by Reinke, Sara
What’s wrong with her? John thought, backing away again. She was between him and the front door, the only way out of the apartment. Her patio was to his immediate right, hidden behind the trash bags, but she lived on the second floor.
“Lucy, your mom sent me,” he tried again.
If his repeated mentions of her name registered with her, she didn’t show it. She didn’t say anything, just kept growling at him, her small breasts hitching up and down as she drew in heaving, ragged breaths. Her left leg appeared to be injured or lame and she dragged it behind her as if it was something leaden or paralyzed.
“I’m here to help you,” he said.
With a shrill, scraping cry, Lucy sprang cat-like from beside the breakfast bar, tackling him. She moved so quickly, so utterly unexpected that he didn’t have time to do anything except flounder in startled recoil. She plowed into his chest, knocking him off his feet, sending him crashing to the floor.
He had a split second to see her mouth open wide, her canine teeth elongated and hooked like the vicious fangs of a sabre-toothed cat. John managed to throw his arm between them before she buried those hideous teeth deep into the meat of his neck. Instead, they sank into his forearm, punching through his shirt sleeve. It felt like her mouth was on fire, filled with napalm or acid that seared clear down to the bone. He struggled to shove her away, but she clamped down all the more, holding on with the ferocity of a rat terrier with a ham hock. All the while, she kept growling at him, that savage, guttural sound, even as his blood sprayed up from the bite wounds, peppering her face, spattering into her hair.
“Get off of me!” John yelled, balling his free hand into a fist and pummeling her with it. Again and again, he plowed his knuckles into her head, punching her in the temple, the cheek, the nose, over and over, trying to dislodge her.
He managed to wedge his foot between them, planting the sole of his shoe against her belly. With all of his might, he punted, ripping her fangs loose from his arm and sending her careening backwards, slamming into the far wall. She hit her head hard enough to stun her and she crumpled to the floor.
Clutching his wounded arm to his chest, John stumbled to his feet. What the hell is wrong with her? She was foaming at the mouth! Does she have rabies or something?
“You stay back,” he told her breathlessly as she lifted her head and glared at him, her eyes blood-red. Her lips peeled back to reveal purplish-black gums beneath, and those teeth, those fangs. She hissed at him, a scraping, menacing sound.
“Stay back,” John said again, limping forward, meaning to inch around her and get to the door. When she’d landed atop him, her weight had landed nearly in full against his groin, and his balls throbbed with an incessant, pulsating ache. “You stay the hell away from me.”
She leaped at him again and he danced clumsily backwards, catching her wrists in his hands as she struck him. They swung together in a reeling pirouette toward the living room. He could smell her. Here was the stink of something rotten that had been so pervasive in the apartment. It was Lucy herself.
Her legs locked around his waist and she snapped at him with her teeth, trying to bite his face, his neck, his hands. John ducked and spun as he struggled with her. He tripped over the coffee table and fell again. The cheap wood and brass frame collapsed beneath his abrupt weight. He hit the floor hard and Lucy lunged, sinking her fangs into his throat, catching him at the delta of his shoulder. Her lips clamped against his skin, dry and cold, like the mouth of something dead and embalmed. Just before her mouth formed a fervent seal against his neck, something hot and wet splashed up into his face—blood.
My blood, he realized in stunned horror. Oh, Christ, she’s drinking my blood.
Because Lucy Weston was sucking furiously at his neck, uttering sloppy, sodden slurping sounds. John slapped helplessly at her, trying to push her away. According to her mother, she weight one hundred and five pounds, but at that moment, it felt like Lucy weighed a ton. He couldn’t move her, couldn’t budge her, not to save his own life.
Which, he realized, it may well boil down to.
“Get off me!” he cried, planting his hands against her shoulders and shoving with all of his might. When she fell back, her mouth abandoning his throat, he heard an audible pop! like the breaking of an airtight seal. Her legs tangled against him as she pitched sideways, and he pushed at them as he tried to crawl away, to scramble upright and run. He couldn’t seem to get his feet beneath him, and he felt dizzy, lightheaded, nearly dazed.
Blood loss, he realized, because without Lucy there, with her mouth gone, the wounds in his neck were now shooting freely like geysers, spurting blood with every pounding, frantic measure of his heart.
He clapped his hand against his throat, trying to stave the massive rush with his palm. He staggered to his feet, then felt Lucy’s hands, her fingers like claws, hooking into his pant legs and jerking fiercely, pulling him down again with unbelievable, nearly impossible strength.
He threw both hands out wildly to try and break his fall. In the process, his fingers slipped past something slick—the garbage bags taped over the patio doors—and he clawed until he found purchase, dragging them down with him. As the trash bags fell, the blinds came crashing down, too, sending in a sudden, brilliant flood of bright, blinding sunlight.
Lucy screamed, a horrific, birdlike screech, and then was gone. She didn’t just let him go, but rather, darted to her feet and scrambled back to the bedroom, reeling drunkenly and crashing into furniture and walls, knocking framed artwork to the floor in the process.
After a long moment in which he heard more crashes and heavy thuds from the bedroom, silence fell upon the apartment, except for the sounds of his own frightened, ragged breathing.
He clamped his hand to his neck again and sat up, pushing aside a shroud of black-green plastic and a tangle of vertical blind slats. A broad swath of sunshine had flooded the apartment, pooled on the floor beneath him. In its unyielding glare, he could see the front of his shirt was soaked with blood.
He knew he had to get to a hospital before he bled to death. How much blood does a person have inside them? He struggled to remember. All at once, it seemed hard for him to focus on anything. His vision had gone murky, his mind even more so. And how much can they afford to lose before they die?
He managed to stand, but almost immediately, his head swam and his knees failed him. With a low groan, he fell to the floor again, landing in that puddle of sunlight, out cold and bleeding.
***
The sound of his cell phone ringing woke him. John moaned, his eyelids peeling back slowly, dazedly.
Where am I?
His phone rested on the floor in front of him, less than six inches from his face.
It must’ve fallen out of my pocket when I… he thought. When I…
When I what?
He reached for it. There was something dark brown and crusted on his hand, caked in the folds and crevices of his fingers.
Blood, he realized dimly, bewildered and disoriented as he picked up the phone and, with a flick of his thumb, flipped back the lid. “Hullo?” His voice came out in a hoarse, strained croak. Pushing with his free hand, he tried to lift his head from the ground and tried again. “Hello?”
“Hey,” Sandy said brightly on the other end of the line. “Do you remember that package I was expecting last week? The one where the Fed-Ex guys couldn’t for the life of them get the shipping address correct? They kept wanting to send it to four-twenty-one Mango Drive instead of four-twelve. Do you remember?”
“Uh,” he said, at an absolute loss. Not just as to what she was talking about, but where he was and what had happened to him.
“So guess what was waiting for me at the door when I came back from lunch today?” Sandy said. “No, come on, really. Guess.”
“Uh.” He sat up, blinking blearily around. He’d been lying sprawled in a heap of trash bags and fallen vertical blinds.
“The package. And only three days late. I’m ca
lling Mainline Receiving to let them know they need to demand a refund for their next-day air costs. You know how much extra you have to pay for that? I’m sure Fed-Ex isn’t going to go out of their way to let them know their corporate account was charged for a service they didn’t render through their own gross incompetence, but you can bet your bottom dollar that I’m going to.”
She rambled on and on, while John looked around again in dazed bewilderment at the mess of fallen pictures and broken furniture, telltale signs of a furious struggle.
“So have you made it out to Lucy Weston’s apartment yet?” Sandy asked.
“I’m sitting in the middle of it.”
“Oh, great.” Then, because he didn’t say anything, the cheerful note in her voice faltered. “John? Are you alright?”
He remembered now. His hand fluttered to his throat. His shirt collar was still sticky and soggy with blood. He’d stopped bleeding, but the puncture wounds in his neck, the twin points where Lucy Weston’s teeth had gored him, remained ragged and painful, even to the most fleeting and ginger of touches. He sucked in a soft, hurting breath, jerking his hand away. As he did, he saw his arm, the same semi-circular pattern of puncture wounds midway between his elbow and wrist.
“John?” Sandy said again, sounding worried now.
“I’m okay,” he whispered, and now, wide-eyed, his gaze darted all around the apartment. When he’d pulled the blinds down, the clamor had frightened Lucy, made her run back into the bedroom. Which meant she was still in the apartment with him.
“Let me call you right back, Sandy,” he murmured as he staggered to his feet. Without waiting for her to reply, he thumbed off the phone, closing it against his hip and tucking it back into his pocket.
Glancing around for anything he might use as a weapon, he settled on the brass stand of a fallen lamp. With a sharp jerk, he snapped the cord loose and tossed it aside, then brandished the heavy stock like a club as he limped across the room.
He crept to the bedroom. She’d tried to close the door, but it hadn’t latched, and now stood ajar. Cautiously, his breath bated and the lamp ready in his hand, John pushed the door, sending it swinging inward in a slow, sweeping arc.
It was dark inside, the windows here covered in black plastic like the patio doors had been. But there was enough light from the living room to cast a faint, illuminating glow, and by it, he could see a queen sized bed, the covers and bedspread thrown back and tangled on the floor, and the closet across the way.
There was no sign of Lucy. More significantly, there was no sound of Lucy, none of the hoarse and heavy breathing or the cat-like growling that had given her away before.
He knew he should leave, and the part of him that had nearly bled to death, mauled by the crazed girl’s teeth, was sorely tempted. But the rest of him couldn’t, the part of him that had been a dutiful and diligent police officer; the part that had, as Sandy had so duly noted, not accepted Ruth Weston’s case for the money alone. He thought of the tears in Ruth’s eyes that she’d struggled not to shed and he slipped through the doorway into the bedroom.
“Lucy, are you here?”
The closet doors were the folding, accordion-style, and he pushed one open. Inside, all of Lucy’s hangers lay bare on the rack, her clothes heaped together in a haphazard pile on the floor. More than this, they’d been torn and shredded, pushed this way and that, swept about and matted down.
She’s been here the whole time, living in the closet, he realized in surprise. I’ll be damned. This is some kind of nest.
CHAPTER FOUR
Beep, beep, beep.
John opened his eyes a bleary quarter-mast, allowing in a sliver of muted light.
Beep, beep, beep.
His eyelids peeled back a little bit more and he found himself blinking at the far end of what appeared to be a king-sized bed covered in a quilted sea-foam green bedspread. Beyond this, he saw a nightstand, a wall covered in yellow wallpaper. Non-descript décor in an otherwise non-descript room that was, even to his muddled mind, obviously not his own.
Where am I? he thought.
Beep, beep, beep, he heard again.
And what the hell is that?
With a groan, he pushed himself up, grimacing at the nagging aches as his joints unfurled, then again, more sharply, at an unexpected pain that ripped through his neck.
He reached for his throat, bewildered and alarmed. When he felt a hand towel against the ridge of his shoulder, tucked beneath the collar of his shirt, he remembered.
Lucy attacked me. She bit me.
Once he’d made sure that the girl had been gone from the apartment, he’d limped out to his car and fished a change of clothes from his trunk. Although he’d never been a Boy Scout, he tried to live by their motto—always be prepared—and thus kept a small duffel in the Galaxie at all times, stuffed with a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and a pair of tennis shoes. Nothing that would have helped him only the day before, when he’d been locked out of the marina and forced to recycle his business attire, but suitable enough for freshening up after a one-night stand. Or in this case, an attack by a rabid girl.
He’d cleaned himself up as best he could inside Lucy’s apartment, then not wanting to stick around any longer than had been necessary, he’d left, checking into a nearby Days Inn. Exhausted, weakened, nearly delirious with blood loss, he’d stumbled up to his room, then collapsed face-first onto the bed.
Apparently, he hadn’t moved since.
Beep, beep, beep.
Finally, his mind unclouded enough to recognize that soft but incessant little sound. My cell phone, he thought, looking around. He found it on the floor just inside the motel room door, where it had apparently fallen out of his pocket. Someone had left him a voice mail message and the phone was chirping to let him know.
John staggered to his feet, closing his eyes against a momentary wave of lightheadedness, then shuffled to retrieve the phone. Once he had it in hand, he returned to the bed, sitting against the foot and flipping back the phone’s cover.
Five missed calls? He frowned, then pinched the bridge of his nose, behind which a dull, aching throb was beginning to stir. I didn’t even hear it ringing. How long have I been asleep?
He glanced toward the bay window, across which heavy drapes had been drawn to muffle sunlight from beyond. A thin seam of bright glow lay visible between the dark blue panels, and it felt like it seared through his eyes clear to his skull. John sucked in a sharp, hissing breath and winced as he squinted, turning his head away.
He had new voice mail messages. Thumbing the Send button to retrieve them, he deliberately shifted his position, swiveling his hips to direct his gaze away from the window and that little line of glare.
The first message was from his ex-wife. Which was, he supposed, to have been expected.
“I don’t appreciate you coming by Davis’s office and hassling him,” Bevi said in the recording, her voice sharp. “I’m not stupid, John, and neither is he. How convenient that of all the private detectives in the Florida Keys, Ruth Weston winds up hiring you to snoop around into a case Davis has already closed. What are you doing, hanging out around police headquarters, just waiting for the chance to make him look bad? Did she even get out of the front door before you were on her like some kind of ambulance-chasing, snake-oil selling...”
There was more but he missed it because he shoved the pad of his thumb firmly against the seven button, deleting Bevi’s message in mid-bitch.
The second message was from his mother. Which made him wish he’d continued listening to Bevi.
“I called your office and that nice secretary of yours told me you’d be down near South Shore today,” Wilma Harker said. “I kept waiting to see if you’d call to let me know, since you’d be so close and all, instead of on the opposite side of the island, but I guess you’re not. And I’d thought we could have supper together.” A heavy sigh, one John matched as he clapped his hand over his face. “It’s alright. Really. I’ve got one of those
Banquet frozen dinners I can eat. Meatloaf, I think, although it’s the kind with brown gravy, not tomato paste, and I really prefer the tomato kind. They were on sale at the Publix for a dollar each. The mashed potatoes aren’t real but that’s okay. With enough butter and salt, you can almost make them…”
With a groan, John shoved down on the seven key again. Then again, just to be sure it had worked.
In the next message, Sandy said in a sheepish tone, no greeting in preamble: “I’m sorry about your mom. She gave me the guilt trip. You know I’m a sucker for the little-old-lady-guilt-trips. I tried to call and warn you, but you weren’t answering your phone. And you’re still not answering your phone.”
The next message was Sandy again. “So I guess you’re still mad at me. Which is fine, but I hope you know that’s a silly way to be. I mean, she’s your mom, for crying out loud. Look, Gracie can be totally off-the-wall, but that doesn’t make me love her any less, if only for the fact she once wiped poop off my butt. And it sure doesn’t mean that I don’t return my phone calls or answer my phone for twelve hours, then not show up for work in the morning because I’m off sulking somewhere like…”
What? John blinked, snapping to attention. Did she just say twelve hours?
“…a cat that’s been dunked in the toilet, then…”
He stumbled upright, then went to the window. Not show up for work in the morning? What is she talking about?
“…flushed two or three times for good measure…”
He cried out softly as he opened the drapes, letting in a flood of blinding sunshine. Drawing his hand up, he tried to shield his eyes, but it felt like the brilliant glare had seared his retinas to the backsides of his eye sockets.
“…spinning round and round alongside some nasty leftover floater…”
John stumbled back from the window, glancing blearily toward the bed. On the nightstand, he could see where he’d haphazardly tossed his wallet and loose change from his pockets before collapsing the night before—along with his sunglasses. Squinting, he floundered across the room to grab them, all but cramming them onto his face, diffusing the painful light into a more tolerable, muted shade.
