Snap, Crackle ...

by Dale Mayer

  Once again, Beth was troubled by the awareness that Lizzy was not here for Hunter. Lizzy would have said, To hell with it, and then run, looking after herself. But, no, not who Beth was. She kept moving through the darkness, until she heard the voices a whole lot clearer. She climbed up to the cabin and peered around the corner.

  “You will never stop me.”

  “Well, I can always just kill you right now, correct?” Hunter said, in a bored tone.

  That stopped Beth in her tracks. Would he really? Or was it just a bluff? She had to believe it a bluff. She didn’t think Hunter would kill indiscriminately like that. Although, if this asshole tried to kill them one more time, she might take him out herself. Where was that fine line? But, in this case, most likely self-defense. Still, if they let the gunman go, he would just come after them again.

  “You still can’t stop me.”

  “Meaning that you have a way to stay alive after death?” Hunter asked curiously.

  At that, the other man laughed. “Wow, you’re one of those far-out psychic people, aren’t you?”

  “And what are you?”

  “I’m a scientist,” he said proudly. “And I’ve seen things that you have no idea about.”

  Hunter nodded. “So have I,” he said calmly. “And this isn’t a pissing contest. I want to know what it is you want with Beth.”

  “I’ve already told you. I’m trying to save her.”

  “From what?”

  He burst out laughing again. “From herself, but I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “Good, because I don’t have a clue,” he said.

  “Untie me,” the other man commanded.

  “That’s not happening.”

  “You need to,” he said. “She’s a danger, I’ve already told you that.”

  “So why is it you’re to rescue her then? It sounds to me like you just want to put her down, like a sick dog.”

  “More like a mad dog maybe,” he said in an ugly tone.

  “I don’t like that,” Hunter said. “I can’t imagine that she’s done anything to deserve that.”

  “That’s because you’re a fool,” the other man snapped. “But, hey, it’s your life, your death. I really don’t care.”

  “Meaning?”

  “She’ll turn on you like the rabid dog she is. You won’t know where, and you won’t know when, but it will happen.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Hunter said in that same calm voice.

  Beth listened intently, looking hard for any doubt in Hunter’s tone, not finding any. Hunter seemed very sure of his answer. That revelation helped to warm her chilled body on the inside. She wondered how that unwavering trust Hunter had for her could even be. He didn’t know her, didn’t know anything about her. For all they knew, this guy was correct. Maybe she had hurt people in the past. Maybe she was a danger to the world. It would break her heart if she were, and she definitely didn’t think it true. It didn’t feel like she was a killer.

  But so much in her world that she didn’t know, that she couldn’t remember, that just wasn’t working for her. She’d been hiding and blocking out her past because that was the only way she was capable of functioning in her present. Just so many ugly memories, so much pain, and so much torture. Even now, if she let herself go in that direction, the thoughts and feelings and pain would overwhelm her, and she’d be completely incapable of handling what was to come.

  She stepped through the back door into the dark cabin and said, “Glad to see you’ve caught him.”

  Hunter glanced at her. “How long have you been listening?”

  She shrugged. “Long enough. Now that you’ve got him, I’ll go get changed.” Her teeth chattered with the cold.

  “Looks like you need to go fast,” he said. “Maybe have a hot bath.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice,” she said, “but I can’t say I feel very safe with this guy sitting here.” Even as she stood here, she felt the intensity of the stranger’s gaze. She studied him, her eyes adjusting to the sparse lighting. “I don’t even know who you are. Why do you hate me so much?”

  “Remember,” he commanded.

  An inkling of something stirred in the back of her mind, a voice almost remembered and yet not. She stared at him. “I can’t remember anything,” she confessed. “Something about your voice is a bit familiar, but that’s all.”

  “Only because you’re choosing not to remember,” he said. He gave her a hard smile. “I will help you to remember, if you let me.”

  “And why would I want to?” she said. “It doesn’t sound like anything is in my past that I want to be aware of.”

  “Are you scared?” he taunted.

  “Maybe,” she said, with utter honesty. “I don’t have a clue what it is that you think I’ve done, but none of it sounds like anything I want to own up to.”

  He gave a brutal laugh. “You never used to stick your head in the sand.”

  “No,” she said, “but a lot of things have changed.”

  “Not that much,” he said. “The reality is, you’re not who you think you are.”

  “Yes, I am,” she said calmly. “That much I do know.”

  “No,” he whispered, “you are who you want to be now, but you’re not who you used to be.”

  “Well, whoever I used to be,” she said, “is dead and gone. I am me now.”

  “And who and what is that?” he asked. “Because it’s not the person I see standing in front of me, content to be oblivious to everything in her world.”

  “You don’t even know me,” she said, “so you have no right to make that judgment.”

  “I know you better than anybody else,” he stated. “I raised you since you were a child.”

  She stopped and stared. “You? No.” She shook her head. “No. I would know.”

  “And what is it that you would know?” he asked.

  “I’d recognize you. Besides, if you were the asshole who kept me prisoner all that time, no way we’ll let you go.”

  Hunter said, “You just became someone the police want to see.”

  At that, the other man laughed and laughed. “If you think I’m staying anywhere long enough for the police to show up, think again,” he said. “There’s a reason she was with me. She is extremely talented.”

  “And you wanted to utilize that talent?” Hunter asked.

  “We wanted to study it,” he admitted. “He wanted to study you. He wanted to see how much you could do, how hard and how fast you could progress.”

  She felt an inkling of truth to that because she did know the competitiveness inside herself. “And I wonder how much of that was you pushing me,” she said calmly, hiding the fear inside her that even now stretched forward from deep inside.

  “You can hide, but you can’t hide from yourself.”

  “Sure I can.”

  “Not for long,” he said and shook his head. “For a little while, yes, everybody can do that. Self-delusion isn’t a brand-new phenomenon,” he murmured. “You can hide for a while, but it doesn’t do you any good.”

  “It feels like it does,” she said, “because I don’t know who and what you were talking about before, but I was not a danger to anybody.” She stopped, wondering if she should ask that question. His gaze was steady and hard but full of enlightenment, and she knew he had the answers that she desperately wanted. “Where is Lizzy?” she demanded.

  One eyebrow shot up, and he gave her one of the coldest, clearest smiles she’d ever seen.

  The two men in this were a stark comparison of this evil man to Hunter—two extremes. Why had she been so uncooperative with him, with Stefan? Yet she knew this evil man from before. Should have initially seen Hunter and Stefan for the goodness that they were, that they put forth into this world. Why was this never so clear as right now?

  “Where is Lizzy?” he repeated. “She’s always around,” the gunman said, with a careless shrug. “You know that.”

  “I don’t know anything,” she said
calmly. “She talks to me sometimes.”

  He nodded. “She was always good at that. You two, were …” He let his voice drop away.

  “Close. Yes, I know,” she said. “We were close. Up until she became a traitor.”

  At that, he didn’t seem to know what to say. “All I can tell you,” he said, “is that you need to come back. We need to help you find your memories again.”

  “I’m okay not remembering,” she murmured. “Nothing from those days is nice enough that I want to remember.”

  Hunter, at her side, asked, “Will you live with that though?”

  “I have to,” she said, “because I don’t trust anything this man says.”

  Hunter nodded in agreement. “I’m with you there,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean we don’t have other ways to help you remember things.”

  At that, the other man looked alarmed. “You can’t. Her psyche is very delicate. It has to be somebody who knows and understands what’s going on.”

  “That sure as hell will never be you,” she said brutally. “Not in any lifetime.”

  He glared at her. “You don’t know that,” he said, “and you need to watch your mouth. It seems like being free all this time has done nothing for your manners.”

  “Manners? … From you?” she said, with a snort. “No, it probably didn’t help at all. But I’ll listen to you about absolutely nothing.”

  He shrugged and said, “You’ll know eventually. Whether it happens now or in ten years,” he said, “the truth will come out.”

  “That’s nice,” she murmured, “but it still doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “I am your truth,” he snapped. “And, in time, you’ll be eager for me to give you the answers you are desperate for.”

  “I’m not that desperate,” she said. “I’ve survived without you all these years. I’ll survive for a whole lot longer.”

  “I found you,” he murmured, “so what do you think it’ll take for Lizzy to find you?”

  “She’s already looking. I think she’s already found me,” she said, with a shrug. “As far as I know, she doesn’t give a damn.”

  “Oh, she cares,” he said, his voice quiet. “She cares a lot. You are just being difficult.”

  “I was always difficult to you,” she said. “Some things just never change.”

  He laughed at that. “Isn’t that the truth?” he murmured, studying her. He turned toward Hunter. “Where did you find him?”

  “Maybe he found me,” she said, tossing her hair in defiance.

  “He’d be an interesting one to test, wouldn’t he now?” he said, as if inviting her to share in the joke of their past.

  She stiffened. “There was nothing fun about any of that testing,” she said. “You hurt people.”

  “No, you hurt people,” he said calmly.

  “I had nothing to do with it. You forced me,” she screamed at him.

  Immediately Hunter reached out a hand. “Easy,” he said. “Remember. This is what he wants. He wants you to lose control.”

  She pulled back, gasping for breath. “Too easily,” she murmured.

  The gunman taunted her. “Oh, but you always had a control issue. I helped you with it, but somehow you just never got smart enough to handle it on your own. I thought that, after all this time, maybe you would have improved, but it looks like you still have some of your inherent weaknesses.”

  “We all have inherent weaknesses,” Hunter said immediately.

  “Stop defending her,” he said. “I know who she is inside and out. You haven’t a clue.”

  “Says you,” Hunter snapped right back.

  She shook her head. “No. He’s right, honestly. You don’t know. He does. But I’m still not going back with him.”

  “Good,” Hunter said, “and stop feeling like just because I don’t know everything doesn’t mean that I don’t have a good idea of who you are at your core. He isn’t the be-all and end-all of your existence.”

  “Well, that’s good,” she said, “because that would be beyond depressing. He’s not a nice man.”

  “Of course I am,” he said. “As much as any of us are. I don’t worry about the social niceties that everybody else seems to worry about. Why should I? Scientifically speaking, that is simply not helpful.”

  “You mean, it didn’t further your own agenda, so who cares?” Hunter said.

  “Of course,” he said. “It’s not like being nice gets you anywhere, and it sure as hell doesn’t help you progress in life,” he murmured. “As you well know, Beth. You tried being nice. We ran all kinds of tests.”

  “No, they weren’t tests,” she said, bits and pieces filtering through her mind. Terrible scenarios. “You would be nice for all of five minutes, and then you would turn around and betray them.”

  “But, in that five minutes, you saw them willingly trying, hopefully grabbing that glimmer of hope that this would all end.”

  “But instead you’d end it for them.”

  “They were nothing,” he said, with a casual wave of his hand, as if they were little more than dust on his leg.

  Hunter faced him. “Did you kill them?”

  “I wouldn’t say I did,” he said, with a half smile. “You just don’t want to see the truth. The woman standing beside you is a killer, a serial killer at that,” he said, laughing. “But she is my problem, not yours. And you need to back off and let me take her with me.”

  “And how do you plan to do that?” he asked.

  Then Beth felt Lizzy’s presence. “No,” she screamed. “Lizzy, get away from him!”

  Hunter instinctively took a step back, and she instinctively took a step forward. “Lizzy, go away.”

  Their captive laughed and laughed. “Oh, my God,” he said, “this is too priceless. You haven’t a clue.”

  But there was that energy, that other energy here. She glared at him. “What have you done to Lizzy?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “But she misses you.”

  “Too damn bad,” she said. She turned to Hunter. “You’ll have to kill him.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not my style.”

  “Then you won’t be alive to try a second style,” she snapped. “You don’t know how dangerous he is.”

  “I can see that he’s dangerous,” Hunter said, “but something is going on here that we need to understand. Otherwise you’ll never be free of this.”

  “They won’t help us,” she said, glaring at Hunter. “I’m not sticking around for Lizzy.”

  “I thought she was your friend.”

  “Was is the point,” she said. “That woman is dangerous.” She glared at the man on the chair. “What do we call you?”

  “Well, you always used to call me Peter. I was a handler there.”

  “My caregiver.” She shuddered at that. “I still can’t believe it’s you.”

  “Of course you can,” he said. “Even if you didn’t believe me, you know perfectly well that’s what Lizzy called me.”

  “She was a sick person,” she murmured.

  “No, she was a survivor. Don’t you remember what people would do to try to survive?”

  “They’ll do anything,” she cried out passionately. “I don’t blame Lizzy. But I do blame you for what Lizzy became.”

  “She’s a hell of a weapon,” he murmured. “Or at least she was.”

  “What? You burned her out too?” she asked brutally.

  At that, Hunter spun on her. “Too? Did he burn you out?”

  “If that’s what you call it, yes,” she said. “I told you that I ran away because I couldn’t handle it anymore. I couldn’t be his captive, his prisoner, and still deal with all the stuff he expected me to deal with.”

  “You don’t have a clue again,” Peter said calmly. “It’s very simple. You just won’t let us deal with it so that you can pull you together.”

  “Ha!” She thought his terminology apropos, when she was dealing with so much of this splintering of her en
ergy because of her own health. She glared at him. “I used to be healthy, until you.”

  “You were healthy at one time,” he said, with a nod. “You’ve also become quite sick, quite weak. And I told you that I could help you, but you won’t let me. So, not a whole lot I can do to make things any better for you.”

  “You’re a liar,” she declared.

  “You keep saying things like that, and you’re just pissing me off.”

  Sure enough, he acted like he was in a temper. She glared at him. “You’re the one who’s tied up.”

  “So what? Have you forgotten how easy some things are to get out of?” he asked. And, just like that, he stood. She stared at him in surprise, and Hunter swore, stepping forward, a weapon in his hand. But the other man looked at him, smiled, and said, “Fight a battle that you’re capable of winning,” he said. “This is not it.”

  And, with that, he disappeared into the darkness outside. Hunter took off in pursuit, even as she cried out, “Hunter, no! He’ll kill you.” But darkness was all around her. And silence. An eerie silence. Almost like the absence of everything. Then she knew that Lizzy was here. “Lizzy, go away,” she cried out. “I don’t want anything to do with you. Leave us alone. I haven’t hurt you. I haven’t done anything to you. Just let me live!”

  That same horrible laughter carried on the ethers. Remember, just remember.

  And, with that, the energy disappeared. Now running full-bent into the darkness, panicked and screaming, getting away from whatever was chasing her, unsure if anything was chasing her at all or if only her own memories, Beth ran until she couldn’t run anymore and finally fell to the ground and curled up into a ball, like a child, sobbing. Only Nocturne found her to curl up at her side. Always there. Always accepting. Always on her side.

  *

  Beyond frustrated, Hunter raced through the darkness, following the little bits of energy that he saw. Finally he came to a stumbling stop. “Stefan, he’s gone,” Hunter said out loud, as if this were easier than a telepathic conversation.