two years ago. I was married to a monster in Boston. He just hit me one too many times, I guess. We’d been married almost three years, and every one of those thousand days was worse than the one before. He abused me in every possible way. Yelling, belittling me, hitting me so often I felt like a punching bag . . . ”
Marla started to shake and I pulled her to me. “You don’t have to --”
“And he’d rape me after hitting me. Fuck me just to hear me scream. Sometimes, though, my mind just went blank.”
She pulled back and looked up into my eyes. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
“You wouldn’t recognize me, Andy. I was a lifeless zombie, not caring if I lived or died.”
She stopped talking, continuing to look at my eyes. I tried to imagine this vivacious, beautiful, strong woman in a marriage like she described. I couldn’t see it.
Marla tried to smile, but it was forced. Even so, her smile always hit me like a hammer, and I kissed her forehead, still amazed that she would agree to marry me. She was definitely out of my league.
There was a knock on the door. We both turned to look as Michele poked her head through. “We’re getting hungry, guys . . . ”
“We’ll be a while,” I said.
“We’re ready now,” said Marla. She whispered to me, “The rest can wait. I just had to tell you the hard part.”
Now her smile was genuine.
The wedding was perfect.
I thought I’d seen Marla in her best form many times before, but when she walked down the aisle with her sister, I knew that I was marrying the most beautiful woman in the world.
We’d known each other for a couple of years, but our first date was exactly one year ago, on her 32nd birthday. It seemed only appropriate to marry on the same day a year later; I wanted the day to be devoted to her. For that matter, I wanted my whole friggin’ life to be devoted to her.
It sounds terribly hokey, but I was head over heels in love, and I knew my sole purpose in the future would be to make Marla happy. That’s God’s honest truth. Marla was on my mind every waking minute, and my feelings were even stronger knowing now what she’d been through in Boston.
I wanted her forever. It all seemed guaranteed, until we were alone in our suite and somebody knocked on the door.
We hadn’t even had time to change out of our wedding clothes. The reception was underway, dinner was over, and the speeches were all done. We were just getting changed into casual clothes to go for one last dance before . . . well, before my fantasies would end and I would make love to her for the first time as my wife.
“Probably Janice,” said Marla. “Not sure what she’d want, though.”
Marla’s sister was the only person who knew our hotel room number. I nodded.
; She flipped the lock on the door and pulled it open. I heard her gasp and turned to see her try to push the door closed. “Ricky? No, it can’t be --”
And then she was blown back, blood splashing out on her peach wedding gown. The gunshot wasn’t loud, but it was very powerful. Blood covered everything, and Marla flew off her feet, landing a few feet behind.
She never moved.
I think I went a little crazy for a while. It was impossible to believe my whole life would be stretching forward without Marla.
I couldn’t cry at her funeral. It was like I was looking at a jigsaw puzzle all broken apart with the pieces mixed up. The picture wouldn’t come to me. It was simply not possible that the casket being lowered into the ground carried my Marla.
For a week after, I ignored the phone calls, the knocks on the door, even the cards that came in the mail from well-meaning friends.
All I knew was that I needed her back. And, yes, maybe I was more than a little crazy, because the only idea I came up with was to follow her. I had to follow Marla beyond death.
Before I did, I needed to talk to her sister, Janice. She opened the door at my knock and gave me a hug. She was a big woman, so different from my petite Marla that it was hard to believe they were sisters.
“I’m so sorry, Andy.”
“I know.”
“Would you like a drink?”
Marla always drank Chardonnay. “Do you have any white wine?”
She smiled and poured the drinks. “To her.”
I touched glasses with her and took a sip.
“How’d she fake her death before?”
Janice looked at me and seemed to be thinking back. “It was so hard on her. She knew if she just left Ricky, he’d hunt her down. He was nutso crazy, but the cops could never do anything. One night we cooked up this plan. It took eighteen months to work.”
“Why so long?”
“Insurance. She took out an insurance policy on herself with me as the beneficiary. Ricky was so stupid, he believed he was the one who would get the money, and that scared Marla even more. We didn’t want it to ring any alarm bells at the insurance company, so we waited a long time
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