The Last Time I Saw Her

by Karen Robards

  “Dude’s coming,” one of the others warned, low-voiced, behind her. “What do we do?”

  “Kill him,” someone else answered.

  “No. Let him come,” Abell said. His voice was chilling. Charlie was too jittery with nerves now to breathe properly. Should she try to warn Hughes? She couldn’t—her life was on the line here, too.

  She risked one more quick glance back.

  Hughes was maybe twenty feet behind them and closing in fast. She could hardly see his features, much less his expression, and with the falling rain creating a rippling curtain between them, there was no way he was going to be able to read his danger in her face. There was, in fact, nothing she could do.

  “Eyes front,” Fleenor growled. Charlie did as he said.

  “Dr. Stone! Wait up,” Hughes called.

  This time Charlie didn’t glance around. With the mouth of Fleenor’s gun digging into the space between her eleventh and twelfth ribs, she could only walk and pray. She hoped desperately that Hughes was perceptive enough to read something into that.

  “Act unconcerned. Let him get to her,” Abell ordered. Like his tone, his expression was terrifying. Charlie could feel menace rising in the air around her. Her breath caught. Her muscles tightened. She couldn’t take this. She had to—

  “Keep quiet and keep walking,” Fleenor said, and ground the gun deeper into her side.

  “Dr. Stone! I just need to—” Hughes called again, and from his voice she could tell that he was close behind her now. Unable to stop herself from glancing back once more, Charlie saw that he was only a few feet away, that the group had parted to let him in, and that they were closing ranks behind him.

  Even with the rain hampering her vision, he looked so like Michael in that moment that she felt weirdly torn. Scared, but also—hopeful. Like she was seeing the cavalry rushing to her rescue or something.

  But Hughes wasn’t Michael, and the cavalry wasn’t coming.

  Her lips parted—I have to warn him—and then it was too late.

  With swift brutality, Torres slammed the butt of his gun into the back of Hughes’s neck. The dull thunk of the blow made Charlie wince.

  Hughes collapsed soundlessly.

  He never even hit the ground. They caught him, four of them, and carried him along with them the few yards to the school bus, which Charlie looked forward again in time to realize was their goal. Then she was being shoved onto it and forced up the narrow stairs right behind the Scared Straight kids.

  —

  Charlie was terrified. Michael experienced the sudden intensity of her fear like a lightning strike. It was an immediate, visceral sensation, so galvanizing that it jerked him out of the agony that tortured him and catapulted him along the string that still connected them.

  He found himself inside a moving bus. Outside, it was raining. Too warm in the bus, the windows starting to fog up. Passengers sitting by the windows, one per seat, with men from a prison—both guards and prisoners, from their uniforms—hunkered down low on the floor beside them, shielded from the view of anyone outside the bus. A gray-haired woman in a flowered dress huddled in the seat behind the male driver, breathing noisily into a paper bag: Michael didn’t know her. Wasn’t interested in her or any of them.

  Charlie. Where is she?

  He couldn’t see her, but he could feel her, feel her terror and desperation and helplessness as vividly now as if he was inside her body with her. He could feel that she was sitting, rigid with fear, fingers pressing hard into her thighs through the smooth material of her pants, her heart pounding and her pulse racing and—his brave girl!—her breathing deliberately even and slow, as if she was working hard at keeping panic at bay.

  Dread: he could feel it twisting her gut, sending icy tremors snaking over her skin.

  Then he felt a warm, wet, repulsive thing drag along her cheek, the sensation as physically vivid as if it was happening to him.

  She recoiled, her head turning sharply toward the source of the sensation, and for a moment it was as if he could see through her eyes.

  It took him a second, but then he realized that the guy in the orange peel who was leering at her, who was sitting on that bus seat hugging up to her with his arm clamped around her waist and his face so close she could smell the stink of his breath, had just licked her cheek.

  Hurt her and I’ll kill you was his silent promise to the guy. But he couldn’t talk, couldn’t move, couldn’t protect her. Michael could only feel what she was feeling, see what she was seeing, and go crazy inside.

  Ratlike face, small, nearly colorless eyes—he recognized the guy with a thunderclap of alarm: Dirty was his prison nickname, for Dirty 30, the thirty-can block of the cheap Keystone Light beer that was his calling card and that had led to his being called the Beer Can Killer by the media. Gary Fleenor, sick fucking bastard of a rapist, of a woman killer, from the Ridge’s death row.

  He had Charlie. How the hell had he gotten hold of Charlie?

  If he’d been alive, Michael would have been sweating bullets at the thought of what Fleenor might do to her. But he wasn’t alive: he was fucking dead. Fucking dead, and he was being shown this to torture him, and there was nothing he could do.

  “You know you want some,” Dirty said, waggling his tongue at her. Michael felt her horror, felt her disgust, felt the shudder of her heart, the hitch in her breathing, the tension in her muscles.

  Then the bastard leaned in to lick Charlie again, this time right on her soft and vulnerable mouth. Her stomach roiled. She cringed away—

  Michael exploded with rage, lunged for the guy—and just like that found himself back in hell’s toilet, freezing and burning and racked with the knowledge of what was happening to her, the awareness of her fear. Everything he had seen and felt in that brief flash came together to form a single, terrible certainty: Charlie was in mortal danger. Encased in darkness, immobilized and helpless, he could only curse fate and the universe and God and every other entity that would allow someone like her to be hurt. He could only howl silently into the dark while he suffered—oh, hell, yeah, come to find out this existed, too—the torments of the damned.

  How many preachers had warned him? About what would happen to him if he failed to repent, failed to heed their words, failed to turn from his evil path? Now he knew what that torment was, and that it was more real and more horrible than anything he could have imagined.

  His fear for her was a hundred thousand times more acute than anything he had ever felt or ever could feel for himself.

  Let me go back. He screamed it inside himself, throwing it into the stew of wordless communication that the monsters had started up again the second he’d returned to them.

  Their chatter was obscene to him now. They taunted him. She is afraid. She will be hurt. She will die.

  If he’d been able to fall on his knees, to clasp his hands like a man who actually prayed, to beseech them like that, he would have done it.

  Let me go back. I’ll do anything.

  The voices subsided. All of a sudden there was nothing there, a void, a silence.

  He begged again: I’ll do anything. And added a word that was hard for him: Please.

  Deeper than the rest, a single voice said, You dare ask us to set you free…

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Inside the bus, the air was thick with fear. With Fleenor crowding next to her on the vinyl-covered seat, Charlie had trouble dragging in enough air.

  Screaming was useless, so Charlie didn’t. Crying and pleading would be worse, she knew. Fleenor fed on helplessness and fear.

  Despite her instinct to recoil as far away from him as possible, Charlie just barely managed to look him in the eyes.

  “Your mother would be angry at you, Mr. Fleenor,” she said, and was pleased at how strong her voice sounded. From his file and her sessions with him she knew that his relationship with his mother had been the most important one in his life. It had been dysfunctional, to say the least. The woman had been controllin
g and abusive, but he had lived with her up until her death eight years ago. His bond with his mother was the one tool Charlie had to work with. She was horribly afraid it wouldn’t be enough.

  Fleenor’s eyes—they were the color of dirty dishwater—flickered. That connected, Charlie could tell. Then he glared at her. His lips drew back in what looked like a snarl.

  “You know jack all about my mother,” he said. “She hated women like you. Social workers, they came to our house, she’d sic the dogs on ’em. Lady doctors, when she was in the hospital, she spit on ’em. She’d be proud, could she see what I’m getting ready to do to you.”

  His arm was around her waist; as he spoke, it tightened. Eyes vicious, he leaned toward her.

  Charlie couldn’t stop herself from jerking away from him, but it didn’t help: she couldn’t escape. Her spine came up hard against the cool metal wall of the bus. The window rattled and shook against the back of her head as it pressed futilely against the glass. Inside, she despaired. Her lungs had trouble expanding enough to allow her to inhale. She was freezing cold. Part of that was because, despite shedding her soaked lab coat, she was still damp from the rain, but shock and terror accounted for most of it. But on the outside, where he could see, she did her best to project as much calm authority as she could.

  Even as his face neared hers she said, “Mimi”—Fleenor had called his mother by her first name—“would have said you were stupid to waste time bothering with a woman when—” You should be focused on getting away was how she was going to finish, when the muffled shriek of a siren going off behind the bus interrupted.

  It was the most welcome sound Charlie had ever heard.

  Fleenor’s head snapped up. He glanced back, and his arm that had been locked around her waist withdrew.

  “Shit,” he said. “What’s that?”

  Charlie sagged against the side of the bus. Relief at the reprieve turned her muscles to jelly. It was all she could do not to swipe the back of her hand across her mouth, but she was afraid of drawing Fleenor’s attention again. He had slurped his slimy, disgusting tongue over her lips, after previously doing the same to her cheek, and she was still shaking inside with revulsion.

  And fear. Bone-deep fear.

  The taste of him on her mouth made her sick.

  She knew what Fleenor’s MO was—first he raped, then he killed.

  As an authority figure in his life, she was the kind of victim he would particularly enjoy. He was a power killer. Power over his victims was his motivation, and wielding power over her, a woman who had exercised control over him while he was in prison, would provide him with the ultimate thrill.

  Words were her only defense, along with her knowledge of him and how his mind worked. From the moment he’d slithered onto the seat beside her she’d been feverishly searching her memory for something useful to fend him off.

  His mother wasn’t much of a weapon, but at such short notice and under such harrowing circumstances it was the best she could come up with.

  “Get back down out of sight, Dirty,” Abell snapped. He was crouched between two seats, rubbing the knee of one of the girls—the thin one in the miniskirt, pretty, with short black hair, olive skin, and scarlet lips. Bree was her name: Charlie had heard her say it, haltingly, when Abell had asked her. Bree was huddled as far away from Abell as she could get, which wasn’t far. Charlie tried not to think about what he had in mind for her. The girl was obviously scared to death: she’d been crying quietly off and on since the bus had been waved through the Ridge’s security checkpoints and started heading unimpeded down the snaking road that led to Big Stone Gap. That’s when it had become obvious that nobody in authority had any idea what was happening, that a prison break was in progress, and that the bad-news kids in the school bus (and a few others as well) were now hostages.

  The fire had been the perfect diversion for a prison break. Charlie had no doubt that it had been set deliberately.

  After making it through the security checkpoints, the bus had rolled through town, stopping at red lights and driving under the speed limit and in general doing nothing to attract attention while the escaping prisoners carefully stayed out of sight of the windows and kept their guns on the hostages. The teens and the women—Charlie and the gray-haired chaperone, whose name and official position Charlie didn’t know—had been positioned in the seats so that their innocent-looking faces could be seen through the windows, and they’d been threatened with death if they so much as blinked wrong. The rain had helped, of course, but the people in the passing vehicles and the pedestrians hurrying along the sidewalks hadn’t given the bus a second glance.

  The farther away from the prison they got, the more the atmosphere in the bus seethed with heightening emotion: fear from the hostages and tension from the escapees. The chaperone started to hyperventilate. Fortunately, the kids had brought brown-bag meals, which were stored in an open crate on a seat within Charlie’s view. Unable to stand listening to the chaperone gasping for breath, Charlie had gone into doctor mode and gotten up, dumped out a bag, and given it to the woman, who she then told to breathe into it. Abell had pointed his gun at Charlie and barked, “Sit down.” When Charlie did as she was told, he pointed his gun at the chaperone and said, “First to die, lady,” which had caused the poor woman to wheeze so hard Charlie thought she would pass out before she could get the paper bag over her mouth and nose.

  Once they were on the highway, the escapees had collected personal belongings, including Charlie’s purse. They’d thrown the cell phones into a river as the bus had crossed the bridge above it and eaten the bagged food, but other than generalized threats, they’d pretty much left the hostages alone.

  Except for one of the larger boys—a beanpole seventeen-year-old six-footer with stringy brown hair and thin shoulders hunched into a black hoodie—who had said something to Bree. For that, he’d been cracked in the face with a gun butt. His nose swollen and bloodied, he was now tied up and sitting on the floor between two empty seats. The real driver, who’d been left in his tighty-whities, was also tied up and sitting on the floor between two empty seats. The two guards—real, as it turned out—who’d escorted the Scared Straight group to the bus had been taken hostage as well. Unarmed themselves, faced with eight armed killers who had it in for them, they’d surrendered without a fight. They were sitting on the floor in the back row under Ware’s guard, handcuffed.

  Charlie didn’t think the situation looked good for those four, or for Hughes, whose sheer size made him someone the escapees might perceive as a threat. The situation didn’t look good for the rest of them—herself, the chaperone, the two girls, and the five remaining boys—either, but she didn’t think they were on the first-to-die list.

  More like the first to be raped and tortured.

  At the thought, more shivers raced over her skin.

  The Ridge is escape-proof. The refrain ran at intervals through her mind. It was common knowledge: everyone who worked at the prison knew that. Warden Pugh bragged about it; it was a point of pride among the guards. Stupidly, she’d never doubted it. Even though Michael had once confessed that he’d considered trying to escape by taking her hostage, she’d never really worried about it because she’d never thought it could actually be done.

  How to put this? Wrong again.

  With the initial shock wearing off and hideous reality starting to set in, Charlie had her own bitter answer to that snippet of common knowledge: The Ridge is escape-proof like the Titanic was unsinkable.

  From the moment she’d been forced aboard the bus and the escapees had taken over, yanking the driver from his seat, making him shed his uniform, and replacing him with one of their own while terrorizing their captives into submission, Charlie had been sure that the escape would be discovered and the bus stopped at any second. When they’d made it through Big Stone Gap, then turned at the McDonald’s onto Cantrell Highway, Charlie still had been sure that they would be surrounded by an army of cops before they’d gone a m
ile.

  Eight convicts could not just disappear from a maximum security facility and not be missed. They could not kidnap fourteen people without anyone noticing.

  Finally, with the bus on a bumpy two-lane road climbing one of the pine-ridged mountains that formed the backbone of the state, the first cop car had put in an appearance. Its siren was what had distracted Fleenor. It was back there doing its two-note whoop behind the bus.

  Charlie wasn’t sure whether to be glad or sorry. She doubted that the escapees would surrender without a fight: these were violent, desperate men whose lives were on the line. They wouldn’t hesitate to kill every single hostage, including teenagers, including herself, if it would give them a better chance to get away.

  But the thought of finding herself at Fleenor’s mercy, at what might have happened just now if the siren hadn’t gone off when it did, made her break out in a cold sweat.

  The real nightmare begins was the thought that had flashed into Charlie’s head as Fleenor had settled in beside her. Dread had knotted her stomach. Her nails had dug into her thighs as she’d fought to remain outwardly composed.

  Now, with the long-delayed appearance of law enforcement, Charlie feared a nightmare of a different sort. As in, there’s going to be a shootout and we’re all going to die.

  The atmosphere inside the bus, which had stabilized into a kind of low-key fear as the minutes had ticked away with nothing too horrible happening, was suddenly turbo-charged again. The teens who’d been slumping in their seats sat up, looking around, a mix of every emotion from fear to hope in their faces. The chaperone bent almost double as she huffed noisily into the paper bag. The escapees were on alert, some watching the hostages, some watching the back of the bus, wired to a man.

  Having spent practically every single minute since she’d been forced into the bus trying to devise a plan of escape, Charlie had hit on nothing that had the least chance of working. She’d settled on trying to come up with a way to survive, but she wasn’t having a lot of luck with that, either. Basically, she was down to using her knowledge of her research subjects to try to distract them from whatever heinous thing they attempted to do, seize any opportunity to run that presented itself, and pray for rescue.