Justin reached out to the end of his cuff and tried to grab her, but she was out of reach.
Gia reached the van and crawled up the running board to get inside the open driver’s side.
Susan climbed out of the broken table still holding the tire iron. She looked back and forth between Gia and Justin. “If you love her more, then I’ll take her from you, you traitor coward.”
Susan lunged toward the van and nearly fell as she limped on her bad leg. She gritted her teeth and continued toward Gia.
“No. Stop. Please,” Justin yelled out.
Gia tried to scramble into the van for safety, but her feet slipped on the wet running board and she fell to the slippery concrete floor on her knees. Susan lifted the iron. Gia dropped to her side in the bits of debris and rolled underneath the van. Susan swung grazing the running board and ringing the metal off the floor, but Gia was already under the van.
Gia belly crawled over the painful bits of grit under the van as Susan swung the iron to and fro under the van. She connected with Gia’s legs, but not hard enough to do any damage.
Gia came up on the other side and pulled at the handle of the passenger’s side door shaking the whole van. It was locked.
She heard Susan’s one shoe scraping and splashing on the other side of the van. She’s coming around for me, Gia thought.
Gia turned and saw the break in the wall of the kitchen. She saw grass, muddy tracks, and woods. She considered running outside barefoot, soaking wet, and lost.
She looked down and saw the broken face of the clown and she thought about what Justin had said about the gun. Gia went down to her knees and swiped her hands through the broken pieces of the cookie jar. The sharp edges cut her hands and tiny shards stabbed into her knees.
She found the textured grip of the handgun and brought it up out of the broken ceramics. She felt the side and thumbed off the safety like she had been taught in the weapons training back on the set of Blazin’ Babes of the Weird West. She had only ever fired blanks on the set and live rounds on the practice range during prep when they tried to get the babes to keep their eyes open when they fired. She hadn’t picked up a real gun since.
She looked up in time to see Susan standing above her. She had on bare foot on the hood of the van and one sneaker on the remains of the counter. Her pajama bottoms were sagging low on her hips from being soaking wet. With only one eye open she looked like some sort of monster or crazy, mutant pirate. Her calf dripped blood onto the floor.
Susan raised the tire iron over her head.
Gia brought the gun up without really aiming and fired wild. The report was deafening and she realized that she had never fired a gun without ear protection and it hurt. Her elbows were bent like they had taught her not to do and the gun jumped back striking her collar bone with a wave of dizzying pain. She barely managed to hold onto the gun as her ears rang.
The bullet sparked off the hook of the iron and shattered the overhead fixture raining glass down and darkening the kitchen into daytime shadows.
Susan staggered backward in surprise and fell off backward.
Gia squared her shoulders and stood. She aimed the gun down at the floor in both hands and rounded the back of the van. She watched her step since she was barefoot. She stayed close to the wall as she emerged from the back of the van.
Susan charged and Gia fired shattering the window over the kitchen sink. The pines continued to sway outside with no regard for the violence unfolding within. Susan fumbled the tire iron and it fell to the concrete with a clatter. She lurched sideways and past her brother chained to the radiator in wide-eyed shock. It only passed through Gia’s mind as a fleeting thought that he might have mixed emotions about the crazy sister he had fled to California with, who had cuffed him to a radiator, who had beaten him, who he had stabbed, and who Gia now aimed at as she hobbled across the floor of the group home.
Gia centered herself and braced her free hand under her gun hand the way she had been taught. She tried to remember the steps she had been shown that included her breathing, but aiming at a living, bleeding person’s back, she could not remember if she was supposed to breathe through the trigger pull or hold her breath. Both seemed wrong to her. This was different in every conceivable way from the conditions on the set and on the firing range. If Gia had gone through this ordeal first, her movies and performances would have been much better and more realistic over the years.
The gun wavered in her hands and she shook at her wrists and locked elbows. She didn’t know if the unsteadiness came from fear, adrenaline, the physical toll of the fight, or the days of being taped or chained. The parts of her body alternated from hurting to being numb up and down the length of her frame and limbs.
Water dripped in her eyes from the broken pipes in the open wall spraying the ceiling above her.
As Susan ran and hopped stutter-stepping past the couch, Gia brought her finger closed on the trigger again. The sound hurt her ears that were already ringing to the point of deafness. The pain of it traveled from both sides into the center of her head and throbbed back out against the inside of her skull. She almost wanted to let Susan go just so she wouldn’t have to endure another gunshot. The entire world was muffled and the only way Gia knew that any sound still existed at all was the dampened sound of water peppering the metal roof of the van behind her. The note of those pops was low enough in register to get through the dead range of her hearing. In that closed range of sound, she vaguely thought how high the ceilings in the group home were that a van had fit inside without scraping the ceiling.
The moment the shot fired the recoil racked through her body. Even with her joints braced properly, her whole body jolted. The back of the couch exploded out of the sheets with stuffing.
Susan staggered and appeared to be going down as she stumbled forward on a bloody leg that didn’t seem to want to support her. As Susan regained her footing and bobbled onward, Gia realized that even if her previous bullet had passed all the way through the sofa, it seemed to have missed Susan.
Gia sighed and took aim again. Susan seemed to be staggering toward the wall like she was seeking help from the balloon bearing clown or wanted to project herself through the surface into the world of the lion and giraffe friends.
Gia felt a pang in her chest and had a moment of odd, almost psychic connection to Susan. Gia felt a twinge of sympathetic charity toward Susan which harkened back to their trips in Susan’s Prius when Gia felt no other real connections to anyone in the world. She felt emotions that dated back to the time before Gia knew that Susan had orchestrated the accident that killed Gia’s mother and before she knew Don’s body was hidden in the small storage section where it probably still festered in the LA heat. Gia projected back to a time before she knew Susan, when Susan was a girl trapped in a functioning group home at the mercy of the desires of a monster named Old Pastor Jack. Gia saw a younger, still skinny Susan Simms curled up on a couch without the sheets and bullet holes, maybe next to her brother Justin who felt helpless to do anything to protect her, and she stared at the animals and clowns on that strange wall. Where the other kids talked about how creepy the scenes were, Susan wanted to escape the three dimensional world of dead parents and monster pastors. She wanted to enter the flat walled world of globbed paint colors, dead faced clowns, and off kilter jungle animals. The real world was the awful, painful place. The funhouse paintings of horror were a place that was safe. Maybe Susan watched Gia’s movies in the dark in growing obsession. feeling the same desire to escape into Gia’s flat horror world on the screen. She felt connected to Gia through dead, drunk mothers and monsters named Jack.
Susan was going for one of the open doorways. Gia took aim again, but Susan flung the door closed and Gia was aiming at the flat wood. She could fire a shot through the hollow door and probably tear it apart like paper. She wanted to, but Gia had lost count of bullets and did not want to waste one. She was afraid to take her aim off the door and have Susan come back at her agai
n like a creature from one of her slasher films.
As she waited the ringing in her ears went from a constant, deafening hum to a pulsing warble with real world sound breaking through between the crests in the pulses of her hearing.
It was in one of those moments of hearing between the deaf pulses that she heard glass shatter behind the door. At first she pictured Susan breaking a vase or bottle to come out fighting with the jagged edge. Then, she realized it was a window. Susan was escaping the house. She might flee, but she might also come around for another attack on Gia and the brother she saw as a traitor. There was no telling what nightmare weapons she might find out there before she came back. Gia pictured the whirling blades of a thresher crashing into the house next.
***
Justin called through the ring in her ears and said, “Uncuff me, Gia. We need to go.”
The engine in the van gave two sledge hammer bangs before going back to its uneven rattle. Whatever was coming apart in there was progressing.
Gia lowered the gun and she stepped to the counter to grab up the handcuff key that refused to fall. As she closed her fingers around it, she felt a dozen wasp stings on the bottoms of her bare feet. She staggered back and looked down to see the broken glass all over the floor.
Gia sat down next to the broken table and forced out the larger shards with weakening pain. She still felt smaller white slivers under her skin, but she could not get to them.
“Let’s go, please,” Justin said.
Gia retook her feet adding the pain of slivers of glass in her feet to every other ache and injury she felt. She turned and limped over towards Justin. He knelt and slid his right wrist in the cuff up the pipe and turned it over so she could reach the lock.
Gia stopped with the key in one hand and Justin’s gun from the clown cookie jar in the other. He looked from the cuff up into her face. His dark hair was limp, flat, and pasted around his face from the wash of water off the ceiling.
She thought about the forced shower after she was dragged into the building with a bag over her head. They were Susan’s words and plan, but Justin had delivered them playing the part of Jack the Liker. She thought about the water in the van and that awful chicken salad with the raisins. Susan probably fed him the lines before he played out the scene, but Justin had delivered them and gave her no safe word for the awful game. She sat in her own piss and he put the tape over her mouth and she was given no choice in the matter. That was the difference between a game and real torture. Susan might be worse and she might have bent Justin’s mind to serve her own dark purposes, but that did not change his part in that service.
Something shifted on Justin’s face. Gia couldn’t read it. It wasn’t fear. She had seen that in him when Susan turned on him. It wasn’t exactly regret. She had seen that when he tried to back out of the game in her apartment. Looking back, she realized she had seen it come through his face as he still played Jack before Susan hit him with the phone.
This was a different emotion. Gia thought maybe she was seeing realization in his eyes. Did he know what she was thinking?
Gia lifted the gun and aimed it down at Justin’s head. He flinched and blinked several times like he thought the shot might come at any instant. He looked down and took a few deep breaths that lifted and dropped her shoulders.
Finally, he looked up at her again past the gun. She expected him to beg for his life or plead his case. He had tried to help her. He had fought Susan on Gia’s behalf and had even stabbed his sister for Gia. He had grabbed up the phone for Gia to try to call for help. He had been surprised when he found out Susan’s version of the story wasn’t true. Gia was ready to hear all those arguments because they were true. If she was going to shoot him for what he had done wrong to her, she supposed it was only fair for him to have a chance to babble out what he had done right.
A look of calm settled into his face instead of any form of survival instinct or desperation. His eyes watered in a way that had nothing to do with the drip from the ceiling. He nodded at her and his mouth settled into a tight line.
“Justin?” The word left her mouth in a whisper as she kept the gun trained on his head. Her hands weren’t shaking anymore and where she had missed the sister in the heat of pitched battle from a distance, she was steady as she aimed down on the brother at point blank range.
***
Chapter 14:
Because She Won’t Stop
“I understand why you have to do it,” Justin said. His voice held steady like he was stating that he was accepting a traffic ticket. It was on the next set of sentences that his voice wavered and his chin crinkled between phrases as he spoke. “I should have known better. She was always messed up and that was my fault too for not protecting her. After mom and dad died, protecting her was my only job and I failed at it. I knew she was obsessed with you, but I didn’t help her; I didn’t stop her. I just did what she said. I should have protected you from her, but I didn’t. She said it was your fault we were here, but that’s a lie. It’s my fault. All of it from the moment I left it to her to solve the problem with Pastor Jack and we ran away has been my fault.”
Gia swallowed. Her finger was inside the trigger guard and the gun felt heavy. It felt so heavy that she thought the weight of it might rest it down against the curve of her finger and the weapon would fire itself.
Would that be the weapon’s fault and not hers? Gia wondered. She put her finger against the trigger and aimed the weapon at the target, but someone else had loaded the bullets. She would have just waited and it was gravity that would have finished the job.
Was that any different than what Susan had done with Justin? Susan had prepped him and aimed him, so could Gia blame gravity for what fired him along this path. Once he saw the truth, he had fought for Gia, after all. Susan had cut the brake line to kill her monster and did not consider Gia’s mother in the path. Was that the kind of thing an abused girl could consider? If Gia fired the gun, gravity would not hold the guilt even if a court found her not guilty due to fighting to free herself from the kidnapping. Susan had used guilt over Justin’s failure to protect her to bring him into her dark games for as long as she had. Gia had played those games too.
“Justin, I …”
He nodded again and blinked at the tears spilling over his cheeks. “Do what you have to do, Gia. Be sure to save one for Susan so you can be free of her. It’s the only way you can be free because she won’t stop any other way.”
Gia held out the key pinched between her fingers. At first she was holding out the handcuff key and still aiming the gun at him. Justin looked back and forth between the gun and the key.
Gia lowered the gun. “Hurry up before she comes back.
Justin took the key from her and fiddled with it in the lock on the bracelet around his wrist. He breathed out without looking up. “Thank you.”
“If we get out of this,” Gia said, “you get to be the one tied up in any games we play from now on.”
Justin shook his head still looking down at the cuff. “Thanks for the invite, but if I get out of this alive, I’m probably going to jail.”
“Justin …”
The cuff popped open and he shoved the key in his pocket as he stood. “Let’s focus on getting away alive first. Can you walk? It’s a pretty long road down the hill and then Dark Orchard is a ways after that.”
Gia shifted her weight from foot to foot. She felt the sting of the glass. She thought about the pastor’s car weaving down and refusing to stop as he plowed through Gia’s mother. She shivered as much from the thought of it as from the cold from the water and the pain from her injuries.
“I guess I don’t have a choice, do I?”
Justin looked at the van. “The engine is still running. We can try it. I’ll carry you down on my back, if I have to.”
He started to step away, but Gia grabbed hold of the front of his shirt. He turned to face her and she leaned in and kissed him on the lips. His mouth was cold. She started to pull away,
but then he leaned toward her and his lips parted. Their tongues explored their lips and teeth before they separated.
“This is so messed up,” he said. “You were aiming a gun at my head just a few seconds ago and then … everything else that’s happened.”
She nodded and managed a smile despite everything. “Yeah, anyone that cares about me would be quite clear that you are bad for me. This is not the way you start anything resembling a relationship. At the moment, you are the only one here fighting for me, so wrong or not, each other is all we’ve got.”
He nodded again. “I won’t let you down this time. Have the gun ready just in case.”
“Okay.” She thumbed the safety back locked.
He turned and took a step toward the van and she followed. He stopped and turned back around and she blinked staring up at him.
He cleared his throat and said, “For my … Susan. I mean to keep it ready just in case we need it because of her. Not to shoot me, I mean. That’s what I meant about having the gun ready.”
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