The Last Time I Saw Her

by Karen Robards

  It wasn’t much, but it was the best she could do.

  “Bastardo’s been following us for about five miles,” Torres said, as Fleenor—thank God!—slipped off the seat and into the center aisle. Crouching, Fleenor moved toward the rear, edging around Hughes, who was sprawled facedown in the aisle with his hands cuffed behind his back, presumably because his size and unconscious state made putting him anywhere else problematic and also so that Torres and Ware, who’d taken up positions in the rear, could easily keep an eye on him as well as the guards. As far as Charlie could tell, the escapees had allocated the few sets of handcuffs they apparently had managed to get hold of—guards didn’t usually carry them—to the hostages they considered the most dangerous. She and the chaperone and the teens had been left unrestrained. But Hughes had made not one single threatening move since being carried aboard the bus, and Fleenor edged past him now like he was about as dangerous as a rug.

  Torres squatted in front of the emergency exit door, neck craned as he peered out the exit door’s window. Behind the bus, the siren continued to wail. Charlie could see the flashing blue lights reflected in the bus’s big side-view mirrors. The rain had stopped, but the sky was overcast and a cloud had dropped low enough so that they were driving through gossamer fingers of mist. It wasn’t yet dusk, but dusk wasn’t far away. The interior of the bus was gloomy.

  “You plan on telling anybody he was there?” Fleenor demanded as he reached the back of the bus.

  “You got eyes just like me,” Torres retorted. Like Abell, Sayers, and Ware, Torres wore a guard’s uniform, one that was obviously too big for his skinny, five-foot-ten-inch frame. Charlie hated to think how he’d gotten it. His thick black hair was shaved at the sides and buzzed on top, and he had a tattoo of a cross on the right side of his neck. At thirty, he was the youngest of her research subjects, and also one of the most depraved. His specialty was young boys. Known in the media as the Carolina Cannibal, he’d killed, dismembered, and eaten the flesh of forty-three early-adolescent males that the authorities knew of. Charlie suspected there were more undiscovered victims. Since boarding the bus, he’d been looking the boys over like a dog eyeing raw meat. Charlie was terrified for them and was glad they knew nothing of his history. “You hadn’t been so busy with Dr. Puta, you’d have noticed sooner and you wouldn’t have been sitting up where the sucio marranos could see you.”

  Charlie knew enough Spanish to translate that last as “dirty pigs” and her own sobriquet as Dr. Whore.

  “You blaming the pig whistle on me?” Fleenor asked, outraged, as he peeped out the exit window, too. Torres looked at him. Charlie didn’t have the best angle on Torres’s expression, but from her perspective it looked murderous.

  Before Torres could respond, Abell said, “Can it, you two.”

  “Couldn’t tell it was a cop until he turned on his lights,” Ware told Fleenor, who was still bristling at Torres. Ware was back there, too, out of Charlie’s sight between the seats.

  Staying low, Abell headed down the center aisle to join them at the rear of the bus. On the way, he kicked Hughes, whose inert body made getting past him awkward, in the ribs. Charlie winced at the painful-sounding thud.

  Whether Hughes was conscious or not, Charlie had no idea. He’d resurfaced once that she knew of as they were leaving Big Stone Gap, lifting his head and groaning loudly enough to attract attention. One of the orange-uniformed escapees she didn’t know—she assumed he’d been with Fleenor in the library talking to the Scared Straight kids—had slammed his gun butt down on the back of Hughes’s head, and he’d collapsed again, knocked unconscious for a second time. He was positioned so that he hadn’t gotten in anyone’s way until now, and so as far as she knew he’d been left alone.

  “What do I do? You want I should gun it?” the driver—Charlie thought his name was Doyle—called back, his voice tight with anxiety. Turned sideways in her seat, which was about a third of the way down the bus, Charlie was able to see a great deal. Doyle’s hands had tightened on the steering wheel. His back had stiffened. Awaiting instructions, he was looking through the rearview mirror at the men now crouched around the back door.

  “No,” Abell replied. He seemed to have assumed the role of leader. “Turn on your flashers and slow down, like you’re getting ready to stop.”

  Sayers stood up abruptly. He was near the front of the bus, on her side. Charlie thought he’d been settled on the floor beside the other girl, a short, plump, platinum blonde with obvious dark roots who up until the siren had gone off had been leaning against her window with her eyes closed and her lips moving as if she were silently praying. Now she was sitting up and looking around, her heavily made-up eyes huge with fright.

  Sayers said, “I’m here to tell you, stopping’s not going to happen.”

  “Get down,” Abell snapped, gesturing at Sayers to get his head below the level of the windows. “And I say what happens.” To Doyle he added, “Hit the brakes. Pull over to the side of the road, then stop. But do it real gradual.”

  Doyle didn’t seem to be in any doubt about who was in charge. The bus rattled and shook as it started to slow. The groan of the brakes was audible even over the following siren. Seen through the windows, the heavily forested mountain became less and less of a blur. Charlie was able to pick out individual trees among the deeply colored oaks and maples and poplars that crowded close to the road.

  Her pulse quickened until she could feel it pounding in her ears. Whatever was getting ready to happen, she had a bad feeling that the escapees tamely submitting to being pulled over wasn’t it.

  “I’m not going back to the Ridge.” Sayers’s tone made it a challenge. Several of the others muttered in agreement, but there was no overt show of mutiny and Sayers followed Abell’s directive and crouched in the aisle, one hand holding on to the seat nearest him for balance, the other clutching his gun.

  “We’re sticking with the plan, okay?” Abell said. “That barn I told you about, the one with the pickup truck, is about fifteen miles from here. Once we get there, we hide the bus in the barn and take off in the truck. Nobody’s gonna be looking for a truck.”

  Sayers frowned. “But what about—”

  Abell cut him off. “Just shut up, will you? I got it under control.”

  As Abell turned back to look out the exit window, tension settled heavy as a blanket over them all. Charlie had just been hit by a terrifying thought—no pickup truck she’d ever seen was big enough to hold eight escapees and fourteen hostages—when she saw that both of the girls and two of the boys—the small, scared-faced one she had noticed in the prison’s hallway and a larger, heavyset boy with carroty hair—were looking at her fearfully. Bree’s mouth trembled, the smaller boy was breathing hard, and from their expressions it was obvious that, with the other good-guy adults present out of commission, all four were turning to her as the authority figure in charge.

  There’s no one else. I’m responsible for them. I have to do whatever I can to get them out of this alive. With the realization came a fresh wave of panic. It made her chest tighten. She had to fight to keep her own breathing slow and even. The hard truth was she wasn’t sure there was anything she could do. For them or for herself.

  Feeling helpless and hating it, she mouthed Shh at them and shook her head slightly, a silent message warning them to be quiet and stay in their seats.

  It was the best she could do.

  “You think they found the guards yet?” asked one of the unknown orange-uniformed escapees. He was tall and bony, with sandy hair, pale skin, and hollowed-out cheeks. Charlie pegged him as early thirties. He wasn’t a serial killer, but that left plenty of room for him to be guilty of all kinds of other horrible crimes.

  “The dead ones we left in the library’s supply closet?” another of the orange-uniformed unknowns responded like he was making a joke. This guy was older, shorter, and heavier, with deep lines in his face and grizzled dark hair. He grinned, revealing a missing front tooth. “Depends
on if we really managed to burn that mother down.”

  “They found ’em,” Fleenor said shortly. “They found everybody. You think this guy being on our tail is an accident? By now there’s bound to be a BOLO out on this damned big yellow school bus.”

  “Could be something like a busted taillight,” Abell said. “Not that it matters.”

  “I still say you shouldn’t have killed Brother Frank.” Ware sounded both uneasy and angry. Of medium height and weight, he was a physically attractive man with even features and thick brown hair, the kind of clean-cut, WASPy guy that nobody was afraid of on sight. Known as the Beltway Strangler, he’d murdered fourteen women, most of them prostitutes, and left their bodies beside the D.C. Beltway. “Offing a preacher—that’s gonna piss God off. I told you.”

  “Makes you feel any better, the last thing Brother Frank said was a prayer,” Torres said, and snickered.

  “It was prayer group.” Ware shook his head. “Killing people there’s just bad karma. And a preacher.”

  Torres said, “Going to prayer group was the only way us hombres muerto caminando”—Charlie quickly translated that as dead men walking and realized he was referring to himself and his fellow residents of death row—“were going to get to the library today. Except for Fleenor. Hey, Dirty, who’d you have to suck off to get the gig with the kids?”

  Fleenor snorted. “Fuck you, amigo. I bribed one of the guards with a month’s worth of smokes to get put on that damned community outreach panel. I hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t even have known these little bastards were coming, much less when and where.”

  “So you lost some smokes,” Torres retorted. “You know what kind of shit I had to put up with from that fat librarian to get those guns hid in there?”

  “You killed him,” Fleenor said. “You got payback.”

  “You could’ve waited till Brother Frank left,” Ware said.

  “You had a problem with what was going to go down, you could’ve stayed in your cell and taken your chances on being the next one hit,” Abell said to Ware. “You didn’t, so shut the fuck up. All of you, shut the fuck up. We got enough problems.” He looked toward the front of the bus, his gaze skimming the hostages. “Kiddies, ladies, you just sit tight. Sayers, Creech, Ruben, make sure nobody does anything they shouldn’t. Anybody gets out of line, kill ’em.”

  Creech and Ruben were the names of the two unknown orange uniforms who’d been talking, Charlie gathered by their reactions. They moved out into the center aisle, going down on their haunches like Sayers to keep from being spotted through the windows, casting meaningful looks at the hostages, guns at the ready. Charlie had a bad feeling about what was getting ready to happen as the bus jolted onto the gravel on the shoulder of the road. The driver had chosen to pull over to the side where the mountain rose above them; on the other side a narrow slice of young trees was all that stood between them and a drop that was obscured by floating gray mist but that Charlie estimated had to be somewhere in the region of five hundred feet.

  Abell was talking to Torres, Fleenor, and Ware, all of whom were gathered around the rear exit with him now in a tight little clump, in a low tone that Charlie couldn’t overhear. Their body language told her that they were edgy and primed for action. Wetting her lips, Charlie glanced at the side-view mirrors again and watched the flashing bar lights of the police car follow the bus onto the shoulder. She hoped the cops in the car knew what they were wading into.

  The thought of that waiting pickup truck wouldn’t leave her alone. A chill slid down her spine. Glancing at the teens, Charlie felt real desperation start to set in.

  Once they get us inside that barn, it’s over. There are eight of them, they have guns, they can do whatever they want to us. Waiting for rescue isn’t going to do it. Even if rescue comes, these guys will kill every one of us before they let us go. We’ve got to escape from the bus. With a big enough distraction—maybe these cops will create enough of a distraction—maybe we can get the front door open and run. Some of the kids might be able to make it out the windows. A few. The fast ones. The skinny ones. The skinny, fast ones.

  As plans went, that was about as sucky as everything else she’d come up with so far. It had almost no chance of success—certainly no chance of everyone making it out alive—but unless something else occurred, it was going to have to do.

  I have to let the kids know.

  She looked around at them.

  “When I tell you, lift the handle and push out,” Abell ordered, loudly enough that Charlie could hear. He was talking to Ware, and something about his tone commanded her full attention. Focusing on what was happening at the rear now, she gripped the metal bar at the top of her seat back as the bus shuddered to a halt. The siren grew louder as the police car pulled up behind it. Blue flashing lights pulsed through the interior of the bus like barber pole stripes.

  “Now,” Abell ordered.

  The emergency exit door flew open. Even as the tinny alarm attached to the door sounded, Charlie caught the merest glimpse of the police car parked a few yards away. The passenger door was open. A uniformed police officer strode toward the bus, mist swirling around his feet. Local, not state police, was all she had time to register before the staccato sound of gunfire ripped through the wailing sirens.

  Pulse leaping, Charlie stayed frozen in place for long enough to watch the cop’s chest explode into a pulpy mess as he got mowed down, to catch his partner emerging from the driver’s side of the police car with a shout and a pointed gun, to see that same cop duck behind the open door of his cruiser as a fusillade of bullets slammed into the car. Abell, Torres, Fleenor, and Ware were all firing out the emergency door. She heard answering gunfire from the cop.

  Should I try to…?

  Something whizzed past Charlie’s head to smack into the wall behind her, then ricocheted off with a whine.

  That snapped her out of it. Forget trying to go out the doors or windows. Right now the name of the game was Don’t get shot.

  “Get down!” Charlie cried to the kids as bullets slammed into metal with a series of sharp slaps and pings and the interior of the bus erupted into an explosion of gasps, screams, shouts, and curses. The clearly terrified teens obeyed instantly, throwing themselves to the floor between the seats. Charlie threw herself to the floor as well, huddling so low in the narrow space in front of her seat that she was practically kissing the dirty metal.

  “Stop them! Don’t let them get away!” Abell screamed. Through the resulting burst of shooting, Charlie heard what she thought was the squeal of tires on pavement, and could only hope that both officers were back in the car—after all, Abell had said “them”—and were peeling out. Go, she urged them silently as the gunfire from the bus intensified until it sounded like a whole Fourth of July’s worth of firecrackers being detonated at once.

  Torres’s triumphant yell of “Yes!” was followed almost immediately by a series of metallic-sounding screeches that Charlie, horrified, had to assume was the patrol car hurtling through some kind of barrier—like, say, trees. Then the wailing siren seemed to drop away—

  “He’s done! He’s over the side!” Ware cried, and the escapees broke into whoops and cheers.

  Even as Charlie looked beneath the seats toward the rear door to try to see something, anything, of what was happening, there was the distant sound of a severe impact. The siren cut off abruptly.

  Oh, no. Her head dropped to rest on her hands, which were fisted on the floor. Her shoulders slumped.

  It didn’t require a psychic to conclude that the cop car had gone off the side of the mountain.

  That both cops were almost certainly dying or dead.

  “Doyle, get this thing moving,” Abell yelled. “Now.”

  There was a grinding sound: the gearshift being engaged. The bus jerked and bounced and rumbled as it took off again. The tires rattled over gravel, then swooshed onto pavement, and they picked up speed. In the distance, she thought she heard the wail of a siren. Was ano
ther cop car out there? Was it chasing them? Or was she imagining things?

  “Damn sucio marranos must’ve called for backup,” Torres said and groaned as Charlie caught her breath.

  Her stomach tightened. Her head came up.

  And her widening eyes immediately fixed on what was planted in the center aisle only a few inches in front of her face.

  A man’s scuffed brown cowboy boot, attached to a long, muscular leg encased in faded jeans, attached to a—

  Charlie kept on looking up, and then her heart stood still.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Michael.

  He stood there, in spirit form, looking as solid and real as any living, breathing human being on the bus.

  If Charlie had been able to say anything, his name would have flown out of her mouth like it had wings.

  “So what’s your plan B?” Sayers yelled, belligerence in every syllable.

  Abell or one of the others replied, but the words didn’t register. All the pandemonium in the bus, the rattling and jolting and shouting and burst of feverish activity as they tried and failed to catch and close the wildly swinging rear door, even her own fear, fell away, blocked by a wave of emotion so strong that it rocked her.

  Michael.

  If she’d been able to move she would have flung herself at him. Not that it would have done any good, because throwing herself at ectoplasm was pretty much the same as throwing herself at thin air, but that’s what she would have done anyway. Instinctively. Because she had never, ever been so glad to see anyone in her life.

  Fortunately, shock paralyzed most of her muscles, including her vocal cords. In those first critical seconds she could neither move nor speak.

  Having traveled up over his wide, white T-shirted chest, her eyes stayed fastened on his face.