by Bryan Smith
Missy knelt and set her big tote bag on the floor. She pulled out some clothes and tossed them aside. Then she reached into the bag and pulled out a plastic bag with a Walgreens logo. She opened the Walgreens bag and dumped its contents on the floor.
Rolls and rolls of gray duct tape. A dozen, maybe more.
Chuck groaned inwardly.
The situation was already seventy-seven shades of fucked-up, but the prospect of being restrained made it so much worse. He would be helpless, incapable of fighting or resisting. Maybe he should try one more desperate run to freedom while his hands and legs were still free.
Missy must have sensed his thoughts.
She got up and came over to him in two quick, long strides. The gun barrel was right in his face this time and he instinctively cringed away from it. “You’re not going anywhere, fuck-o.”
Chuck felt like crying, but somehow the tears wouldn’t come.
He was becoming numb inside.
Rob and the girls scooped up rolls of duct tape and set about the task of taping the four of them to the chairs. Rob started with Chuck, pulling his wrists together behind the back of the chair and then winding more than a dozen layers of tape around them. The son of a bitch was very thorough. Chuck tested the tape. There was no give at all. Maybe he wasn’t into this, but it was clear he would do whatever Missy wanted. Chuck felt that little flicker of hope snuff out as Rob used a full roll of tape to secure each of his legs to the chair legs.
Yes. Very, very thorough.
Just like a concentration-camp guard.
Chuck looked at Emily and frowned. They hadn’t dealt with her yet. She didn’t seem afraid anymore. In fact, she was smirking and her eyes gleamed with that same mad glee he’d seen in the younger girl’s eyes.
“Emily—”
She came at him fast and whipped a hand across his face. It was a hard blow and it snapped his head hard to the right. A bright flash of pain set his cheek ablaze with pain, but that was a minor thing compared to what he felt when her arm swung back around and she backhanded him, her knuckles mashing a nose still tender from the beating he’d received earlier in the week. A spike of agony slammed through the center of his head. She slapped and backhanded him several more times. Through it all, he was dimly aware of the confused and startled voices of his friends. Even Joe wanted to know what the hell was wrong with her.
Emily stopped hitting him and seized a handful of his hair to hold his head steady. His face throbbed and he stared at her through eyes bleary with tears. She spat in his face. “My hand hurts.”
He coughed and blinked at her. “Wh-what?”
She was smirking again. “My hand hurts, you fucking asshole. But it’s totally worth it. I can’t wait to see what Missy does to you.”
“You…know her?”
“Obviously. Now I have a question for you. Where’s Zoe?”
Missy had been standing back, watching the scene with an expression of mild amusement. Now she frowned. “Who’s Zoe?”
Emily let go of Chuck’s hair and turned toward her. “She’s Chuck’s girlfriend. Remember the hot blonde with us at Starbuck’s?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s Zoe.”
Missy’s frown deepened. “We need to find her.”
The bald girl moved closer to Missy. “We’ve checked all the rooms. All empty.”
Emily looked at Chuck and smiled. “She must be down at the beach. I’ll go get her.”
Chuck bucked against his bonds. “You bitch! You backstabbing cunt!”
The bald girl offered Emily a big hunting knife crusted with flecks of what had to be dried blood. “Here, take this.”
Emily smiled again and waved off the offer. “Won’t need it.” She shot another leering smile Chuck’s way. “Zoe’s not happy with me right now, but deep down, she loves me. She really does. And there’s nothing I can’t talk her into when I put my mind to it. She’ll come back with me hand in hand, never guessing anything’s wrong.”
Missy nodded. “So go. But make it fast. I’m itching to get started.”
Emily winked at Chuck and departed without another word. Chuck’s eyes tracked her across the room and out the shattered door, his soul seething with hatred unlike anything he’d ever experienced. He wanted to scream out a warning, but knew Zoe would never hear it over the wind and the sounds of the ocean. And he didn’t want to exhaust his strength by exercising his lungs. He would need every ounce he could spare for the ordeal ahead.
He couldn’t wrap his mind around what Emily was doing. She was a mean bitch, sure, but there were a lot of those in the world, just as there were a lot of mean, cold-hearted bastards. But there was a huge chasm between this and just being mean.
This was betrayal on a level beyond his comprehension.
It wasn’t human.
It was…evil. Yes, evil. It was a strange thing to think, but it was true. There was a devil living in that girl’s heart. She’d surrendered her soul to darkness.
He thought about the things she’d said about Zoe and wanted to weep.
Because he knew they were all true.
A dark figure came striding down the beach toward her as Zoe emerged dripping wet from the ocean. She wiped salt water from her eyes and smoothed her hair back, which fell in a thick, wet sheet across her shoulders. It was too dark to discern the figure’s identity from this distance, but instinct told her it was Emily. A surge of anxiety swept through her as she slogged through the wet sand toward the row of canvas chairs where she’d left her things. She gathered up her beach towel and wrapped it around her waist like a sarong. She glanced up as she stuffed a hardback novel into her tote bag and was unsurprised to find her hunch verified.
Emily had closed to within ten yards.
She smiled as Zoe’s eyes locked with her. “Hi.”
Zoe didn’t return the smile. She didn’t want to talk to Emily. Not right now. She didn’t want to start bawling. But she couldn’t just ignore her and walk on by. Well, she could, but it didn’t feel right. “I was just about to go back inside.”
Emily’s smile faltered slightly. “You mind if I at least walk back with you?”
Zoe suppressed a groan. “I don’t know, Emily.”
Emily came closer, stopping just a few feet in front of her. “Look, I know this has been a rough week. Nobody’s happy with me. Not even Joe, believe it or not. But you’re the only one who matters, Zoe.” Her voice became thick with emotion. She sounded on the verge of tears. It made Zoe feel bad. “You…you’re my best friend. My only real friend. Please just let me walk with you and say a few things. We don’t have to have a real talk until you’re ready.” A single tear traced a slow trail down one of her cheeks. “Would that be okay? Please?”
Zoe felt her heart begin to melt. And though it went against her better judgment in light of all that had happened, she found herself unable to deny Emily’s request. She really was her best friend. Still. Even now. Accepting this frightened her because she had no idea how things would shake out in the end. There were her other friends to consider. They all hated Emily. It wasn’t fair. She was an adult. Shouldn’t she be able to choose her own friends? She sighed. “Okay. But—”
She gasped as Emily grabbed her and pulled her close. Emily kissed her. Her tongue slid between her lips and tangled with Zoe’s tongue. Zoe braced her hands on Emily’s shoulders and tried to push her away, but Emily tightened her embrace and kept kissing her. The towel came loose and slid to the ground. Zoe tried to wrench her head away, breaking the kiss for the slightest moment before Emily’s mouth found hers again. This time she kissed back.
Jesus fuck, what am I doing?
She braced her hands on Emily’s shoulders again and shoved with all her strength. This time the embrace was broken and Emily staggered back several steps. The strange thing was, she didn’t look pissed. She was still smiling. She licked her lips. “You always taste so sweet.”
Zoe scooped up her towel again, grabbed her tote bag
, and gave Emily a wide berth as she started up the beach toward the house.
Emily hurried after her. She slowed a bit as she came up alongside Zoe, matching her stride for stride. “Remember that night in the hotel room?”
Zoe didn’t say anything.
Emily laughed. “You sure didn’t have any inhibitions that night. I guess the coke helped loosen you up. I’ve still got some, you know.”
“I don’t care.”
“Liar.”
The dune and the little bridge beyond were coming up fast. Anxious to be back inside and away from Emily’s discomforting insinuations, she picked up her pace to trudge up the grassy dune.
Emily gave her a little sideways shove as they reached the bridge and moved into the narrow space ahead of her.
Zoe glared at her as she followed her onto the bridge. “Hey! What the fuck was that?”
Emily laughed and kept moving. She didn’t respond.
Zoe’s anger surged. “Seriously, that was really fucking rude. What’s your problem?”
Even as she asked the question, Zoe figured she knew the answer. Emily wasn’t used to having her advances spurned. She was very self-centered and couldn’t abide rejection in any form. Some of Zoe’s anger subsided as she realized it was at least partly her fault. A lot of her recent behavior had laid the groundwork for situations like this. If she’d always rejected Emily’s amorous overtures, this wouldn’t be happening now.
“I’m sorry.”
Emily stopped at the far end of the bridge and turned to face her. She had moved fast and was some twenty yards ahead of where Zoe stood. Her figure was a dark outline in the dim moonlight. “Really?”
Zoe stopped five feet away from her. “Yeah.”
Emily smiled. “Wanna go back down to the beach?”
“No.”
Emily’s smile vanished. “Whatever.”
She turned away from her again and stepped off the bridge, but she moved slower as she continued down the dune to the gate at the back of the fence. Emily opened it and they stepped inside. Zoe paused inside the gate to wash the sand off her feet with the hose. Emily lingered, waiting for her. It struck her as passing strange. She sensed their conversation was over. There was no more to say on the subject of their endangered friendship until later. But Emily seemed to want to stick close anyway. Whatever. It didn’t matter. She’d head back to her own room once they were back inside. No way she’d want to hang around upstairs with Chuck, not after this afternoon’s debacle.
Zoe shut the hose off and started across the deck, angling toward the staircase leading up to the balcony.
Emily followed, hanging close, almost on her heels.
Zoe glanced over her shoulder at the other girl.
She frowned.
Emily was smiling, but her eyes looked hard, malevolent.
Weird.
She started up the stairs and heard the slap of Emily’s sandals on the stairs beneath her. The first little flutter of alarm hit her as she glanced down and again saw that same vaguely evil expression. But that was forgotten as they reached the balcony and Zoe saw the broken shards of glass sprayed across the wooden beams. An accident, she assumed. But why hadn’t someone cleaned it up? This could be dangerous. She wasn’t wearing shoes or sandals and would have to—
“zoe! run!”
Zoe frowned again.
Chuck?
She heard pain in that voice. And terror. Something was horribly wrong here. She heard something else in the house. A whimper. A female sound. More evidence of something very bad happening. Then terrible, gleeful laughter. The laughter of a sadist. Followed by a scream.
Zoe moved back a step.
And she felt a hand at the small of her back.
The hand shoved her forward. She cried out as broken glass slashed at the soles of her bare feet. Emily grabbed her by an arm and wrenched her toward the space formerly occupied by a large pane of glass.
A glimpse of hell made her weak in the knees.
Emily shoved her again. Shards of glass still embedded in the door frame ripped at her flesh as she flew through the empty space and crashed to the hardwood floor. She rolled onto her side and stared straight up at Chuck. His face was streaked with tears. His mouth moved as he tried to speak, but he couldn’t force the words out.
Oh, Chuck…
She felt a foot on her shoulder. It pressed down, forcing her to lie flat on her back again. She looked up and saw a familiar face above her. Familiar, but not the face of someone she knew. It was her. She looked different, but it was definitely her. The girl Chuck had picked on at the coffee shop.
The killer.
Missy Wallace grinned. “Glad you could join us, Zoe. Now we can finally get this party started.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
March 27
Julie held her hand a few inches over the burner. Heat warmed her palm as the metal coil began to glow a bright red. The kitchen was spacious and modern, with an island and lots of gleaming fixtures. To the left of the stove was a counter crowded with various snack foods. Bags of chips and boxes of cookies, among other things. She reached into an open bag of tortilla chips and plucked one out, popping it in her mouth and savoring the salty taste. She was tempted to gobble down the whole bag. There hadn’t been a lot of opportunities to eat since yesterday. The pantry and fridge in that old guy’s home had been pretty bare. She’d been kind of irritated about that and hadn’t felt at all bad about sawing his ear off.
Her palm was hot now.
The big hunting knife was on the counter. She picked it up and placed the blade across the glowing burner coil. Someone screamed in the living room. A sound of unimaginable agony. Missy was probably doing something pretty interesting to one of the college kids. It wouldn’t be Rob. He never participated. She turned away from the stove and saw him standing several feet away from the action.
He sure looked nervous.
Maybe she could calm him down.
Leaving the knife on the burner, she walked into the living room. “Hey, uh…Missy?”
Missy paused in the act of torturing the one called Joe with a pair of pliers and looked at her. “Yeah?”
“Can I borrow Rob for a few minutes?”
Rob stopped staring at the floor long enough to look up and frown.
Missy clamped the pliers around one of Joe’s fingers again. “Sure.”
Julie took Rob by the hand and began to drag him out of the living room and down the hallway toward the master bedroom. Once they were in the room, she removed her clothes and stretched her naked body across the luxuriant bed.
“Fuck me, Rob.”
Rob glanced at the open door. Julie could see the backs of the people tied to the chairs from her vantage point. Rob wiped his mouth with a trembling hand and looked at her. “Shouldn’t we close that?”
“No.”
Rob sighed.
“I want to hear the screams clear as a bell. It’ll make it hotter.”
The look on Rob’s face was priceless. She saw horror and disgust. And fear. He was afraid of her. But not too afraid, apparently.
He began to unbutton his shirt.
The orgasmic screams emerging from the master bedroom disturbed Annalisa almost as much as anything else that had happened so far. How could anyone sane pause in the midst of committing atrocities to screw?
The answer to that was obvious.
These people weren’t sane. They were vicious and cruel. They derived great pleasure from acts of sadism. Well, the two girls did. Their behavior bothered the guy, she could tell. But his presence made him equally complicit. And maybe he wasn’t a sadist, but he was clearly twisted in his own way. He was screwing a young girl’s brains out while listening to people out here scream and cry. He was just as sick as his female companions. The only real difference was his apparent cowardice.
These people meant to kill them all. She had no illusions about that. This was the last night of her life. It scared her. She didn’t want to
die. She didn’t want to hurt like Joe was hurting now. Her only comfort now was her firm belief in an afterlife. She was smarter than the average person. Her grades and IQ scores confirmed that. A lot of smart people didn’t believe there was anything beyond this life, but her faith in something bigger was strong and came from a place of calm, even in the face of all this horror. She would exist somewhere else in some form after her life here was over. She only hoped Sean would be there with her.
She looked at Emily.
Zoe was still lying flat on the floor, but now she was on her stomach. Emily sat on her back, pinning her there. She looked totally enthralled as she watched Missy torture Joe. All five fingers of Joe’s right hand were mangled wrecks. The digits were twisted in different directions. In more than one place a bit of broken bone poked through torn flesh. Joe was shaking and sobbing in his chair. This was the man Emily supposedly loved. She hadn’t actually loved him, of course. It was just another of her many deceptions. She didn’t know or understand the connection between Emily and these psychos, but it didn’t matter. Knowing wouldn’t change anything.
She heard footsteps from the hallway and glanced that way to see the bald duo returning from their bedroom romp. The guy wouldn’t look at them. He shuffled off out of view again while the girl went back into the kitchen. She returned to the living room a few seconds later, the big knife she’d threatened them with earlier in her hand again. Annalisa felt a pit open up in her stomach as the girl came right up to her.
“Look at me.”
Annalisa raised her head and looked the girl in the eye.
The girl smiled. “You’re pretty.”
Then she grabbed a handful of Annalisa’s hair and wound it in a tight knot to hold her head steady. Annalisa’s eyes jittered in their sockets as she watched the girl’s other hand slowly bring the big blade toward her face. She felt the heat of it as it closed to within inches of her flesh. She cried and started breathing faster.
Someone was saying, “Nonononononono…”
