Runaway Girls

by Skylar Finn

  He didn’t think it would be fair to deny Dana a chance to escape like the others. He could see that he wouldn’t be able to persuade her to leave by simply extending a casual invitation, however. Then she might decline, to her detriment. He would have to be more persuasive than that. Only then would she see that she had an alternative to her superficial life and her quest for popularity.

  He laid Dana gently across the backseat of his car. She looked like Sleeping Beauty. Smiling tenderly down at her, he shut the door gently, locking it as quietly as he could. It wasn’t as though she was going to wake up, but at the end of the day, it was the thought that counted.

  The entire festival had plunged into darkness and chaos in mere minutes. There were muffled cries in the dark as people stumbled around and issued confused cries.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Power must have gone out.

  “Is it the storm?”

  “How could all the generators go out at once?”

  “Is it something else? What was that sound? Is it a twister?”

  Chaos reigned as people began stampeding for the exit. Cell phone lights clicked on and bobbed through the dark. I was afraid they’d start trampling one another, but at that moment, we had a much more pressing concern on our hands than crowd control.

  I stumbled forward blindly through the dark as my hands fumbled in my coat for my Maglite. I clicked it on and cast the beam in the spot where we’d seen Dana before the power went out. I didn’t see her, but I was still ten yards away.

  I pressed determinedly forward. I stopped at the edge of the Ferris Wheel, where she’d stood staring into the dark as if hypnotized like a snake in a basket. I swept my light over the ground, shining it into the dark.

  “Dana!” I called. “Dana Haskell!”

  Harper combined his beam with mine. We pressed farther into the darkness, moving forward in case the girl had simply run like a startled deer when the power went out. There was no sign of her. After minutes that felt like hours, we came to a rusty chain-link fence. There was a person-sized hole torn into it, just about the size of a very tall man.

  Harper held the fence back while I slipped through. I shined my light on the ground. In the fresh mud, a set of tire tracks extended ahead of me and disappeared into the dark. Just like Dana had.

  I threw my light onto the ground and screamed with frustration and rage. How careless and stupid had we been for her to disappear right in front of us? She was just there.

  I felt Harper’s hand on my back. He lifted my mag lite from the ground and slid it into my hand.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  As Harper sped through the streets of the small town, we immediately got sucked into the bottleneck of a hundred people pouring out of the fairground all at once. The tracks had ended where the fairgrounds met the road, and he could have gone anywhere. Harper stuck to the main streets as if we might see a lone vehicle making its way out of town, but it had been insanely easy for him to disappear in the crowd once the lights went out and everyone left the fair en masse. Cars and trucks surrounded us. Any one of them could have held Dana Haskell, driven by the Pied Piper, to a second location.

  We sat in tense silence, stuck in gridlock by the alley I had so recently glanced down as I contemplated the desolation of the town. The Wells Inn towered over us, its deterioration invisible in the darkness. In the dark, it seemed to retain every inch of its previous grandeur.

  Then I saw it.

  Parked along the curb, directly ahead of us, in a way that only fate and coincidence could have brought us there at that exact moment in time, was a black Ford F-150 with Louisiana plates. The license plate was lit up by Harper’s headlights, like the beacon from a lighthouse. I sat up.

  “Harper,” I said.

  He saw it seconds after I did and reacted immediately. The space behind the truck was empty. Harper swung a hard right and drove the car up over the curb and onto the sidewalk. Someone honked loudly behind us.

  We got out of the car, our guns drawn. The building was pitch black like the festival. I remembered Harper’s words that very first day at the coffee shop. There’s something weird about this one. It was a feeling you felt in your very bones. I felt it now.

  It was a chill, a tingling that started at the base of my spine and worked its way up all the way to the top of my head. I knew with complete certainty without justification for how I could possibly know that the Pied Piper was in this building. If he was here, the girls were here. I just prayed they were still alive.

  The front doors were locked. My vision superimposed a memory on the scene before my eyes. It was day. Mid-afternoon, to be exact. There were a couple of men in work boots and overalls when we approached the porch. They glanced up at us, then went back to reading their papers.

  Harper gave a brief jerk of his head, and we went around back. I could hear the voice of the innkeeper as we made our way around the back. We have a couple of long-term rentals. Oil and gas men. There are only two people staying in the place right now.

  It was a dark, moonless night. With the power out and the streetlights off, it seemed that we had plummeted into an endless sea of black. With my light held over my gun, I could just make out the back of Harper’s coat in the single bright circle of light ahead of me.

  This is a small town. They all are up and down the river. Everybody knows everyone else. Not the kind of place you’d steal somebody’s kid and think you could get away with it.

  Harper stopped. I saw he’d found a door at the back. He tried the knob. The door creaked open as if it had been left unlocked for us. As if someone were waiting for us inside, patient as a host awaiting visitors.

  I bet you someone from out-of-state up and took her. Probably waited till he was at the end of a job. Think of how easy it would be just to disappear. From a place no one knows you, has ever even seen you?

  The lobby was eerie and silent, the skeletal frame of a ladder just in front of us. For no good reason, I thought that I mustn’t walk under it, as if avoiding the ladder would determine the fate of the girls and whether we caught the Piper—or he caught us.

  You think if you have a gun and a badge, you’re protected from the bad guys in a way that the average citizen is not. Which is why you protect them. But in the dark with nothing but your wits and your weapon, even with a reliable partner at your side, you know that any moment could be your last. The person you hunt is unpredictable and does not operate by any set of agreed-upon rules that are known to us all. He could be waiting in the dark, hidden by the shadows, to pick us off one-by-one. It would be arrogant to assume that we were the ones doing the hunting. We were also being hunted.

  It was important that we didn’t get caught out, not for the preservation of our own lives but because in that moment, we were the only ones who knew where the three girls who had vanished in the night had gone. We were the only difference, in that moment, between all of them going home to their families, and none of them ever being seen again.

  I couldn’t fail them, not again. Not when I knew they were somewhere in the dark, alone and frightened, with no idea of what might come next. I had already failed them so many times.

  It’s a crying shame, what happened here.

  25

  The Brave One

  Brittany knew it was a risk. They still didn’t know where they were. If they weren’t detected in time, they would die. But they were probably going to die, anyway.

  And she had heard him return, heard his heavy footsteps creaking on the stairs. He would certainly intervene. If they were dead, it would ruin whatever his plans were for them. Surely, they were more valuable to him if they were alive.

  Brittany dragged the cheap bedding off her cot. The sheets were polyester. Fake down filled the comforter. She ripped it open with her teeth and hands and pulled out heaps of the fluffy white synthetic stuff.

  She pulled the curtains down from the window. She dragged the ugly threadbare rug into the center of the room
and threw everything on top of it. She didn’t have an accelerant, so she would just have to rely on the flammable nature of Walmart-bought linens to carry her through.

  She reached into the inside pocket of her denim jacket and took out the lighter she’d casually boosted from Randall. She’d instantly regretted it and felt guilty, like Crystal or her mom would find out and yell at her, and Crystal would stop hanging out with her and being her friend forever.

  Now, she was grateful she had done it. Though she promised herself that if she got out of this alive, she’d never engage in any more of her stupid delinquent antics ever again.

  Brittany held the lighter up to the fluffy white bedding and flicked it. It went up at once, releasing an unpleasant smell as it smoked and burned. If he smelled it, he would come running to the source and unlock the door. He wouldn’t see her through the smoke, and she could slip out the door while he put out the fire.

  The smell of smoke and burning material was overpowering. She wondered if she could also smell Crystal’s bedding on fire, too. In the drawing on the note, as rudimentary as a cave painting, it depicted the two of them using everything around them to build fires. Someone would see them or smell them and call for help, or he would come to put them out and open the door, giving them their chance to escape.

  The room filled with smoke, and the smell was overpowering. Brittany got on her stomach on the floor and got as close to the door as possible. He’d left the slot for her tray open for the first and only time, not bothering to pull the plywood back across. He’d never been that careless. Was that her last meal?

  Either way, the open space provided much needed fresh air. It was stale, damp basement air, but it felt fresh compared to the smoky room. It was getting smokier and hotter by the second, but still, no one came. Brittany felt fear wash over her. The fire was getting big enough that she wasn’t sure she could put it out. She’d used all her bedding to build it and didn’t know what to throw over it to smother the flames. Could she get enough water from the toilet, the sink?

  But she was getting light-headed from breathing in the smoke. Brittany clawed at the door, frantic, panicking. What a stupid, senseless, terrible idea. Imagine surviving all that time without being murdered only to kill themselves. She wondered if the police would realize how stupid they had been or if they would think the man who took them had killed them by setting the building on fire. She hoped it was the latter. It seemed stupid that she could still be concerned right now about how this would look later on after she was dead, but she was.

  She rattled the doorknob, red hot and getting hotter by the second. She gave a cry of pain that turned to shock when a blast of cool air from the hallway hit her. The door swung inward.

  It had never been locked.

  Brittany stumbled into the hallway in a state of shock. Between the fire and the fear, it was hard to untangle her frantic thoughts. Had he ever locked her in? Had she ever tried the door? Or even the window? Or had she just assumed that he must have locked her up and thrown away the key?

  He was so careful to slide the plywood back when he removed the tray from her meals. She felt sure it was because the narrow opening—had she even been able to fit through it, which of course, she could not—had been the only way out of the room. Had he simply made her believe it? How easily she had fallen for all his tricks. It was probably funny to him. Going back to wherever he went during the day and thinking of the foolish girls, sitting in unlocked rooms, waiting obediently and patiently for him to show up and feed them like hamsters too dumb even to try and escape their cages.

  Crystal. Was Crystal’s room unlocked, too? What if it was too late? What if she had already suffocated? Brittany stumbled down the hall, leaning one hand against the cement wall for support. She felt lightheaded from the smoke. She had to get to Crystal before it was too late.

  She ran, her breath jagged and uneven. The hall seemed endless. At the end of it, she thought for a second that she’d come to a dead end. There was a wall in front of her. Glancing to her left, she saw a sharp turn into an adjacent corridor.

  Brittany ran down the second hall, completely winded and out of breath. At the very end, she could see a doorway. The door was open, the door ajar. Crystal.

  She felt certain she was seconds from seeing her friend and saving her. She didn’t realize until she got to the room that there was no trace of either fire or smoke. She stopped before the open doorway and doubled over, trying to regain her breath. She straightened up slightly and squinted through burning red eyes, looking for Crystal.

  The room was empty.

  Dana awakened in a dark room and sat up. She fumbled next to her, where her nightstand at home would normally be. She found a lamp and turned it on. Light immediately flooded the room. It was strange because she thought the power went out earlier at the festival. What had happened?

  She looked around the room, confused. It wasn’t her bedroom at home. It looked like a hotel. Was this where Park Sangsoon was staying? The last thing she remembered seeing was Park Sangsoon’s manager. But where was Park Sangsoon?

  Dana went over to the window. She was on the second floor. She saw a dark street below, packed with cars. She felt confused. It looked like Sistersville, but where had all the people come from? Was the festival over already? What time was it? If she didn’t find Jenny Lundgren and make it back by eleven, her mom would murder her. Murder her and never let her go out with her new friends again.

  She went over to the door, and just as she was about to open it, she heard heavy footsteps in the hallway. Scary footsteps. She paused. Who was here? Was it Park Sangsoon’s bodyguards? She swayed on the spot, woozy and uncertain. She felt a little bit sick like she might throw up. Vaguely, she remembered the scarf. She felt as though the scent was still in her nostrils. Where had the manager gone? What was going on?

  There was a pounding on the door, and Dana fell back onto the floor, scared. She curled up in the corner in a ball. She didn’t know what was going on anymore. She just wanted to go home.

  She hid her face in her hands as if she could disappear inside of them. Just before the door burst open, she thought she detected the smell of smoke.

  We found Dana Haskell curled up in a ball in the corner of a room on the second floor. We’d checked the upstairs first for any sign of the Inn’s two sole guests. Strangely, Dana’s light was still working. It illuminated the room in a warm, golden glow.

  “Dana?” I crouched on the floor beside her. “It’s me, Agent St. Clair.”

  She looked up at me bleary-eyed, confused. “Where’s Park Sangsoon?” she asked.

  “Who?” asked Harper.

  “She’s been drugged,” I said. “Dana, do you know where Brittany and Crystal are?”

  “They went missing,” she said, sounding bewildered. “No one knows where they are.”

  She didn’t even realize she had been taken. I thought of the size of the place. One of us would have to stay with Dana and get her outside to safety, to call for back-up. The other would have to sweep the building alone.

  I looked up at Harper, but his eyes were no longer on us. His expression was distant, his nostrils flaring. “Do you smell that?” he asked.

  It smelled like smoke.

  The building was on fire.

  He could hear Dana asking about her pop star as he ferried his remaining charge past the room. He sighed deeply. He had thought, outside the confines of her ridiculous existence, she might be able to think of something slightly less asinine than a handsome pop star she admired. He had overestimated her. In his defense, it had been difficult not to. She was just so pretty.

  When he opened the door to Crystal’s room, she looked up, wide-eyed as a raccoon caught in the garbage. She froze. He supposed she thought he was there to kill her, especially considering she looked to be in the process of attempting to set her room on fire. That wasn’t his intention at all. He hated when they thought he planned to kill them. It was their families who were killing them. He
was there to set them free.

  “Do you want to stay? Or go?” he asked.

  “What?” Her nostrils flared. She looked like a trapped animal, glancing wildly around the room.

  He stepped aside from the doorway to indicate she could run right past him and leave. She sat frozen on the floor, afraid to come anywhere near him. He sighed.

  “You can go home now if you want,” he said.

  “Mister, is this a fucking joke?” she said.

  He smiled. He had always liked that about her, that firecracker nature of hers. Brittany was a little bland. Dana, a little bit dense. But this one? This one was just right.

  “You can go now,” he said. “If you want. You can go home to your mom. You can keep living in that house. You can go back to school. You can keep taking all your classes. Doing the mindless little assignments you hate that mean nothing, assignments you’ll never apply to your life or ever use again. Making time with the dumb football jocks in the woods behind the school. Drinking and smoking and still just feeling oh-so-empty inside. I know all about you, Crystal Deakins. I know your life. Is that really the life that you want?”

  She looked at him for a long time. Around the corner and down the hall, the acrid smell of smoke emitted from Brittany’s room. She had gone through with their little plan, the foolish girl. She didn’t need to light anything on fire.

  But wasn’t she always lighting things on fire, from her grades to her relationship with her family to her entire life, by talking to him? By getting into the car with him? He thought it was a respectable appetite for destruction, for deconstruction really, but when push came to shove, she’d reacted like a frightened little girl who just wanted to go home. She was a disappointment, like so many of the others. But not this one.

  He held out a hand. She reached up and took it.