Never quite succeeding.
Demi passed the ring back to Trudi, muttering incoherent thanks and ran out of the store, sprinting across the street. A station wagon skidded to a shuddering halt in front of her, horn blaring angrily.
“Good God, Demi! Do you want to get yourself killed?” Granddad yelled, once she was back into the pickup. “What’s got into you?”
“The truth,” Demi blurted, her voice unsteady.
Granddad looked uneasy. He harrumphed. “Well, go easy on the truth,” he advised gruffly. “Dole it out a little bit at a time. Truth is strong stuff. Especially if you’re not used to it.”
“I have to start somewhere,” she said.
The tears started, to Granddad’s dismay. “Oh, honey,” he begged. “Please. Don’t.”
“I can’t stop,” she quavered. “Drive the car and leave me the hell alone, please.”
Grandad did as she asked. Demi covered her face with her hands and sobbed silently all the way back to his house. The sobbing had the extra bonus effect of silencing Granddad’s angry rants. It also intimidated him straight into his den once they got to his house, leaving her to lick her wounds alone at the kitchen table in blessed solitude.
Demi stared blankly at the cup of tea she’d made for herself until the steam stopped rising. She’d forgotten that she was supposed to drink it. After her sob-fest she felt numb and distant, but she kept seeing her father on the floor, by the door. The shame in Boyd’s shifty eyes. The beautiful ring that cost Eric so much more than he could afford.
His grand gesture.
Oh, crap. If she thought about it, she’d start to cry again.
She closed her eyes, rubbing them hard, and saw Eric in her mind’s eye in Otis’s camouflage coat, moving through the woods like a shadow.
The feelings flared up, fighting it out inside her. Stubborn macho idiot. Always had to be the man. She wanted to bash him over his head, but what a waste that would be when she could leap on him instead and tear his clothes off. Run her hands over that fabulous hard body. Stare into those hypnotic eyes. Listen to that deep, scratchy voice. Pin him down. Make him stay. Hers, for-fucking-ever.
This was no time to be thinking of sex. But oh, she’d so much rather dwell on someone who wanted her and valued her. Someone who would fight for her.
Her whole life, her father had only pretended to care. He’d sold her out to save his own skin. On some level, she’d always known it.
Her mind flinched away. She turned her thoughts back to Eric, wondering if he’d seen anything up at GodsAcre. Or, more to the point, if he’d been seen by anyone else.
She sipped her tea with a grimace. It was cold and bitter from steeping so long.
The alarm system chimed. Someone was coming up Granddad’s long driveway. She went to the monitor to check.
Well, look at that. Eric’s Porsche. Her heart jumped. She couldn’t see him through the shadows of the thick, overgrown pines that lined Granddad’s driveway, but she’d know that car anywhere.
But it had only been a couple of hours. Nowhere near long enough to have completed the hike he’d proposed, and get himself back down to town.
Strange, too, that he was driving the Porsche when Otis’s pickup was so much more practical for those rough country roads. Maybe he’d started up that hill and come to his senses. Changed his mind.
But Eric Trask didn’t change his mind. It was one of his defining characteristics.
Well, he’d explain himself soon enough. The Porsche pulled up alongside the kitchen, slowing to a stop when she leaned forward, tapping the glass and waving.
She threw on her jacket. She really ought to tell Granddad they had a visitor, but she preferred to have this conversation in private, especially if it involved any mention of the Prophet’s Curse. That was a subject best avoided in public.
Eric had pulled into the shady corner of the car park right beside Granddad’s pickup, but he didn’t get out. He just tapped the horn, a short blip of sound.
Like he was summoning her. The hell?
She hurried over to the passenger’s side and knocked on the window. She leaned in as it buzzed down, her eyes still adjusting to the dark from the bright light outside.
His face was shadowed in a hooded sweatshirt. He turned to her, and she realized as his arm whipped up. That wasn’t—
Pfffffttt. Vaporized spray hit her face, eyes, nose. Ice cold, burning.
Couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe. Eyes watering, stinging. Nose on fire.
Her face was numb. She couldn’t get enough air to yell. Only gasp and choke.
Darkness dragged her from below, sucking her down.
20
Eric peered down from his perch on the rock tower above the ruins of the GodsAcre compound through the binoculars. It was getting dark, but he’d walked over every part of the place and hadn’t seen any vehicles. He’d seen huge rutted tire tracks from the big earth-moving rigs everywhere, and piles of excavated rock, mostly down the hill toward the entrance to the caverns. Which was now a huge, hollowed out crater in the ground where part of the cavern had evidently collapsed.
That labyrinth of rough caverns had been the feature that had attracted Jeremiah Paley to this land in the first place. Jeremiah had liked the idea of an underground refuge for the dark days that would surely come after the fall of civilization. Over the years, those caverns had been extensively built up. Ceilings and passageways had been reinforced, paths had been smoothed out, electricity and water and ventilation and drainage had been installed. There had been huge storerooms packed full of supplies. Bottles and cans, potable water, freeze-dried food, MREs, fuel, weapons, explosives, electronics, an enormous technical and medical library. Kimball’s large and well-equipped med lab.
He and Mace and Anton had blown it all to hell on the night the fire broke out.
The crater was right at the level where Mace had set the charges. Mace was the pyrotechnics guy. He’d always loved blowing shit up. Anton and Eric had the necessary technical expertise, but they didn’t take quite the same unholy pleasure in it that Mace did.
After that filthy perv Kimball had gotten Anton flogged, they had all decided that they’d had enough. GodsAcre was a living hell. It had to end, and the three of them were the only ones with the nerve to get the job done.
Fiona got away clean, thank God. But the rest of them had paid. In blood and skin.
They had blasted the caverns because GodsAcre was nothing without the caverns and their contents. That was its reason to exist. But they particularly wanted to bury Kimball’s precious lab, if only because all Kimball’s own personal money had been sunk into it, if the rumors were true. So fuck Kimball and his needle-sticks. Sliming on a fifteen-year-old girl. Pedophile prick asshole could watch all his expensive equipment get blown all to shit and then go fuck himself. That had been the plan. Fuck the consequences.
They knew damn well that Jeremiah and Kimball might kill them. They were too angry to care.
Then, they saw the smoke from the building complex up the hill. Flames, glowing a lurid orange above the trees. By the time they ran back, the Great Hall was an inferno.
Everyone had been trapped inside. Someone fastened bolts in place on the armored doors with the big heavy locks…from the inside. Whoever had done that had committed both murder and suicide. The building had no windows to jump out of. It had been built to be an impregnable defense. Those steel doors had been massive.
And now the memories were fucking with him. Rattling him.
So ghostly, the shapes of those familiar buildings, now blackened ruins. Trees he remembered were now dead stumps or else much taller. The Great Hall was a big rectangular block, just the towering, lonely chimney jutting up. Its concrete foundation and heaps of fire-blackened bricks were overgrown with climbing vines, ferns, thick moss.
The place was strewn with garbage. Cans, fast food wrappers, Styrofoam, cigarette butts and plastic bags everywhere. The stench of piss. A lot of men must h
ave been working here for some time now.
But why? There was nothing here worth excavating. Anything in the cavern’s storerooms below would have been buried in broken rock for thirteen years. It would be trashed, crushed, molded, rusted out. And even if there was something, who would want it? Who could be looking for it? Anyone besides the three of them who might have known what was in those caverns was long dead.
Not all of the bodies inside the Great Hall had been positively identified, but Jeremiah and Kimball and most of the adults, the ones with dental records, had been. Eric and his brothers had refused to let Kimball’s name be carved on that monument with Jeremiah and the rest. Kimball’s ashes were probably in a box on in the police station storage closet. Eric didn’t care where that bastard’s ashes were as long as he wasn’t buried along with the GodsAcre people.
Eric heard a car motor down the hill. He crouched, peering between a cleft in the rocks. Headlights strobed through the tree trunks on their way up the hill on the old road. They jogged and jolted past the ruined Great Hall, and on down the newer, muddy tracks that had recently been carved through the hillside in the direction of the collapsed caverns.
Another set of headlights appeared. Then another. A convoy. A big four-by-four truck emerged from the trees, mud spattered. A black SUV. Followed by—what the fuck?
Alarm buzzed inside him. That was his own Porsche, rattling and thudding over the rough terrain, scraping over rocks and ruts. Past the ruins down toward the first plateau. It stopped behind the other two trucks, in a muddy open space near the huge open crater where they had been excavating.
Eric peered through the binoculars as men spilled out of the pickup and the SUV. Two men got out of each. The back of the big SUV popped open. A man got out of his Porsche and walked around to the back of the SUV, gesturing to one of the others.
The two men stared into the car for a moment before reaching inside together and hauling out what looked like a bulky burlap bag.
The bag twitched, jerked. Someone was inside it. One of the men holding it elbowed it savagely.
They hauled the twisting, struggling bag over to where the other three men stood, grouped near the excavated pit. He heard the hum of a generator starting up, and then a bright light shone out. They had switched on a lantern that was strung up on a pole.
A man stepped forward. The one who had driven his Porsche. He was the guy with the black receding hair in a deep widow’s peak and the spotted, fish belly skin, from the funeral, the reception, Benedict Vaughan’s house. The other guy had called him Felix.
Felix looked up into the darkness in Eric’s direction.
“Eric Trask!” he bawled out.
The relative silence of the forest and the natural amphitheater shape of the land on that mountainside amplified his voice. “I know you’re up there!” the guy yelled. “We saw you through the surveillance cameras, you big dumb fuck. You’ve been poking around in our shit for hours.”
Eric crouched, motionless, his hand on the Glock. Waiting for Felix to finish grandstanding and get to the point.
“I suggest you focus your long range camera lens right down here at what I have to show you,” he called out.
Oh fuck. He braced himself. Bad times ahead.
“Poke your head out of the hole. Look at what we’ve got in the bag.”
Eric trained his lens through the cleft in the rock on the struggling figure in the canvas bag. They hoisted the bag upright. He recognized another of the funeral crashers. The slab-faced, beefy, bearded guy who always accompanied Felix. Rocco.
Felix whipped the hood off the figure’s head, releasing a mass of dark, tousled hair. He yanked a cloth out of her mouth. She coughed, gasping for air.
Demi.
* * *
Demi’s shriek of rage choked into a racking cough as they dragged the gag out of her mouth. Her head throbbed with whatever they’d drugged her with. The bag over her head had muffled what was said, but she’d caught the gist of it.
They were going to use her to control Eric.
If she could just stop coughing. The black-haired guy patted her on the back. His breath smelled like death.
“Dry mouth?” he asked solicitously. “Something cold to drink?” He looked around at the garbage scattered around them and reached down for a filthy, crushed Styrofoam cup, the kind fast food joints sold coffee in. He scooped up some filthy brown water from a puddle with it. “Here you go, beautiful.” He heaved the contents straight into her face.
Demi sputtered as the filthy water dripped down her face. “Asshole,” she spat.
“You’re in a canvas bag, you dumb bitch. Be more polite.” He grabbed her face, sealing her mouth and nose shut. Her lungs bucked desperately for air.
Her struggles were weakening. The black wave swept up, rolled over her again...
Consciousness came back. She choked in a little air, coughing and gasping—and the hand clamped over mouth again, so hard she cut her lip with her teeth and tasted blood. He grinned down, and the harsh glare of the lantern cast grotesque shadows over his face. His twinkling dark eyes looked gleeful and crazed. Her vision dimmed again...
“…be more polite?” Whack, he slapped her again. “Pay attention, bitch!”
She spat blood into his face. “Fuck you,” she gasped out.
He wiped his face. “You are a rude, dumb cunt,” he said. “But tonight, you’ll learn manners. You’ll be so eager to please by the time I’m done with you. You’ll do fucking anything to make it stop.”
He grabbed the back of her head, winding her hair through his fingers and called out in Eric’s direction again. “I’m asking one more time. Are you going to be good?” He waited, cocking his head as if listening to her speak, and then forced her head to nod violently. Her hair flopped and swung in front of her with the movement.
“That’s better,” he called. “See? The bitch can be reasonable! She just needs a strong hand. You were too soft on her, Trask. She likes hard discipline.”
She inhaled to speak, and found his hand on her mouth and nose again.
“Trask! I’m going to teach your cunt girlfriend manners now. Think I’ll start by slicing off an ear.” He wrenched her head up, yanking her ear so hard she yelped.
She stared up at a hole in the clouds. A star glinted through it. A bright one, glowing against the blue. Out of nowhere, she thought of the ring he’d gotten her. The love he’d shown. The grand gesture.
“Eric!” she shrieked. “I love you! Run!”
Whack. He rapped the side of her head with his knuckles. “Eric, don’t!” he mimicked, in a taunting singsong tone. “After the ear, we strip her down and take turns picking what tender pink part to cut off next. Waste of a sweet piece of ass, but business is business. And I’ll make it entertaining. Say goodbye to your ear, beautiful.”
She sucked in air, feeling the pressure of the blade—
“Don’t cut her.”
Eric’s voice. Low and calm, and startlingly close.
He emerged like a ghost from the shadows. The gleam of his intense silvery eyes came into focus first, reflecting the lantern-light, and then the shadows around his hooded face took on shape as he moved toward them with soundless grace.
“Hold it right there!” the dark man yelled. “Hands in the air!”
Eric stopped and raised his hands. He tossed the hood back.
Demi felt a blade’s edge against her throat. “I’ve got a razor blade at her jugular,” her captor said. “And it’s your own razor blade, asshole. I took it from the bathroom, down at Otis Trask’s house. It’s all covered with your DNA. Your hair, your skin. Just so we’re clear about how this is going to play out.”
“We’re clear,” Eric said.
“We know you’ve got a gun,” the guy said. “Pull it out. Real slow. Toss it on the ground in front of you. Real slow.”
Eric reached into the coat pocket and pulled out the gun, holding it out so that it dangled from between his thumb and forefinger
. “Let it drop!” the dark guy bawled out. “Two steps back!”
The gun thudded softly to the ground. Eric took a step back. Another.
“Are you carrying any other weapons?”
“No.” Still that quiet, utterly calm voice.
The dark guy jerked his chin at the huge giant with the beard. “Search him,” he said. “And get that gun.”
The big bearded guy marched stolidly over and picked up the gun, tucking it into his coat. He moved around behind Eric, who never took his eyes off her, and started removing things from his pockets. Otis’s camera, the one that they had found in the clock. The big camera that hung around Eric’s neck. The magazines for the gun. Binoculars.
“You killed Otis,” Eric said. “Because he saw your operation?”
“Shut up. You’re wasting my time. Take off your coat. Throw it on the ground.”
Eric did so. No weapons. He was as helpless as she was, but he didn’t look even remotely afraid.
“Take the memory card out of the cameras,” her captor ordered. “Destroy them. Throw both cameras into the pit.”
The bearded behemoth swiftly, mechanically did as he was told, and hurled the two cameras, one after the other, into the excavated pit.
They hit the bottom with a splash.
“What do you want with this place?” Eric asked. “There’s nothing here for anyone.”
“Not your business, punk.”
“Why kill Otis?” Eric asked.
“Kill who? I never hurt anybody. Otis was an old man. He didn’t have a mark on him. Natural causes, fuck-face. I build the narrative. And that’s what the narrative says.”
“My father, too,” Demi croaked it out, against the choking pressure of the man’s arm against her throat. “You killed him, too.”
“Your father was a dumb fuck. He got what was coming to him. Years late, but he got it.”
Headlong: The Hellbound Brotherhood Book Two Page 20
